Five Must-See Exhibitions: Summer 2025
Designed to guide readers to important cultural events in the global artworld calendar, this new quarterly feature presents a selection of upcoming and just opened exhibitions that engage with diverse perspectives, experimental approaches and nuanced narratives within contemporary photography. Here are our top picks for summer 2025.
1000 Words | Resource | 3 July 2025
Foreword – International Centre for the Image, Dublin
17 July – 14 September
This summer, PhotoIreland opens the International Centre for the Image in Dublin, a new space emerging from research carried out since 2017 into the form a museum for lens-based practices might take. Its inaugural exhibition, Foreword, gathers seventeen artists whose work probes the frictions of image-making between technology and perception, representation and control. Through photography, video, installation, and virtual worlds, the show pulls at the edges of climate collapse, digital decay, cultural memory, and personal loss, asking how images are shaped by the systems that carry them. Featuring several new works, Foreword is a fitting introduction to the space that consolidates PhotoIreland’s impressive project under one roof. Curated by Ángel Luis González Fernández and Julia Gelezova, artists include Alex Prager, Penelope Umbrico, Basil Al-Rawi, and others.
Claudia Andujar, In the Place of the Other – Les Rencontres d’Arles 2025
7 July – 5 October
Two years of archival research have uncovered a largely unseen chapter of Claudia Andujar’s oeuvre, revealing the roots of her impassioned human rights activism and the development of her singular visual language. Curated by Thyago Nogueira of Instituto Moreira Salles, this is the first international retrospective devoted exclusively to Andujar’s formative works from the 1960s and ’70s, created in Brazil before her acclaimed engagement with the Yanomami people of the Amazon. The show traces her early ties to vulnerable communities, humanistic photography, graphic experimentation, and a budding environmental consciousness, during a period when she contributed to magazines, exhibited widely and travelled throughout the region.
Mangrove Theatre: The Wartime Photography of Võ An Khánh – IC Visual Lab Bristol
24 June – 14 September
A member of the North Vietnamese Communist Army, Võ An Khánh was entrusted with the task of capturing the collective spirit of resistance, yet, through immaculate, auteur-like compositions, his photographs reveal moments of quietude rarely associated with frontline conflict. Living amid the country’s mangrove forests, Võ developed a body of work that, in his first European solo exhibition, offers an intimate glimpse into the daily life of the Communist resistance during the Vietnam War. Marking the 50th anniversary of the war’s end and Vietnam’s reunification, Mangrove Theatre centres on sixteen carefully composed scenes that present a profoundly different vision of wartime experience.
Lucas Foglia, Constant Bloom – Galerie Peter Sillem, Frankfurt
6 June – 16 August
Galerie Peter Sillem presents Constant Bloom, Lucas Foglia’s latest and ambitious photographic undertaking. Debuting in Germany, Foglia’s project documents the migratory journey of the Painted Lady butterfly, which, over millions of years, has traversed a vast route spanning Kenya to Norway – the longest known butterfly migration across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As Foglia followed the butterflies on this journey, encountering communities affected by unseasonal droughts, floods, and freezes, migration came to embody a metaphor for the permeability of borders and the intricate networks of global interdependence – concerns explored in an accompanying exhibition volume from Nazraeli Press.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us – Centre Pompidou, Paris
13 June – 22 September
Who other than Wolfgang Tillmans to take over the 6,000 m² of Level 2 in the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (Bpi) – marking the first time the vacated library has been used in this way – to stage a profound meditation on image-making, democracy, and the contemporary moment through a monumental exhibition spanning over 35 years of practice? Beyond his photographic work, Tillmans has woven moving images, music, sound, and text into an expansive, polyphonic installation, enriched by contributions from performance artists. Reflecting on how to ‘activate and use the space’, Tillmans promises to resist the logic of the retrospective, instead privileging site-responsiveness and exhibition-making as a medium in its own right.♦
–1000 Words
Images:
1-Alex Prager. Film still from Run (2022). Courtesy Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London
2-Claudia Andujar, from the A Sõnia series, São Paulo, SP, circa 1971. Courtesy the artist and Instituto Moreira Salles
3-Võ An Khánh, A song and dance class in the Southwestern region, which had begun in 1970 and lasted more than one year since the students had to simultaneously study and fight the enemy during the war, 1970-71. Courtesy Dogma Collection
4-Lucas Foglia, Erei and Thomas Collecting Painted Lady Butterflies, Mpala Research Centre, Kenya, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Sillem, Frankfurt
5-Wolfgang Tillmans, Frank, in the shower, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, Maureen Paley, London, and David Zwirner, New York
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• Roxana Marcoci navigates curatorial practice in the digital age
• Tanvi Mishra reviews Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect
• Discover London’s top five photography galleries
• Tim Clark in conversation with Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Academic rigour and essayistic freedom as told by Taous Dahmani
• Shana Lopes reviews Agnieszka Sosnowska’s För
• Valentina Abenavoli discusses photobooks and community
• Michael Grieve considers Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler’s posthumous collaboration with their late family member
• Elisa Medde on Taysir Batniji’s images of glitched video calls from Gaza
