Tag: MoMA

10 Must-See Exhibitions: Autumn 2025

Our quarterly guide to the global art calendar is back with must-see exhibitions for Autumn 2025, taking in galleries, museums, festivals, and project spaces from Milan to Beijing.

1000 Words | Resource | 7 Oct 2025
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Nan Goldin, This Will Not End Well – Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan
11 October – 15 February

At Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca is the most comprehensive presentation of Nan Goldin’s slideshows to date, billed as her debut solo exhibition as a filmmaker. As with its previous presentation in Berlin, Goldin’s works are housed within structures designed by architect Hala Wardé, a longtime collaborator of the artist. In what she calls a ‘village,’ Goldin’s hallmark themes; intimacy and connection, the everyday alongside wild parties, and the tension between autonomy and dependency, are brought to life and into conflict in a way that mirrors the complexity and instability of the lives she chronicles. The show also features two works making their European museum debut alongside a newly commissioned sound installation.

Poulomi Basu, Phantasmagoria – Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
25 October – 15 February

Phantasmagoria, the title of Poulomi Basu’s first major solo exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur, draws on the ghostly spectacle of 18th-century lantern shows – those early cinematic illusions that conjured spirits, staged the supernatural and flirted with resurrection. This legacy of apparitions and imagined worlds threads Basu’s own transmedia universe, where photography, virtual reality, film, and performance collide. For over a decade, Basu has immersed herself in the lives of some of the world’s most marginalised women and through this prolonged, often deeply personal engagement, her documentary mode meets ecofeminist myth, and the real slips, hauntingly, into the fantastical.

Richard Avedon, In The American West – Fondation Cartier Bresson, Paris
30 April – 12 October

To mark 40 years since the publication of In the American West, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson has taken a bold look back at Richard Avedon’s iconic portrait series. Shot over five years and spanning more than 1,000 sitters – from miners to performers to salesmen – Avedon’s stark, white-backdropped images strip away frontier mythology to reveal the raw human drama of the American West. The exhibition assembles over 100 master prints from the original book, presenting the complete photographic series for the first time in Europe, and features previously unpublished archival materials that document its formation and imprint. Abrams has reissued the long out-of-print book, returning a classic to shelves.

Lisa Barnard & Isadora Romero, After Nature Photography Prize 25 – C/O Berlin
27 September – 28 January

C/O Berlin announces the winners of the After Nature Photography Prize 25: Lisa Barnard and Isadora Romero. Accompanied by a dedicated publication from Hartmann Books, a double exhibition of Barnard’s and Romero’s work is on view at C/O Berlin before travelling to the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt in spring 2026.

Barnard’s project, You Only Look Once, takes inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, investigating how emerging technologies – from animal echolocation to driverless vehicles, lithium mining, and nuclear test sites – reshape human sensory experience and ecological awareness. Notes on How to Build a Forest is described as ‘a decolonial reflection on our relationship to the world,’ in which Romero examines the colonial framing of tropical rainforests, combining classical documentary photography, organic materials, and experimental development processes to propose a more thriving relationship between environment and inhabitants.

I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies – Autograph, London
10 October – 21 March

Autograph hosts a major group exhibition curated by Bindi Vora that interrogates the photograph as a site of mutability, a site to be fragmented, sutured and recharged through the idioms of collage and photomontage. Probing the politics of representation and its limits, the participating artists complicate the ‘constructed’ image, questioning whether it can bear the weight of contested narratives where language falters. With over 90 works by 12 contemporary artists, the participating artists turn to collage and summon its long history of political dissent to splinter the photograph’s presumed coherence and loosen the knots between image and the political.

Alice Poyzer, Other Joys – Serchia Gallery, Bristol
30 October – 30 November

Tucked into a Victorian house on the hillside in Cotham, Bristol, Serchia Gallery is a not-for-profit space run by Christine Marie Serchia. Other Joys, introduces the work of young British photographer Alice Poyzer, who recently received the British Journal of Photography’s Female in Focus Award, among other accolades. Poyzer, in her own words, describes the project as “an ongoing body of work that highlights my special interests as a woman with autism, through portraits and constructed imagery.” The resulting black-and-white photographs linger on butterflies, animal shows, and pieces of taxidermy; precise images that gently affirm self-acceptance and open a window onto Poyzer’s way of moving through the world.

Sam Contis, Moving Landscape – The Art Gallery of Western Australia
31 May – 9 November

AGWA hosts the first Australian solo exhibition of acclaimed US photographer Sam Contis, presenting over 85 works in dialogue with the histories of photography and film, and broadly with narratives of gender, place‑making and belonging. Bringing together the series Deep Springs, Overpass and Cross Country, Moving Landscape follows Contis’ exploration of how bodies and landscapes shape one another, from the deserts of the American West to the footpaths of rural England and the cross-country trails of Pennsylvania. It is a welcome selection of works, rhythmically composed, yet carrying us on a complex journey through terrain, through time and through ourselves.

Hoda Afshar, Performing the Invisible – Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
30 September – 25 January 

Hoda Afshar’s research into the history of gazes and her visual experiments with the image converge at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, which presents her first major exhibition in France. The show brings two chapters of her practice into conversation: Speak the Wind (2015–20) and The Fold (2023–25). The latter draws from archival materials uncovered during Afshar’s own research at the museum, confronting orientalist and colonial photographic legacies. Meanwhile, Speak the Wind journeys to Iran’s southern coast, exploring the beliefs and stories tied to the winds that shape life on the islands of the Strait of Hormuz. Through photographs, videos, sound, and printed mirrors, a bridged path emerges between the two where invisible narratives begin to take form.

Chow and Lin, Even If It Looks Like Grass – Bounded Space, Beijing
6 September – 8 October

Artist duo Chow and Lin’s first solo exhibition in Beijing brings together previously shown works that investigate the systems of wheat and data centres across 10,000 years of human history, alongside new pieces created for this multi-room installation, incorporating AI models, food security research and immersive sensory experiences. The Beijing-based husband-and-wife duo, long active on the international stage for their engagement with global policy and research, continue their inquiry into how statistical, mathematical, and computational methods map the world’s vulnerabilities – a chance to see works from 8 projects across Chow and Lin’s 15-year art journey.

New Photography 2025, Lines of Belonging – MoMA, New York
14 September – 17 January

True to its name and marking its 40th anniversary, the New Photography programme brings together 13 international artists and collectives from Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City, each presenting distinct bodies of work for the first time. Exploring the tangible and intangible forces that bind communities together, the show “draws out connective threads within, across, and beyond the idea of borders,” says curator, Roxana Marcoci. Highlights include Sandra Blow’s vibrant portraits of LGBTQ+ youth in Mexico City, The Public Life of Women project chronicling Nepali women’s experiences, and Gabrielle Garcia Steib’s installations linking Latin America and the American South, among others.♦

–1000 Words

Images:

1-Nan Goldin, Self-Portrait with Eyes Turned Inward, Boston, 1989

2-Poulomi Basu, from the series Fireflies, 2019

3-Richard Avedon, Annette Gonzales, housewife, and her sister Lydia Ranck, secretary, Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico, Easter Sunday, 4/6/80. © The Richard Avedon Foundation

4-Isadora Romero & Ailín Blasco, Palms at Mache Chindul, 2024

5-Sheida Soleimani, Magistrate; from the series Flyways, 2024

6-Alice Poyzer, A taxidermy kitten, with additional wings, held in the air; from the series, Other Joys

7-Sam Contis, Clover 2019

8-Hoda Afshar, Untitled #2, 2015-20

9-Chow and Lin, Even If It Looks Like Grass, 2024. Courtesy the artists and Bounded Space

10-Prasiit Sthapit, Saloni and friends (2013); from Change of Course, 2012-18

1000 Words favourites

• Renée Mussai on exhibitions as sites of dialogue, critique and activism

• 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

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1000 Words

Curator Conversations

£13.99

Click here to order the new and expanded edition of Curator Conversations

£13.99

Curator Conversations is a collection of interviews with leading curators working within contemporary photography today. It offers precious insights into key modes of thinking behind the curatorial practices that have resulted in influential and landmark exhibitions at galleries and museums across the globe, including MoMA, Tate Modern, Pompidou Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Finnish Museum of Photography, Zeitz MOCAA – Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Instituto Moreira Salles and SCôP: Shanghai Center of Photography, among others.

Their contributions provide wide-ranging discussions and a strong sense of critical self-reflexivity to explore the various ways curating mediates our experience and understanding of the photographic image. Among the fundamental questions engaged in the book are the medium specificity of photography; exhibitions as ‘artwork’; critical contexts for imagery; the curator’s role; collaboration and community; notions of ethics, responsibility and care; relationships between artists and curators, museums and audiences; as well as propositions for ‘decolonisation’ through forms of curatorial activism. Ultimately, this volume sheds light on the aesthetic, political and personal concerns of creative individuals involved in exhibition-making, generating new pathways for thinking about the display and dissemination of photography.

Featuring Sarah Allen, Mariama Attah, Yves Chatap, Clément Chéroux, Charlotte Cotton, Marta Dahó, Christine Eyene, Louise Fedotov-Clements, Yining He, Tom Lovelace, Roxana Marcoci, Shoair Mavlian, Renée Mussai, Thyago Nogueira, Azu Nwagbogu, Danaé Panchaud, Alona Pardo, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Holly Roussell, Drew Sawyer, Kathrin Schönegg, Urs Stahel, Lisa Sutcliffe, Nadine Wietlisbach, Duncan Wooldridge.

Editor Tim Clark
Copy Editor Alessandro Merola
Design & Art Direction Sarah Boris
Production Assistant Louis Stopforth

Tim Clark is Editor in Chief of 1000 Words and Artistic Director for Fotografia Europea in Reggio Emilia, Italy, together with Walter Guadagnini and Luce Lebart. He also teaches at The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University.

Publication date November 2023 (second edition)
Format Softcover
Dimensions 198 mm x 129 mm
Pages 160
Publisher 1000 Words (1000 Words Photography Ltd)

We ship our books from the UK warehouse. Please be aware local taxes may be applicable where relevant. It is advised to check rates when placing an order.

Distribution
Public Knowledge Books
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Press:

Source Photographic Review
El País
Photomonitor
The British Journal of Photography

Curator Conversations is part of a collaborative set of activities on photography curation and scholarship initiated by Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University), Christopher Stewart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) and Esther Teichmann (Royal College of Art) that has included the symposium, Encounters: Photography and Curation, in 2018 and a ten week course, Photography and Curation, hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2018-19.

Curator Conversations #5 | Roxana Marcoci: “Exhibitions are grounded in asking questions, and in that sense their initial form is investigatory.”

Roxana Marcoci is Senior Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The recipient of the Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship in 2011, Marcoci chairs the Central and Eastern European group of MoMA’s C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a global world). She is the co-founder of MoMA’s Forums on Contemporary Photography, held three times a year since 2010.

Major exhibitions she curated or co-curated include Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW (2017); A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde (2016); Zoe Leonard: Analogue (2015); Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960-1980 (2015); From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola (2015); Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (2014); The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012); Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2012); Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence (2011); Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960 (2011); Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography (2010); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (2010); Take your time: Olafur Eliasson (2008); Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making (2007) and Thomas Demand (2005).

Marcoci is also visiting critic in the graduate programme at Yale University and a contributor to Aperture, Art in America, Art Journal, and Mousse. She has co-edited and authored Photography at MoMA, a three-volume history of the expanded field of photography (2015/17), and is currently at work on a Wolfgang Tillmans retrospective.

What is it that attracts you to the exhibition form?

Exhibitions are grounded in asking questions, and in that sense their initial form is investigatory. But the making of an exhibition is an active statement of positions. Its unfolding entails exchanging ideas with artists, engaging with objects, narratives, and processes, or in conceptual art, non-objects, and introducing creative models for collective or collaborative authorship in ways that unsettle the past and imagine the future. I’m attracted to all these aspects, and also to the fact that an exhibition pays attention to the structure of reception, or spectatorship – the form of address by which art seeks a rapport with its viewers.

What does it mean to be a curator in an age of image and information excess?

It has been suggested that today there are more images of the world than the world itself. Of course none of this is as new as it sounds. As early as 1927, in his essay “Photography” the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer compared the mass-media explosion of photographic and film images to a “blizzard” of images. Then, in 1983, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, media philosopher Vilém Flusser likened the function of photography to a dam that has absorbed all traditional images. The revolutionary potential and, at the same time, aberration of the technical (photographic) image was its built-in potential to collect all traditional (prephotographic) images. According to Flusser, our collective memory is formed by technical images circling to and fro on their own axes and around us. In the age of Covid-19, we experience much of culture in the form of digital culture. The pandemic crisis and our physically distanced lives are enacted on zoom and social media platforms. This mediated relation to the real has resulted in an excess of images and information. We are seeing digital exhibitions with high-resolution renderings of art works, virtual cultural events, and live streaming studio visits with artists. Much of our curatorial initiatives have moved online: #MuseumFromHome. At MoMA online viewing has far surpassed (by millions) the traffic within the institution’s tangible walls. The museum’s analogue and digital platforms are complementary. Personally, I don’t have an issue with image excess as long as we develop the critical apparatus to interpret visual information – one issue to keep in mind is who is visible, who is invisible, and what vision signifies.

What is the most invaluable skill required for a curator?

More than a skill, I think it’s the desire to create a legacy for what is happening in the now and generate new ideas and scholarship. For me that means connecting photography’s first 180 years to contemporary ideas, to lens-based, time-based, and digital practices, to a larger visual culture that expands photography’s ability to reveal things about the world around us. There is invaluable power inherent in looking at art – and at the world – in a new way. And that is a sine qua non quality for a curator.

What was your route into curating?

Curating means to be engaged in the creation of culture. I always had an interest in the humanities, and I arrived to curatorial work by studying art history, theatre and film criticism, and sociology. And by seeing lots and lots and lots of exhibitions.

What is the most memorable exhibition that you’ve visited?

Feminist, global and multimedia in approach, dOCUMENTA (13), curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, across multiple venues throughout Kassel, Germany and three major outposts in Kabul and Bamiyan, Afghanistan, Cairo, Egypt, and Banff, Canada, remains one of the most memorable exhibitions of the new millennium. Its emphasis on the trauma of war, violence of history, and artistic solidarity is still very present with me. So many of the artists I admire, including Jérôme Bel, Trisha Donnely, Pierre Huyghe, Sanja Iveković, Goshka Macuga, Julie Mehretu, and Zanele Muholi were presented in that exhibition. But, equally important was the work of artists with whom I wasn’t familiar beforehand, such as the 1930s figurative tapestries by self-taught weaver Hannah Ryggen, or the botanist paintings of priest Korbinian Aigner, or the abstractions made since the late 1950s by poet and writer Etel Adnan. This is just to offer a few references since the exhibition featured work by more than 300 artists, writers, and performers as well as research by scientific thinkers in the fields of genetics and quantum physics.

What constitutes curatorial responsibility in the context within which you work?

Curators should advocate for artistic diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have an ethical obligation to take political and social stands on how we present art history – from multiple perspectives, not just the standpoint of dominant Western-centric narratives. At MoMA we have various initiatives, such as C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a global world) and the Modern Women’s Group, which consist of curators and affiliated colleagues who think a lot about these questions: How do we go about unsettling established art historical narratives? Activating new readings? Unfixing the canon? Researching counterhistories? Expressing transnational synchronicities? Constructing resistance? Opening alternative models of solidarity? Envisioning oppositional practices? Proposing unexpected linkages? Investigating why
 particular lacunae subsist? Critiquing from inside the institutions in which we work? Envisioning the political extent of our scholarly jobs? All this translates in our continuous ability to respond (“response-ability”).

What is the one myth that you would like to dispel around being a curator?

The word “curator” has certainly been abused and misinterpreted, but I like myths. Let them accumulate because they belong to the process of interpretation. Mythology, parables, allegory, reversals of perspectives are entirely necessary.

What advice would you give to aspiring curators?

Make lasting friendships with artists, and don’t be afraid to think large, creatively, outside the box. As Oscar Wilde said, “An idea that isn’t dangerous isn’t worthy of being called an idea at all.”♦

Further interviews in the Curator Conversations series can be read here.

Click here to order your copy of the book

—
Curator Conversations is part of a collaborative set of activities on photography curation and scholarship initiated by Tim Clark (1000 Words and The Institute of Photography, Falmouth University), Christopher Stewart (London College of Communication, University of the Arts London) and Esther Teichmann (Royal College of Art) that has included the symposium Encounters: Photography and Curation in 2018 and a ten week course Photography and Curation hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London in 2018-19.

Images:

1-Roxana Marcoci in the exhibition Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.

2-Installation view of Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014.

3-Installation view of Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017.