Nina Wakeford, et al.

The Unfinished Business of Living Together

★★★☆☆

Curated by Gianmaria Andreetta, Luca Beeler
On until 22 November 2026

This year’s Swiss artistic committee — their project billed unusually as a curatorial device delegated to adjunct research artists — immersed itself in the late-1970s public image politics of homosexuality to draw out its social repercussions on today. Projections taken from television magazine programmes, brought into the twenty-first century with jaggy CGI, narrate the tension and tenderness of civic rights and aesthetic emancipation. Alarmist activist statements serve as the show’s wayfinding. News cuttings point to a sense of peril, while a gay predator shark has triumphantly devoured the patriarchy. 

Mission accomplished? Not quite, the wall text suggests. Yet the forms on show do not attest to the project’s cyclical necessity; they merely foreground once vital art’s descent into dry sociology. They please the eye as they do so, granted, but that only makes their demand more pernicious. This call for liberation is bogus! If the Swiss don’t think they’re free, who is?


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely at Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant ★★★☆☆

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely

★★★☆☆

These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

RE/SISTERS at Barbican ★★☆☆☆

RE/SISTERS

★★☆☆☆

Too many deadpan landscape photographs turn intrigue into fatigue and into paralysis.

Yoko Ono at Tate ★★★☆☆

Yoko Ono

Music of the Mind

★★★☆☆

This show will sell tickets. But it won’t change the weather.

Mandy El-Sayegh, Interiors at Thaddeus Ropac ★★☆☆☆

Mandy El-Sayegh

Interiors

★★☆☆☆

For the abundance of material, there simply aren’t enough ideas in the exhibition to go around these Mayfair interiors.

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