designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this july

July exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

Exhibitions on view during the month of July have a unique material charge. A supermarket is remade entirely in felt, a playground takes over the Great Hall of the National Building Museum, AI is treated as both image engine and cultural problem, while modernist architecture in post-independence West Africa is revisited through the buildings that helped shape public life.

Elsewhere, buttons, bar interiors, kinetic light, mountain landscapes, and found materials carry bigger questions about labor, power, and how display can change the way we read everyday forms.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

Architects Of Liberation: Modernism In Western Africa

MoMA’s Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa looks at modern architecture as part of a broader political and cultural shift, tracing how newly independent nations used buildings to imagine public life beyond colonial rule.

Spanning work across Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo, the exhibition brings together drawings, models, archival photographs, new films, and commissioned images to revisit a period of intense architectural production, with particular attention to the first generation of trained African architects and the civic spaces, schools, housing, and cityscapes they helped shape.

name: Architects Of Liberation: Modernism In Western Africa
museum: MoMA
location: New York, USA
dates: July 5th — January 2nd, 2026

Centre International du Commerce Extérieur du Sénégal (CICES), Dakar, Senegal. 1971–74. Jean-François Lamoureux (b. 1943) and Jean Louis Marin (b. 1943). 1974 | image by Michel Fegyveres

Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience

At the Momentary, Lucy Sparrow turns the supermarket into a full-scale felt archive of late twentieth-century convenience culture. The Beginning of Convenience recreates a 1980s and 1990s Walmart-inspired grocery store through more than 20,000 hand-sewn replicas, from frozen dinners to beauty products.

Sparrow uses softness and humor to look at how domestic routines, consumer habits, and ideas of efficiency were packaged for everyday life. The exhibition also brings viewers into Sparrow’s working process through a replica of her Felt Cave studio and a documentary following the making of the show.

name: Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience
artist: Lucy Sparrow
museum: The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
location: Arkansas, USA
dates: July 18th, 2026 — July 11th, 2027

plush bananas for The Beginning of Convenience | image courtesy Lucy Sparrow

The Playground

Inside the National Building Museum’s Great Hall, Snarkitecture turns the playground into an architectural experiment at the scale of a public interior. The Playground brings familiar elements of parks and play spaces indoors, using nine interactive zones to explore movement, construction, and shared space through materials such as plywood and scaffolding.

Following the studio’s earlier installations The Beach and Fun House, the project treats play as a design tool, asking how built environments can invite people to climb, gather, rest, and move through space together.

name: The Playground

architects: Snarkitecture
museum: National Building Museum
location: Washington DC, USA
dates: July 3rd — August 3rd, 2026

Snarkitecture, The Playground | visualization courtesy National Building Museum

Tomás Saraceno. Ancestral Futures

Air, webs, and the politics of extraction come together in Tomás Saraceno’s Ancestral Futures at Haus der Kunst, where the artist’s long-running research into Aerocene and Arachnophilia expands into a new collaboration with Indigenous communities from Red Atacama and Las Salinas Grandes in northern Argentina.

Through air-fueled sculptures, multi-species habitats, and spatial environments, the exhibition connects fragile ecological systems with the social pressures behind the global energy transition, asking how architecture, art, and science might support different ways of living with the worlds around us.

name: Tomás Saraceno. Ancestral Futures
artist: Tomás Saraceno
museum: Haus Der Kunst
location: Munich, Germany
dates: July 17th, 2026 — February 7th, 2027

Tomás Saraceno, The Sanctuary of Water, 2026 | image © Studio Tomás Saraceno

Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides

At the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA, Joshua Vides has turned a gallery of cars into a walk-in black-and-white drawing.

The Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, takes over the Armand Hammer Foundation Gallery with five hand-painted vehicles, tire stacks, gas pumps, wall graphics, and oversized garage signage, all rendered in his crisp monochrome line-work.

The space reads at first like an auto body shop stripped of color. Familiar objects of car culture are still there, but Vides flattens them into something closer to a full-scale sketch, using black lines to trace seams, shadows, panels, and edges across every surface.

name: Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides
artist: Joshua Vides
museum: Petersen Automotive Museum
location: Los Angeles, USA
dates: June 20th, 2026 — July 5th, 2027

Joshua Vides, Flat Out: The Art of Joshua Vides, installation view | image © Petersen Automotive Museum

Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Buttons become a measure of labor, empire, and political memory in Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! at Factory International, where the artist turns an everyday fastening into a monumental material record.

Centered on a vast new installation made from thousands of buttons sourced from a defunct British manufacturer, the exhibition looks across two centuries of global history through the linked forces of industry, colonialism, craft, and control.

Alongside large-scale works in Lego, film, sculpture, and installation, Ai uses repetition and accumulation to make systems of power feel both intimate and physically overwhelming.

name: Ai Weiwei: Button Up!
artist: Ai Weiwei
museum: Factory International
location: Manchester, UK
dates: July 2nd — September 6th, 2026

Ai Weiwei, Law of the Journey, 2017 | image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sadness

A functioning bar becomes the unlikely center of Pace Gallery’s Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sadness, a group exhibition in Berlin that moves through the moods and social codes of the night.

Built around a replica of Friedrich Kunath’s private studio bar in Los Angeles, the show gathers painting, sculpture, and photography by twenty-seven artists around ideas of entertainment, melancholy, performance, and after-dark ambiguity.

Works by Elmgreen & Dragset, Alicja Kwade, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Lauren Quin, and others extend the bar’s atmosphere into a wider study of how interiors, thresholds, and staged encounters can hold both pleasure and unease.

name: Goodbye Sadness, Hello Sadness
museum: Pace Gallery
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: July 4th — August 23rd, 2026

Esben Weile Kjær, Flash, 2025 | image © Esben Weile Kjær

Rencontres d’Arles

Returning to Arles from July 6th to October 4th, 2026, Les Rencontres d’Arles brings photography back into the fabric of the southern French city, where exhibitions spill across historic sites, cultural venues, and temporary spaces.

The 57th edition looks across geographies including Africa and the Mediterranean, with a program that moves between archival material, major solo presentations, and new photographic voices to consider how images shape identity, memory, and representation today.

name: Les Rencontres d’Arles 2026
museum: various exhibition venues around Arles
location: Arles, France
dates: July 6th — October 4th, 2026

Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Many Reasons to Live Again, 2022 | image courtesy the artist and Galería Alta

Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers

Wrong Answers, the first solo exhibition of American artist Jenny Holzer in Portugal, opens within the sprawling garden-exhibition space of Porto’s Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Fundação de Serralves). In the midst of the American political moment, where the airwaves are replete with references to President Donald Trump, Holzer adapts her decades-long visual language to address these divisive and peculiar times.

The site-specific retrospective collects the works, mediums, and techniques that have defined Holzer’s oeuvre. There are spinning LED works, poetic self-devised slogans, and messages carved in stone. Her work has continually adapted, both in media and message, to the times in which she has lived while also revealing the story of the artist herself.

name: Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers
artist: Jenny Holzer
museum: Fundação de Serralves
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: June 18th — November 1st, 2026

installation views of Jenny Holzer: Wrong Answers | all photos © Serralves Foundation

O século de Gehry (The Century of Gehry)

At the Serralves Foundation, The Century of Gehry looks back on the life of the late Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry (1929-2025). In collecting the creations of his lifetime – architectural models, cardboard chairs, and carpets – the exhibition in Porto creates a retrospective of the designer who pioneered an architectural style that came to define the turn of the 20th century.

name: O século de Gehry (The Century of Gehry)
architect: Frank Gehry
museum: Fundação de Serralves
location: Porto, Portugal
dates: June 13th — December 30th, 2026

O século de Gehry (The Century of Gehry), installation view, Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal | image © Filipe Braga – Serralves Foundation

Mountains Don’t Know Their Names

Catherine Opie approaches the Norwegian landscape as something closer to a subject than a view in Mountains Don’t Know Their Names at PoMo.

Developed after a winter road trip through mountains and fjords, the exhibition brings together photographs, ceramic sculptures, and site-specific video installations that linger on weather, light, scale, and the human urge to name what exists beyond us.

Known for her portraits of people, places, and cultural identity, Opie turns that same attention toward nature, treating each mountain as a presence to be studied over scenery to be consumed.

name: Mountains Don’t Know Their Names
artist: Catherine Opie
museum: PoMo
location: Trondheim, Norway
dates: June 25th, 2026 — March 1st, 2027

Catherine Opie, Moonrise, 2024 | image courtesy PoMo

Alien Terrain

text

name: Alien Terrain
artist: Ken Price
museum: PoMo
location: Trondheim, Norway
dates: June 25th, 2026 — March 1st, 2027

Ken Price, Miroesque, 1995 | image by Fredrik Nilsen © Estate of Ken Price

Mohamed Bourouissa: Pour Noubia

Mohamed Bourouissa’s Pour Noubia begins with family memory and expands into a wider portrait of belonging, visibility, and social exchange.

At Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the French-Algerian artist draws on the photographic legacy of his aunt Noubia through images, spatial gestures, and installation strategies that keep personal history in conversation with collective experience.

The exhibition brings forward voices and diasporic narratives often left outside dominant records, while Bourouissa’s collaborative approach gives the work a lived, relational charge instead of fixing identity as something static.

name: Mohamed Bourouissa: Pour Noubia
artist: Mohamed Bourouissa
museum: The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art
location: Zurich, Switzerland
dates: June 13th — September 6th, 2026

Mohamed Bourouissa, Pour Noubia, exhibition view, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2026. | image © Studio Stucky, courtesy the artist

Julio Le Parc. Light. Colour. Action.

Julio Le Parc’s work turns looking into a physical encounter at Tate Modern, where light, movement, and perception become active materials.

Bringing together interactive installations, kinetic sculptures, and large-scale op art paintings, the exhibition traces seven decades of the Argentina-born artist’s experiments with participation and visual instability.

Rather than treating the viewer as a passive observer, Le Parc’s shifting environments make the body part of the work, opening a playful study of how art can move, flicker, and respond in real time.

name: Julio Le Parc. Light. Colour. Action.
artist: Julio Le Parc
museum: Tate Modern
location: London, UK
dates: until May 3rd, 2027

Julio Le Parc, installation view, Screen with Refracted Blades | image © Owen Harvey

NARI WARD: UNTIL THAT DAY

At DESTE’s former slaughterhouse on Hydra, Nari Ward’s Until That Day gives found materials a sharp political and geographic weight.

The site-specific exhibition reflects on migration, race, and belonging through the experience of African communities in Greece, extending the Jamaican-born, New York-based artist’s long engagement with discarded objects as carriers of social memory.

Taking its title from Haile Selassie’s 1963 address to the United Nations, the show brings sculpture, performance, and music into conversation with questions of displacement, solidarity, and who gets to feel at home.

name: Nari Ward: Until That Day
artist: Nari Ward
museum: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
location: Hydra, Greece
dates: June 23rd — October 31st, 2026

portrait of Nari Ward | image by Axel Dupeux, courtesy the artist

the world through AI

At Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, The World Through AI looks at artificial intelligence through the images, systems, and hidden labor that now shape visual culture.

Bringing together around forty works by thirty international artists, the exhibition moves from machine vision and face recognition to AI slop, environmental cost, microwork, and political propaganda.

AI isn’t presented here as a purely futuristic tool. The show instead places it inside a longer history of image-making, data storage, psychological influence, and technological power.

name: The World Through AI
museum: SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt
location: Frankfurt, Germany
dates: June 11th — September 20th, 2026

Grégory Chatonsky, The Fourth Memory, 2025 | image © Grégory Chatonsky

prologue

At the edge of the historic Mediterranean city of Arles, Villa Bank becomes the first address for Casa Ideale, a new hospitality project by Luca Pronzato and We Are Ona. The 1970s house, designed by Émile Sala, sets the tone from the start with curved volumes, pale surfaces, a pool, and rooms that seem to move between interior space and the landscape outside.

Casa Ideale begins as a pop-up hotel from July 1st — 10th, 2026, during the opening week of Les Rencontres de la Photographie, before continuing with the exhibition Prologue, which will run through October. 

Prologue is organized with Fondazione Sozzani and curated by Maddalena Scarzella, bringing more than sixty photographs from the Carla Sozzani Collection into the villa. Works by figures including Urs Lüthi and Helmut Newton enter the rooms alongside pieces selected by Luna Laffanour’s Downtown+ gallery, turning the house into what the project calls a sequence of ‘rooms of vision.’

name: Prologue
museum: Casa Ideale
location: Arles, France
dates: through October 2026

Prologue brings photographs from the Carla Sozzani Collection into the rooms | image © Laurent Giannesini

Machine Dreams: Rainforest DATALAND

Refik Anadol Studio’s Machine Dreams: Rainforest opens Dataland in Los Angeles with an AI-generated ecosystem built from permission-based natural-world datasets.

Across five galleries, the exhibition uses the studio’s Large Nature Model to translate images, sounds, and environmental data into immersive digital environments that shift between rainforest memory and machine interpretation.

The show presents computation inside a conversation about biodiversity, perception, and how technology might learn from living systems.

name: Machine Dreams: Rainforest
museum: Dataland
location: Los Angeles, USA
dates: through January 31, 2027

Machine Dreams: Rainforest, installation view, 2026 | image courtesy Dataland

youth palace

Rockbund Art Museum’s Youth Palace turns the institution into a provisional site for learning, play, and ideological rehearsal, drawing from the socialist Children’s Palace model once used to expand access to music, dance, theater, and technical training.

Unfolding across all five floors of the Shanghai museum, the group exhibition combines new commissions, reworked projects, archival material, and artist-led workshops to ask what happens when education is treated as a tool for shaping bodies, attention, and collective imagination.

The show’s strongest tension sits between optimism and control, revisiting the dream of training a better society while leaving room for more open forms of gathering and exchange.

name: Youth Palace
museum: Rockbund Art Museum
location: Shanghai, China
dates: June 1st — September 20th, 2026

view of Youth Palace: or, some small acts of self-making, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, 2026 | image © Ling, courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: EXTINCTION

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Extinction frames photography as both image and endangered material, returning to the gelatin silver process that has shaped the artist’s practice for more than half a century.

At the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, around sixty works trace Sugimoto’s evolution from early series such as Dioramas, Theaters, and Seascapes to later investigations of form, memory, and perception.

New works appear alongside familiar bodies of work, giving the exhibition a subtle urgency as it considers what disappears when a photographic technique, and the way of seeing attached to it, begins to fade.

name: Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction
artist: Hiroshi Sugimoto
museum: The National Museum of Modern Art
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: Until September 13th, 2026

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Pokot, 2025 | image © Hiroshi Sugimoto, courtesy Gallery Koyanagi

Animalia

At the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris, Animalia follows the animal form across centuries of image-making, ornament, belief, and power.

Drawn from The Al Thani Collection, the exhibition brings together more than 120 objects spanning four continents, with real and imagined creatures appearing as bronze votive figures, jeweled handles, garment hooks, and carved sculpture.

The animals on view are not just decoration — the show further examines how different cultures have used them to carry status, symbolism, protection, and myth through material form.

name: Animalia
museum: Hotel de la Marine
location: Paris, France
dates: July 1st, 2026 — January 10th, 2027

Garment hook (daigou) in the form of a tiger, China, Eastern Zhou, Warring States Period | image © The Al Thani Collection 2018. all rights reserved. photography by Todd White Art Photography

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