designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this may

May exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

May’s exhibition calendar is shaped by a series of large institutional presentations and focused solo shows that revisit key figures while introducing new commissions. Major exhibitions by artists such as Marina Abramović, Katharina Grosse, and Ron Mueck anchor the month, while group surveys and thematic projects — from New York to Venice — consider how artists are working across performance, installation, and image-based practices today.

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.

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

Dreamlike and futuristic, the work of designer Iris van Herpen is set to show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in May 2026. The opening will mark the North American debut of the traveling exhibition, dubbed Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, which brings more than 140 couture works into dialogue with design and scientific artifacts.

The museum has a long history of fashion exhibitions, and this one situates Iris van Herpen’s practice within a broader design conversation. Exhibits showcase how her garments operate as constructed environments for the body, shaped by material research, digital fabrication methods like laser-cutting and 3D printing, and a sustained engagement with natural systems.

name: Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
artist: Iris Van Herpen
museum: Brooklyn Museum
location: New York, USA
dates: May 16th — December 6th, 2026

Iris Van Herpen, Morphogenesis Dress, from the Sensory Seas collection, 2020. laser-cut and screenprinted mesh, duchesse satin, and laser-cut Plexiglas. collaborator: Philip Beesley. model: Yue Han. photo © David Uzochukwu

NIGO: From Japan with Love

NIGO: From Japan with Love marks the first museum retrospective of Japanese creative director NIGO to be presented outside Japan, tracing a 30-year career from Harajuku to a global context. Bringing together more than 700 objects, it includes a reconstruction of his teenage bedroom, rare designs, hand-thrown ceramics, and a full-scale glass tea house, reflecting influences that range from vintage Americana and hip-hop to traditional Japanese craft and 1980s Tokyo.

Spanning fashion, music, and design, the presentation situates his work within broader cultural shifts, from founding A Bathing Ape in the 1990s to his current role at KENZO. Through personal archives and a network of collaborators, it outlines a practice that moves across disciplines while shaping the relationship between streetwear and luxury fashion.

name: NIGO: From Japan with Love
artist: NIGO
museum: The Design Museum
location: London, UK
dates: May 1st — October 4th, 2026

NIGO, image courtesy The Design Museum

Knife Fork Spoon: Everyday Tools, Extraordinary Design

Knife Fork Spoon: Everyday Tools, Extraordinary Design surveys more than a century of flatware through approximately 150 sets dating from 1900 to 2026. Installed in the Martin Building, the exhibition traces how utensils have reflected shifts in design thinking, moving from Art Nouveau ornament to contemporary forms shaped by digital fabrication.

Bringing together works from the museum’s collection alongside loans from collector Dung Ngo, the presentation follows the evolution of materials, production methods, and social contexts through a chronological structure. Historical examples sit alongside recent commissions, including 3D-printed pieces, outlining how these everyday objects register broader changes in technology, culture, and use.

name: Knife Fork Spoon: Everyday Tools, Extraordinary Design
museum: Denver Art Museum
location: Colorado, USA
dates: April 17th — May 17th, 2026

Shigeo Fukuda, Hi-Sense, 1990. photo courtesy Dung Ngo © Shigeo Fukuda

Flower Power

Flower Power at the New York Botanical Garden brings together a garden-wide program that considers flowers as cultural symbols across art, music, and social history. Spanning the Conservatory, outdoor grounds, and gallery spaces, the exhibition includes a mix of plant installations, archival material, and artworks from the 1960s and ’70s, with contributions by figures such as Andy Warhol alongside contemporary site-specific commissions.

The presentation situates these works within the broader visual and political landscape of the period, linking floral imagery to movements around peace, environmental awareness, and collective expression. Monumental installations, artist-designed structures, and historical material are interwoven throughout the garden, extending into live programming and evening events that draw on the era’s performance and visual culture.

name: Flower Power
museum: New York Botanical Gardens
location: New York, USA
dates: May 23rd — October 18th, 2026

image courtesy New York Botanical Garden

Marcel Duchamp

Gagosian presents a selection of works by Marcel Duchamp to inaugurate its new ground-floor space at 980 Madison Avenue in New York. The exhibition returns a group of key readymades to the same building where they were first shown in the United States in 1965, and coincides with a major retrospective at Museum of Modern Art.

Centered on the 1964 editions produced with Arturo Schwarz, the presentation includes works such as Bicycle Wheel, Fountain, L.H.O.O.Q., Bottle Dryer, and Boîte-en-valise, tracing Duchamp’s approach to authorship, replication, and the status of the art object. Positioned in relation to later practices, the exhibition situates these works within a lineage that extends across conceptual and postwar movements, highlighting their continued resonance in contemporary art.

name: Marcel Duchamp
artist: Marcel Duchamp
museum: Gagosian
location: New York, USA
dates: April 25th — June 27th, 2026

Marcel Duchamp, Porte-chapeaux (Hat Rack), 1964 (after 1917 lost original) © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2026. photo by Rob McKeever

collective hallucinations

Perrotin presents Collective Hallucinations, an exhibition of new work by Nick Doyle that brings together denim-based collages and an immersive installation centered on a fictional psychic parlor. Across these works, Doyle examines the entanglement of landscape, technology, and cultural myth, drawing on imagery tied to the American West and its shifting narratives of progress and decline.

At the center of the exhibition is Mirror, Mirror, a constructed storefront housing an AI-driven figure named Ava, described as an oracle who interacts directly with visitors. This marks Doyle’s first use of artificial intelligence, extending his materially focused practice into a digital register.

Surrounding works reinterpret familiar symbols and historical imagery — ranging from everyday objects to reworked mountain scenes — tracing how ideas of expansion, extraction, and aspiration persist across both physical and virtual terrains.

name: Collective Hallucinations
artist: Nick Doyle
gallery: Perrotin
location: New York, USA
dates: April 24th — May 30th, 2026

installation view, Collective Hallucinations, Nick Doyle. image courtesy Perrotin

Cecilia Vicuña: El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso)

This show marks the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum by Cecilia Vicuña. Bringing together installation, poetry, and video, the exhibition situates Vicuña’s practice (shaped by feminist, ecological, and decolonial concerns) within a broader trajectory that spans her early concept of ‘Arte Precario’ to recent works grounded in participation and site-responsive making.

Conceived for the Manica Lunga, a newly commissioned quipu, a textile recording device, unfolds horizontally through the gallery as a suspended installation of raw wool, drawing on Andean systems of knowledge while addressing environmental loss. The project connects the disappearance of glaciers in the surrounding Valle di Susa with broader questions of memory, landscape, and collective responsibility, extending through a process that also involved local communities in gathering materials and shaping an outdoor installation.

name: Cecilia Vicuña: El glaciar ido (The vanished glacier / Il ghiacciaio scomparso)
artist: Cecilia Vicuña
museum: Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea
location: Turin, Italy
dates: April 29th — September 20th, 2026

Canoa de luz (Canoa di luce), 2000. installation view in Quotidiana, Casa del Conte Verde, Rivoli-Torino, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino © CECILIA VICUÑA, by SIAE

Greater New York 2026

Opening this spring, Greater New York 2026 returns to MoMA PS1 for its sixth edition, coinciding with the institution’s 50th anniversary. Occupying the building’s former school spaces, the exhibition brings together more than fifty artists based in New York City, focusing on early and mid-stage practices across a range of disciplines through new commissions, recent works, and performances.

Organized by the museum’s full curatorial team, this iteration considers the conditions shaping life in the city, from surveillance and economic pressure to evolving technologies. Across these contexts, the exhibition traces how artists respond to and navigate these forces, registering both tension and possibility within the layered experience of New York today.

name: Greater New York
museum: MoMA PS1
location: New York, USA
dates: April 16th — August 19th, 2026

installation view of Greater New York 2026. photo: Kris Graves

HYBRIDS. LEANDRO ERLICH AL NEGOZIO OLIVETTI

Presented in time for the Venice Biennale, ‘Hybrids. Leandro Erlich al Negozio Olivetti’ brings a new body of work by Leandro Erlich to Negozio Olivetti, the historic space designed by Carlo Scarpa. The exhibition is curated by Marcello Dantas and organized as a collateral event of La Biennale di Venezia, in collaboration with FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano and supported by Galleria Continua.

Bringing together around twenty sculptures, including several new works, the presentation focuses on hybrid forms that merge natural and artificial elements. Installed within Scarpa’s interior, these works engage the architecture while probing how perception shifts when familiar materials and forms are reconfigured.

name: Hybrids. Leandro Erlich al Negozio Olivetti
artist: Leandro Erlich
gallery: Negozio Olivetti
location: Venice, Italy
dates: May 9th — November 22nd, 2026

Leandro Erlich, Papillon, 2021, bronze. image courtesy Leandro Erlich Studio

Time’s Scythe

Nicola Turner brings her most ambitious site-responsive work to date to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), where Time’s Scythe, a sprawling installation made from raw wool and horsehair, occupies the historic Chapel until September 27th, 2026.

The work begins on the exterior of the building, spilling from the bell tower and entering through an upper window before cascading over the balcony into the nave, where visitors move among its sinuous, bulbous forms. The earthy smell of the material amplifies its sensory presence, while a flock of sheep grazing the surrounding landscape extends the work’s reach beyond the walls of the building.

Nicola Turner, Time’s Scythe, presented in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art | all images by Mark Reeves, courtesy YSP

Ron Mueck

Artist Ron Mueck presents a focused survey of his work in Japan, marking his second solo exhibition in the country since his 2008 retrospective at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa. Known for his hyperreal figurative sculptures, Mueck builds each work through close observation of the human body, rendering moments of vulnerability, tension, and introspection with an altered sense of scale that unsettles perception.

Bringing together eleven works, the exhibition traces the development of his practice from early pieces to recent sculptures, including Mass (2016–17) and the rarely exhibited Angel (1997). Originally presented by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in 2023 before traveling internationally, the exhibition also includes photographs and films by Gautier Deblonde, offering insight into the processes behind Mueck’s sculptural production.

name: Ron Mueck 
artist: Ron Mueck
museum: Mori Art Museum
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: April 29th — September 23rd, 2026

Ron Mueck, Mass, 2016-2017, installation view: Ron Mueck, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2025. photo by Nam Kiyong, courtesy Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle presents Something Missing?, an exhibition developed in close collaboration with the artist that brings together seven major series spanning five decades of work. Occupying the museum’s West Wing, the presentation includes more than 300 elements — photographs, texts, and video — reflecting Calle’s ongoing exploration of intimacy, narrative, and the shifting boundary between lived experience and constructed story.

Working across image and text, Calle combines documentary formats with personal and often ambiguous accounts, creating a tension between observation and invention. The exhibition includes early works such as The Blind (1986), recently acquired by the museum, alongside later projects like Voir la mer (2011), in which participants encounter the sea for the first time. Together, these works trace a practice that engages perception, memory, and emotion through direct yet open-ended gestures.

name: Something Missing?
artist: Sophie Calle
museum: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
location: Humlebæk, Denmark
dates: March 26th — June 9th, 2026

installation view: Sophie Calle, Something Missing?, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2026

Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today

Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today examines how ideas of masculinity are shaped, performed, and contested in contemporary culture. Taking its starting point from the rise of online ‘manosphere’ communities, the exhibition considers masculinity as both a structure of power and a lived condition, addressing its contradictions across public and private contexts.

Bringing together new commissions, installations, and performances, the presentation includes works by Reba Maybury, Jasmine Gregory, Sven Gex, Hamishi Farah, and SoiL Thornton, alongside a performance by Zhana Ivanova. Across these works, masculinity is approached as a set of shifting roles and representations, shaped by media, economics, and social behavior, and examined through gestures, images, and spatial interventions.

name: Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today
museum: Stedelijk Museum
location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
dates: April 17th — August 2nd, 2026

Amanda van Hesteren, I Want to go Higher (video still), 2023. © Amanda van Hesteren. Produced by Amanda van Hesteren & Sky Verbeek. courtesy Amanda van Hesteren

Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy

Transforming Energy presents a major exhibition by Marina Abramović at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, marking the first time the institution dedicates a large-scale presentation to a living woman artist. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale Arte and the artist’s 80th birthday, the exhibition — curated by Shai Baitel — extends across both permanent and temporary galleries, placing Abramović’s work in direct relation to the museum’s historical collection.

Bringing together key performances, new works, and interactive installations, the exhibition traces Abramović’s long-standing focus on endurance, vulnerability, and presence. Projects such as Imponderabilia, Rhythm 0, and Balkan Baroque are shown alongside newly conceived ‘Transitory Objects,’ while Pietà (with Ulay) enters into dialogue with Titian’s late painting. Through these juxtapositions, the exhibition considers the body as a site of transformation, linking performance to longer histories of material and spiritual inquiry.

name: Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy
artist: Marina Abramović
museum: Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia
location: Venice, Italy
dates: May 6th — October 19, 2026

Marina Abramović, portrait. image © Marco Anelli, 2025

Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince

The show ‘Helter Skelter’ brings together works by Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince at Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice. It marks the first dialogue between the two artists. Spanning more than fifty works across photography, video, installation, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition also includes new pieces and a collaboratively produced zine developed through exchanges between the artists.

Installed across the palazzo’s ground and first floors, the presentation examines how both artists draw from and rework images circulating within American visual culture. Through juxtaposition and overlap, it traces shared strategies of appropriation and image-making while situating their practices within broader questions of identity, media, and cultural narrative, reflected in the layered references embedded in the exhibition’s title.

name: Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince
artist: Arthur Jafa, Richard Prince
museum: Fondazione Prada
location: Venice, Italy
dates: May 9th — November 23rd, 2026

Arthur Jafa, Mickey Mouse was a Scorpio, 2017 (detail). private collection © Arthur Jafa / Midnight Robber © photo by Ian Watts.TV. Richard Prince, Graduation, 2008. collection of Larry Gagosian © Richard Prince

LUMA ARLES

LUMA Arles presents Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 6: Zaha Hadid ‘I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation’, marking ten years since the death of Zaha Hadid. The exhibition revisits Hadid’s practice through her long-running dialogue with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, tracing her development from early conceptual work to built projects, and situating her approach to architecture within a broader field of artistic and theoretical inquiry.

Presented in the Tower at the Parc des Ateliers, designed by Frank Gehry, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, notebooks, archival materials, and previously unseen interviews. Focusing on her early calligraphic works and their relationship to later buildings, the presentation outlines a practice that moved between abstraction and construction, emphasizing experimentation as a central method in Hadid’s approach to space and form.

name: Zaha Hadid ‘I Think There Should Be No End to Experimentation’
architect: Zaha Hadid
museum: LUMA Arles
location: Arles, France
dates: May 1st, 2026 — March 31st, 2027

image © Zaha Hadid Foundation

I Set Out, I Walked Fast

I Set Out, I Walked Fast exhibition in White Cube London brings together new works, archival material, and a large in-situ installation by Katharina Grosse, assembling them into a single, continuous environment. Rather than following a chronological order, the exhibition connects works from different periods, allowing them to interact across time. Individual pieces function as points within a wider network, where relationships shift depending on movement and proximity.

Since the late 1990s, Grosse primarily worked with acrylic pigments applied with an industrial spray gun, a technique that extends the reach of the body and registers the act of painting as movement. The gesture is not contained within a surface but unfolds across space, linking the act of looking with the act of making. This approach draws from performance and spatial practices, where boundaries between artwork, site, and viewer are reduced.

name: I Set Out, I Walked Fast
artist: Katharina Grosse
museum: White Cube
location: London, UK
dates: April 22nd – May 31st, 2026

installation view, I Set Out, I Walked Fast, Katharina Grosse. image courtesy of White Cube

Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong

M+ presents Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong, a local iteration of the project initiated in 1969 by John Giorno. Developed to bring poetry into everyday experience through sound, the work takes the form of a gallery installation of telephone sculptures, where visitors can listen to recorded readings drawn from an evolving archive.

This Hong Kong edition features newly recorded poems by thirty local writers in Cantonese, English, and Mandarin. Installed in the museum’s Focus Gallery, the project invites visitors to engage with the cadence and texture of spoken language, with each call or handset offering a randomly selected recording.

name: Dial-A-Poem Hong Kong
museum: M+
location: Hong Kong
dates: April 25th — August 30th, 2026

visitors at the Museum of Modern Art listening to Dial-A-Poem, 1970. image courtesy the Giorno Poetry Systems Archive

The post designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this may appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.