11 Unmissable Exhibition Openings in 2026

Saodat Ismailova | Swiss Institute, New York | 21 January – 12 April

In a recent piece for frieze, Saodat Ismailova reflected on her journey into film, stating: ‘My story is a very simple one, although it might not be the kind you would expect to hear from a female director from Uzbekistan.’ She goes on to describe how being raised in the post-Soviet era by a filmmaker father, in an apartment building where many of her neighbours also worked in the industry, shaped her path into filmmaking, as well as the cultural concerns that continue to inform her work.

At the Swiss Institute, the world premiere of Ismailova’s newly commissioned film Amant (2026) will mark her first solo exhibition in the United States. The film focuses on the artist’s long-term engagement with Arslanbob – a vast walnut forest in present-day Kyrgyzstan that for centuries has been regarded as a spiritual site. Accompanying the film will be a group of sculptural works derived from the project, alongside a complementary sound installation intended to attune listeners to a meditative, drifting state, capturing nocturnal soundscapes from the forest. Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel in an expanded form to LUMA Arles before concluding at Kunsthalle Bern.

Pierre Huyghe | Halle am Berghain, Berlin and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen | 23 January – 8 March, 24 May – 13 September

Pierre Huyghe is known for his large-scale environments and speculative film works that integrate biological organisms and cutting-edge technology. Newly commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, this collaboration marks the Paris-born artist’s first solo presentation within a Berlin institution. As part of LAS Art Foundation’s Sensing Quantum programme, Huyghe will continue his long-standing inquiries into non-human forms of intelligence. Through sustained conversations with physicist Tommaso Calarco, he has developed new ways to approach quantum logics, treating it as a raw material to be converted into sensitive experiences, unfolding via ‘film, sound, vibration, dust and light’, according to press materials.

Later in the year, Foundation Beyeler will present a major new exhibition of Huyghe’s works, further extending the reach of his innovative practice. The show will include key pieces from recent years alongside new ones conceived exclusively for the foundation. At a moment when artificial intelligence occupies a central place in global discourse, Huyghe’s practice appears increasingly urgent and relevant.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | M+, Hong Kong and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin | 14 February – 5 July, 11 September – 23 May 2027

Widely celebrated for his award-winning film scores, such as Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) and The Last Emperor (1987), ‘seeing sound, hearing time’ at M+ will celebrate the legacy of Japanese composer, producer and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, showcasing async - immersion (2023), made with long-term collaborator, Shiro Takatani.

Since the 1990s, the pair have repeatedly worked together, combining their independent vernaculars into immersive, atmospheric installations. Notable among these is the ‘wordless opera’ TIME (2017/24), which took viewers through a meditative non-linear sequence that incorporated performance, music and moving image, and which formed the last major stage work and collaboration Sakamoto conceived before his death in 2023.

At M+, the pair will be united once again in a site-specific installation encompassing Sakamoto’s 2017 album async with the visual compositions created by Takatani, documenting the instruments, books and other ephemera found in Sakamoto’s studio. Later in the year, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin will present the first major retrospective of the artists’ work.  

Catherine Opie | Fridericianum, Kassel, The National Portrait Gallery, London and Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh | 14 February – 19 July, 5 March – 31 May, 8 August – 1 November

American photographer Catherine Opie is one of the most significant artists of her generation. Influenced by socially oriented photography of the 20th century – most notably the work of US sociologist Lewis Hine – Opie received a Kodak Instamatic for her ninth birthday and began documenting her immediate environment and community. These subjects have remained central to her practice for more than 30 years.

In 2026, two milestones will mark her career: her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, alongside a concurrent presentation at London’s National Portrait Gallery, which will be the first major exhibition of her work in the UK. In Kassel, the artist has designed the exhibition as a site-specific installation engaging with the historic building – one of the oldest public museums in Europe – while in London and Edinburgh, Opie will stage a series of interventions placing nearly 80 works from her portrait series, including her first major work Being and Having (1991), in dialogue with the permanent collections of both institutions.

Ahaad Alamoudi | Sharjah Art Foundation | 8 February – 3 May

This Spring, Jeddah-based artist Ahaad Alamoudi will present her first solo exhibition in the United Arab Emirates at the Sharjah Art Foundation. Alamoudi’s work draws on ethnographical studies and vernacular digital culture, humorously tracing both the historical and contemporary history of the Gulf and its representation in popular media. Raised between England and Saudi Arabia, themes of belonging and national identity recur throughout her multidisciplinary practice, which spans video, photography, installation, performance and sculpture.

At the Sharjah Art Foundation, Alamoudi will continue her investigation into what press materials call the ‘shifting representations of the region’, through new commissions and existing work. Prior to this, she will also present work at the 2026 Diriyah Biennale, ‘In Interludes and Transitions’, co-curated by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed.

‘Spectrosynthesis Seoul’ | Art Sonje Center, Seoul | 20 March – 28 June 

In 2017, the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation presented its inaugural exhibition, ‘Spectrosynthesis – Asian LGBTQ Issues and Art Now’, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei. The exhibition marked the first LGBTQ+ themed exhibition held within an art museum in Asia. Since then, the foundation has continued to collaborate with multiple institutions, progressing its mission to promote dialogue around equity within the Asia-Pacific region.

For the fourth edition of the ‘Spectrosynthesis’ series, Sunpride will collaborate with the Art Sonje Center in Seoul to present a major exhibition examining contemporary queer art through the lens of South Korea’s history of artist-organized queer exhibitions. The show will feature works by local artists, such as siren eun young jung, Kang Seung Lee and Inhwan Oh, alongside artists from across the Asia-Pacific region. At a time when South Korea’s socio-political landscape continues to limit legal recognition for LGBTQ+ citizens, exhibitions that openly engage with queer themes offer vital visibility to marginalized voices.

‘Hikmah’ | CCA Tashkent | March

When it opens on 21 March, CCA Tashkent will be the first institution of its kind in Uzbekistan. Spearheaded by Gayane Umerova of the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, the CCA will hope to build on the success of the Bukhara Biennial, which opened last autumn and announced the country’s intentions to become the art capital of Central Asia.  

The CCA will launch its programme with a group exhibition titled ‘Hikmah’ – Uzbek for ‘wisdom’ – bringing together 10 contemporary artists who will expand upon different forms of knowledge through a wide range of cultural perspectives and varying material disciplines. Curated by CCA director Sara Raza, works on display will include Kimsooja’s piece Archive of Mind (2016) – which invites viewers to empty their minds of distractions and join fellow participants at the large workspace to play with a handful of clay – as well as Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Flying Carpets (2011) and a new installation by seventh-generation Uzbek ceramicist Shokhrukh Rakhimov, amongst others.

Lorna Simpson | Punta della Dogana, Venice | 29 March – 22 November 

As the art world prepares for its biannual pilgrimage to Venice, one show that should be top of the agenda is Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson's presentation at the Punta della Dogana. Since her rise to prominence in the late 1980s, Simpson has continued to interrogate the mechanism of image construction and the representation of race and gender within American visual culture, expanding her initial focus on conceptual photography into an illustrious multi-disciplinary practice.

Building on her recent exhibition, ‘Source Notes’, presented earlier this year at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – which featured a selection of Simpson's paintings from the last decade – this iteration in Venice offers a renewed and expanded selection of works. Carefully conceived for the unique architecture of the 17th-century warehouse, the exhibition brings together approximately 50 works from the artists expansive and genre-defying career.

Veronica Ryan | Whitechapel Gallery, London | 1 April – 14 June

‘Multiple Conversations’ by Montserrat-born British artist and Turner Prize winner Veronica Ryan is set to be one of the artists most extensive presentations to date. The exhibition will feature more than 100 works spanning four decades of her capacious and materially diverse career, with a special focus on recently rediscovered works from the 1980s. These include the thought-to-be-lost piece Attempts to Fill Vacant Spaces (1986), which has not been presented since the year it was created.

The exhibition takes its title from the work Multiple Conversations (2019–present), which will be displayed on a long shelf running the entire length of the Whitechapel gallery. It comprises a variety of palm-sized sculptures and assemblages: stacks of plaster cast leaves bound with green thread, clusters of dissected and carefully reconstructed teabags and the artists recurring motif of seed pods. In this work, and in the exhibition as a whole, various modes of expression are set to converge, highlighting the interlinking threads that continue to define the artist’s delicately crafted oeuvre.

Marcel Duchamp | MoMA, New York and Philadelphia Art Museum, Pennsylvania | 12 April – 22 August and 10 October – 31 January

Almost 50 years since Marcel Duchamp’s last retrospective in the United States, the legendary conceptual artist will be celebrated in a travelling exhibition staged across two major US institutions: MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

From his Cubist masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) to the infamous readymade Fountain (1917), the survey at MoMA will feature 300 works, presented chronologically and spanning the full range of media Duchamp explored between 1900 and 1968. While the exhibition opens first in New York, a visit to Philadelphia is essential: as one of the largest holders of Duchamp’s oeuvre, the museum is also the permanent home of two of his most monumental works, The Large Glass (1915–23) and Étant donnés (1946–66). Due to the intricacy and site-specific nature of their construction, these works will not travel to New York.

Jesús Rafael Soto | The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) | November – March 2027

Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto was a prominent figure in the Latin American modernism movement and a pioneer of kinetic art. Through optical illusions and audience participation, Soto sought to transform people’s perception of their everyday surroundings by proposing new ways of interacting with, and experiencing art. Most notably, his iconic Pénétrable series (1967–2005) consists of large-scale installations made of vertical threads suspended in space, into which spectators are invited to freely move in and amongst the work.

While details surrounding his upcoming exhibition at MASP have yet to be disclosed, a recent seminar hosted by the museum in partnership with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art – at which scholarly papers examined the conceptual principles of Soto’s practice, as well as its political and social contexts – built excitement for this highly anticipated survey, staged more than 20 years after the artists death.

^{Main image: Saodat Ismailova, Amanat (detail), 2026, video still. Courtesy: the artist}