The Rise of Vaporwave Curating

Vaporwave curating is haunting the art world. You know it when you see it: poetic titles and fuzzy curatorial frameworks that unfurl languorously, like a dust mote dancing in a sunbeam. Sensuous language of community and care creates a kind of honeyed, sunset-lamp effect, encouraging the viewer to feel good about feeling bad about the state of the world. It’s polycrisis curation that eschews the local in favour of a grab-bag approach that nebulously gestures towards the deprivations of somewhere else. ‘Exhibition about political crisis is so subtle, viewers must guess which crisis,’ as one @freeze_magazine meme goes. 

Examples over the past few years include the 2022 Istanbul Biennial (no title but themed as ‘biennial as compost’ – all slow fermentation and no fizz); the 2023 BIENALSUR in Riyadh, ‘Imagine: Fantasies, Dreams, Utopias’ (cynical lobby art with a vaguely environmental gloss); and the 2025 Sharjah Biennial, titled ‘to carry’ (a sprawling assembly of disconnected exhibitions)​​​​​​. Each of these biennials – and indeed this tendency disproportionately affects the genre – featured flashes of brilliance and stunning individual works, but never quite cohered as a show. And the issue is a global one. TBA21’s two-part exhibition ‘Ecologies of Peace’ (2024–25) at Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía in Córdoba suffered the same fate, as did, according to reviews, this year’s Berlin and Ljubljana biennials.  

To me, this curatorial style feels a lot like vaporwave – the early 2010s microgenre that pastiched 1980s, ’90s and 2000s corporate culture. A product of the internet, it spanned electronic music, memes and art, and introduced the online term A E S T H E T I C, which today has come to be a shorthand for anything that visually soothes, from clean-girl matcha minimalism to ​​​​cottagecore and dark academia. Vaporwave blended slowed-down mood music and dreamy, downtempo beats with infomercials and other artefacts of the era, all layered with nostalgia and heavy reverb. It was unfailingly upbeat: muzak for the creeping, liminal anxiety of early platform capitalism. Like vaporwave curating, its visual vocabulary – Graeco-Roman statuary, kanji and katakana, retro-futurist references – was a sea of floating signifiers, unmoored from context and stripped of political meaning. 

This is curating in the passive voice. Even as exhibitions lovingly celebrate the concept of agency, they mimic the sleight of hand found in newspaper headlines that report people were bombed, were killed, happened to starve. Such phrasing erases actors along with any sense of complicity, responsibility or the need for reparations. It allows everyone to agree that it’s just terrible what’s happening, but we’re all in this together. This narrative stems from the dangerous assumption that the art world is inherently progressive, even radical – and that a singular ‘art world’ exists at all. 

Perhaps this tendency is unsurprising. As the crises around us deepen, so too does the climate of intimidation and suppression, with increasingly severe repercussions for artists and curators who are too vocal in their dissent. In Europe, we might consider this tendency towards carefully anodyne politics a legacy of the antisemitism furore around documenta 15 (2022), but ruangrupa’s curatorial looseness at that exhibition was equally influential. Shows in this mode don’t just aestheticize risk and vulnerability, as Joshua Segun Lean put it in his recent essay on biennials for this magazine, but externalize them too. The hazards of this are especially acute for immigrant art workers and those with curtailed global mobility: often, it’s not just a matter of staying hired or continuing to get gigs, but the ability to be granted visas, maintain status or even naturalize. 

I’m tired of ‘go girl give us nothing’ as curatorial strategy.

Elsewhere, artists, curators and writers have always had to self-censor, expressing themselves through intimation and allusion in the face of shifting geopolitics or the rise of populist governments, as in Narendra Modi’s India. In the Gulf, where I live, the shift towards ambiguity and a kind of geographic ventriloquism is palpable as the wider region burns.​​​​ And across the board, biennial bloat and its attendant cacophony of subthemes has the blurring effect of burying the lead and, along with it, any salient political commentary. There’s a safety in not saying what you mean, even if it means ultimately saying nothing at all. 

With every day bringing fresh horrors, perhaps what people want from art right now is not provocation but a reassuring panacea. At a time when change in the present feels impossible, engaging with the struggles and successes of the past can have a mollifying, escapist effect. But I’m tired of ‘go girl give us nothing’ as curatorial strategy. I want to see shows that have stakes, that have a point of view, that are deeply rooted in their time and place, or at the very least in conversation with them. What if every curator started with the questions ‘why this’, ‘why now’ and ‘why specifically here’? We have nothing to lose but our emotional support biennials.  

^{Main image: Retro 80's Grid Abstract Background (detail), 2025. Courtesy: Kieran Stone / Getty Images}