What to See Across Europe This November

Mark Leckey | Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin, Germany | 11 September – 3 May 2026

Despite being primarily video-based, Mark Leckey’s exhibition ‘Enter Thru Medieval Wounds’ at the Julia Stoschek Foundation is structured around two other media: sound and architecture. Sound, in particular, dominates each room, where it acts not as mere accompaniment to the video works but as their raison d’être. Leckey’s well-known early work Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), for example, uses found footage to trace the evolution of British dance subcultures, while the most recent piece in the show, the titular Enter Thru Medieval Wounds (2025), is a radio play exploring the role of medieval iconography, whose audio track reaches us through speakers embedded in the gaping wounds of a statue in the museum’s dingy basement storage room. Custom speaker towers from the artist’s Sound Systems (2001/12) add an immersive dimension to the club scenes depicted in the show. – Alison Hugill

‘Ghosts: Visualizing The Supernatural’ | Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland | 20 September – 8 March 2026

A light flickers. The air turns unnaturally cool. A shrill creak travels down a dimly lit corridor. The camera shakes, then cuts to a hazy figure cloaked in white, hovering just above the ground: a ghost. In medieval Europe, the constant losses brought by plague alongside the popularization of the Catholic concept of purgatory fuelled belief in souls trapped between realms: restless spirits left to wander the earth as cautionary tales or benevolent guides. Fast-forward to today, and our obsession with the phantasmal has been amplified into something grotesque and ghoulish through horror cinema. At Kunstmuseum Basel, ‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’ chronicles 250 years of Western visual culture, exploring our enduring fascination with these enigmatic forces. – Yaa Addae

Lukas Luzius Leichtle | CCA Berlin, Germany | 11 September – 20 December 

While being part of the body, the skin in Lukas Luzius Leichtle’s oil paintings functions as something separate: no longer a comforting enclosure but a distancing surface. In his solo exhibition ‘Eindringling’ (Intruder) at the CCA Berlin, the body becomes an estranged counterpart, prompting us to question whether we ever fully understand our own corporeality or whether we are, in some ways, always an intruder within it. 

On entry, I first encounter Father’s Sleeping Shirt (all works 2025): a powder-pink T-shirt that appears to float inside out, perhaps caught in the act of being removed. The delicate composition and handling of oil on linen fuses fabric and flesh: creases become wrinkles and folds gather like skin, exposing the protection we seek in textiles and the indistinct threshold between interior and exterior, clothing and body. This sets the tone for the rest of this intimate presentation, where unguarded aspects of embodiment are unveiled – positioning the gaze as intrusive. – Brooke Wilson

Nancy Lupo | Kunstverein Kevin, Vienna, Austria | 13 September – 15 November 

The light at Kunstverein Kevin – emanating from small night lamps mounted close to the floor (all works Untitled, 2025) – is so harsh that, if you stare too long, colourful spots start dancing before your eyes. It is dizzying, irritating even, but this sensory jolt cannot undo the sense of enchantment that fills ‘Disko’, Nancy Lupo’s new solo exhibition. The space glimmers with wonder: chandelier crystals scattered across the floor catch and refract the light, resembling pools of liquid while also evoking fantasies of elegance and bubbling champagne. They encircle nine amorphous floor sculptures: tent-like wooden structures draped in paper towels, pigment and glue, bent and compressed almost brutally into irregular, wretched shapes. At times spiky, at others hollowed or collapsed, their shimmering surfaces of iridescent blue, pearl and silver transform them into something otherworldly: alien topographies, the shells of unknown creatures or the wings of fallen bats. – Ramona Heinlein

Jordan Strafer | Fluentum, Berlin, Germany | 11 September – 13 December 

If, like me, you were a teenager in the 1990s, you might have a soft spot for all things talk show: the padded armchairs illuminated by spotlights, the stage designed like an inviting but not-too-grand living room, the rows of chairs for a studio audience poised to ask provocative questions as presenters like Ricki Lake, Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer adjudicated. Such is the scene of Jordan Strafer’s DISSONANCE Set (2025), the installation that opens her exhibition of the same name at Fluentum.

The museum itself, a vast hall of black marble complete with columns and sweeping staircases, occupies part of a complex built between 1936 and 1938 as the district headquarters of the Nazi Luftwaffe. Here, during Berlin Art Week, Strafer filmed DISSONANCE (2025), which depicts a talk show hosted by a US soldier who leads the audience through a guided meditation. The film will be on view from late October and is situated in the same universe as her ‘Loophole’ series, following LOOPHOLE (2023) and DECADENCE (2024), projected one after the other onto a vast screen above the staircase. – Louisa Elderton

^{Main image: Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigerator (detail), 2010, video still. Courtesy: the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels/New York and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York}