What to See in Europe This June

‘Ferocity at Home’ | Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, France | 16 May – 19 July 

In her 1987 memoir Fierce Attachments, the feminist critic Vivian Gornick magnifies the friction and folly involved in parent-child relationships. ‘I know she’s burning and I’m glad to let her burn. Why not? I’m burning, too,’ Gornick writes of her mother and the mutual destruction that can be wreaked by family. Curator Oriane Durand’s current group exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Pernod Ricard, ‘Ferocity at Home’, is titled in a nod to this sense of domestic tumult.

While few of the works on display here can equal Gornick’s fierceness, recognizable patterns of behaviour – from relatives who, even well-meaning, can be overbearing or disappointing – emerge and are repeated throughout the show. Opening the exhibition in a vitrine display are the grey and pink press-kit notes from Chantal Akerman’s 1977 film News from Home, a work that conveys a sense of adult-offspring ambivalence. Akerman’s documentary features visual vignettes of New York, over which she reads letters her mother sent her when she lived there several years prior. In one excerpt of these texts, legible in the press notes, her mother’s doting affection is threaded with evident frustration towards her living so far away. (‘Tell us when you think you’ll come back.’) – Sarah Moroz

Pol Taburet | Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany | 29 March – 13 July 

Moments of heavy silence suffuse Pol Taburet’s debut German solo show, ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre’, at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin – the second in a three-part series of exhibitions that began in March at the Pabellón de los Hexágonos in Madrid and will conclude at the Bienal de São Paulo later this year. 

An assembly of five bronze heads (Papa and Soldier, all works 2025), with pinched facial features and sealed mouths, rest atop rectangular plinths. They are encircled by a series of four large-scale paintings depicting ghoul-like figures engaged in spiritual ceremonies. The exhibition text introduces the legend of Papa Tonnerre, a mute figure weighed down by the secrets of others, who gains speech through a deal with a witch. Unable to bear the emotional burden of his knowledge, he breaks his silence – and is exiled for the confessions he reveals. Although never directly depicted, Tonnerre – a character inspired by Creole oral tradition – haunts every work, eliciting an attentiveness to what is left unspoken. – Brooke Wilson

Anthea Hamilton | Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Italy | 8 May – 2 November

In a 2024 interview for De Singel, British multidisciplinary artist Anthea Hamilton described her work as ‘an invitation to view things differently’. Her latest show, ‘Soft You’, at Fondazione Memmo in Rome, extends this proposition by creating a choreographed environment – featuring sculptural installations, pungent aromas and photographic works – that initiates a dialogue with the Eternal City itself. Taking its title from the closing monologue of William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) – in which the titular character, a Black general living in predominantly white Venice, is destroyed by the prevailing racist ideologies that cast him as a lawless and monstrous outsider – the exhibition skilfully intertwines questions of race, gender, domesticity and collective memory. – Ana Vukadin

Eva Helene Pade | ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark | 10 April – 31 August

Aged just 27, Danish-born artist Eva Helene Pade has already developed an assured painterly language that feels distinctly her own. Her debut institutional solo show, ‘Forårsofret’ (The Rite of Spring) at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, does not arrive quietly. With natural light entirely blocked from the gallery, the room is saturated with the colour and visceral energy of Pade’s latest paintings: ten large-scale, freestanding canvases staged diagonally across the room and tiered like theatrical vignettes, guiding viewers along a narrative path. Despite taking its title from Igor Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet, Pade’s exhibition is far from a literal homage. Instead, she composes something more urgent: a painterly reckoning with sacrifice and femininity, challenging traditional portrayals of women as passive victims. – Sofia Hallström

Tavares Strachan | Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany | 11 April – 24 August 

Tavares Strachan’s first major survey in continental Europe is a bold, poetic and immersive journey through forgotten histories and speculative futures. ‘Supernovas’ assembles a wide constellation of voices that find expression through a diverse range of media. Upon entering the first gallery – its walls painted black – one is greeted by a disembodied voice, synchronized with flickering neon text affixed to the walls. Glowing in yellow and blue, There is a Light in Darkness (2024) cites a passage from James Baldwin’s 1964 essay ‘Nothing Personal’. The work sets the tone for the rest of the show, in which figures who once flickered at the margins are made luminous and corporeal, and the historical contributions of Black visionaries to science and art are highlighted. – Radia Soukni

_{Main image: Pol Taburet, The Nest, 2025, bronze, wood, 166 × 81 × 93 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York; photograph: Frank Sperling}