ESCAPE-VELOCITY
Ghostmachine | 23 Monroe St, New York
July 31 – August 29, 2026
How might we reconcile our existence in the natural universe with the human-centered philosophy that has long shaped our lives and structures, at a time when that philosophy seems to have ensured universal destruction? At our present moment of ecological precarity, ESCAPE-VELOCITY encourages closer attention to our own participation in and enmeshment with technological and natural processes by offering a space of possibility responsive to human action.
The exhibition is a product of Ghostmachine’s annual open call, from which curator Dominika Tylcz selected four artists across an intergenerational spectrum. Tylcz describes the title as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the ways in which the featured works imagine alternative modes of thinking and being with technology and nature: an imagining beyond our current conditions (not an exit from them so much as an attempt to think otherwise), gesturing towards destination. The artistic practices presented seek to reconcile the foundations of the Anthropocene and its crises with the possibility of futurity, recentering the viewer within open-ended ontologies that embrace change and interconnectedness.
The artists included—Amy Cheng, X.S. Hou, Cecil Howell, and Goldie Poblador—present differing modes of encountering scientific realities through material engagement with research-based practices. These practices evoke Yuk Hui’s philosophical concept of "cosmotechnics," an anti-universalist framework for understanding that foregrounds heterogeneous, globally diverse technological traditions and cosmologies in advocating ecological rebuilding. Central to the exhibition is Poblador’s free-standing glass sculpture Oil Slick Turbinaria Striped (2026), created at Tylcz’s request to underscore the visual echo between coral and neural systems. Placed focally in the gallery, it serves as a loud visual reinforcement of ESCAPE-VELOCITY’s fundamental premise: that patterns across nature and humanity may serve as conduits of thought.
While avoiding a human-centered science, this exhibition recognizes the importance of engaging humanity in knowledge-building to imagine a different future. The resulting experience is ultrasensorial, with several works harnessing delightful moments of recognizable technological and sensorial interaction to encourage bodily participation. In Hou’s 地籁 (earth's pipe/reed) (2025), for example, the viewer is encouraged to blow on hanging scrolls embossed with satellite images of a tornado forming to activate a deconstructed vape screen that bears a whirling tornado animation. By drawing visitors into adaptive exchanges, these artworks force physical and visual apprehension of the viewer’s own involvement in environmental and technological systems. What is thus demonstrated is a reciprocal interplay of human and inhuman, the boundaries between matter and consciousness blurred through mutual responsiveness.
These artists' relationships to anthropologically-centered science are productive, investigative, and challenging. Across practices, they strive to break viewers out of the mold of universal explainability imparted by Western philosophy, facing a present of ecological and technological entanglement and imagining a future in which such interrelations might be harnessed productively, rather than to the detriment of all. Together they form a system of portals into engaging with the universe as it is imagined, even proven, to be without boundaries.
Mona Hatoum: Over, under and in between
Fondazione Prada | Largo Isarco, 220139 Milan
January 29 – November 9, 2026
At Fondazione Prada's Cisterna, Mona Hatoum leaves the viewer with few places to stand securely. A constellation of hand-blown glass spheres hangs overhead. Another thirty thousand gather into a world map underfoot, while beyond them an immense aluminium lattice repeatedly buckles before returning upright. Over, under and in between reads almost literally: less a title than a set of coordinates the body is asked to inhabit.
The setting proves anything but incidental. Built in 1909 to house the storage tanks of the former Società Italiana Spiriti distillery, the Cisterna unfolds through three towering chambers whose sequence shapes the exhibition. Two installations—Web (2026) and Map (red) (2026)—were conceived specifically for them. Hatoum noticed the ledge running along the first space and imagined a work hanging across it; the next seemed to call for something on the ground. “My favourite way of working is to go and spend time in the place I am exhibiting in and make work locally,” she has said. Here, that responsiveness becomes the exhibition's rhythm.
Over, under and in between also belongs to Hatoum's longstanding habit of returning to structures that organize our experience of the world—a web, a map, a grid—and subtly shifting our relationship to them. The latter-day surrealist's oeuvre offers another throughline: the familiar acquires darker, stranger meanings often through a simple change of material, scale, or context. In Web, glass spheres dissolve into the height of the room before revealing their geometry. A spider's web, Hatoum notes, can evoke protection and danger; the beads recall dew drops or a “celestial constellation,” even “the interconnectedness of all things.”
That interconnectedness takes a different turn once the glass reaches the floor. In Map (red), thirty thousand loose spheres form a borderless world according to the Gall–Peters projection, an alternative to the Eurocentric distortions of the more familiar Mercator map. Hatoum has returned to maps since the mid-1990s, undoing the certainty they seem to offer. Foucault once described the map as an instrument of power-knowledge, questioning the apparent objectivity of something shaped by the cultures and politics that produced it. The loose glass gives the mappa mundi an unstable quality that wears away at its usual assertiveness. More interestingly, that precariousness extends to the viewer: one false step could send the spheres rolling—or redraw a coastline.
That same sense of instability carries into all of a quiver (2022). Nine stacked aluminum frames buckle and slowly straighten in a perpetual cycle, hovering between the remains of a building destroyed by war and the scaffolding of one under construction. Hatoum has acknowledged that institutions and political systems once assumed stable now appear increasingly fragile—yet the work never resolves into commentary. She has often spoken of wanting to “push and pull” viewers in different directions. Perhaps what she resists, more than anything else, is the moment when an image finally settles.
Once More, With Feeling
Yancey Richardson | 525 West 22 St, New York
August 12 – 28, 2026
Once More, With Feeling is not about leaving things to chance, but seizing the agency and passion in storytelling. Across three rooms at Yancey Richardson, the works of Yale’s 2026 photography MFAs are heavily figurative and often intimate, folding sincerity into mystery. Alongside atmospheric, glowing photographs, Untitled (Dad in Sister’s Hands) (2026) captures Jasmine Clarke’s sister caressing her father’s face; the small archival pigment print is itself suspended in the amnion of a brown wooden frame. In Chen Xiangyun’s installation Jajang Billiards (2026), photos wrap around the walls like dilapidated posters, and a phone on the wall allows visitors to hear conversations with members of the billiards community as pool balls clack in the background. Em Wall’s print Boys Wrestling (2025) is playful, intimate, and fleeting: a high-contrast image of two young boys, overlapped and reminiscent of Laura Gilpin’s poem, The Two-Headed Calf. Iconoclastic, fragile, and wondrous, the two-headed calf is both a product and victim of nature.
Sometimes the intimacy is offered as a performance: Christopher Postlewaite’s photos are grungy and nestlike, offering a peek behind the curtain. Faith Couch’s lighting, composition, and perspective invoke the formality of the stage, but her use of sequence and subtleties such as a subject’s raised heel add a quotidian idiosyncrasy. In Olivia Reavey’s series of gelatin prints, bodies bend, flex, and bite while both imitating and reacting to the metal structures which surround them.
The exhibition presents a visual representation of the bonds that connect us to our respective ecosystems, cultural narratives, and even physical limitations. Christian Badach’s works, for example, track the relationship between their subject’s hypermobility disorder and the seasonal cycle of Western Massachusetts. A swarming pit of crocodiles is both a threat and a collective in John Shen’s striking print, Congregation (2026). Even Andrew Warner’s photograph of a desire path—improvised trails formed by human or animal traffic—implies an absent subject. It is a show that leans into the agency of storytelling, not just through documentation but through reimagining, remembering, and reassembling.
As the artists of Once More, With Feeling express the confusion and joy of participating in a beautiful and difficult world, they offer us distinct interpretations of attachment. Whether our bonds constrain or secure us is a matter of semantics, but the connections themselves are undeniable: vividly captured in a wealth of texture and light.
The cataclysm of binary star systems
Nunu Fine Art x 603 Arts |
August 8 – 29, 2026
The cataclysm of binary star systems does not peddle eco-panic or eco-pessimism so much as acceptance of inevitable disaster—it’s a question of “if,” not “when,” our planet will become uninhabitable. The group exhibition, a collaboration between 603 Arts and Nunu Fine Art, swivels between an interest in past systems of renewal and future modes of innovation, resulting in the fusion of synthetic materials with organic or biomorphic forms.
Elegantly-finned fish made of photopolymer resin swim in Danni Huang’s Phantom Limbs sculptures (2026); a brain is formed out of handblown glass in Lena Becerra’s COAGLVA (2026). Becerra’s depicted combination of organic and artificial elements to depict an anthropomorphic form evokes Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg: the blue-and-white brain is capped by a steel frame, simulating a mainframe, and is held up by a metal container, the base of which snakes onto the wall like metallic veins. According to Haraway, the cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine, transcends current ideological and political hegemonies by rejecting essentialist binaries and embracing plasticity. This blurring of borders persists throughout the exhibition, as objects incorporate the organic and artificial, and imagine a future while engaging with the past.
The exhibition is strongest when it maintains an emphasis on futurity while employing unconventional existing materials. Particularly striking is María-Elena Pombo’s Unweaving the Starches of Abya Yala (Starches of Abya Yala) (2026), in which a curtain of waxy, gelatinous strings akin to jellyfish tentacles hang from a metal rod. Here, materials for alternate futures exist already: Pombo uses corn, potato, cassava starch, among others, to form a mysterious portal, perhaps leading into a utopian space. While many artists employ sculptural materials—glass, LEDs, resin—there are also six paintings included in the exhibition. Painting is an unexpected medium for an exhibition centered around futurity, as its possibilities have arguably been taken to their farthest point. However, its successes can be seen in Ang Ziqi Zhang’s painting Second Order Condition (2025), which cultivates a visual language of futuristic forms. The depicted shape flickers between a spacecraft and a seashell; it has both the sharp angularity of a futuristic ship and the concentric swirl of a conch. Inside a hazy purple backdrop, this pearl-hued configuration is not a literal depiction, but instead is an impression of futurity. In this conception, painting can be a template for what can be built when old media fails.
In the lower level is Assembly Line (2025), an installation by José John Santos III, in which over five hundred casts of crab shells spill from a wooden box, spread out across the floor and crawl up the walls. Though the crabs’ carapaces are affixed to the gallery surfaces, their sheer volume imbues them with a scuttering mobility. The installation is an alternate conclusion to the problems posed by the works upstairs: here, after humanity has abandoned Earth in search of alternative ways of living, or perhaps died out entirely, endangered flora and fauna will repopulate the abandoned world. This exhibition envisions two worlds: one in which, through natural materials, humans will innovate beyond the heating Earth, and one without human innovation, where the Earth and its inhabitants will return to equilibrium.
Flare-Up
Goldsmiths CCA | St James's, London SE14 6AD
May 21 – August 16, 2026
Flare-Up, curated by Natasha Hoare and Mariana Lemos at Goldsmiths CCA, is an expansive exhibition bringing together a group of UK-based and international artists whose work engages with illness, disability, neurodivergence, and deafness. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, film, poetry, music, and performance, the exhibition explores how these artists live with, against, or outside of systems of welfare, healthcare, and medical authority.
Spread across two floors, there is no clear route through Flare-Up. The exhibition is structured with several entry points and forms of access, inviting visitors to move at their own pace. I followed the wheelchair access route, beginning in the downstairs galleries, where remnants of the building’s past as a public bathhouse—exposed pipes and Victorian-era water tanks—line the industrial halls.
Carolyn Lazard’s Into the Wild Blue Yonder (2025) is made up of six LED panels. The panels present an image of a blue sky with scattered clouds and tree branches, blowing gently in the wind. The work recalls photographic reproductions of nature in a medical context. Laid on the floor, however, to be looked down upon, Lazard strips the panels of their utility, making apparent the manufactured calm of institutional settings.
Upstairs, pages from JJJJJerome Ellis’s book, The Clearing (2021), are thumbtacked to the wall. The book and accompanying album, playing on nearby headsets, explore Ellis’s stutter while describing the relationship between music, Blackness, and water. Extending the length of the wall, Ellis’s text breaks and scores the paper with language. Letters repeat themselves. Punctuation becomes fluid. Elsewhere, letters leave behind their line and drift through blank space to form images: a tree, a blizzard of letters, a scatter of tilted j’s like a flock of birds taking flight. Ellis asks: How can a book bear the trace of music, and the racialized, disabled body?
One of the final works in the exhibition, Violence in the Form of Stationery (2018), Bella Milroy’s series of altered Department for Work and Pensions envelopes, returns to the show’s central concerns. Milroy writes, “The DWP have changed their stationery from brown paper to white … white, like any other household bill, dressed itself up as ordinary.” With the Labour Government’s recent proposed reforms to cut and tighten benefits and access to work for disabled people, Milroy’s text and charcoal drawings act as protest, signaling the innate violence behind the government’s actions and the precarity of living amidst financial uncertainty.
Positioned in a historically charged space, once an extension of state and municipal authority, Flare-Up at Goldsmiths CCA challenges normative ideas about bodies and minds, reframing the political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts in which artists live and work with disability. Intentional seating, wall text, audio descriptions, and printed exhibition guides throughout the exhibition demonstrate how curating with an emphasis on accessibility and care can transform the viewer's experience and reshape modes of engagement beyond what’s commonly offered in the standard contemporary gallery model today.
Xin Liu: EXHAUST
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo | Via Modane, 16, 10141 Turin
April 15 – October 11, 2026
Two bodies writhe along the crest of a desert dune, heads in the sand, making slow, measured movements that leave a trace of something not quite human, nor completely serpent. As they crawl on the landscape, a voice speaks in Mandarin: “We often look up, or look down to find the remaining traces. Pressed down by the sky, shrouded in shadow, and submerged by dust into the strata … This may make you dizzy.” Humans have treated the Earth as if it has infinite resources; the sky is ours to keep and the ground to empty, as if we believe entropy truly is zero. For science and equations, this may be true, but humans are suffering as a result of that debt run up in opposite directions at once. This is precisely the argument at the heart of Xin Liu’s EXHAUST at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The image of bodies in the desert appears at the end of the 21-minute video artwork, The White Stone (2021), one of the three works in Liu’s exhibition. The hypnotic future history film traces the artist’s investigation of the deserts and remote villages of Western China for the debris of rockets launched since the 1990s and the effect on the nearby residents. The artist led a recovery mission parallel to the creation of her film, tracking down fragments of fallen rockets before government authorities could remove them, discovering near-abandoned oil towns in the process.
Opposite the video hangs a woven tapestry made from Vivomer, a bioplastic grown from waste biomass, in a state of degradation. Titled The Map: Karamay (2026), the work shows the geography of the artist's hometown in Xinjiang, a city on the precipice of decay and still under extraction. Nearby in the repurposed museum’s storage closet, The Lab (2026) illustrates Liu’s meticulous research: maquettes and material tests sit alongside a working archive recording the decay of Vivomer in real time, functioning more as an instrument than an image.
EXHAUST isn’t concerned with why humans set their sights upward—it instead underscores the same pattern of use and discard on Earth, now extended upward. We mined the Earth just to mine the sky, only to have the sky crash right back down and lay out what we have destroyed and still will. The world outside the gallery shows the same stories: The New York Times recently published an article on the destruction that unpredictable falling space junk has caused to Nairobi, the Pacific Ocean, Florida, the Canary Islands, Western Australia, and more. Liu’s exhibition leaves us with a dizzying call to pay attention to the failure and decay we’ve caused as consequences of supposed progress and preservation.
Whatever Happened to Gary Cooper?
CC Jasper | 131 Chrystie St, New York
July 21 – September 13, 2026
The opening of Whatever Happened to Gary Cooper? at CC Jasper drew a packed house, complete with a bouncer checking IDs at the door. Tucked into the back of the gallery is a swanky, dimly lit bar, so apparently the kids have to stay home. Given some of the decidedly NSFW artwork on view, that might be for the best anyway.
Take, for instance, Cliff Danger’s American Cream (2026), a seemingly innocuous house-like structure made from plywood and a vintage Gilbert Erector Set. Peer through its peephole and you’re suddenly transported into a red-light scene —a glory hole for the eyes, if you will. It sets the tone for an exhibition preoccupied with looking, being looked at, and the strange ways identity is constructed through images.
Nearby, I met artist Jimmy Johnson while gazing at his work, Enyaw Nhoj (2025), an acrylic and pigment print on canvas featuring John Wayne in a classic Western scene, complete with a pig nose seamlessly affixed over his face. It would be quite the conversation piece in a private collection, though perhaps not as conversational as Atnas (2025), a similarly manipulated image of Santa Claus with a shushing pointer finger in front of his mouth and his infamous red cap replaced by a large erect penis emerging from his forehead. There’s a joke somewhere between the vintage Gilbert Erector Set and Santa’s own “erector,” and this exhibition is more than willing to make it.
The show takes its title from Tony Soprano’s famous lament: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type.” As the exhibition text argues, Tony isn’t really mourning Gary Cooper so much as “mourning the possibility that identity was ever uncomplicated.” Gary Cooper becomes mythology, the rugged, self-assured American male whose certainty now feels increasingly fictitious.
Some of the exhibition’s quieter works complicate this idea beautifully. Photographer Mario de la Ossa’s I Only Have Eyes for You (2025) depicts a man in glasses, peering through diaphanous, daylit curtains. The title gives the photograph an ominous undertone, suggesting surreptitious surveillance. There is a kinetic energy to the figure as he peers toward the left edge of the picture plane, perhaps looking outward while simultaneously reckoning with something in the past.
Maite Iribarren Vázquez’s cast-aluminum dominoes of Server Farm (2025) are particularly striking: familiar and iconographic, the individual pieces are strung together with metal wiring, folding the game into a sculptural object that can no longer be played, only considered. It immediately brought me back to childhood games of Chicken Foot with my grandparents in Houston, Texas; that familiar communion and bonding of games transformed here into something fixed, inaccessible, and memorialized.
Roxanne Wolanczyk’s pottery carries that emotional inheritance more explicitly. One vessel declares on its surface, “I hold so much sorrow,” while its full title continues: “There is no way to make meaning of this. Men can be brutal.” Girl, we feel you on that one.
Throughout the exhibition, there is a kind of sensual politics at play. Voyeurism and surveillance sit alongside solidarity, communion, memory, humor, and expressions of vulnerability. The exhibition statement aptly describes our current societal condition as a “perilous state of over-identity,” where signifiers become shortcuts, and the taxonomy of sexuality, gender, religion, astrology, and pop culture helps guide the understanding of our contemporaneous existential crises.
Chunghee Yun: The Blue Mirror
Gladwell Projects | 130 Bay Street, Jersey City
May 9 – August 21, 2026
Mirrors sustain reflections of absent figures. Looming, comedic Death glares over shoulders like a kinetic afterimage. Before strokes blend, Chunghee Yun’s erotic imagery at Gladwell Projects opens into a chimerical distortion of selfhoods.
The Blue Mirror, Yun’s nine-piece series, brings a spectral aura to Gladwell Projects’ six-floor presentation, Six Artists. Six Floors. Six Solo Exhibitions. Her oil paintings work like vignettes among frayed concrete and exposed metal. In a sprawling concrete expanse, echoes bounce around the room; the pieces enter into both visual and spoken dialogue. Yun's paintings first start as a discourse on the instability of sex in the company of desire and surveillance.
What rises are conflicts of interiority manifested in contorted bodies and interior spaces, seen in washed faces of painted subjects and felt in the closure of a blink. Yun heavily implicates voyeurism in her interrogation of sexual dynamics as but one spectacle in which power is continuously arranged. In bringing a multitude of perspectives manifested in mirrors, specters, and consciousnesses, Yun subverts the pornographic lens to the point of irrelevance. Yun forcefully separates nudity from sexuality: nakedness so raw and abound points to something more natural and honest. Here, body and self are confused; eroticism rests on the precipice of life and death, of sacrifice, of loss, of self-possession.
The Blue Mirror mocks the sexual objectification of women by sabotaging the power dynamics erected by heterosexual hegemony. Reminiscent of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), Yun’s Baptism II (2025) shows a crowd of mostly women gathered around a supine woman, her chest cut open and disturbed by a shirtless male figure bearing down over her body. From the cavity, a masculine vector erupts chaotically like a phantom of movement. Definition and dissection have long been appendages in the masculine European tradition of accruing and preserving "mastery" of the world, both in the violence of the acts themselves and the way they appeal to authority through rationality. As masculine energy rises from a feminine body, Yun’s audience is challenged to understand themselves as part of the illustrated audience and consider viewership as a mimetic paradox. But does the viewer see Yun’s worlds as her desires, or as a reflection of a heteronormative, spectacularized culture?
What’s missing from the space is any definition of Yun's autobiographical experience, thus rendering the perspective of her lens more universal—perhaps even omniscient. What’s left for the viewer is the tension between universality and interiority: we see ourselves reflected and implicated, but are forbidden from any full clarity. If it is impossible to identify with Yun herself, catharsis instead weaves itself into her worldbuilding as an erotic and imaginative fever dream.
