THE RECESS 031 - 6 months ahead
including: what to look forward to until December, including: Folkestone, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Bukhara bi&triennials / Tai Shani / Wes Anderson / Hélio Oiticica / Turner & Constable / Andy Goldsworthy
07 July 2025
Now that the solstice has passed & we are in summer mode, it’s time to look ahead to the cold, wet autumn & winter with our 6-months-ahead guide. In January we brought you art & architecture diary notes for the first half of 2025, and below we bring you highlights for the remainder.
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July to December - Our picks:
July
Manchester International Festival has just started & runs until 20 July, taking over the city but centred on Factory International’s home building, the OMA-designed Aviva Studios. Later in the week we will have a full preview & review of the opening events, but there’s a lot going on so look into the listings to search a globally-infused lineup including a Samoan SAUNIGA ceremony and a theatre-filling installation by Dutch scenographic artist Germain Kruip in collaboration with the Royal Northern College of Music.
www.factoryinternational.org
It’s also time for the slightly-delayed Folkestone Triennial, running from 19 July to 19 October. Where other town-covering festivals may disappear with little trace after the programme ends, Folkestone is now littered with artworks from the previous five editions of the Triennial. This years theme is How Lies the Land?, asking visitors & artists to think about what lies beneath. Artist grappling with the theme, some of which may be making pieces that remain on the coastal town, include Céline Condorelli, Emilija Škarnulytė, Katie Paterson, Laure Prouvost & Monster Chetwynd. It promises to be exciting, and while recessed.space will be bringing you full coverage, plan your seaside trip now to join in the fun.
www.creativefolkestone.org.uk
Land art legend Andy Goldsworthy has a well-deserved major retrospective at the National Galleries Scotland. The largest ever indoor exhibition of an artist more used to constructing works that can cover vast landscapes since the 1970s, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as an immersive work responding to the architecture of the Royal Scottish Academy.
www.nationalgalleries.org
August
From 26 August until 23 November, the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale takes the intriguing theme of Séance: Technology of the Spirit, promising to explore the occult, mystical & spiritual to push back against the “accelerationist and rationalistic logics of capitalist modernity”. The project calls itself an “exhibition-as-séance” and will feature works from a wide roster of artists living and dead (who we presume may all be present in some form) including Nam June Paik, Rudolf Steiner, Amit Dutta, Suzanne Treister, Sky Hopinka, & Haroon Mirza.
www.mediacityseoul.kr
Perhaps also bringing something of the spiritual, a new sculpture featuring a soundscape by composer & double bassist Maxwell Stirling will occupy the centre of London’s Somerset House grand courtyard. It’s a work by artist Tai Shani titled The Spell or The Dream that invites visitors inside to sleep and dream of a renewed collective future. Alongside the sculpture, Shani is co-curating The Dream, a global 24/7 radio show, convening thinkers & academics to imagine a better future, also featuring three new commissions from Cécile B Evans, Moor Mother & Cecilia Vicuña.
www.somersethouse.org.uk
Starting right at the end of August on the 29th, the 41st EVA International – Ireland’s Biennial – takes place across Limerick city until 26 October. Titled It Takes a Village, concerns around shared thinking, working & doing will be raised in projects by creatives including Eimear Walshe, Noor Abuarafeh & Eoghan Ryan.
www.eva.ie
September
Returning to Korea, Thomas Heatherwick is the curator of the fifth Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The thematic overview is tightly aligned with the designer’s Humanise agenda to make cities “more human” and less “boring” using the few façade-focused ways of considering architecture he personally considers important. From 01 September until , Seoulites have the chance to grapple with the depth & ethics of the message – a central themed exhibition will display “one massive sculpture” alongside 24 external works which convey the message that “Architect is for people [&] every building should be interesting, friendly, and emotionally available.”
www.seoulbiennale.org
Does the world need another biennial? Perhaps so, if it’s one that may bring genuine new intersections and ideas. The first Bukhara Biennial takes place from 05 September to 20 November in the Uzbek city, and – suited for a city on the Silk Road – combines artists from both East and West. These include Pakui Hardware from Lithuania, Antony Gormley from the UK & South African Ighshaan Adams alongside several artists from the region including at least 76 creatives from Uzbekistan. The whole thing is curated by Diana Campbell with Wael Al Awar as Creative Director of Architecture & coincides will take place across the UNESCO Creative City of Craft & Folk Art with free admission for all.
www.bukharabiennial.uz
Another biennial! But it’s a biggy, so we had to include it. The 26th Bienal de São Paulo also has a biggy title, Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, referencing a poem by Conceição Evaristo. Since 1957, the biennial has taken place in the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed by a team lead by Oscar Niemeyer and Helio Uchoa, a huge building which needs a great number of artists to fill it. Luckily, the curators (who adopted bird migration patterns as a methodological guide for selecting participants) also have a biggy number of artists, including Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ernest Cole, Frank Bowling, Oscar Murillo, Forensic Architecture & Otobong Nkanga.
www.36.bienal.org.br
October
Previewed at the current Venice Biennale, the Jean Nouvel-designed Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain opens at the Place du Palais-Royal. Replacing their current glass and steel (and perfectly fine) current home, also designed by the same architect, the wealthy cultural institute starts a new life in a Haussmannian building that was once the Magasins de Louvre. Nouvel has gutted the huge building, creating a large central atrium & spaces which it is hoped a new kind of exhibiting will emerge. Using digital throughout, the promise is to be a kinetic and immersive experience for the visitor. The space will open with a ten-month exhibition of the 600 artworks & 100 artists who have participated with the organisation since it opened in 1984.
www.fondationcartier.com
London-based Argentine Amelia Pica opens a solo show at Cample Line, 24km north of Dumfries in Southwest Scotland, on 04 October. Pica is interested in modes of communication, especially in relation to the built & social worlds we inhabit. The artist often creates work relating to architectural form in a practice exploring cultural intimacy & how the person learns to navigate the world.
www.campleline.org.uk
The Fitzwilliam in Cambridge presents an exhibition looking at the work of craftspeople some 5,000 years ago in The Makers of Ancient Egypt, the first time an institution has considered the empire through the lens of craft & making. The institution will bring its leading Egyptian research to its own collection as well as loans from the Louvre & Berlin’s Egyptian Museum in a presentation which doesn’t so much look at ancient Egyptian objects as historical, but considers them as technologically inventive & radical.
www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
November
If there was ever a film titled Marmite: the story of an extract (& with all these commercial spinoffs, it’s not unlikely) then the selected director might be Wes Anderson. Love his aesthetic, hate his schtick, Anderson’s work is identifiable and deeply interested in the consideration of place, architecture & style. London’s Design Museum has been given access to the filmmaker’s personal archives to create a first retrospective looking at the approach of the artist behind works such as The Grand Budapest Hotel, Asteroid City & The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Turn up between 21 November & 26 July next year to see maquettes, sketches, props & notebooks from the polarising auteur.
www.designmuseum.org
Tate Britain presents the ultimate English landscape painter face-off with Turner and Constable, opening 27 November & running until next April. They’re not really presenting it as a battle, however, but marking their shared 250th birthday by comparing approaches to rural landscapes – and skyscapes. The exhibition will not only include the big hitters in Tate’s own collection, or loaned in, but also notebooks, sketches & personal items to look at how each responded to nature.
www.tate.org.uk
Dia Beacon in New York host an exciting exhibition of work by Hélio Oiticica from 21 November. Central to Brazilian modernism & Neoconcrete movement, the artist who died in 1980 aged 42 used abstraction to bring politics, participation & economics into an art practice largely conducted while Brazil was under a military dictatorship. Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus) (1960–63), a structure of suspended panels in hues of yellow to orange, will act as a centrepiece to the show.
www.diaart.org
December
While December is the hardest month to preview, with fewer openings of the exhibition & architectural variety, there is a Hito Steyerl exhibition planned for Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio space. Somewhat smaller than their spectacular OMA-designed Milan campus of exhibitions & discoveries, the Osservatorio is tantalizingly perched overlooking the glass rooftops of the Vittorio Emanuele II arcades, with access from the tourist-drenched ground level. No details are yet available for German moving-image maker & tech theorist Steyerl, but it will likely use the unique space in interesting ways.
www.fondazioneprada.org
We can’t 100% predict this one, but the delayed reopening of Hammersmith Olympia is set to take place “late 2025” and we think they will work hard to open up the most financially useful parts of the building for the Christmas rush. Co-designed by Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC, the events centre that opened in 1886 and has hosted the likes of gigs by Jimi Hendrix and Vivienne Westwood’s first fashion show, is undergoing a £1.3bn project to give it sparkle and huge income potential. The new owners hope that it will generate over £600m a year through a music venue, theatre, 30+ restaurants, “Boutique gym”, private school, offices & flats.
www.olympia.london
The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) is the gift that keeps on giving. Dublin architects Heneghan Peng one the design competition in 2003 & 22 years later are inching towards seeing their project complete. Much of the complex is already soft-opened, but the grandest spaces, including the its Tutankhamen galleries, have been held back for the grand opening. This was supposed to have happened last week, but hostilities between Iran & Israel as well as impact in Egypt from violence in Gaza & Sudan, led to a cautious pause. We have squeezed this into the end of 2025 in the hope that this architectural saga nearly as slow as the construction of the Pyramids themselves may come to a close.
www.visit-gem.com
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Heatherwicking the city
With designer Thomas Heatherwick popping up twice above, in Seoul & London, it’s a good time to revisit our review of his Humanise book, by Karrie Jacobs: “Frequently, to demonstrate that human beings really prefer curves over straight lines, or a variegated streetscape to a monolithic one, Heatherwick cites scientific studies. This is the worst of both worlds: a big ego bolstered by cherry-picked science.”
🔷 READ HERE 🔷