This exhibition traces the enduring legacy of colonialism in the Caribbean context and explores water as a living archive that preserves movements, displacements, and memories. Far from being conceived as a boundary, the sea is presented as a space of exchange where human and non-human experiences converge.

• X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM), Shanghai.

The show premieres an eponymous five-channel video installation in the basement of the exhibition space, accompanied by sculptural interventions on the ground floor. The central video work unfolds across five screens, tracing seven seemingly unrelated locations—from Europe’s largest flower farm to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Baudelaire weaves these disparate sites into a meditation on the splendor and cruelty of coexistence: a testament to the beauty and absurdity of how we live, work, and organize our collective lives at a moment when the foundations of society feel increasingly fractured. The exhibition takes its title from Roland Barthes’ final lecture series, How to Live Together (1977), in which he observes: “To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable—except when night falls.” Held against that threshold, the work opens a space to reflect upon the conditions we create for living together, ones that preserve difference and dignity, as darkness settles in all around us.

Flare-Up is the first institutional exhibition in London to bring together seventeen UK-based and international visual artists whose work engages with the poetics and aesthetics of illness, disability, neurodivergence and Deafness. 

Thus, Flare-Up situates also contemporary British practices in dialogue with international contexts and with earlier movements, including the enduring influence of HIV/AIDS art and activism. Works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Derek Jarman trace such intergenerational continuities. This lineage is most explicit in Benoît Piéron’s Pillbox Dungeness Seed Bomb (2018), a chromatic pill organiser containing capsules filled with seeds from plants at Prospect Cottage – Jarman’s final refuge-garden in Dungeness, Kent. The seismic impact of this legacy has been foundational in the formation of crip communities and artistic strategies, drawing on queer approaches to abstraction and opacity as forms of crip aesthetics.

The core of the installation is a five-channel film set in a vast refrigerated building in the Netherlands, where forty-six million flowers—flown in from farms in Africa and South America—are sold at auction every morning.
This process is captured in a hypnotic form of visual anthropology that is at once seductive, because flowers are beautiful, and terrifying, because the scale of this globalized trade is ecologically troubling. The documentary sequences are framed by the presence of a fictional observer who roams the streets at night, inspired by a character from Luigi Pirandello’s short play L’Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca [The Man with a Flower in His Mouth]. The flower, which also gives the installation its title, refers to an epithelioma—a tumour that was incurable at the time Pirandello wrote the play. The protagonist, sensing death upon him, projects himself into the minute details of the world he observes intensely, as a way of escaping his impending fate.

Featuring four projects by five artists—Dana Prieto & Safaa Alnabelseya, Deja Hosein, Euridice Zaituna Kala, and Randa Maroufi—the group exhibition Every Worker Should Have Equal Labour Rights is curated by Nima Esmailpour in the context of the 41st annual Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts. Each artist presented, working across different media, critically engages with the lived experiences of working people, drawing connections across histories of labour injustice and worker-led resistance in the Global South.

Against the backdrop of growing polarisation and fragmentation in the world – and in our own society – the exhibition seeks to create conditions for a more open debate about the changing relationship between contemporary art and its audience in times of multiple crises. Bringing together historical and contemporary works, Superglue, or Inventing the Friend reflects on encounters with the other through different notions of otherness, the emergence of the posthuman figure, and contemporary art itself as something not entirely knowable – something foreign.

In her new commission for the MSN staircase, Minh Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong) extends the language of abstract painting into architecture. The work unfolds vertically through the space, like a scroll released from above, taking form as a single 19-metre sheet of natural latex. Suspended within the stairwell, it functions as a translucent membrane—responsive to light, gravity, and movement—through which questions of materiality, energy, and transformation quietly circulate. 

While the staircase implies ascent, Tran counters this upward logic with a gravitational pull. The work responds equally to descending and ascending bodies, to crossings and reversals. It may be read as emergence or return: rising from the ground and sinking back toward it. This dual motion is mirrored in the production process itself. Made in the museum’s basement and installed through an act of lifting, the work traces a trajectory from underground to overground, and finally toward the sky. Painting becomes a conversation with what lies beneath, positioning the artwork as a mediator between earth, body, and light.

A means of revisiting, reconstructing, and reclaiming histories that have been erased or repressed, Rememory signifies the intersection of memory and history, where recollection becomes an act of reassembling fragments of the past—whether personal, familial, or collective. The 25th edition of the Biennale connects the delicate space between remembering and forgetting. By engaging with Rememory, artists will highlight marginalised narratives, share untold stories, and inspire audiences to rethink how memory shapes identity, belonging, and the creation and celebration of new communities and connections. 

• Paula Nascimento, co-curator of  the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial 17 (United Arab Emirates)