Editors’ Selects: November 2025
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well
Pirelli HangarBicocca | Via Chiese 2, Milan
October 11, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Nan Goldin, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022). Three-channel video with sculptural elements and ephemera. © Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist, Kramlich Collection and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo Agostino Osio.
Nan Goldin’s traveling retrospective is a corpus of work in the most literal sense. This Will Not End Well, currently on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, shows the figures that have made up Goldin’s decades of practice—queer bodies, Black bodies, familial bodies. The exhibition opens with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), a 42-minute slideshow of images set to a soundtrack of pop hits, ballads, and rock anthems. Before entering through the red curtains, a “no photography” sign and a note from Goldin ask viewers to respect the privacy of her friends and subjects.
Inside, figures appear in both horizontal and vertical compositions. Calling it a slideshow feels a bit pedestrian for an artist of Goldin’s stature, yet the format underscores her diaristic approach. Her subjects are lit by flash, framed in smoke-filled rooms; the familiar film grain evokes the sensation of flipping through a family album. The work moves in loose chronology: first the parties, the cigarettes, the pasties; then weddings, a pregnant belly rising from a soapy bath; later, portraits of children playing in the yard.
These people are strangers to us, yet through Goldin’s intimate compositions, they become oddly familiar. However adorned in glitter, makeup, and costume, her subjects are never performing. Their vulnerability feels unposed, as if they wouldn’t have turned the camera on themselves. Through that gaze, Goldin preserves a life that might otherwise have slipped from history, giving weight and texture to communities that were often unseen.
But, as with anybody, there is pain that inevitably reveals itself. Goldin’s celebration of community carries within it a deep mourning for those lost—to addiction, to violence, to time. Across the exhibition’s eight video works, the physical toll of dependency and grief becomes visible. This is felt most palpably in Sisters, Saints, Sibyls (2004–2022), where the audience looks down from an over twenty-meter-tall platform onto a recounting of the life of Goldin’s sister, her suicide, and the trickling impacts it has had on the artist’s life.
In this revealing of herself, in portraits of self and of bodies in proximity to her own, in festering wounds and in ecstasy, there is an embodied history on display. It’s a kind of archive that bleeds, heals, and remembers through the act of being seen.
— Annalise Kamegawa
Francisco Javier Ramírez and Edward Schwartz: Streets Taken
Columbia University Butler Library | 535 W 114th St, New York
September 25 – November 30, 2025
Installation view of Francisco Javier Ramírez and Edwards Schwartz: Streets Taken, 2025. Image courtesy of the artists and Columbia University.
On the third floor of Columbia’s Butler Library, Streets Taken, curated by Melina Moe, unfolds within quiet wooden glass cases that are easy to mistake for antique decorative pieces. The exhibition pairs photographs by Edward Schwartz, a mid-century photographer of New York’s immigrant life, depression-era and postwar unrest, whose archive dates from 1938 to 2007, with new works by artist Francisco Javier Ramírez, a Mexico City-born current MFA student and recipient of Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library Research Award. Documentation of 1930s immigrant New York meets the layered photographic and sculptural interventions of Ramirez. The pairing feels destined: two artists separated by almost a century, connected by their shared attention to lives made visible only through struggle.
Schwartz’s photographs hold tenderness, but also the weight of surveillance: the artist’s own gaze embedded in systems that have turned marginalized lives into objects of study. Ramírez takes that tension and cracks it open through scanning, rephotography, and collage. He layers fragments of the past with his own interventions, applying a queer lens that blurs looking with cruising and belonging with refusal. Included are The Grapes of Wrath (2025), an archival inkjet print on metallic canvas from a handheld scan of the 1940s film of the same name, which visualizes John Steinbeck’s novel chronicling the westward journey of an Oklahoma family driven off their farm by poverty. Destabilized by the glitch and distortion of the handheld scanner, the haunting image trembles in abstraction.
Artifact 1 (2025), made of cold-cast, photographs, resin, and patina, is an example of the sculptural objects made to appear as if found in an archeological dig from the 1930s—a play on the aesthetics of remembrance. Ed at age 34 (2025) is a hardcover book produced by frannie, Ramírez’s own press, which elegantly brings together fragments of the archive, his work, and the exhibition as a way of preserving this encounter for future generations. Like his glitch film scans, history flickers, unstable and alive. Ramírez treats the archive not as a mausoleum, but a communal site where the ghosts of displacement and desire still operate.
And yet, the setting sharpens the paradox. Columbia University, a site of immense intellectual capital, has turned its weight against students who dared to challenge the university’s stance on Palestine. Within these walls, the act of remembering becomes political terrain: who gets archived, who gets erased, whose dissent becomes a footnote?
Streets Taken resonates differently in this context. Ramírez’s engagement with Schwartz’s images feels necessary. It’s a reminder that the politics of seeing, of who and what we choose to look at, remain as urgent now as they were then. In this small, charged exhibition, the archive breathes again, not as a monument to what was, but as a space of encounter.
— Francisco Donoso
Yvette Mayorga: Magic Grasshopper
Times Square, New York
October 15 – December 2, 2025
Installation view of Yvette Mayorga, Magic Grasshopper, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Michael Hull.
Yvette Mayorga’s use of pink in Magic Grasshopper is infectious and reminiscent of confectionery. Her application of thickened acrylic through piping bags is alluring and gives her work a sculptural appearance more akin to a cake than a Koons. A truly divisive maneuver, it is clear through her process that Mayorga intends to elevate her practice to a different level of distinction. Abound with cultural significance and motifs, this public work, placed in the center of New York City’s largest commercial hub, still manages to stand out amidst the brightest and most colorful block in the city. In constant flux, Magic Grasshopper encourages keeping an open mind and deploying emotional intelligence when engaging with it.
The implication of movement throughout this artwork is an important aspect and supported through various facets of its makeup. The horses were manufactured in two different points of their strides, but are firmly tethered to their foundation by ornamental posts. The carriage appears to rest atop a parade float, accompanied by the usual skirting that would conceal the wheels and undercarriage of the vehicle. The choice for both the horses and the float to remain stationary directly opposes the usual behavior of their historical designs, respectively. The result of these creative decisions is a commentary on physical and metaphorical movement and stagnation. By reimagining objects that carry traditional connotations and interpretation, Mayorga encourages us to deploy the same skepticism in our daily lives upon the processes we willingly or unknowingly contribute to.
A notable strength of this work lies in its careful utilization of texture. The pink hues are immediately complementary to one another. Somehow, the horses’ saddles appear distinctly different than the solitary backpack that rests atop one of them, and the suitcases above the carriage provide even more difference. The surface of the carriage imitates the smooth exterior of a professionally decorated cake, while the piped acrylic detailing brandishes its imperfections and the importance of the human touch.
The coupling of Magic Grasshopper’s impossibly smoothed surfaces with their hand-decorated trimmings places a serious importance on personality and individuality. The lives of working people, particularly in New York, are buttoned up every day and unendingly presentable. The details of this work serve as a reminder that personal touch cannot be replaced, scrubbed, or smoothed over. Everyone has something about them that is uniquely their own, and this is an unavoidable aspect of being human. Once you embrace these differences, you understand that they are what bring people together, across cultures, communities, and countries. Mayorga’s Magic Grasshopper aims to do just that.
— Rory Martin
Bahareh Khoshooee and Naz Orakzay: And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst
Penumbra Foundation | 36 E 30th St, New York
October 17, 2025 — January 9, 2026
Installation view of Bahareh Khoshooee and Naz Orakzay: And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst, 2025. Courtesy of the artists and Penumbra Foundation.
At Penumbra Foundation, And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst unfolds like a correspondence between Earth and sky. Curated by Maryam Ghoreishi and realized with the works of Kabul-based Naz Orakzay and Brooklyn-based Bahareh Khoshooee, the exhibition traces a dialogue of solidarity that transcends geography, technology, and fear. Over months of distance and upheaval, the three women built what Ghoreishi calls “a space for listening, reflection, and care”—a fragile constellation woven by trust rather than proximity. The show emerged from a long exchange between them, working via WhatsApp and Zoom, exchanging images, research, and voice messages. They had no predetermined exhibition concept; instead, it “grew from trust and conversation,” says Ghoreishi during our sit-down interview.
In Inner Cosmos, a photographic installation in which Orakzay collages objects and photographs of planets that were taken from NASA’s website, she conveys the concept of how she already exists in the universe. For Orakzay, the moon is both witness and interlocutor. She reimagines her confinement as a planetary system where every orbit—family, teacher, therapist, even the Taliban—is given cosmic scale. “By surrendering to the depths instead of striving for heights,” she writes, “I discovered vibrant worlds beneath the surface of everyday life.” This act of mapping interior life against the universe becomes resistance itself: a refusal to be erased, a way to expand like the cosmos and reclaim voice when the world denies it.
Across the gallery, Khoshooee’s work examines access and fragility—how networks flicker on and off under censorship, how connection itself can fracture. Together, they revisit NASA’s 2009 LCROSS lunar-impact mission, transforming an act of male dominance and extraction into an allegory of care. Their moon is not a site to be conquered, but a body to be tended.
Ghoreishi’s curatorial hand is both fierce and gentle. Her tone, in correspondence and exhibition alike, resists the patronizing gaze often cast upon Middle Eastern women, insisting instead on complexity and strength. Through video, sound, and Orakzay’s written testimonies like My Narration, where she asks, “What happens to my dreams? What becomes of all the effort I poured in?” the show becomes an archive of poetic persistence.
In a world consumed by noise and war, And She Made the Moon a Light in Their Midst offers a counter-universe built from care, rage, and imagination—proof that even under siege, women still create constellations of their own.
— Francisco Donoso
evan ray suzuki: plot hole
PAGEANT | 70 Graham Ave #3, Brooklyn
November 6 – 7, 2025
evan ray suzuki, plot hole, 2025. Photography by Nyah Maudrina Raposo.
evan ray suzuki’s newest work, plot hole, says something about being cool (there’s a QR code on the back of the program that takes you to a clip from Harmony Korine’s 2013 film Spring Breakers). plot hole seems like a blurry pastiche of the twenty-something-in-Bushwick aesthetic, but twists and contorts this image until it becomes unstable and unsettling. Bleary-eyed, stumbling, shaking, performers dance their way through a coked-out post-party trip, leaving you questioning where the line between satirizing and worshipping something is drawn.
The work, which debuted in PAGEANT’s one-room studio performance space, begins with blaring Skrillex. When the EDM cuts, a fog machine spurts with a pathetic sadness. Performers are splayed across the kitchenette at the back of the space: one of them is in the fridge, another sitting in the sink with a pink vape held loosely in their hand. It’s a carefully curated tableau, with the dancers staring, expectantly, through their neon plastic sunglasses—it feels so awkward that the awkwardness becomes a point. When the performer lounging on top of the fridge pops the tab of a Whiteclaw, it punches through the silence, and the lazy movement of their hand tips it over. The seltzer spills onto the outstretched leg of the person in the fridge. They stay slouched, unmoving.
The work morphs between this image of desensitized, contrived coolness and the portrayal of intense sensation. Further into the production, performers contort their bodies, limbs buckling and twisting as droning, gaping sounds fill the space (Leo Chang, who made the original music, sits in the corner and creates the soundscape live). They seem to be exploring individual ideas, letting an investigation of something internal spill out in their movement. One dancer with a red lace thong pulled on crookedly over black pants, trips and thrashes while letting laughs and grins and gags escape, eyes focused on the empty air. Another creeps into the room with small, shaking steps like they’re raking their feet over coals.
Other moments of the work dive into the theatricality of its opening, interrupting the sensation-driven movement. Somewhere in the middle, a dancer takes center stage with a microphone as she sings a whispery rendition of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi.” She twitches, feet flexing and shifting, and her face, covered in little shards of mirror, glints in the lights. Its melodrama pulls us out of the blurry contortions of movement and into the carefully curated zeitgeist again.
Something about it all—the tumbling, thrashing, moaning—feels like desperation. We’re watching them in the hole, dug deep, and they’re trying to claw themselves out. But it also rings a bit empty, so locked in on its ideas that it becomes murky whether plot hole is poking fun at its subject or playing into it.
— Lucy Kudlinski
soft weapons
12 Franklin Street, Brooklyn, NY, US
October 18 – November 22, 2025
Installation image of Ayanna Dozier, Doing it for Daddy, 2024, 16mm film, color, silent, 2 minutes, 50 seconds, Edition 1 of 5 (2 APs), and Nightwalker, 2022, Super 8mm to 16mm film, color, sound, 6 minutes, Edition 2 of 5 (2 APs). Photograph by Aidan McLellan, courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York.
The group exhibition soft weapons, curated by Cassandra Neyenesch and Lydia Nobles, takes an expansive approach to materializing the existential dread of the current administration’s continued efforts to decimate reproductive rights and challenge bodily autonomy. Featuring twenty-nine artists working across different mediums, genres, and forms, the exhibition offers a defiant snapshot into the collective efforts and means of creative protest with a unified motivation most aptly described with the tagline of the exhibition: “KEEP YOUR F*CKING HANDS OFF MY BODY!”
With a show so dense with meaningful work, every piece tells a complex and nuanced story; the exhibition as a whole communicates an extremely compelling narrative depicting and abstracting the simultaneous pain and defiance triggered by conditions of distress. The media room of the exhibition space features two short films, Doing it for Daddy (2024) and Nightwalker (2022), by multidisciplinary artist and writer Ayanna Dozier that encapsulate the function of art to depict, adorn, and subvert reality, thus communicating an experience with equal beauty and depth. The presentation of the videos through film projection acknowledges the materiality of a medium that has now become regarded as predominantly digital. It also gives the two-dimensional video installation a sculptural element that demands attention through literally taking up physical space.
Exploring power dynamics, service, and bodily autonomy through the lens of sex work and romantic relationships, the selection of films considers temporality, as the films appear as though they could have been produced 50 years ago, yet are set in the present, accentuating the circular nature in which feminine bodies have been observed, debated, and policed throughout time. Other works utilizing a certain level of glamour and intrigue are the garments created by Viva Ruiz from her continued efforts with Thank God For Abortion, an organization she founded that utilizes creative resistance through design and community organizing to advance reproductive rights. Taking an approach rooted in practical use, Viva Ruiz’s contributions to the exhibition bring in an external context by presenting artworks that could exist outside of the confines of a traditional art-viewing space.
Ruiz’s works are not only visually unique from a fashion standpoint but unapologetically and purposefully eye-catching. Often, a protest’s significant measure of success is the visual spectacle produced, and a common thread throughout the curation of the exhibition is works that are aesthetically compelling enough to be accessible to be enjoyed without any context. While a protest’s first aim is to attract attention, the second crucial component is to effectively communicate a message and the motivation for the protest. soft weapons tactfully achieves this aim with a balanced presentation of pieces that have strong concepts that, when experienced collectively, generate an inspiring yet truly infuriating feeling.
— Ciaran Short
Konstantina: RE: Imagined
JGM Gallery | 24 Howie Street, London
October 29 – December 6, 2025
Konstantina, Wali, 2025. Acrylic on linen, 75.5 cm x 75.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and JGM Gallery.
Konstantina, Wali, 2025. Acrylic on linen, 75.5 cm x 75.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and JGM Gallery.
Konstantina, a Gadigal artist from the Eora Nation, currently works with the British Museum on accurately classifying Gadigal objects taken from First Nations people in early Australian settlements. In her exhibition, RE: Imagined at JGM Gallery, she uses ochre and acrylic paint to translate her study of the Gadigal artifacts into paintings.
Konstantina engages with the physicality of various Gadigal makings: possum skin rugs, reed necklaces, corded string formed from native hibiscus or kurrajong bark. Each painting is titled by the Gadigal word for either the material or craft it is inspired by. Bamal, which translates to soil, earth, clay, or ochre, was used to create ceremonial pigments, rock paintings, and decorate possum cloaks by the Gadigal people; in the modern context it is used for carbon dating. Bamal II (2025) reflects these multifaceted purposes: layers of dirt run deep in maroon, rust, and gray decorated with white dots in the patterns of starbursts, suns, dunes, strata of rich soil, and red earth snake over and under each other. The bamal works are especially poignant, holding both archaeological and ceremonial significance—growth, life, and decay are present in its pigments.
The paintings echo the archival nature of their inspiration: in Wali (2025), meaning possum, the outline of a possum appears in the geometric pattern that resembles an animal-skin rug. The image is contained within an oval shape on the canvas, a nod to the microscope lens that was used to study it.
The paintings become vessels for communicating with the past as Konstantina unearths, learns, recreates, and processes the Gadigal history, reconnecting with cultural crafts that have been suppressed and erased for hundreds of years since colonization. Their oral and visual language is conveyed through the symbolism repeated throughout the exhibition: the white dots that litter the Bamal I and II landscapes, the knotted coils of Murrira I and II (2025), the oblong wooden reeds of Guwirang I and II (2025) linked together in a swaying dance.
The tactility of the paintings holds a connection to their craft; what constitutes a historical object and what constitutes art is blurred in her work. The abstract and scientific combine, each informing the other and reinventing itself. The paintings recenter the Gadigal people in their history. Konstantina finds a way to communicate the trauma of being dislocated, isolated, and erased by re-engaging with cultural memory and reinterpreting it in a modern context. Millions of miles away from its home, Gadigal culture is being revitalized in the act of recreation.
— Sehrish Alikhan
Doug and Mike Starn: A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty
HackelyBury Fine Art | 4 Launceston Place, London W8 5RL
October 8, 2025 – February 28, 2026
Installation view of Doug and Mike Starn: A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty, featuring MTN 648 crop 2, 2025. Acrylic paint on Epson K3 Ultrachrome inkjet print on gelatin hand-coated Zerkall paper, Scotch tape, art size: 129 x 223 cm / 50.8 x 87.8 inches, framed size: 156.2 x 250.2 cm / 61.5 x 98.5 inches. Copyright the artists.
In a quiet corner of the leafy London borough of Kensington is a small exhibition of devastating beauty by the legendary but elusive artistic duo Doug and Mike Starn. Showing works from two distinct but interrelated series, Under the Sky (2023–) and Everything is Liquid (2025–), alongside key historic pieces, this museum-level show bears witness to HackelBury’s long-standing relationship with the twin makers. An ode to the phenomenal presence of light and our fundamental interconnectedness, A Tragedy of Infinite Beauty is a show that reminds us there is beauty to strive for despite all opposition in this world. What makes this so compelling is that every work in this show (save a single snowflake) was created in unity. As twins, the Starns have a heightened sensibility to the strange duality of life, the tension between nature and nurture, the blurry lines of individuality, and the influence of time, dust, and happenstance on the trajectory of every life.
The first work upon entering Bullet Holes in the Cemetery Walls (2024), a three-dimensional ultrachrome K3 Epson ink jet print on gelatin hand-coated Zerhall paper, finished with acrylic paint, varnish, and wax. At the centre of the image is a dark cumulus cloud, underlit by the golden tones of a setting sun; the sky behind is a vibrant, Titian blue. My eyes travel around its central greyness, following the chromatic shifts that suggest a hidden sun. The surface of the image is painterly, with uneven edges. The corners of a pine inner frame don’t quite touch, as if the artists walked away before the work was finished. The cloud is still there, but its vanishing seems imminent.
Whilst focused on nature, their work also highlights the human condition, how we are apart from but also a part of everything; when photographed in isolation and transformed into a work of art, the branch of a tree might also represent neural networks. Looking from the snow-capped mountains to the sea and back again, I am reminded that everything portrayed belongs to one giant, constantly changing body of water. The same molecules we bathe in on languid summer days then evaporate into the atmosphere, where they accumulate in clouds that eventually burst or release droplets that exist momentarily as individual snowflakes. Everything is connected, as the Starns say: “Everything is liquid, everything is flowing, moving, finding new form.”
Perhaps the most poignant of all their series, alleverythingthatisyou (2005–09) documents the structural uniqueness of snowflakes. A potentially infinite catalogue of the singular, it is also an investigation into how we all belong to a family of things: “Together, we are one artist, yet we are two individuals, so that has made us very conscious of parts.” The brothers went to great lengths to capture each photomicrograph: they wore breathing apparatus to collect snow on glass plates that had been frozen to stop the snowflakes melting; humidity interfered, and the fibre optic cables were too hot, so they cooled them down with dry ice. The only way to capture frozen water is to create light without heat.
Whilst writing about this show, I have lingered on found images of their giant painted skies, trying to grasp what it is about their work that evokes feelings of the sublime. Perhaps it is their essential oneness—each work stands as an affirmation that although they are from one, divided in two, for this briefly gorgeous time on earth, they are singularly together. Doug and Mike Starn’s art gently insists that to strive for a connection with nature’s awesome beauty is to accept the interplay of our brief separation in life, before we fall back into a blanket of stardust.
— Nico Kos Earle