Basel Biennale aims to cast light on the many artworks that exist in public places in Basel, but often stay unnoticed. The first two Basel Biennales have been dedicated to them. But Basel’s public space also features artworks that are almost impossible to miss – and these are this year’s protagonists. But even the most popular artworks need care. That’s why the Basel Biennale also aims to raise awareness for preserving these works of art. Some of them need regular maintenance, some of them need to be repaired, so giving them continued love and respect is desired.

The artists: Jonathan Borofsky, Bettina Eichin, Fischli/Weiss, René Küng, Lang/Baumann, Pablo Picasso, Nikki de Saint Phalle, Ferdinand Schlöth, Thomas Schütte, Richard Serra, Paul Suter, Jean Tinguely, Alexander Zschokke.

Here’s the map (video documentary coming soon):

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Impressions from the opening reception of Jennifer Rubell‘s solo exhibition at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York. New York, June 4, 2026. The exhibition revolves around Jennifer Rubell’s new AI-based smartphone app Attune. Attune is an AI-powered smartphone app that helps users before they send a text message. It’s both a consumer product and a conceptual art project. How it works: You enter your draft text — the message you’re about to send. Attune analyzes it — It identifies the underlying “social move” you might not realize you’re making (e.g., hesitation, vagueness, weakness, unintended subtext, or self-sabotage).
It rewrites the message — in your own voice, making it clearer, sharper, more confident, and better aligned with your actual intentions.
The app essentially acts like a thoughtful friend (with a bit of “tough love”) that spots how you might be getting in your own way and helps you communicate more effectively. It targets the anxious “moment before you press send.”

Press text (excerpt): Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of artist Jennifer Rubell’s new AI texting app, Attune, on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026 from 6–8pm at 327 West 36th Street, New York.

Attune is a mass-market smartphone app for the moment before you send a text. It identifies the social move you may not realize you’re making, then rewrites your message in your own voice, clearer, sharper, and more attuned to your intentions. In the gallery space, Attune invites viewers to reconsider what art is and what a gallery does. How does art survive the collapse of old structures of transaction, objecthood, and human experience? Rubell uses the mechanics of a tech product launch as medium: exclusivity, desperation, virality, male ease, and hype are all fair game.

Attune appears as the subject of three new artworks by Rubell: Baller is an exuberant sendup of neo-macho startup culture. Thousands of beach balls hand-stamped with the Attune logo fill the gallery space. 250 are limited-edition collectors’ items signed by Rubell. One beach ball grants lifetime access to Attune. The work blurs the line between merch and collectible. Visitors are invited to take home as many free balls as they can carry. Young Man with Phone is a live month-long performance featuring a hunched-over twenty-something, endlessly absorbed in his device: the archetypal male figure of our time. The performer’s number appears on the wall label, where visitors are invited to hit him up. He responds if he feels like it. He uses Attune when he feels hesitant. Free for a Month is an oil-on-canvas diptych that includes a QR code granting gallery-goers 30 days of complimentary access to Attune.

The exhibition will remain on view through June 26. Attune will launch in limited release on the App Store beginning June 3, 2026. Subscriptions start at $12.99/month. Join the waitlist at attuneofficial.com.

Jennifer Rubell (b. 1970) is an American conceptual artist whose work centers on the viewer’s physical and emotional engagement with the object. She works across a wide variety of participatory mediums ranging from interactive sculpture, painting, and video to food performance. Select performances and exhibitions include Landscapes at Fondation Beyeler; Old-Fashioned at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Creation for Performa; Made in Texas and Nutcrackers at Dallas Contemporary; So Sorry at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery; The de Pury Diptych at Saatchi Gallery; and Icons at Brooklyn Museum. Rubell received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She lives and works in New York City. This is her fourth exhibition with Meredith Rosen.

“How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?” is the title of the contribution of the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) to the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The show features three artists (Benjamin Orlow, Klara Kristalova, Tori Wrånes), each representing one of the Nordic countries, with a focus on sculpture, installation, performance, transformation, mythology, vulnerability, and the interplay of bodies, materials, sound, and memory under pressure (both literal, from the pavilion’s architecture, and metaphorical). Nordic Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.

Official description: How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? approaches the Nordic Countries Pavilion as a site of compression, where architecture actively shapes experience. Works by Tori Wrånes, Klara Kristalova, and Benjamin Orlow explore how bodies, materials, sound, and memory coexist under pressure. Transformation is understood as a process rather than a conclusion; bodies disperse and reassemble, structures remain provisional, and space becomes a lived condition where sensation accumulates over time rather than resolving into clarity.

This is walkthrough of Lubaina Himid’s exhibition “Predicting History: Testing Translation” at the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.

Official description:

Lubaina Himid’s British pavilion commission explores the nature of belonging and how to make a home in a new place. In her dazzling, large multi-panelled paintings, Himid places industrious figures – Architects, Boatbuilders, Chefs, Tailors, Gardeners – discussing, arguing, collaborating on whether to move or stay. The exhibition captures daily tensions of belonging felt by those from elsewhere as they navigate different cultures, behaviours and climates.

Himid embraces the pavilion’s neo-classical architecture, presenting Britain as welcoming and pleasant. Yet an underlying unease permeates through sounds, texts and images suggesting awkwardness and uncertainty in this otherwise apparently idyllic setting.

Himid invites the active involvement of the audience, creating scenes in her paintings that viewers might be experiencing. As if for theatre, she establishes characters, crafts narratives, imagines dialogue and creates sound effects. She wants the viewer to be as engaged as if they were watching a performance – and to be thoughtfully provoked as a result. You are in the performance; the viewer is the performer.

Himid’s work avoids easy solutions, opening a space for generous, intelligent conversations while maintaining an unshakeable belief in art’s capacity to reshape how we see the world and our place within it.

In this video, Tony Cragg takes us through his Venice exhibition Ocean of Drops and reflects on the new sculptures, his long-standing fascination with material and form, and life at his studio and sculpture park in Wuppertal, Germany. Venice (Italy), May 5, 2026.

On the occasion of the 61st Venice Biennale, Fondazione Berengo and Berengo Studio present Tony Cragg | Ocean of Drops, a solo exhibition by the influential British-German sculptor Tony Cragg (b. 1949) at Ca’ Tron from May 5 to June 28, 2026. The exhibition revolves around a monumental glass sculpture created in Murano, which gives the show its title. This central work, together with recent large-scale sculptures in wood and stone, forms a “field of tension between matter and perception.” Cragg’s pieces explore the internal structures of materials — evoking atoms, molecules, and particles — revealing what is normally invisible and probing the relationship between micro and macro, interior and exterior, structure and surface. Rather than representing reality, the works investigate continuous transformation and challenge how we perceive the world. Tony Cragg, a Turner Prize winner (1988) who represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, is renowned for his experimental approach to materials and ongoing inquiry into form and matter. He lives and works in Wuppertal and Berlin. Fondazione Berengo and Berengo Studio, pioneers in collaborating with contemporary artists in glass since 1989, continue their long-standing commitment to expanding glass as a contemporary medium through this focused presentation of Cragg’s latest developments.

Press text (excerpt):

On the occasion of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Fondazione Berengo and Berengo Studio present Ocean of Drops, a solo exhibition by Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949), one of the most influential voices in contemporary sculpture, on view at Ca’ Tron from May 5 to June 28, 2026.

Conceived around a monumental glass sculpture produced in Murano—which lends the exhibition its title—the project brings together a selection of recent large-scale works, offering a focused insight into the latest developments in Cragg’s practice.

Ocean of Drops unfolds as a field of tension between matter and perception. The central glass sculpture, both visual and conceptual fulcrum of the exhibition, evokes the intrinsic nature of materials, prompting a reflection on their internal structure and on the processes that determine form and appearance. Rather than representing, the work discover new forms that reflects on the continuous transformation of mattter, while resisting fixed definition.

Alongside this central presence, the exhibition includes sculptures in wood and stone through which Cragg investigates the physical and dynamic properties of matter. These forms evoke fundamental structures—atoms, molecules, cells, particles—rendering visible what normally remains unseen, and probing the relationship between micro and macro, structure and surface.

The project as a whole is rooted in a broader inquiry into the relationship between the interior and exterior of matter. Cragg’s sculptures challenge the mechanisms through which we perceive the world, highlighting the limits of sensory experience and the decisive role of cognitive structures in shaping our understanding of reality. In this sense, Ocean of Drops operates as a critical device: an invitation to question not only what we see, but how we see.

Active since the early 1970s, Tony Cragg has exhibited in museums and institutions worldwide, establishing himself as a central figure in contemporary sculpture. The Venice exhibition offers a significant opportunity to engage with a practice that continues to redefine the relationship between form, material, and knowledge.

Tony Cragg (Liverpool, 1949) is a British-German sculptor and one of the most influential contemporary artists. After studying at the Royal College of Art in London, he gained international recognition in the 1970s. His practice is distinguished by an experimental approach to materials and a sustained investigation into the processes that govern matter and form. Over the course of his career, he has received numerous awards, including Premium Imperiale and the Turner Prize in 1988, and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Wuppertal and Berlin.

Founded on Adriano Berengo’s pioneering vision, Fondazione Berengo has established itself as a key institutional voice in bringing glass into the discourse of contemporary art. Originating from Berengo’s Murano studio in 1989, the foundation provides a platform that revitalizes the centuries-old traditions of Venetian glass while fostering a dynamic international community of contemporary artists through innovative collaborations and partnerships.
Based at Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti in the heart of Venice, the foundation launched the acclaimed exhibition Glasstress in 2009 as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, presented in the historic palace for five consecutive editions. Following its success, Glasstress evolved into a traveling exhibition shown in cities including Riga, Stockholm, New York, Beirut, and London, and in 2015 was presented in collaboration with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

In 2016, the foundation initiated collaborations with major international institutions and artists for exhibitions including Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings (St. Petersburg), Glassfever (Dordrecht), Zaha Hadid (Venice), and Robert Wilson in Glass (Venice). In 2018, it partnered with the artist duo Penzo+Fiore to present the exhibition series Radical at Palazzo Franchetti, aimed at supporting emerging contemporary artists.
As a second venue for Glasstress and a future permanent collection, the foundation opened an exhibition space in a former glass furnace in Murano, which in 2019 hosted the celebratory edition marking the project’s tenth anniversary.

Today, Fondazione Berengo continues to play a vital role in the Venetian contemporary art scene, fostering a vibrant artistic community dedicated to expanding the possibilities of glass as a medium, while also supporting artistic practices across other disciplines inspired by its creative potential.
Berengo Studio is one of the world’s leading creative glass furnaces. Founded in 1989 by Adriano Berengo the Studio specialises in collaborations with contemporary artists to produce works of art in glass. Inspired by Egidio Costantini’s Fucina degli Angeli (Furnace of Angels) which allowed artists such as Picasso, Chagall, and Cocteau to produce art in glass during the 1960s, Berengo decided to further this vision of creative collaboration and bring its vital energy into the world of the 21st century. He recognised the potential for glass as a medium for art, but also noticed how difficult it was for contemporary artists to access the world of such a complex medium. With Berengo Studio he opened the furnace doors, providing a space where artists are able to think in glass. Today sculptures made at Berengo Studio can be found in museums, galleries, and private collections around the world and the Studio has worked with over 400 artists, including Turner prize-winners Tony Cragg and Laure Prouvost, and internationally acclaimed figures such as Thomas Schütte and Ai Weiwei.