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“When the Water Turns to Wind” is Saodat Ismailova’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, presented at Portikus in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The exhibition centers on a newly developed film installation of the same title, created specifically for the Portikus space. In it, Ismailova’s camera traces the contours of the Aral Sea — once one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water, now dramatically shrunk due to Soviet-era irrigation projects and extractivist policies, leaving behind the Aralkum Desert, toxic dust storms, salt flats, and desolate landscapes. The work shifts between former water-dominated environments (shaped by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers) and the windswept, arid terrains that have replaced them, evoking processes of disappearance, transformation, and absence.

Rather than a conventional documentary, the installation offers a sensory, poetic, and immersive experience. It interweaves ecological loss (dried-up waters, extinct species, environmental degradation) with cultural and historical memory — lost knowledge from Soviet and post-Soviet ruptures — while touching on the broader imaginary of historical Turkestan. A custom soundscape, developed in collaboration with composer and sound artist Marc Parazon, enhances the atmospheric quality through field recordings and original compositions. Ismailova’s approach counters purely exploitative views of the land by invoking ancestral rituals, myths, dreams, and traditional knowledge, suggesting alternative ways of relating to depleted environments. Absence serves as a central motif: vanished waters, erased histories, and silenced voices amid ongoing political, social, and ecological upheaval in Central Asia. The installation synthesizes the artist’s long-standing engagement with the region’s complex history, post-Soviet transformations, and intertwined human–environmental narratives.

Saodat Ismailova: When the Water Turns to Wind / Portikus Frankfurt/Main (Germany). March 24, 2026.

Feel Free was the title of Sarah Sze‘s solo exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills in February 2026. The exhibition included two large video installations — Sleepers (2024) and Once in a Lifetime (2026) – and a new series of large paintings. Sze uses collage across different mediums to create works that explore how images, light, and space interact in today’s media-filled world. The three connected gallery spaces feature changing relationships between light, materials, and time. Images appear, fragment, move across surfaces, fade into shadow, and reappear in subtle ways, connecting what is seen to personal memories. The video installations use projected light on suspended or shaped surfaces to create shifting, rhythmic visual experiences. The paintings combine oil, acrylic, photographs, digital images, collage, and objects to blend real and remembered scenes in layered compositions.

Sarah Sze: Feel Free / Gagosian Beverly Hills. February 28, 2026.

Press release (excerpt):

Gagosian to Present Sarah Sze: Feel Free in Beverly Hills
Exhibition of New Installations and Paintings Opens January 29, 2026, Preceding Fall 2026
Solo Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Gagosian is pleased to announce Sarah Sze: Feel Free, the artist’s debut gallery exhibition in Los Angeles. Opening January 29, Feel Free brings together two immersive video installations and a new series of large-format paintings.

Throughout the exhibition in Beverly Hills, Sze redefines collage as a spatial and temporal language that moves across mediums in flux, transforming the image itself into a sculptural material. In a process of continual fragmentation and reconstruction, these works explore how our senses, emotions, and memories are conditioned by today’s media-saturated world.

Organized across three interconnected galleries, Feel Free presents spatial systems that unfold according to their own internal logic. Each room embodies a different relationship to light, material, and time, in which metamorphosis of imagery through multiple states becomes the subject—as images move across constructed forms, fall into shadow, splinter into color, and return as quiet traces. Many begin as interior visions—impressions held in memory that are recognized only when they reemerge. By linking the images on view to those we carry in our mind’s eye, Sze makes perception itself a material of her work.

The exhibition’s two sculptural video installations create distinct but interrelated environments for image making. Sleepers (2024) develops across a constellation of suspended surfaces in a sequence of interwoven chapters. Projected light moves from plane to plane, appearing and dissolving to generate an internal rhythm of sight and sound. In Once in a Lifetime (2026), projections fracture through shadow and reflection as they encounter sculptural forms that organize and interrupt a fluctuating field of light. Together, the installations reveal images as unstable spatial events shaped by structure, surface, and changing conditions of light.

The third gallery features Sze’s newest paintings. Incorporating oil and acrylic paint, photographic fragments, digital imagery, collage, and objects, these layered surfaces further the artist’s experimentation with representation, form, and dimension—where glimpses of observed and remembered worlds converge within compositions of modulated scale and tempo.

The recursive structures of the exhibition mirror how imagery traverses contemporary life and memory—returning in flashes, mutating with context, and persisting across shifting physical states. Sze’s installations and paintings together form a continuum in which an understated intimacy emerges. As the distance between artist, artwork, and viewer diminishes, the shared condition of being shaped by images becomes fleetingly visible.

Following the exhibition at Gagosian Beverly Hills, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present Sarah Sze: Forever is Composed of Nows, opening November 21, 2026. Transforming the museum’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium, this ambitious site-specific, multisensory commission creates a shifting landscape where light, sound, and movement intertwine.

“An exhibition that brings fundamental change. The Helmhaus’s white floors are its trademark. Yet they are also polarising. Some people like them, while others, for various reasons, find them objectionable. Lynne Gbodjrou Kouassi is an artist who has been working with – and against – those same white floors for many years now. For the 2019 exhibition of color, for example, she painted the floor of the first floor purple – even if the Helmhaus reverted to its standard white as soon as the show was over. The new institutional identities that Lynne Gbodjrou Kouassi is now proposing will be revealed in this first major solo exhibition of hers, called salbung – anointing. The act of rubbing a substance into the skin can be soothing; but it can also signify a shift or transfer of power. The artist developed this exhibition in close collaboration with the Helmhaus over a period of several years. Artists: Lynne Gbodjrou Kouassi, in collaboration with Daniel Vollmond (artist), Ann Karimi Kern (graphic artist) and Daniel Morgenthaler (curator).” (official description)

Lynne Gbodjrou Kouassi: Salbung (Anointing) / Helmhaus Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), February 6, 2026.

Kaiserwache is an artist-run space for contemporary art housed in a former public restroom from 1906 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). Kaiserwache is currently hosting a solo exhibition by the Swiss artist collective Protoplast, invited by curator Ilja Zaharov. The exhibition runs until 26 April 2026 and can be visited by appointment.

Protoplast (est. 1990, Basel, Switzerland) is a three-member artist collective that has been generating artefacts for over 35 years: cross-domain works oscillating between hybrid glitch and cultural residue. Their practice unfolds across painting, woodcut, drawing, screen printing, etching, sculpture, video, poster art, and large-scale public interventions – a singular visual language running through every medium.

The works operate within a tension of space, time, desire, suffering, and humour. Pop-cultural references meet the legacy of traditional image-making techniques, generating meaning through broken causality and individual association. The group maintains outward anonymity; authorship remains collective.

Protoplast Solo Exhibition at Kaiserwache, Freiburg. Freiburg im Breisgau, March 27, 2026.