An exhibition for the post-truth era, Trevor Paglen’s “You’ve Just Been Fucked by PSYOPS” opens at Pace New York. In it, the American artist charts the “enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture” through several new works. These include an unknown orbital object photo series, and Because Physical Wounds Heal… (2022, image right), a mixed media—steel, bullets, resin—sculpture that mythologizes the iconography, sloganeering, and abject horror of U.S. psychological warfare.

Old Tree, a sculptural intervention into New York City’s urban fabric by Pamela Rosenkranz, takes root on the High Line. By constructing the primordial symbol of life and knowledge out of man-made materials (the 7.5 m sculpture is a steel armature layered with foam and resin), and coating in a hot pink and red paint job that starkly contrasts the surrounding monochromatic skyscrapers, the Swiss artist acknowledges both a romanticized ecology and a world “in which the synthetic has become nature.”

“Mutant Passages,” a new body of work by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri, opens at Kunsthaus Bregenz (AT). Articulating her central interest in oil sculpturally, the works include petrochemical molecular structures inflatables (image: BENZENE FLOAT, 2023), gastropod seashells that tell a story of “bizarre changes and contaminations” when listened to, and a white room filled with dark glass forms (inspired by the oil-drenched animal carcasses that washed ashore during the Gulf War).

“Grand Bal,” a retrospective of works by Ann Veronica Janssens, opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. Presenting works from the last three decades, the British artist offers a “visual and sonic choreography” of glass, fog, light, and video for visitors to traverse. Featured works include Golden Section (2009), suspended mirror foil and wrinkled PVC made with Belgian artist Michel François (image), and Blue Glass Roll 405 (2019), a series of cast glass sculptural forms (image foreground).

Basel’s House of Electronic Arts (HEK) premieres new works by Pe Lang, Johanna Bruckner, and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler—three Swiss media artists and winners of the 2022 Pax Art Awards—in parallel solo exhibitions. Veteran Lang translated a scene from his forthcoming sci-fi novel into a kinetic light installation, whereas emerging talents Bruckner and Scherler authored CGI video and sculptural works that explore techno-bodies (image: Body Obfuscations, 2023) and climate anxiety.

Berlin-based media artist Aram Bartholl plants a towering heart emoji, or Triangle of Sadness (2023), outside of Stadtgalerie Kiel, Germany, as part of the gallery’s “Tourismus. Let’s do it all” group exhibition. The latest in Bartholl’s series of supersized Internet iconography (Map, 2006-19, This is Fine, 2022) deals with the performative aspects of travel in age of platform capitalism and calls attention to the social cost of algorithmically driven content production and consumption cycles.

“Refigured,” a group exhibition that collapses “today’s material and virtual realms,” opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Curator Christiane Paul brings together Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Auriea Harvey (image: SITE1, 2023), and Rachel Rossin—artists engaged in “refiguring” material forms and bodies—to showcase sculptures that are “simultaneously physical and virtual,” and videos and animations that “extend beyond the screen and into the gallery.”

The final chapter of the museum’s “Trilogy of Matter” exhibition series, “A Leap into the Void” opens at GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, to examine “Art beyond Matter.” Interested in artistic acts of “dematerialization” that explore the void as an “ideal or imaginative dimension,” curators Lorenzo Giusti and Domenico Quaranta gather works from nearly 50 luminaries from the historical avant-garde (Alison Knowles, Vera Molnar, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono) to today’s (JODI, Eva & Franco Mattes, Trevor Paglen, Rachel Rossin, Hito Steyerl).

“Cosmos,” a survey of kinetic and interactive sculptures by Björn Schülke blending “action and reaction, surveillance and performance,” opens at bitforms gallery San Francisco. Included are spacecraft- and rover-inspired assemblies, vision machines, a maquette of his Norman Y. Mineta San José Airport sculpture (2010), and sound art (image: Supersonic #3, 2007). Also featured: the German artist’s first olfactory sculpture, which emits a scent created for NASA that smells like space.

“REVENANTS,” a show featuring Kelly Richardson, Nicholas Sassoon & Rick Silva, opens at the Rectangle artist-run space in Brussels. Addressing notions of scale and the geological, Richardson’s Origin Stories (2023) zooms in on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Sassoon’s lava rock-inspired The Prophet (Tanaga 1) (2023, image) evokes what exhibition essayist Alexandra Crouwers describes as “the unimaginable turmoil that is in a constant grind beneath our feet.”

Jan Robert Leegte’s solo exhibition “Document Performance | Permanence” opens at Berlin’s panke.gallery. Juxtapozing the Dutch artist’s Repositions (2018) series and Window #219 from the eponymous NFT collection (2022), the show explores software as performance and, conversely, sculpture. Both series are web-based constructs made in HTML DOM. The former renders dynamic documents in your browser, the latter lives on-chain and “behaves and feels like hardware.”

“Chronos/Synthesis,” a solo show by Canadian artist Oliver Pauk, opens at Toronto’s J Spot Gallery. For the window gallery show, Pauk presents an array of 3D printed, CNC milled, and hand carved sculptures alongside video and AR works. The selection underscores two driving interests: rendering pure digital form, and his efforts “to replicate the patterns and aesthetics of automated, computerized processes” in more traditional mediums (image: Object #90, 2017).

“Refined Vision,” an exhibition in which Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadir draws parallels between Texas Gulf Coast and Persian Gulf region petro-cultures, opens at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Featured works include Crude Eye (2022, image), a new single-channel video piece on landscapes and infrastructures of extraction, and Spectrum (2016), a series of 3D-printed sculptural forms that abstract the ‘alien’ aesthetics of (ornate) oil and gas drill bits.

Aram Bartholl debuts This Is Fine (2022) as part of the “On Equal Terms” group exhibition at Uferhallen, Berlin. In what is, perhaps, a timely follow-up to his Map public sculpture series (2006-19), the German post-internet artist erects a 3×4 meter fire emoji in the venue’s courtyard, capturing the deep anxiety many of us grapple with: as the climate crisis and geopolitical conflict continue to escalate, “it feels like the world is on fire.” 🔥

From 15th Century painting to NFTs: “Meta.Space: Spatial Visions” opens at Francisco Carolinum in Linz, Austria, gathering over 30 artists that examine “social, real, and imaginary space.” Next to the virtual worlds of late luminary Herbert W. Franke, for example, towers the site-specific ‘crypto sculpture’ by Alexander Grasser and Alexandra Parger. Open Architectures (image) is a wooden model of one of 50 community structures built collaboratively via interactive NFT.

“Because The Sky Will Be Filled With Sulfur,” a show by artist Jeremy Bolen opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia (MOCA GA) in Atlanta. Contemplating deep time, its works consider the future-history of the climate crisis and the “aesthetics of a possible geo-engineered future.” Included are photos of an expedition to a key Anthropocene site, and a new series of casts of 20th century relics: air conditioners, airplane parts, and leaf blowers (image).

“Robota,” a show featuring Matthew Angelo Harrison’s encasements of auto industry ephemera and African sculptures in sold resin blocks, opens at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. A Detroit native who worked as a clay modeller for Ford, Harrison “attends to the devaluation of human labour” by freeze-framing UAW strike ephemera and hardhats, headlights (image: Seer: Lay Bare, 2020), and African sculptures in vitrine-like forms.

“Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota,” the first major survey of the work of the pioneering artist in Japan in three decades, opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT). A fixture in Fluxus, Kubota made pioneering contributions to video sculpture, exploding the screen into scenes and structures bathed in shapes and colour. “Viva Video!” includes the triumphant Skater (1991-2, image), the cascading Niagara Falls (1985), and her signature Duchampiana series (1970-90).

Alex Schweder’s “The Sound and the Future” opens at Clifford Gallery in Hamilton, New York. Its name borrowed from its lone work, the exhibition offers a fun glimpse into Schweder’s world of “performnace architecture”—dynamic architectural and sculptural forms. Here, a made-to-order very Detroit installation, first shown at Wasserman Projects (2016, image) sways again; a homage to Motor City’s dance music genre, silvery nylon inflatables undulate, animated by blown air, to a slowed down techno soundtrack.