Rice University‘s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston (US) presents “Imaging After Photography,” a group show probing algorithmic bias, synthetic image-making, and photographic truth in the era of generative AI. Coinciding with FotoFest’s 40th anniversary, the show features Refik Anadol, Sofia Crespo, Trevor Paglen, and others. Nouf Aljowaysir’s Ancestral Seeds (2025) subjects British archaeologist Gertrude Bell’s photographs of the Middle East to computer vision models, exposing biases embedded in AI.

“Daya Benda” at New York’s Swiss Institute presents Indonesian artist Bagus Pandega grappling with resource extraction—from the colonial-era spice trade through contemporary minerals. Featured installations include Hyperpnea Green (2024), which pumps oxygen as viewers exhale CO2, and Anim Wraksa (2025), where a tree branch is nickel-plated and the transformation is broadcast. Of note: Putar Petir Racing Team (2025), an EV motorcycle built from scratch and inspired by Javanese street racing.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “Zifzafa” at MUNCH, Oslo, simulates the colonial violence of green energy infrastructure. Centred on Zifzafa: Livestream Audio Essay (2025), a navigable videogame where players move through the Golan Heights hearing geolocated field recordings and turbine noise. The Lebanese artist demonstrates how the proposed giant turbine blades would further “sever ties between people and the landscape” in the Israeli-occupied territories, writes curator Tominga O’Donnell.

In their latest investigation and accompanying “Inherited Testimonies” exhibition, Forensic Architecture traces the disappearance of Namibia’s grasslands to German settler colonialism. The London-based research group used oral testimony, archival records, and fieldwork in present-day Namibia to develop new methods for documenting long-term environmental violence. “Working with descendants of Nama and Ovaherero survivors, we were able to digitally recreate lost life-worlds not sensible to the colonial archive.”

Monira Al Qadiri’s “Hero” continues the Kuwaiti artist’s examination of petrostate aesthetics at Berlinische Galerie, depicting oil tankers as vessels of extraction and decay. Dominated by toxic red hues referencing the shipbuilding biocide tributyltin, her sculptures and video trace crude oil’s colonial legacies. The titular mural Hero (2025) depicts a supertanker that “radiates industrial power” and is simultaneously a feat of engineering and a capitalist environmental menace.

This year’s jury of the longest-running media arts prize had a taste for robotics and ritual: Prix Ars Electronica’s coveted Golden Nicas go to Thomas Kvam & Frode Oldereid’s towering robot idol, Requiem for an Exit (2024), Paula Gaetano Adi’s post-colonial Andes-crossing robot equine, Guanaquerx (2024), and Navid Navab & Garnet Willis’ robotically-prepared historic pipe organ, Organism (2024). Congratulations!

Migros Museum of Contemporary Art Zurich continues “Accumulation—on Collecting, Growth and Excess” with its second sequence, examining the side effects of unchecked economic growth. Featured artists include Rindon Johnson, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Raqs Media Collective exploring fast fashion, digital infrastructures, and colonial narratives. Selma Selman’s Motherboards (2023), for example, documents the artist and her family extracting gold from e-waste, recasting stigmatized labour as valuable practice.

“Becoming Ocean” convenes 21 artists at Villa Arson in Nice (FR) to augment a UN marine conservation conference and the Nice Arts Biennale with “a social conversation about the Ocean.” Allora & Calzadilla, Kapwani Kiwanga, Armin Linke, Allan Sekula, and others present works that explore ecological crisis, colonial histories, and extractivism. The curators hope to inspire action beyond “repairing damage” and help “foster a fundamentally different mindset” toward the natural world.

Cairotronica returns to Egypt’s capital to ask hard questions about techno-consumerism and environmental stewardship. Themed “Out-Natured,” the week-long program presents international and regional creators including Haya Alghanim, DISNOVATION.ORG, Anna Dumitriu, Rah Eleh, Assem Hendawi, Jawa El Khash, Joana Moll, and Katsuki Nogami in talks, films, and exhibitions that center the Middle East and Global South, where the ‘externalities’ of progress are most acutely felt.

The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) stages a tribunal to assess the enduring damage caused by the East India Company. Taking over central London’s cavernous Ambika P3 gallery, CICC organizers Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal preside over three sessions assessing how the brutal legacy of the colonial mega-company “endures as a legal, institutional, and ideological framework for extractive capitalism and imperialism, perpetuating ecological collapse.”

Morehshin Allahyari presents Speculations on Capture (2024, image) at the Gazelli Art House Project Space in London. In the 36-minute film (which debuted at the V&A in fall 2024), the Iranian-Kurdish artist critically contrasts CGI reconstructions and archival media of 13th-18th century Iranian and Pakistani astronomical instruments with their post-acquisition records in Western museums. The staging of the piece coincides with Allahyari commencing a two-month residency with the organization.

Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari explores the rich history of Middle-Eastern astronomy in a new CGI film at London’s V&A. Presented alongside archival material, Speculations on Capture (2024) expands on the fragmentary stories of astronomical instruments made in Iran and Pakistan (1200s–1700s) and now held at the V&A. Allahyari “deliberately combines fact and fiction to speculate on the encounters that have been lost, the knowledge that has been diverted and the cultural histories rendered inaccessible.”

A genre study from Asian and Indigenous perspectives, ”SCI-FI: Mythologies Transformed” opens at the University of Melbourne’s Science Gallery. Co-produced with the ArtScience Museum in Singapore (where it debuted as “New Eden”), the show “explores science fiction’s possible roots in Asian philosophy and spirituality” and breaks with Western, male-dominated traditions. Over 30 woman and alternative voices including Morehshin Allahyari, Cao Fei, HONF, Mariko Mori, and Sputniko! delve deep into “hybridity, mysticism, transcendence, and otherwordly utopias.”

Spanning two venues, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s “The song is the call, and the land is calling” opens at Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. At CC, they present May Amnesia: Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2020-, image), a poetic remix of social media clips depicting joyful moments of song and dance from Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. The work by the duo—both of Palestinian descent—explores “how shattered communities resist annihilation and reclaim place, self, and community.”