2026-10-03 03:00:00
Gaia Alari’s works are defined by a distinct, effervescent visual language. Made from thousands of handmade drawings on paper, the artist’s elaborate animations put on strikingly tactile performances as fleeting marks of oil pastel and charcoal dance across the screen.
Meandering botanical forms, gestural bodies, and sweeping birds converge into fluid loops that create a rhythm reminiscent of a stream of consciousness. Whether Alari is collaborating with a brand, exploring personal interests, or creating static illustrations, it’s clear that each piece tells a distinct story. Watch more from the artist on Vimeo and keep up with her explorations on Instagram.
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2026-10-03 00:02:10
How might we visualize the inextricable web of space, time, and matter, enormous concepts that are so systemic they can almost become abstract? Rendering these connections in a tangible, accessible, and even participatory manner continues to ground Tomás Saraceno’s multidisciplinary practice. Born in Argentina and based in Berlin, the artist plays with scale and spectacle to draw our attention to the life-giving ecosystems in which we’re all bound, merging art, architecture, and science into alluring works.
At Haus der Kunst, Saraceno’s ecological and collaborative projects take center stage for a sweeping presentation titled Ancestral Futures. Spanning more than two decades, the solo exhibition emerges from the central premise that the knowledge we’ve gained in the past is critical to understanding and creating our shared tomorrow.
Called “the art world’s favorite arachnophile,” Saraceno frequently returns to the spider and its web as a metaphor for and example of the networks that undergird life. Interactive installations invite visitors to crawl through sprawling structures, while the decade-long Webs of At-tent(s)ion series welcomes several species of spiders into the museum to spin their sticky structures inside boxes. Continually returning to the web is a clear reminder that we’re all connected to one another and that nature’s processes are cyclical.
Saraceno also adapts his interest in solar-powered air balloons for the museum. An immersive cavern made of crowd-sourced plastic bags inflates with the help of willing visitors who ride stationary bicycles to power the project. Others can wander inside, where they become enveloped by a colorful patchwork of brands and remnants of humanity’s culture of disposability and consumerism.
Perhaps the most impressive works in the exhibition are those created as part of Saraceno’s ongoing collaboration with Indigenous communities of Red Atacama, in the basin of Salinas Grandes in northwestern Argentina. Eleven weavers loaned their handmade blankets, which are presented together as a vibrant, soft space for lounging at the show’s opening. Immersion into the landscape of Salinas Grandes follows with galleries filled with sand, water, salt, and more.
Several works reference The Sanctuary of Water, the multi-pronged project Saraceno and the people of Salinas Grandes are undertaking together. The collaboration, the museum says, “emerges in solidarity with the communities’
resistance to lithium mining in one of the world’s largest lithium-rich regions. Their struggle highlights the continuing legacy of colonial exploitation: While international corporations profit from resources such as lithium—essential for technologies including electric cars—the environmental and social costs are borne by local communities.”
As a permanent land work, “The Sanctuary of Water” is organized around a large reflective pond that captures the sky above, skewing boundaries between land and air. “In our worldview,” says the collaborative project’s website, “Pacha names the inseparable weave of space, time, and matter. It is one living body, sustained by the water that flows through them all.”
If you’re in Munich, you can see Ancestral Futures through February 7. Otherwise, explore more of the artist’s collaboration with the communities of Salinas Grandes on the project’s website.
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2026-10-02 21:41:17
The year’s best roundup of the funniest animal photos is back with its list of 2026 finalists, taking on a kind of blooper reel-like quality with some of the goofiest happenstances and candid moments photographers captured. Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026 celebrates the wild, wonderful, and wily in habitats around the world.
From Tanner Mansell’s “Spicy Orangutan” snapped in Borneo to a damselfly appearing to wave at British photographer Lee Frost through a window in a nibbled leaf, this year’s top contenders are not only silly, but immanently relatable, illustrating how for all of our differences, we all share this incredible planet.
At more than 10,000 photos, the competition received its highest ever number of entries this year from photographers in 112 countries. “What began as a small effort to raise awareness of wildlife conservation has grown into something far bigger than we ever imagined,” says awards co-founder Tom Sullam. “We use humour to get people to feel empathy towards wildlife, and it’s that empathy that creates behavioural change for the better.”
Nikon will announce the competition winners on December 8. In the meantime, see all 40 finalists, plus portfolios, videos, and youth submissions on the contests’s website. Additionally, cast your vote for the Sterna People’s Choice Award.
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2026-10-01 22:30:00
Avant-garde style, technology, and performance converge in a fantastical, joyous competition every year in New Zealand. World of WearableArt is a vibrant multimedia competition established in 1987, which continues to invite entrants from around the world to sew and sculpt their most ambitious garments. Whimsical and technically impressive, many of the works call upon cultural traditions, while others tap into nature, futurism, and the chimerical.
This year’s show is titled GLO!, with Kayla Christensen of New Zealand taking the top prize for her work “Sacred Nightfall,” a spectacularly noble, draped floral garment that nods to Indigenous ceremonial cloaks. Additional standouts include the enigmatic “Enchantress” by Ashish Dhaka and an iridescent insect by Katherine Bertram, among many others. Performances of GLO! continue through October 4 at TBS Arena in Wellington. See more on the program’s site.
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2026-10-01 20:00:00
Against a patchwork wall of hammered copper, a black veil appears to billow in mesmerizing motion. The fabric-like layer writhes and twists against the glimmering backdrop, revealing its diaphanous texture as it unfolds to translucence. Like a curtain flapping in an open window, the digital projection floats across the metallic surface of one of teamLab’s latest works.
Part of teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity at the Smart Museum of Art, “Sea of Darkness, Memory Shining from the Depths” is one of several new commissions from the international art collective. Founded by Toshiyuki Inoko in 2001, teamLab consists of hundreds of artists, animators, musicians, mathematicians, developers, engineers, and more who tap into the provocative intersection of art, science, and technology.
The collective has long been interested in the limits of human perception and imagination. Through interactive and immersive installations, they invite viewers into a world where boundaries are suspended and continuity in space and time are key. teamLab was one of the earliest adopters of incorporating digital technologies into experiential works, and they continue to use basic software and programs most people have access to.
Today, encountering such elegant, yet technologically simple digital works is rare as we witness the exponential rise of AI and a collective outsourcing of much of our lives. In contrast to the tech evangelists and the luddites, teamLab’s approach is decidedly human without eschewing the digital. Works like “Order in Chaos” respond to physical touch, shooting a cacophony of vibrant lines across the floor, walls, and a grid of screens in the gallery. Riotous in energy, the piece “is an attempt to expand painting from a completed image, or a perspective illusion of space, into a spatiotemporal pictorial space that is continuous with the real space,” the collective says.
Bridging divides between time and location also emerges in “Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity II,” which corresponds to its current exhibition’s environment. While on view in Chicago, for example, the floral piece brightens as the sun rises and darkens when it sets. As fall turns to winter, so will the ecosystem on the screen.
Closing the exhibition is one of teamLab’s most ingenious pieces, “The World of Irreversible Change.” Depicting a serene animated community as it goes about its day, the paneled digital work is programmed to respond to human touch by triggering a year-long, irreversible state of war and bloodshed between the inhabitants if the piece is tapped too many times. Several editions of “The World of Irreversible Change” were created, although the iteration on view at the Smart Museum is the only to exist in its original, pristine condition (it’s understandably cordoned off for preservation).
As Inoko tells us during a walkthrough of the exhibition, when the battle breaks out, the community can never return to its quieter days of peace. Eventually, all the people die, and the once thriving metropolis turns desolate. After a few years, shrubs begin to pop up and later still, bird song rings through the skies. But humanity never returns, a poetic if not cautionary tale for our era.
teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity is on view through February 21 at the Smart Museum of Art. Explore more of teamLab’s works on its website and YouTube.
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2026-10-01 00:21:41
Hailing from the French West Indies in the Caribbean—specifically the island of Guadeloupe—and currently based in Montréal, multi-disciplinary artist Eddy Firmin is deeply interested in the history and politics of colonization and identity. His home region’s inextricable ties to the dark legacy of slavery informs a practice that interrogates how knowledge is shared and passed down through generations.
Throughout more than three centuries, upwards of 20 million or more people were transported to the Western Hemisphere to be sold as slaves in what is now viewed as one of the most atrocious crimes against humanity ever perpetrated. Millions died due to exhaustion, disease, and brutal transport and living conditions.
Chattel slavery was particularly extreme in the Caribbean, where roughly 40 percent of those taken from Africa were put to work on sugar cane plantations owned by European capitalists. Myriad African traditions crossed the Atlantic with members of their displaced communities, taking on new forms and evolving into tools for resistance.
One of these traditions is known as Gwoka, an Afro-Caribbean custom that involves music, dance, and storytelling. It continues today in contemporary form, taking place during festivals and other events, furthering a legacy of resilience that enslaved people drew on for mutual support and perseverance.
In Gwoka and similar artistic endeavors, technical ability and aesthetics “aim to seduce and mesmerize, while the hidden message fosters resistance to dominant discourse in the arts as in the social space,” Firmin says in a statement. Music and the way it’s broadcasted continues thematically in a large-scale collaborative work made with Afro-Caribbean and Franco-Canadian artist Géraldine Entiope titled “Pa ka tann ?!” A vibrant, elaborately patterned DJ booth with monumental speakers is set on top of a small car, from which Caribbean music can be played and celebrated.
The artist often works with ceramics, recontextualizing symbolic motifs and patterns and testing our associations with materials and their applications. Punching bags and tools are made of porcelain, while sculptures drawing on the African masking traditions are paired with glossy corporate branding.
Busts of Black men, often depicting Firmin himself, mirror the types of marble and alabaster sculptures that historically honored affluent or influential European figures. In the artist’s reimagining, we are confronted by uneasy, contemporary relationships. The self-portrait titled “Sans Signe” (“Without Sign”), for instance, portrays a man with a metal collar around his neck and the seemingly incongruent monogram pattern of Louis Vuitton emblazoned across his face. Eyes closed, he may even be blinded.
The public occasionally scrutinizes fashion brands’ ethics, such as the enormous backlash Nike faced in the 1990s due to its reliance on overseas sweatshops. But most people never see or even think about how the products they purchase are made. Just because it’s not immediately apparent doesn’t mean that the corporate messaging and reliance on material possessions isn’t altering the very fabric of global society. Firmin prompts us to consider how much agency anyone has in a capitalist system where enormous wealth increasingly concentrates for a slim few while most people struggle to get by.
The artist also interprets consumerism as yet another colonizing force: when corporate interests and the demand for manufactured goods increasingly influence daily life, what happens to local and Indigenous customs, value systems, creativity, and autonomy? Here, shackles serve as a stark reminder of both a grim past and a present peril.
If you’re in Toronto, a few of Firmin’s works will go on view starting October 9 in the exhibition After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum. See more and follow updates on the artist’s Instagram.
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