The Best Art from 2025
By Keshav AnandFrom long-term collaborations and reimagined archives to ambitious institutional projects and experimental forms of hospitality, featuring moments from London, Accra, Berlin, Doha, New Delhi and beyond, the below selection brings together some of the most compelling practices, exhibitions, and ideas that have shaped 2025.
“I Have Been Moved to Find Beauty in Places of Deep Precarity”: In Conversation with Gauri Gill
One of India’s most important contemporary photographers, Gauri Gill is renowned for her deeply immersive and collaborative approach to image-making. Gill’s work is shaped by long-term engagements with rural, indigenous, marginalised and diasporic Indian communities. Through sustained interactions, she captures narratives of resilience, resistance and beauty, offering an intimate perspective on lives often overlooked. Her photographs sensitively examine the intersections of gender, caste, class and community, revealing the social structures that shape individual and collective agency. In her latest solo exhibition, The Village on the Highway, New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery presents the most comprehensive showcase of this series to date. Opening today, 4 February 2025, as part of Defence Colony Gallery Night, the exhibition marks the first time this body of work is being shown in India. Ahead of the show’s opening, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand spoke with Gill.
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Interview: In Conversation with Nicole Wermers
For over two decades, London-based German artist Nicole Wermers has honed a singular sculptural practice that navigates the intersection of design, architecture, and the social politics of space. Known for her precise juxtapositions of found and fabricated forms, Wermers explores the structures that shape urban life and the hierarchies that govern bodily presence within them. Her work is marked by an incisive material intelligence and a subtle, often dark humour, rendering the rituals and objects of contemporary life uncanny and newly legible. The artist first came to my attention in 2015 with her Turner Prize–nominated exhibition Infrastruktur at Herald Street, which used altered modernist chairs and fur coats to probe ideas around class, consumption and control. Ten years later, at the gallery’s Bloomsbury outpost, her new exhibition Tails & Fainters extends her investigation into the physical and symbolic alignments of the body within space. Here, looping tails and fainting figures sprawl, slip, and strain against social codes.
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Portals, Paradox, and Performance: In Conversation with Christelle Oyiri
Known as much for her unpredictable DJ sets as for her conceptual installations, Paris-based artist, DJ and producer Christelle Oyiri moves fluently between sound, performance and image. Last month, Oyiri arrived in Berlin with Dead God Flow, her first installation in the city, presented by LAS Art Foundation and opened during Berlin Art Week. The solo exhibition, on view until 19 October, is staged as a séance, where history, myth, and music overlap in uncanny and unexpected ways. It follows a landmark commission at Tate Modern and comes just ahead of her upcoming presentation, Venom Voyage, with Gathering at Frieze London. If you haven’t gathered, Oyiri is very busy. In conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, the artist reflects on portals, paradoxes, and why both pyramids and basslines might be understood as monuments.
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The Best from Sharjah Biennial 16: An On the Ground Guide
The morning sun is bright but I’m surprised by how cool the air is. Arriving early at Al Mureijah Square, I realise I’m underclad for my first tour of Sharjah Biennial 16 (SB16). Titled to carry, the Biennial presents over 650 works by nearly 200 artists, including Alia Farid, Citra Sasmita, and Himali Singh Soin. Thankfully, shortly before noon, the day begins to warm up. Co-curated by Alia Swastika, Amal Khalaf, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Natasha Ginwala, and Zeynep Öz, SB16 explores what we carry—physically, emotionally, and historically—through a discursive lens shaped by myriad voices. Spanning 17 venues across the Emirate of Sharjah, the ambitious programme unfolds through exhibitions, performances, music, and film. With so much to see and experience, Something Curated has compiled a concise guide highlighting 12 standout projects not to be missed.
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Skin to Skin: Sandra Mujinga on Her Most Ambitious Work Yet
Before the opening of her exhibition Skin to Skin at the Stedelijk, Something Curated sat down with Sandra Mujinga to talk about her most ambitious project so far. Born in Goma, and now based in Oslo, Mujinga has emerged as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary art. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, and performance, often drawing from science fiction and digital culture to imagine alternative realities. In her show, fifty-five monumental figures take over the museum’s basement, accompanied by shifting light and sound. The result is an immersive environment that feels both protective and uncanny, opening a conversation on visibility and community.
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Akeem Smith’s Work Is “A Lens to Decode the Things That Don’t Make Sense”
Akeem Smith’s new works, presented by Heidi at Art Basel Miami Beach, appear like weathered relics. Rusted metal frames, contorted gates, and fragments of walls are conjoined, holding within them flickering images of faces. The photographs and VHS stills feel as though they’re surfacing through the material itself, tugging the eye toward excavated stories. Raised between Brooklyn and Kingston, Jamaica, the New York–based artist and founder of fashion label Section 8 has built a practice that oscillates between clothing, film, and sculpture, all rooted in cultural memory. For years, Smith has been building an archive, gathering images entrusted to him by family, friends, and key figures from the world of Caribbean dancehall. Less about nostalgia, for Smith this is a living resource, one shaped by trust, intimacy, and the politics of who gets to preserve a history. To learn more about Smith’s work, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand speaks with the artist.
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Doha Opens the First Museum Dedicated to the ‘Picasso of India’
Living and working until the age of 95, Maqbool Fida Husain arrived in Qatar relatively late in his life. Yet it’s here, in Doha, that the first museum dedicated to the “Picasso of India” has opened. Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum is the latest undertaking of the Qatar Foundation. And while I still wish that a museum devoted to this master’s work might one day stand in India, it makes a lot of sense why this ambitious project found its home here – just as the artist himself did. For much of the twentieth century M. F. Husain was inseparable from India’s artistic and cultural landscape. Born in Pandharpur in 1915, he came of age amid the churn of a newly independent nation searching for its voice. He painted cinema posters to earn a living, travelled across cities with a bag of brushes, and became a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, a collective intent on breaking from colonial academic conventions. His canvases depicted village life, city streets, political awakenings and mythological figures with a language that felt both modern and deeply rooted in the everyday.
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How to Make Artist Mohammed Z. Rahman’s Refreshing Mas Satney
Opening on 9 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery will host Hearthside, a new installation by British-Bengali artist Mohammed Z. Rahman, presented over six days in collaboration with Oitij-jo. The project meditates on hospitality, food knowledge, ecosystems, and the power of the dinner table to foster solidarities. Across painting, sculpture and installation, Rahman draws on the deep ties between cooking and art-making, conjuring what they describe as a “magically alive gastronomical universe.” Their practice, self-taught and shaped as much by the kitchen as by the studio, traces its roots to a working-class Bengali family home in London, where Rahman began cooking as a teenager.
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Interview: Haroon Mirza on Ambiguity and the Algorithmic Divine
Pakistani-British artist Haroon Mirza has long been preoccupied with the unseen and the unheard—the overlooked energies, signals and codes that shape our perceptions of the world. Known for building self-sustaining systems that generate sound and light, his work exists in a state of restless translation: data becomes vibration, so-called silence becomes rhythm, belief becomes circuitry. For In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation, a major exhibition at Southend-on-Sea’s Focal Point Gallery in collaboration with the Roberts Institute of Art, Mirza presents a newly commissioned audio installation and performance that reimagines an earlier work of his from 2013. On this occasion, in conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, the artist reflects on how language fractures and reforms across generations and why ambiguity is essential for making good art.
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Sculptor of the Wind: In Conversation with Pioneering Japanese Artist Susumu Shingu
Dubbed the “sculptor of the wind,” Japanese artist Susumu Shingu has spent a lifetime making invisible forces visible. Now, at the age of 87, Shingu is the subject of Elated!, his first solo institutional exhibition in the United States, presented by Japan Society in New York. Trained first as a painter and later working in shipbuilding and aerodynamics to better understand how materials move and respond to natural forces, over the years, Shingu has collaborated with the likes of architects Renzo Piano and I.M. Pei, fashion designer Issey Miyake, and choreographer Jiří Kylián, among others. His works are installed everywhere—from Paris and Tokyo to the Arctic—but it is the artist’s own Wind Museum, nestled in the leafy forests of Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, which perhaps offers the purest and most personal expression of his philosophy. On the occasion of his landmark survey in New York, Shingu speaks with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand about movement as language, collaboration, and the revelations that still come after more than five decades of watching the wind.
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“My Existence Is Inherently Political”: Inside Okiki Akinfe’s World
Okiki Akinfe paints from the in-between: the layered, often contradictory spaces where Britishness and Nigerian identity rub up against one another. Based in London, Akinfe’s work draws on personal memory, pop culture and academic research to question what it means to belong – and what it means to be seen. After studying painting at the Slade and the Royal College of Art, her practice has developed into a kind of counter-archive – one that repositions the gaze, centres Black experience, and reclaims softness and humour as radical tools. In conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, Akinfe speaks candidly about making her first solo show Where the Wild Things Are at Ginny on Frederick, the childhood game of “Scramble,” and how books, music, and rest have shaped her visual language. Thoughtful, funny and deeply attuned to the politics of everyday life, Akinfe invites us into a world where Tina Campt, ghosts, and chicken shops coexist – and where painting becomes both portal and provocation.
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Between Ruin and Revelation: Reginald Sylvester II and the Rebirth of Accra’s Limbo Museum
Accra. The first thing you notice is the heat. Not the gentle kind that warms the skin, but a thick, breathing heat that turns the air into something tactile, alive with red dust, incense, and the scent of fresh concrete baking beneath the Ghanaian sun. Then comes the sound, a low metallic hum, like machinery at prayer. And out of that hum emerges the artist. Reginald Sylvester II, composed, magnetic, eyes tracing light as if it were scripture. He speaks softly, and yet the words seem to part the air. “I’m a servant of God,” he says. “And I consider my work as a medium.” It is not performance. It is prophecy spoken gently, almost as if to himself.
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Decolonising Darwin: Sāmoan-Japanese Artist Yuki Kihara on Queerness in Nature
“Growing up in Catholic schools often limited my exposure to broader historical perspectives, particularly the Indigenous Pacific worldview that is frequently overlooked. My personal journey towards decolonisation continues as I explore various archives that challenge my understanding of the world around us,” Yuki Kihara tells Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, discussing her new show, Darwin in Paradise Camp, at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. Over the past decade, the Sāmoan-Japanese artist has built a cross-disciplinary practice that straddles performance, sculpture, video, photography, and curation. The new exhibition, now open and on view until 3 August 2025, presents the UK premiere of Paradise Camp (2022), Kihara’s critically acclaimed photographic series first exhibited at the 59th Venice Biennale, alongside original works by Paul Gauguin, and a newly commissioned video piece, Darwin Drag (2025).
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Interview: With No Signs of Slowing Down, Kim Yun Shin Reflects on 70 Years of Making Art
Kim Yun Shin has spent 70 years building a resonant artistic language that bridges sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Her deeply meditative practice explores the fundamental interplay between addition and division—concepts that guide her process and help frame her lifelong engagement with nature, material, and time. Following the presentation of her work at the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Kim unveils two new major exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin in London and New York. Speaking with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, the artist shares insight into her fascinating journey, from overcoming societal barriers as a first-generation woman sculptor in Korea to establishing an international presence that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries.
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The Sacred and the Feminist: In Conversation with Indonesian Artist Citra Sasmita
On 30 January 2025, Indonesian artist Citra Sasmita will unveil her first solo exhibition in the UK, Into Eternal Land, at The Curve, Barbican. Bringing together diverse media—from embroidery to scent—Sasmita will transform the 90-metre-long gallery into a sprawling landscape that connects cultures, histories, and cosmologies. Building on her interdisciplinary practice, Into Eternal Land challenges traditional narratives surrounding gender, power, and coloniality, while honouring craft techniques and mythologies passed down through generations. At its heart, the exhibition envisions a post-patriarchal world, centring women as powerful agents of transformation and resistance. Ahead of the presentation’s opening, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand spoke with Sasmita.
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Feature image: Yuki Kihara, Fonofono o le Nuanua: Patches of the Rainbow (after Gauguin), 2020. Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand