New Genres: June 2026

The Forest as Archive: Abel Rodríguez / Mogaje Guihu at MALBA

June 23, 2026 | nadiaevangelina

There is a peculiar calm running through “The Tree of Life and Abundance”, the exhibition devoted to Abel Rodríguez, known in his native language as Mogaje Guihu. Yet beneath this serenity lies an immense density of knowledge. What appears at first as a botanical illustration gradually reveals itself as something far more complex: a visual system through which memory, cosmology, ecology, and language become inseparable.

Born in the Colombian Amazon and trained from childhood as a sabedor within the Nonuya tradition, Rodríguez spent decades preserving knowledge that had always existed orally. Forced to leave his territory in the 1990s, he began drawing from memory, reconstructing the forest tree by tree, leaf by leaf. Over the years, this practice evolved into one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary Latin American art. The exhibition at MALBA, organized by MASP and curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Leandro Muniz, brings together a substantial selection of these works, spanning more than three decades.

The title refers to the mythic Tree of Abundance, a primordial image present in numerous Indigenous cosmologies. In Rodríguez’s hands, however, mythology never appears as allegory or fantasy. It is embedded within the materiality of plants, rivers, seasons, and cycles. His forests are not landscapes in the Western sense; they are systems of relationships. Species coexist according to rhythms of flowering, harvesting, flooding, and migration. Nothing is isolated. Every form belongs to a larger living structure.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rodríguez’s work is its resistance to spectacle. There is no heroic gesture, no expressive excess, no attempt to overwhelm. Instead, the drawings operate through patience and attention. Their delicate lines and subtle chromatic variations convey a profound familiarity with the Amazonian world. One senses that each branch and each root have been remembered rather than invented.

Seen today, shortly after the artist died in 2025, the exhibition acquires an additional resonance. Rodríguez’s drawings emerge not only as works of art but also as acts of cultural continuity and repositories of ancestral knowledge. Their quiet precision stands in stark contrast to contemporary forms of extraction and ecological devastation.

"Abel Rodríguez / Mogaje Guihu. El árbol de la vida y la abundancia"

Location: Malba, Junín 1930, Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, C1425CLA CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Opening Date: 19th June 2026

End Date: 23rd August 2026

Working hours: Wednesday- Monday: 12pm to 8pm

Official website:

https://www.malba.org.ar/

https://www.instagram.com/museomalba/

Mentioned Artist:

Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu)

art installation

Summer Solstice: Light, Time and Contemporary Artistic Inquiry

June 21, 2026 | Cosmina Marcela OLTEAN ArtPage

Each year, around 21 June, the Northern Hemisphere reaches the summer solstice - the longest day and shortest night of the year. Astronomically, the event marks the moment when the Sun reaches its highest apparent position in the sky. Culturally, however, the solstice has long represented far more than a calendrical occurrence: it has served as a temporal threshold, a ritual marker, and a means through which communities have situated themselves within larger cosmic cycles.

Sun Tunnels - installation by Nancy Holt

The summer solstice offers an opportunity to reflect on how contemporary artists have investigated light as a physical, perceptual and cosmic phenomenon.

While the solstice itself rarely appears as a subject in contemporary art, numerous artistic practices engage with questions of light, landscape, observation, orientation and the relationship between the body and the environment. Artists working within land art, environmental art and perceptual art have often approached astronomical phenomena not as objects of representation but as frameworks for inquiry. In this context, the solstice becomes both a material reality and a lens through which to consider how we perceive natural processes unfolding around us.

The Solstice as an Instrument of Observation

The apparent movement of the Sun cannot be perceived directly. Instead, it becomes visible through its effects: the shifting length of shadows, the changing colour of light, and the gradual variation of daylight throughout the year. In this sense, the solstice is less a spectacle than a phenomenon of attention.

Contemporary artists have found fertile ground in this condition. Rather than depicting the Sun itself, many works concerned with humanity’s relationship to the cosmos create situations in which light, time and space become perceptible. These projects function as sensitive observational devices, transforming natural processes into aesthetic experiences.

Nancy Holt and the Architecture of Light

One of the most significant artworks explicitly connected to the solstices is Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), created by American artist Nancy Holt in Utah’s Great Basin Desert.

The work consists of four monumental concrete cylinders arranged to frame the sunrise and sunset during both the summer and winter solstices. Visitors do not simply observe an astronomical event from a distance; instead, they are positioned within a structure that makes celestial movement physically and spatially comprehensible.

Within Sun Tunnels, light becomes a sculptural material. Shadows and sunlight continually generate new configurations, while the surrounding desert landscape is transformed into a vast astronomical observatory. Holt’s project invites viewers to experience perception itself as a measuring instrument, rendering time visible through the movement of light.

As art historian James Nisbet has observed, Holt’s practice was deeply concerned with orientation, perception and the ways individuals locate themselves within larger environmental systems. The work demonstrates how a simple alignment with solar cycles can generate an expanded awareness of place and time.

Olafur Eliasson and Mapping the Longest Day

Nearly fifty years after Holt completed Sun Tunnels, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson proposed a different approach with Long Daylight Pavilion (2025), commissioned for Helsinki.

The installation translates the Sun’s trajectory on the day of the summer solstice into physical space. A sequence of vertical elements marks successive solar positions throughout the longest day of the year, transforming a temporal phenomenon into an architectural form.

Rather than representing the Sun itself, the project materialises data generated by its movement. Astronomical information becomes a three-dimensional drawing, making perceptible what would otherwise remain abstract. Eliasson’s work can therefore be understood as a translation of time into space and of light into form.

Like many of Eliasson’s projects, Long Daylight Pavilion foregrounds embodied experience. The viewer encounters not an image of nature but a structure through which natural processes become directly legible. The work reflects the artist’s longstanding interest in perception and in the relationship between human experience and planetary systems.

Charles Ross: Building with Cosmic Time

If Holt works through solar alignment and Eliasson through the spatial mapping of daylight, American artist Charles Ross explores the relationship between the human body and the cosmos on a far broader temporal scale.

Ross’s monumental project Star Axis, begun in 1971 and still under development in the New Mexico desert, exists simultaneously as sculpture, observatory and architectural environment. Every angle, passage and chamber within the structure is determined by astronomical relationships between Earth and the stars.

Visitors move through the work in order to experience planetary rotation, celestial alignment and the orientation of the Earth’s axis. One of its central components, the Star Tunnel, is aligned precisely with the Earth’s rotational axis, allowing viewers to perceive directly their relationship to the polar sky.

Although Star Axis is not dedicated specifically to the summer solstice, it shares with Holt’s and Eliasson’s projects a fundamental ambition: to transform cosmic phenomena into physical experience. Ross does not illustrate the universe; he constructs conditions through which it can be encountered.

See photos of the project > https://www.staraxis.org/

Light as Experience

Taken together, these projects reveal an important shift in the way contemporary art engages with nature. Light is no longer simply an element represented on a surface, as it often was within the tradition of painting. Instead, it becomes material, structure and event.

Nancy Holt employs light to reveal the relationship between the body and solar cycles. Olafur Eliasson translates the Sun’s trajectory into a navigable architectural form. Charles Ross constructs spaces in which planetary and stellar movements become tangible experiences.

In each case, art functions as a tool of observation. These works render visible processes that exist independently of us but that we rarely perceive consciously. The summer solstice thus serves not merely as a calendrical marker but as an invitation to reflect on how light structures our experience of the world.

In an age saturated with images and information, such works remind us that some of the most profound aesthetic experiences emerge not from the accumulation of signs but from sustained attention to elemental phenomena: the movement of the Sun, the changing qualities of light, and our position within a larger cosmic order.

Sources

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), Holt/Smithson Foundation: https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/sun-tunnels
James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, MIT Press, 2014.
Olafur Eliasson, Long Daylight Pavilion, HAM Helsinki Art Museum: https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/sculptures/long-daylight-pavilion
Charles Ross, Star Axis: https://www.staraxis.org
United States Naval Observatory, “Astronomical Applications: Solstices and Equinoxes”: https://aa.usno.navy.mil
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Summer Solstice”: https://www.britannica.com/science/summer-solstice

art museum

HAIR! HAIR! HAIR! Contemporary Art & Anthropology: Exploring Identity Through One of Humanity’s Most Intimate Features

June 16, 2026 | Cosmina Marcela OLTEAN ArtPage

The Art Museum in Brașov , in collaboration with the Centre for Visual and Digital Anthropology, presents “HAIR! HAIR! HAIR! Contemporary Art & Anthropology”, an exhibition that brings together contemporary art and visual anthropology in a thought-provoking exploration of one of humanity’s most intimate and culturally charged materials: hair.

More than a biological feature, hair functions as a powerful carrier of identity, memory, belief, and social belonging. It grows, falls, is cut, combed, braided, dyed, replaced, rejected, or revered. Embedded within these everyday gestures are cultural practices and symbolic meanings that shape how individuals understand themselves and connect with others.

The exhibition creates a dynamic dialogue between anthropological research and contemporary artistic practice. At its core is the work of anthropologist Emma Tarlo, whose research across India, Myanmar, China, the United States, and Europe investigates the complex social, economic, and cultural lives of human hair. A central point of reference is her influential book Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair, which maps the global networks through which hair is collected, traded, transformed, and circulated.

Visitors encounter stories that range from ritual head-shaving ceremonies performed in and around temples in India to the production of sheitel wigs worn by Orthodox Jewish women, and the luxury market for premium remy hair extensions. Through these interconnected narratives, hair emerges as both a deeply personal element of the body and a global commodity shaped by religious traditions, beauty standards, economic forces, and cultural values.

The exhibition further examines the cultural and political significance of head coverings, wrapping practices, and hair-braiding traditions, while also highlighting innovative contemporary applications of hair in areas such as sustainability, ecology, and fashion.

Through multimedia and intermedia works, installations, painting, sculpture, photography, objects, and readymades, the participating artists explore themes including memory, transformation, acceptance, recycling, human-animal relationships, gender, beauty, sensuality, eroticism, ritual, alterity, and mortality. Together, their works reveal hair as a material that carries traces of personal histories while simultaneously connecting individuals to broader social and cultural narratives.

By weaving together artistic perspectives and anthropological inquiry, “HAIR! HAIR! HAIR! Contemporary Art & Anthropology” uncovers a largely unseen history of human connections. The exhibition invites visitors to consider how something as seemingly ordinary as hair can illuminate fundamental questions about identity, belonging, memory, and the ways in which people understand and navigate the world around them.

Curatorial Team

Project Curator: Gabriela Nicolescu (Anthropologist)
Contemporary Art Curator: Nora Cupcencu
Assistant Curator: Marina Aristotel

Scientific Consultant: Emma Tarlo (Anthropologist)

Participating Artists

Alexandru Ranga, Beniamin Popescu, Diana Oană, Dumitru Gorzo, Emma Tarlo, Elena Waldorf, George Soare, Ioana Bălțan, Jenni Dutton, Marina Aristotel, Mihai Zgondoiu, Mircea Modreanu, Misha Diaconu, Nora Cupcencu, Petru Lucaci, Radu Pandele, Răzvan Neagoe, Saint Machine, and Victoria Zidaru.

Photo credits: Brasov Art Museum

Argentinian Art

Edgardo Giménez at Torre Macro: The Persistence of Joy

June 08, 2026 | nadiaevangelina

There is something almost radical about Edgardo Giménez’s latest exhibition at Torre Macro. At a moment when much contemporary art often gravitates toward critique, anxiety, and social fracture, Giménez insists on another possibility: joy as an aesthetic and existential position. “La alegría es lo que hace girar al mundo” (Joy Is What Makes the World Go Round) is not a nostalgic return to the optimistic spirit that made him a central figure of Argentine Pop Art in the 1960s. Rather, it demonstrates how that spirit can remain surprisingly relevant in the present.

The exhibition brings together recent works, previously unseen pieces, and new productions created specifically for the space. What emerges is not a retrospective in the conventional sense but a living ecosystem of images, objects, and visual ideas that have accompanied the artist for more than six decades.

Walking through the exhibition, one is immediately confronted by color—not merely as decoration but as a structural force. Giménez has always understood color as an emotional device, capable of producing an immediate physical response. Large-scale paintings, luminous floral installations, and sculptural forms occupy the space with a theatrical confidence that feels entirely free of irony. The works do not ask to be decoded; they ask to be experienced.

A particularly compelling aspect of the exhibition is the presence of the “Fancy Monas” series. These figures, among the most recognizable elements of Giménez’s visual universe, appear here through a system that combines physical and digital production. Generated from a vast archive of motifs drawn from the artist’s own career, the project explores seriality in a way that extends Pop Art’s historical fascination with repetition into the age of algorithms and NFTs. Yet despite the technological framework, the works never feel detached or mechanical. They retain the playful personality that has always characterized Giménez’s practice.

What ultimately distinguishes this exhibition is its refusal to separate pleasure from seriousness. Giménez’s work has often been described as optimistic, but optimism here should not be mistaken for superficiality. His visual language proposes that imagination, humor, and beauty are not escapes from reality but ways of inhabiting it. In that sense, “La alegría es lo que hace girar al mundo” becomes more than an exhibition title; it functions as a manifesto.

The result is a rare exhibition that feels generous. Rather than confronting viewers with despair, it offers an invitation to look, to smile, and perhaps to reconsider the cultural value of happiness itself.

“La alegría es lo que hace girar al mundo”

Location: Torre Macro, Av. Madero 1172, CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)

Opening Date: 12th April 2026

End Date: June 2026

Working hours: Monday- Friday 10am-6pm

Official website:

www.instagram.com/fundacionmacro

Artists:

Edgardo Giménez

The Forest as Archive: Abel Rodríguez / Mogaje Guihu at MALBA

Summer Solstice: Light, Time and Contemporary Artistic Inquiry

HAIR! HAIR! HAIR! Contemporary Art & Anthropology: Exploring Identity Through One of Humanity’s Most Intimate Features

Curatorial Team

Participating Artists

Edgardo Giménez at Torre Macro: The Persistence of Joy

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