designboom radar: exhibitions to see around the world this december

december exhibitions from DESIGNBOOM RADAR

December arrives with exhibitions that push imagination and reveal how artists and architects reframe the worlds we inhabit. From Marguerite Humeau’s visions in Helsinki to Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental textile forms in Paris, the month charts practices drawn from transformation and embodied experience.

Tokyo’s TOTO Gallery·MA foregrounds Marina Tabassum Architects’ climate-attuned design ethos, while Milan sees Hito Steyerl reimagine narrative and time through a science-fiction lens and OMA‘S Countryside exhibition reframes the rural as a terrain for future living. Meanwhile, major presentations by Doug Aitken in Mumbai, Alex Da Corte in New York, and Christian Marclay in Berlin expand the conversation across continents.

Some of the exhibitions highlighted in earlier radars and listings on our dedicated events guide remain on view, giving designboom readers more time to encounter them around the globe.

Marguerite Humeau: Torches

Unfolding like an opera in multiple acts, the exhibition presents a series of speculative scenes that imagine new ways of being — what if humans could evolve into collective organisms, attuned to all forms of life? In her practice, Marguerite Humeau explores the origins of life, the mysteries of early human history, and possible futures for its survival.

Working primarily through sculpture and immersive installation, Humeau combines materials as diverse as 150-year-old walnut, hand-blown glass, alabaster, beeswax, and even cyanobacteria or wasp venom. Her meticulously crafted works are often animated by sound and light, transforming space into a site of myth-making and inquiry.

She describes: ‘Being an artist is a way I filter and channel knowledge and bring physical worlds alive… imagining what has vanished or what may still come.’

name: Torches
artist: Marguerite Humeau
museum: HAMHelsinki
location: Helsinki, Finland
dates: until March 15th, 2026

Marguerite Humeau, The Holder of Wasp Venom, 2023. Marguerite Humeau, ‘Meys’, White Cube Bermondsey, 5 April – 14 May 2023. © Marguerite Humeau. photo: © White Cube (Julia Andréone).

Magdalena Abakanowicz:The Thread of Existence

A pioneering force in contemporary sculpture and textile art, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) stands as one of the most influential Polish artists of the 20th century. The Musée Bourdelle now stages the first major French exhibition devoted to her work.

Shaped by the trauma of war and life under political censorship, Abakanowicz created immersive, poetic, and often unsettling forms that draw on the organic world, seriality, and monumentality. Her sculptures and textiles — at once political, humanistic, and deeply intuitive — echo many of today’s environmental and feminist concerns.

Bringing together around eighty ensembles in a newly restored concrete gallery, the exhibition traces her evolution through a chronological and thematic lens, foregrounding her powerful sculptural installations alongside key textile works, drawings, and photographs. The Thread of Existence draws on the artist’s belief that fabric is a fundamental unit of the human body.

name: The Thread of Existence
artist: Magdalena Abakanowicz
museum: Musée Bourdelle
location: Paris, France
dates: April 12th, 2026

Abakan rouge, 1969, Magdalena Abakanowicz. Tate, Présenté anonymement, 2009. photo © Magdalena Abakanowicz

Lee Miller

Tate Britain presents the most comprehensive UK retrospective to date of Lee Miller, celebrating her as one of the 20th century’s most compelling and uncompromising artistic voices. After first working in front of the camera as a sought-after model in the late 1920s, Miller quickly moved behind the lens, becoming a central figure in the avant-garde communities of New York, Paris, London, and Cairo.

The exhibition traces the full sweep of her career — from her involvement with French Surrealism to her pioneering fashion and war photography — while also highlighting lesser-known chapters, including her striking images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.

With around 250 vintage and modern prints, many never shown before, the survey reveals the clarity, curiosity, and courage that shaped her vision. As Miller once said of her refusal to follow anyone else’s path, ‘It was a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.’

name: Lee Miller
artist: Lee Miller
museum: Tate Modern
location: London, UK
dates: until February 15th, 2026

Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England c.1943 © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024

People Place Poiesis

TOTO Gallery·MA hosts People Place Poiesis, an exhibition that traces how Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) reshapes architecture in Bangladesh through climate-attuned design, community agency, and lightweight systems built for a rapidly changing world.

The show spans two floors and extends into the courtyard with a full-scale Khudi Bari, MTA’s now-seminal flood-resilient housing prototype, installed alongside a newly developed Japan-specific version built with architect Kazuya Morita and students from Kyoto Prefectural University.

Previously presented in Munich and Lisbon, this Tokyo edition sharpens the spatial contrasts of the exhibition, placing rural, urban, and transnational responses in close conversation.

name: People Place Poiesis
architect: Marina Tabassum Architects
museum: TOTO GALLERY·MA
location: Tokyo, Japan
dates: until February 15th, 2026

image courtesy of TOTO GALLERY·MA

Hito Steyerl: The Island

‘The Island’ is a site-specific project by filmmaker Hito Steyerl at Osservatorio in Milan, weaving together a new film, installation elements, and interviews to explore flooding as a metaphor for the rise of AI-driven authoritarianism, the climate crisis, and the politicization of science.

Drawing on quantum physics and science fiction, Steyerl collapses temporal and spatial boundaries, creating a series of narrative ‘leaps’ that move from microorganisms to galaxies, from the Neolithic to imagined futures. Inspired in part by an anecdote from critic Darko Suvin — who survived a 1941 bombing by imagining himself inside a Flash Gordon serial — the project reflects on how alternate worlds can emerge in moments of crisis.

Hito Steyerl provokes ‘a clash between two different notions of time: the junk time of technology and capitalism that disrupts time with continuous jumps and loops that interrupt and exhaust us, and the deep time — not human time, Neolithic time, underwater time — times that are outside of the human artificially created spectrum.’

name: Hito Steyerl: The Island
artist: Hito Steyerl
museum: Osservatorio Fondazione Prada
location: Milan, Italy
dates: December 4th, 2025 — October 30th, 2026

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015, installation view from the Venice Biennale, German Pavilion, 2015. image courtesy theartist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. photo: Manuel Reinartz

Dynastic Jewels

Focusing on jewelry as both a symbol of power and a vessel of personal meaning, this exhibition traces the stories of pieces linked to some of Europe’s most iconic figures, including Catherine the Great, Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise, and Queen Victoria. From tiaras and diadems to brooches, necklaces, and rare gemstones, these creations were designed for the splendor of royal courts, where they signaled lineage, authority, and imperial ambition.

As the third in a trilogy of exhibitions developed in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the show brings together glittering works from the V&A and The Al Thani Collection, many shown in France for the first time.

name: Dynastic Jewels
museum: Hôtel de la Marine
location: Paris, France
dates: December 10th, 2025 — April 6th, 2026

Queen Victoria Coronet Designed by Prince Albert; made by Kitching & Abud. London, 1840-42Sapphires, diamonds, gold and silver © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Hélio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica — an artist and theorist of the 20th century — developed a practice that moved fluidly between sculpture, painting, installation, drawing, and performance, fundamentally reshaping ideas of participation and abstraction. A key figure in Brazil’s Neoconcrete movement and a co-founder of Tropicália, Oiticica explored how art could respond to and emerge from the social, political, and economic realities of Latin America, insisting on embodied experience and spatial awareness as central to meaning.

At Dia Beacon, the exhibition centers on Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus) (1960–63), one of Oiticica’s most immersive environments. Composed of rectangular panels painted in shifting tones from bright yellow to deep orange and arranged in a multidirectional grid, the work breaks away from the flat pictorial plane of his earlier Metaesquemas and Monocromáticos. Instead, it invites viewers to move among its forms, making their own presence an essential part of the work’s structure and unfolding.

name: Hélio Oiticica
artist: Hélio Oiticica
museum: Dia Beacon
location: New York, USA
dates: from December 5th, 2025

Hélio Oiticica, Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus), NC3, NC4, NC6, 1960–63. © César and Claudio Oiticica, courtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Doug Aitken: UNDER THE SUN

The Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) presents Doug Aitken’s first exhibition in India, Under The Sun, a three-floor exploration of time, perception, and place. Each level of the NMACC Art House is ordered chronologically under themes of past, present, and future, and unfolds through a constellation of sculptures, textiles, film, and an immersive new light installation.

At the heart of the exhibition is a suite of site-specific commissions, many emerging from a two-year collaboration between Aitken’s studio and more than a dozen artisans across India. Working with local materials and advanced craft techniques, these collaborations weave regional knowledge into Aitken’s wider investigation of how we navigate history and imagine what comes next.

name: Under The Sun
artist: Doug Aitken
museum: Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)
location: Mumbai, India
dates: December 6th, 2025 — February 22nd, 2026

Doug Aitken, NEW ERA, 2018. video installation with three channels of video (color, sound) three projections,freestanding room, PVC projection screens, mirrors © Doug Aitken. courtesy Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre and 303 Gallery, New York

Alex Da Corte:Parade

Matthew Marks presents Alex Da Corte: Parade, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in more than five years, spanning both of the gallery’s West 22nd Street spaces. The show features eleven new sculptures set within a carefully staged narrative environment, reflecting Da Corte’s interest in how images from popular culture and art history shape contemporary life.

Though Da Corte works fluidly across video, performance, painting, and drawing, Parade centers sculpture — the medium he considers the grounding force of his practice, ‘because… it has a side you cannot see. And that is uniquely human.’

The exhibition comprises three chambers separated by thresholds of art historical reference. Da Corte himself appears throughout the installation in life-size sculptural form: as the Pink Panther recast as a house painter; as Popeye perched on a brick piano, quietly contemplating a pumpkin; and as a figure reclining in a reconstruction of Paul Thek’s legendary 1967 installation The Tomb.

name: Alex Da Corte: Parade
artist: Alex Da Corte
museum: Matthew Marks Gallery
location: New York, USA
dates: until December 20th, 2025

Alex Da Corte, Housepainter II, 2025, image courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Christian Marclay:The Clock

Christian Marclay’s The Clock arrives in Berlin for the first time, bringing his 24-hour video installation to a newly built cinema space inside the Mies Glass Hall. Painstakingly assembled over several years, the work functions as an absorbing journey through a century of cinema and as a fully operational timepiece: each moment on-screen corresponds precisely to the local time of its exhibition, collapsing cinematic fiction into real-time experience.

Drawing on scenes from thrillers, westerns, sci-fi films, and countless lesser-known titles, The Clock weaves together shifting moods, narratives, and eras, allowing viewers to feel time unfold in multiple directions at once. The work is on view daily during the museum’s opening hours, with select weekend opportunities to experience the full 24-hour cycle.

name: Christian Marclay:The Clock
artist: Christian Marclay
museum: Neue Nationalgalerie
location: Berlin, Germany
dates: until January 25th, 2026

Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010 © Christian Marclay. photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave

Qatar Museums, in collaboration with AMO under Samir Bantal and Rem Koolhaas, presents Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave, a sweeping exhibition that reconsiders the rural world as a site of sustainability, innovation, and future possibility. Spanning a geographic arc from Africa through the Middle East and Central Asia to China, the project illuminates regions long linked by history and still home to most of the world’s population.

Through immersive installations and research-driven narratives, Countryside challenges the dominance of the urban lens and asks how rural life might offer more humane and ecological responses to contemporary crises. Presented across both Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) and the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ), the exhibition encourages cross-generational dialogue and opens space for imagining new ways of living beyond the city.

name: Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave
architect: AMO / OMA
museum: Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) and NMoQ Gallery
location: Doha, Qatar
dates: until June 30th, 2026

image © Marco Cappelletti Studio

Mr. Strangelove or: How He Learned to Stop Conventional Art Style and Love to Draw the Girls

Mr., a leading figure of Japan’s Superflat and Neo-Pop movements, presents his first solo exhibition in Kaohsiung — a vibrant, immersive world shaped by the wide-eyed innocence and exuberant energy of anime-inspired characters. With imagery that feels both playful and uncanny, he blurs dimensional boundaries and invites visitors into a universe built from ‘ultimate cuteness’ and uninhibited imagination.

Since the mid-1990s, Mr. has helped redefine contemporary Japanese art by channeling into his work otaku culture and the atmosphere of 1980s Japan, an era steeped in manga, anime, and emerging subcultures. Curated by Kenji Kudo, director of the Tagawa City Museum of Art, the exhibition features around 70 works, including large-scale paintings, sculptures, and early receipt graffiti.

name: Mr. Strangelove or: How He Learned to Stop Conventional Art Style and Love to Draw the Girls
artist: Mr.
museum: Neiwei Arts Center
location: Kaohsiung, Taiwan
dates: until April 26th, 2026

Soft Robots:The Art of Digital Breathing

Soft Robots gathers works by fifteen artists and collectives to explore how emerging technologies like AI and synthetic biology are reshaping our sense of self in a world defined by surveillance capitalism and digital doubles. In this shifting technological ecology, the exhibition looks beyond utopian promises and dystopian fears, asking what kind of future we are building alongside our machines. Many works were created specifically for the show, revealing how art can probe these questions with poetry and critical imagination.

Drawing on perspectives that challenge the Western divide between the natural and the artificial — including pan-Asian philosophies like Shintoism, which sees spirit in all things — the exhibition moves fluidly between avatars, doppelgängers, and seductive machines. Inspired in part by Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Nightingale,’ it reflects on what might be lost when the mechanical stands in for the soulful.

name: Soft Robots:The Art of Digital Breathing
museum: Contemporary Copenhagen
location: Copenhagen, Denmark
dates: until April 19th, 2026

A.A.Murakami, Beyond the Horizon ©A.A.Murakami. commissioned by M+, 2024. photography byAdam Kovář and PETR&Co. model by Ashley Lin. image courtesy the artist

Seeds of Hate and Hope

Seeds of Hate and Hope brings together artists including Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Zoran Mušič, Peter Oloya, Kimberly Fulton Orozco, and Indrė Šerpytytė to reflect on how individuals have witnessed, endured, and responded to mass atrocities — from genocide and ethnic cleansing to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Rather than depicting violence directly, the exhibition presents works shaped by personal histories and shared memory, offering space for grief, resistance, and healing.

By highlighting artistic responses across the 20th and 21st centuries, Seeds of Hate and Hope underscores art’s capacity to confront the legacies of conflict and to challenge the simplistic narratives often found in media imagery. The works on view point to the ways resilience and solidarity can take root even in moments of profound rupture, emphasizing empathy and human dignity as essential forces against prejudice, dehumanization, and hate.

name: Seeds of Hate and Hope
museum: Sainsbury Centre
location: Norwich, UK
dates: until May 17th, 2026

Robert Therrien:This is a Story

The Broad presents Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the most extensive museum exhibition of the late artist’s work to date. Known for his uncanny shifts in scale and his transformation of familiar objects — giant tables and chairs, outsized dishes, alongside intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels — Therrien developed a visual language that feels at once playful, enigmatic, and deeply rooted in memory.

Featuring more than 120 works across five decades, the exhibition offers an unprecedented look at his evolving practice, located just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio he occupied for nearly thirty years. Many pieces, including works made shortly before his passing in 2019, have never been shown in a museum, opening new perspectives on his lifelong exploration of perception, narrative, and the quiet strangeness of everyday forms.

name: Robert Therrien: This is a Story
artist: Robert Therrien
museum: The Broad
location: Los Angeles, California
dates: until April 5th, 2026

image courtesy The Broad

Ron Mueck: Encounter

Ron Mueck: Encounter brings an exceptional selection of the celebrated Australian sculptor’s work exclusively to Sydney, marking his most significant solo exhibition in the country in over a decade and his first in the city since 2003. Since the late 1990s, Mueck has transformed figurative sculpture with his meticulous realism, using shifts in scale to probe themes of birth and death, solitude and connection, and the complexities of the human condition.

At the center of the exhibition is Havoc, an immersive new installation featuring a pack of larger-than-life fighting dogs created especially for this presentation. Oversized yet quietly charged, the work draws viewers into a space that feels both intimate and unnervingly tense.

name: Ron Mueck: Encounter
artist: Ron Mueck
museum: Art Gallery of NSW
location: Sydney, Australia
dates: December 6th, 2025 — April 12th, 2026

Ron Mueck Couple Under an Umbrella 2013/2015, collection museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands © Ron Mueck, photo: Antoine Van Kaam

The House on Utopia Parkway

Gagosian presents The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson, a Paris exhibition conceived with curator Jasper Sharp that reimagines the artist’s legendary workspace in Queens, New York. Marking Cornell’s first solo presentation in Paris in more than forty years, the storefront gallery at 9 rue de Castiglione is transformed into a life-size, Anderson-designed shadow box — a time capsule built from more than three hundred objects and curiosities sourced from Cornell’s own ‘spare parts department.’

Cornell (1903–1972), a self-taught artist who never left the United States yet wandered Paris through books, postcards, and conversations with Marcel Duchamp, created some of the twentieth century’s most original collages and assemblages. His basement studio, lined with whitewashed boxes and jars of ephemera, provided the raw material for the poetic shadow boxes that would influence generations of artists.

name: The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson
artist: Wes Anderson
gallery: Gagosian
location: Paris, France
dates: December 16th, 2025 — March 14th, 2026

Mark Leckey:And the City Stood in its Brightness

‘And the City Stood in Its Brightness,’ the second commission in the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s in situ series, features a new site-specific installation by Mark Leckey, who explores how popular culture, technology, and memory shape collective identity. Drawing on his upbringing near Liverpool during the industrial decline of the 1970s and ’80s, Leckey examines how images and media become shared emotional landscapes.

For this project, he reimagines Sassetta’s City by the Sea (1424), one of the earliest Western cityscapes, translating its otherworldly geometry into sculptural form. The installation unfolds through a six-minute loop of sound and light — ambient audio, sudden bursts of speech, shifting illumination, and a climactic strobe — that transforms the sculpture from a physical structure into a flickering apparition.

name: Mark Leckey:And the City Stood in its Brightness
artist: Mark Leckey
museum: Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
location: Bilbao, Spain
dates: until December 4th, 2026

image courtesy Museo Guggenheim Bilbao