Quilt artist Lois Klassen presents her first Manitoba exhibition, "Lamentation and Celebration," featuring a series of collaged textile works that explore the duality of grief and beauty. The exhibition showcases Klassen’s signature style of juxtaposing found, recycled, and commercial fabrics with traditional needlework fragments to create complex visual patterns and textures.
Topkapi Palace in Istanbul has opened the Mabeyn Route Tile Art Gallery, a new permanent exhibition space inside a historic corridor that once connected the imperial reception area with the Imperial Harem. The gallery displays around 250 ceramic tiles, tracing the stylistic and technical evolution of Ottoman tile art from Iznik to Kutahya, with many pieces previously kept in storage and rarely seen by the public. The corridor was restored as part of a long-term program by the National Palaces Administration, and the gallery also features large-scale tiles inscribed with the names of Ottoman sultans and verses from a 11th-century poem.
A pop-up art exhibition in Philadelphia explores the dismantling of Isaiah Zagar's public mural *Skin of the Bride* (c. 1990-2001), a ceramic-and-tile mosaic originally housed in a community arts center. The building was sold in 2017, purchased by a real estate developer in 2023, and despite efforts to protect the mural as a historic site, it is slated for demolition. The Magic Gardens team selectively removed certain tiles, including Mexican folk art, while leaving others behind, altering the artwork's visual integrity. The exhibition presents fragments of Zagar's work alongside a video installation and a multimedia piece reflecting on memory and placemaking.
En Grèce, le musée archéologique Thessalonikéon Métropolis ouvre ses portes
The Thessalonikéon Métropolis archaeological museum opened on May 7 in Thessaloniki, Greece, inside the renovated Pavlos Melas barracks (Building A3). Its collection of over 300,000 objects—including ceramics, jewelry, mosaics, sarcophagi, and architectural fragments—was unearthed during the construction of the city's metro system, which began in 2006 and became the largest rescue excavation in northern Greece. The centerpiece is the Decumanus Maximus, a well-preserved Roman-Byzantine commercial street discovered at the Venizelou station, nicknamed "Byzantine Pompeii." The museum's restoration cost about €14.5 million, partly funded by European Union funds, while the total archaeological interventions cost between €75 and €203 million.
The Uruguay Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale presents "ANTIFRAGIL," a new installation by artist Margaret Whyte, curated by Patricia Bentancur. The work combines textiles with obsolete technological objects such as old machines, motorcycle helmets, and waste fragments, embodying the concept of antifragility developed by Nassim Taleb—systems that grow stronger through disorder and instability. Whyte's practice transforms fragility and vulnerability into poetic resistance, challenging traditional hierarchies between craft and contemporary art.
Adam Patrick Grant’s artistic practice is rooted in a meticulous and devotional process of observation, transitioning from a background in film to a dedicated focus on oil painting over the last three years. Working from his London studio, Grant utilizes an extensive archive of personal sketches, photographs, and found imagery—such as anonymous postcards and family photos from markets—to capture fleeting moments of intimacy and the unspectacular everyday. His work is characterized by a rhythmic dialogue between the act of walking, the gathering of visual fragments, and the translation of these memories into tender, precise compositions.
The Goethe-Institut Sudan, in collaboration with the Humboldt Forum Berlin, presents 'Scattered Memories,' a transcontinental exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Kairo from 1 to 3 May 2026. The show features Sudanese artists working across collage, film, music, performance, food, and storytelling to explore themes of loss, remembrance, and cultural memory. Public programs include discussions, guided tours, and a traditional coffee corner, transforming the exhibition into a space for communal gathering and exchange.
Three master’s students from Stellenbosch University—Rebekah Pringle, Thabo Ngwenya, and Emily Fitzgerald—launched an exhibition titled "Matter of Self: Private fragments, public forms" on 7 August at the Gallery University Stellenbosch (GUS). The show is part of a master’s review series that highlights their academic year progress. Pringle’s work explores her domestic experience and caretaker relationship with her grandmother using repurposed furniture; Ngwenya’s pieces address alienation as a Ndebele man in Zimbabwe through pop culture references and self-portraits as "boundary objects"; Fitzgerald’s art challenges patriarchy and heteronormativity using archival photographs, clay, and photolithographic processes.