Art is the Language

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‘Fjord,’ from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu (), follows a devout Christian couple played by Sebastian Stan () and Re...
05/24/2026

‘Fjord,’ from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu (), follows a devout Christian couple played by Sebastian Stan () and Renate Reinsve () who are accused of physically abusing their children. What begins as a family matter becomes headline news once child protection services opens an inquiry, turning the case into a proxy war between religious tradition and social liberalism. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes 2026, Mungiu’s second — he also took the prize in 2007 for ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.’


05/24/2026

For this year’s Venice Biennale, Hugh Hayden () has unveiled a permanent commission on the island of San Giacomo, brought to life by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. A full-scale brick chapel tilted forty degrees forward rises from the ground, topped with a green metal roof and a ten-meter steeple that nods to the campanile towers scattered across the Italian landscape. Step inside and you find pews, a reimagined crucifix, and a space that functions as a genuine sanctuary for quiet and reflection. In the tower above, a locally cast bell carries the inscription “Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin” — pulled directly from The Three Little Pigs.

Hayden has long used fairy tales and fables as a lens for exploring how stories shape morality, power, and identity. The chapel pushes that inquiry to an architectural scale, using the off-kilter and the familiar to create something that feels both deeply recognizable and entirely destabilizing.

05/23/2026

John Simmons () brings through ‘Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985.’ This exhibition brings together over 100 artists and 150 works across photography, painting, collage, and video. The exhibition traces how Black artists and activists used photography to celebrate Black culture, build community, and advance the fight for civil rights  at a time when self-representation was power and visibility was political. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Among the featured artists is LA-based John Simmons, who began his career at 15 photographing for the Chicago Daily Defender and went on to document Civil Rights Movement icons, protests, musicians, and intimate moments of everyday Black life.  Simmons is one of several Southern California artists represented in the show, which dedicates a section specifically to the contributions of LA’s Black photographers to the movement. 

05/22/2026

Lightning in a Bottle () returns to Buena Vista Lake with one belief intact: true wonder doesn’t come from algorithms or spectacle, but from human connection and imagination.

This year’s edition features a reimagined stage built by hand by founders Jesse () and Josh Flemming () from upcycled materials, transporting audiences to a rugged scrap yard spaceship. Proof that art comes in all shapes, sizes, and spaceships.

05/20/2026

Lady Gaga’s () ‘Mayhem’ arrived in March 2025 as a full creative reset: synth-pop, industrial dance, electro, and rock colliding around themes of love, chaos, fame, and identity. The Mayhem Ball tour treated the music as theater, built around an elaborate opera-house set and staged in arenas specifically to preserve the precision the show demanded.

‘Mayhem Requiem’ is what came after. Gaga in widow’s weeds, moving through the ruins of that same set, performing the full album in new arrangements incorporating industrial music, techno, grunge, and orchestral elements — rawer and more exposed than anything the tour offered.

A eulogy for the era, and possibly for the persona herself.

05/18/2026

Framework () is back with their Gin Ling Way summer series, this year tapping artist Alan Chin () to engage with the site’s history and architecture.

Chin works primarily in ceramics, using material process to explore how meaning is shaped through everyday forms and repeated use. His practice spans sculpture, painting, installation, performance, and film — examining systems, repetition, and transformation as they relate to labor, perception, and social experience. For a site like Gin Ling Way, built in 1938 as the heart of LA’s New Chinatown, the pairing makes sense.

05/14/2026

David Lamelas is a foundational figure in conceptual art whose work explores time, information, perception, and the systems through which reality is mediated. Working across installation, sculpture, film, and performance since the 1960s, the Argentine artist has developed a practice shaped by movement, using space and communication as tools for examining how meaning is constructed.

Curated by Humberto Moro (), ‘David Lamelas: The Machine’ at Dia Chelsea () surveys Lamelas’s practice from 1965 to 2026 through installations, sculptures, films, and newly commissioned works. The exhibition highlights the artist’s long-standing interest in opposing forces, systems of information, and the viewer’s perception of time and space.

In parallel, Dia’s collaboration with Frieze New York () at The Shed presents moving image works from Lamelas’s ongoing ‘Time as Activity’ series alongside ‘To Pour Milk into a Glass’ (1972), extending the exhibition into the context of the fair and bringing together key works from across his film practice.

View the works at Frieze New York through Sunday and experience the full exhibition, ‘David Lamelas: The Machine’ at Dia Chelsea through January 2027.

05/13/2026

Derek Fordjour’s () practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance to explore the intertwined histories of power, labor, representation, and the Black experience. Through layered surfaces and archetypal figures drawn from sports, entertainment, and service industries, Fordjour examines the tension between spectacle and exploitation, individual ambition and systemic inequality.

For High Line Art (), Fordjour presents ARCHETYPES, a series of painted bronze sculptures depicting a boxer, server, and burlesque dancer installed between 25th and 26th Streets. Together, the works consider the historic use of the Black body as a vehicle for social mobility within economies of entertainment, labor, and performance. Alongside the sculptures, Fordjour’s mural Backbreaker Double extends these themes into the surrounding cityscape, transforming the High Line into a meditation on visibility, aspiration, and the systems that shape public life.

Now on view on the High Line () through April 2027.

05/11/2026

Austin Geller () is an LA-based musician, visual artist, film composer, and event organizer whose work pulls the community into his creative process. His EP Parallel Play, cinematic and genre-bending experimental electronic, has surpassed a million streams on Spotify. The practice extends well beyond recorded music: he organizes the free outdoor series Public Sounds, composes for film and TV, and incorporates large-scale digital projection art into his live shows. The EP’s title borrows from a child development concept (children playing independently alongside each other), a framework that maps onto his broader output, where multiple disciplines run in parallel without collapsing into one another.

GENER8ION () releases ‘Storm I & II,’ a seven-and-a-half-minute short film that goes beyond a music video. Directed by R...
05/09/2026

GENER8ION () releases ‘Storm I & II,’ a seven-and-a-half-minute short film that goes beyond a music video. Directed by Romain Gavras () (Athena, The World Is Yours) and set to music by GENER8ION — the audio-visual project of French producer Surkin — the film stars Yung Lean () as a brutal, magnetic presence at the center of a near-future British boarding school, class of 2034.

The film serves as a portrait of boyhood: the violence, the boredom, the solidarity, and what lies underneath all of it.
The film’s climax arrives in a single unbroken shot — Lean standing still as his classmates erupt into a full-scale choreographed sequence by Franco-Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet (), whose body of work includes Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Suspiria’ and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Anima.’

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