The Water Garden forms part of a multi-year collaboration with Belgium landscape architect Bas Smets, aimed at making the Vitra Campus more climate-resilient. Situated in front of Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum, it enters into a compelling dialogue with the building’s dynamic architecture, creating new spaces for visitors to linger and stroll. The pond features three sculptural fountains by Hella Jongerius which are in the fabulous surrounding company of a bench by Balkrishna Doshi, a prefab house by Jean Prouvé and sculpture “Balancing Tools” by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen — all of which provide diverse design perspectives echoing those within the museum itself.

Once a symbol of efficiency and growth, the office today reflects shifting realities shaped by digitalization, remote work, and artificial intelligence. Basel Social Club engages this condition through exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy, and informal encounters that explore questions of labor, time, productivity, and rest. The building remains continuously activated throughout the week, with artists responding directly to its architecture and atmosphere.

He hung chairs from the ceiling and transformed interiors into colourful playgrounds; few designers have shaped design in the second half of the twentieth century as decisively as Verner Panton. To mark the 100th anniversary of the Danish designer’s birth, the Vitra Design Museum is presenting a comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Vitra Schaudepot. 

Unfolding like a living environment in constant transformation, artificial breathing organs, neural networks coming alive, echoing sounds and murky aquariums, the Fondation Beyeler has just opened a major new exhibition of Pierre Huyghe. The artist is renowned for his boundary-crossing works, where fiction and reality seamlessly merge. The exhibition invites visitors to explore Pierre Huyghe’s fascinating and uncertain world.

Architecture is always a reflection of its time. It is embedded in economic systems, political priorities, cultural movements, and technological developments, and is shaped by available resources and the prevailing values of the moment while it is never limited to the present alone. Against this backdrop, Cobe presents In Transformation: 16 projects on the theme of transformation in the exhibition. The examples from two decades encompass a broad spectrum of scales and typologies. 

In Ruin, curated by Kathleen Reinhardt, Henrike Naumann and Sung Tieu explore both the ideological ruptures and material traces of post-reunification Germany. With formal vocabularies ranging from maximalist opulence to minimalist clarity, they examine the enduring legacy of a once divided Germany and the socio-political upheavals of the 1990s transformation period and beyond.

Already in its 22nd edition, Gallery Weekend Berlin continues to reflect a city as multifaceted as ever. At the beginning of May, 50 galleries across 66 locations will open their doors, showcasing over 80 established and emerging artists from more than 30 countries. This year also sees the launch of Perspectives, a new sector featuring a rotating annual selection of galleries.

What’s going on? is the opening exhibition of the program by Dennis Brzek as new director of the Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin. The group exhibition is showing both existing works and new pieces created in dialogue with the site. The works on display raise questions about time, absence, and personal histories, using both private and shared memories as their material. 

 Multispecies Members Club develops a forward-looking model of coexistence: an inclusive alliance in which humans, animals, plants and machines act as equal members. The exhibition at MGGU sees itself as a living experiment: it shows how technology can enable communication between different species and how democratic participation can be rethought – beyond a purely human-centered view of the world. 

Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things is the first retrospective to present the full scope of the Dutch designer’s oeuvre and offers insights into Jongerius’ working methods, multi-layered thinking, passion for craft processes and deep engagement with materiality and the symbolism of objects. Her interest in craftsmanship and colour is always accompanied by critical reflection on her own practice and on the role of design in today’s society.

Basel Social Club returns in June 2026 for its 5th edition, continuing its nomadic tradition of transforming unexpected sites into temporary social spaces for art during the week of Art Basel. This year, the office becomes both subject and stage and brings together exhibitions, performances, music, gastronomy and informal encounters and will take place in a vacant office building designed by the architecture office Diener & Diener, just a few steps from Basel SBB train station.

For the first time in its history, the Fondation Beyeler is dedicating a solo exhibition to Paul Cezanne; pioneer of modern art and one of the most important artists in its own collection. The exhibition focuses on the last and most significant phase of the Frenchman’s work, highlighting key themes from his later years, including still lifes, portraits, landscapes and bathing scenes. 

Spanning the 1980s to the present, The China Moment. Contextualizing Individualism in Chinese Contemporary Art by the documenta institut at the Kasseler Kunstverein functions as both a research project and an exhibition, blending historical and narrative approaches. Drawing on archival materials, paintings, photographs, videos, installations, sound and performance, it presents artworks alongside the social contexts that shaped them — from spontaneous apartment shows and underground gatherings to experimental club and performance scenes.

Under the motto There Is No Art Without Criticism, TEXTE ZUR KUNST celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2025–26. Since its founding in 1990, the magazine has established itself as a critical, theoretically grounded medium within the international art world. Alongside special editions, the anniversary issue System Change: Art Market and Criticism examines the current upheavals in the global art market.

Engaging with the past decade of Cauleen Smith’s career, the Kestner Gesellschaft will present The Volcano Manifesto in December 2025. The title refers to her three film works My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024), which together open up complex meditations on geological and cinematic time, the abyss of volcanoes and the depths of mines and caves in the form of large-scale video installations, new textile works, a facade project, drawings, and a space for collective exchange and reflection.