Best Shows to See Across Europe this November

Hamid Zénati | Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt | 28 September – 12 January

It's rare for an exhibition of so-called applied arts to evoke a sense of motion. Typically, such displays are confined to dimly lit vitrines, where fragile relics are encased in quiet reverence. Yet, walking through ‘Eclectic Affinities’ – an exhibition that brings together the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt and the decades-long artistic practice of Hamid Zénati – one does not simply witness movement, but creates it. Zénati’s mesmerizing textile works, suspended from the ceiling and walls, sway lightly as visitors pass. – Ben Livne Weitzman

‘Same Day’ | The 15th Baltic Triennial at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius | 6 September – 12 January

Installed across the newly renovated Contemporary Art Centre, ‘Same Day’, curated by Tom Engels and Maya Tounta, transports the viewer between varied sensory states. We move through the dark heat of a room featuring multiple analogue projections: Kevin Jerome Everson’s Recovery (2020), a 16mm black and white video of an American airman conducting his training in a ‘spin-and-puke chair’, plays near Rey Akdogan’s Carousel #2 (2010/19), #8 (2015) and #9 (2016) – three slide projections portraying layered plastics. Everson’s nausea-inducing shots engender a creeping sense of vertigo, whilst Akdogan’s ostensibly beautiful images reveal themselves, upon closer inspection, to consist of commercial and industrial waste. – Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe

‘Les voix des fleuves' (Crossing the Water) | 17th Lyon Biennale​​​​​ | 21 September – 5 January

The 17th Lyon Biennale kicked off at the end of September to great pomp. As guest curator Alexia Fabre announced to a crowd of journalists, this year’s edition is informed by ideas of personal relations, altruism and welcoming the other – vague but not irrelevant topics given how close France came to electing the far-right National Rally Party in July of this year. 

Among the most memorable works in the Grandes Locos – a former train-repair depot which serves as the biennial’s main site – is Gözde İlkin’s The Majority of Accent (2018–24), a mixed-media work in which the artist’s characteristic biomorphic figures are painted and embroidered onto the surface of a large textile print of a quarry. The work evokes the venue’s industrial past via images of labour organizing, accompanied by recorded interviews with former workers emitted from speakers hidden in printed, painted and embroidered sacks. – Wilson Tarbox

Lukas Thaler | Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Vienna | 31 October – 21 December

Lukas Thaler’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Thoman, ‘ooze’, feels like a desert, rife with mirages. The experience of the artist’s wall-mounted works – wood panels daubed with acrylic resin, marble sand and ink – resides in their uppermost layers. Interacting with light, the paintings’ surfaces become loci for optical illusions, inviting us to investigate their meticulously sculpted forms. His aim, the artist tells me, is to ‘create the feeling that the colour is not on the object but comes out of it’. Drawing in the viewer, this ‘oozing’ effect almost invites touch: the beautifully crafted and luminous facades repeatedly evoke vitality, movement and organicity, yet beneath their animate textures lurks a cool stillness. – Simone Molinari

Louis Fratino | Centro Pecci, Prato | 26 September – 2 February

There’s a type of pornography in which the camera operator is involved in the action, shooting as they engage in various sexual acts. The resulting video, presenting a participant’s point of view, allows its viewer to imagine they – not some distant actor – are the one being penetrated or fellated. Louis Fratino achieves the same effect, albeit through different means, in his miniature painting Blowjob and Moon (2019), in which a man kneels on all fours, eyes fixed forward. Oral sex is about to be performed, but its recipient is just outside the frame – is, in fact, the person standing in front of it, studying Fratino’s neat brushwork. Most of the gallery’s visitors don’t seem to realize what’s about to go down. – Lou Selfridge

^{Main image: Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, En Rachâchant, 1982, ‘Same Day’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Vilnius; photograph: Kristien Daem}