The Best Shows to See Across Europe This February

Racheal Crowther | Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin | 24 January – 1 March

There is often a thin line between care and control. We see this on both micro and macro levels, with the latter including state apparatus, such as the police, through which power is exercised in the name of protection. Racheal Crowther’s sparse but bold exhibition ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ (Utility Music) may comprise only two works, but their aesthetic combination of cold steel and surveillance technologies effectually evokes the interplay of vulnerability, exploitation and scrutiny that exists within systems of safe-guarding. – Louisa Elderton

SAGG Napoli | Basement Roma | 14 November – 14 February 

On the opening night of her solo show at Basement Roma, multidisciplinary artist SAGG Napoli made her way through the throngs of visitors spilling out of the small gallery. She walked inside unobtrusively, her head bowed and partly concealed by a hoodie as she listened to music on her headphones. Perhaps it was her diminutive figure or her inconspicuous outfit, but it was only once she stepped inside the performance space, demarcated by a wire mesh fence, that the crowd realized it was the artist herself – her persona otherwise well-known thanks to a prolific Instagram account that doubles as an extension of her artistic practice. SAGG calmly proceeded to get ready for her performance – an archery session – with transfixing concentration. – Ana Vukadin

Delcy Morelos | Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville | 28 May – 9 March 

Cinnamon, cloves, cocoa, tobacco: you’ll smell Delcy Morelos’s works before you see them. For more than three decades, the Colombian artist has scented the soil in her large-scale installations to engage with our relationship to the earth. The significance of this gesture is made explicit in ‘De Profundis’, her current exhibition at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) in Seville, a river city central to the development of international trade routes and colonies between the 15th and 17th centuries.

Arranged across four rooms of the deconsecrated monastery that now houses CAAC, the sole and titular installation, Profundis (2024), comprises locally harvested sediments – red soil from Huelva; clay and albero sand from north of the city – mixed with other natural materials, such as hay, jute, wood, latex, spices, seeds and plants. By blending local earths with specimens that Christopher Columbus introduced to Europe from the Americas, Morelos alludes to the history of colonial botany. – Edmée Lepercq

Adrian Piper | Portikus, Frankfurt am Main | 23 November – 9 February 

Adrian Piper’s latest show at Portikus, ‘Who, Me?’, offers a compelling extension of the artist’s self-interrogative practice with two new site-specific works: I’m the Tree and I’m the Screen (both 2024). The exhibition sees Piper return to minimalism with installations that combine readymades, such as mirrors and furniture, with large-scale natural objects in a call for collective transformation.

Piper’s installations operate in what she terms the ‘indexical present’, a notion she unpacked in an essay, initially published in Reimagining America: The Arts of Social Change (1990), as a focus on ‘the concrete, immediate here-and-now’. The permanence of her objects confronts the viewer’s subjectivity, urging self-reflection: our experience of the work is shaped by our temporary moods and emotions alongside more firmly rooted behaviours, assumptions and prejudices. – Helena Julian

Britta Marakatt-Labba | Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiruna | 23 October – 16 March 

While the act of piercing fabric with a needle may seem slight, it has the capacity to create great strength. Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba’s embroideries on white linen interweave ancient mythologies and arctic landscapes to depict colonial tensions between the nation-state and indigenous culture. Her retrospective at Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, which includes more than 70 works spanning from the 1970s to the present day, marks Marakatt-Labba’s first large-scale retrospective in Sweden. Having opened last year at the National Museum in Oslo, the show will tour to Moderna Museet in Stockholm this summer. – Amanda Hakoköngäs 

^{Main image: Racheal Crowther, Close Call Only (10783, DE) (detail), 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin}