7 Shows to See During EXPO CHICAGO 2025

Wakaliga Uganda | The Renaissance Society | 1 March–27 April

Wakaliwood (also known as Ramon Film Productions) is a film studio founded by Isaac Nabwana in the Wakaliga neighbourhood of Kampala, Uganda. Characterized by a joyous DIY ethos, the studio has inspired devotion in Wakaliga’s residents, who have joined as actors, stunt performers and set designers to make films with budgets of several hundred US dollars or less. Nabwana’s determination in the face of material challenges – and his vision of film as a story that is continuous, elastic and communally built – informs ‘If Uganda Was America’. This spirit of exchange can be seen within the older works on view, such as Who Killed Captain Alex? (2010) and Crazy World (originally released in 2014 and featuring cameos from fans all around the world). However, the jewel of the exhibition is Wakaliwood’s newest film, also titled If Uganda was America (2025). Watch it to see a geopolitical kung-fu satire filled with guns, helicopters and a whole lot of literal, and metaphorical, guts.

Pothole³ | Good Weather and M. LeBlanc | 21 April–25 May

Chicago writer Nelson Algren once fell into a pothole outside of the Gold Star Bar. Or was it the Rainbo Club? This half-remembered anecdote feels like a fitting epigraph for the show at the latter venue, ‘Pothole³’. Organized by the galleries Good Weather and M. LeBlanc, the exhibition is a sequel to last year’s ‘Pothole²’, also at Rainbo Club. Curated by artists Cameron Spratley and Ron Ewert, and with works by over 30 artists – including Margaret Crowley, Nandi Loaf and Noelia Towers – the show takes a stacked gallery roster out of the white cube and into a bar with cheap beer and a 2am closing time. A bar-cum-gallery installation is a thrilling and fun way to enliven the idea of a site-specific interruption; it lets art live amongst people, music, noise, friends, strangers and the night’s changing light.

Wafaa Bilal | Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago | 1 February–19 October

To experience the intimacy of ‘Indulge Me’, years after Wafaa Billal created much of the work, is an eerie sensation. Billal produced major pieces such as the durational performances Domestic Tension (2007) and 3rdi (2010–11) in response to the personal fallout he experienced from George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ (2001–), particularly the Second Persian Gulf War (2003–11). The artist experienced a sense of displacement in Iraqi and American contexts, and his brother was killed by an American missile strike while living in Iraq. We are now living in an acceleration of the imperialism and Islamophobia of the War on Terror. With death and destruction livestreamed to our phones, desensitizing us, we can no longer engage with Bilal’s tech-mediated intimacy as we could during the early aughts. Sadly, it seems that many Americans still fail to care about the people that Billal desires to ‘humanize’ through his YouTube journals and video games. This realization, of a society’s moral failings, is the show’s magic trick. Billal’s work has evolved with the times: it is no longer a plea for empathy, but rather a mirror that reveals where our own hearts stop short.

Yuge Zhou | Boundary | 12 April–10 May

Yuge Zhou’s ‘Soft Plots’ asks what it means to live with one another in cities as a fractured collective, and how we are changed by the transient and mundane interactions fostered by these systems of spatial organization foster. How is our shared sense of time, for example, moulded by the exchanges that take place in stores, in parks, in schools? In the three videos on view (Soft Plots, 2017, Pale Patrol, 2019, and Trampoline Color Exercise, 2024), gymnasts perform floor routines; volleyball players and beachgoers frolic upon Chicago’s Oak Street Beach; and protestors and police face off on that same beach. Collaged with mathematical, spiny precision, Yuge’s figures and landscapes are sometimes interchangeable. In Trampoline Color Exercise, tiny figures flip and whirl above pale salmon gym mats; as their leotards change, their identities become increasingly difficult to differentiate. These transformations of identity, of allegiance, of sensibility, of whatever can be changed about us, are a fitting entry point to the question at the heart of the show: who are you, really?

Nick Raffel | Prairie | 22 March–3 May

The epigraph to Nick Raffel’s show is a quote by the philosopher and psychologist William James: ‘There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.’ Perhaps Raffel’s analysis of our relationships to artworks and galleries is not so unlike a devotee’s accounting of their own faith and experience with God. In a twist, Raffel’s work is the gallery itself: the artist removed a portion of Prairie’s drywall to expose the studs and replaced the gallery’s fans with different models to change the air flow. The effects of these interventions, which transform a viewer’s experience in the space, recall James’s theory of emotion, developed beginning in the 1880s, which asserted that changes in or to the body are experienced as emotions because the body is connected to the mind. A subjective stance, to be sure, but that’s Raffel’s (and James’s) point: no two visitors will feel this air the same way.

Jessica Campbell | Western Exhibitions | 18 April–7 June

The title of Jessica Campbell’s exhibition, ‘Dogman Lives on the Ground’, is credited to the artist’s longtime friend and former partner, the late artist Lee McClure. I’ll admit I’m not entirely sure what to do with McClure’s sentiment, but given that this is a show about grief – specifically Campbell’s grief at McClure’s absence – I think not ‘getting it’ is the point. Channelled through Campbell’s graphic, animated sensibility and neon-shaded sense of humour, loss becomes a bit of a funhouse mirror – for after the death of a loved one, the world seems to hang upside down and inside out. With Campbell’s drawings and textile works – like the playful yet deeply sad tapestry Piggy Bank Lee Brought Me Back From Halifax (2025) – in conversation with pieces she made in posthumous ‘collaboration’ with McClure, the show functions as a surreal cartography of their relationship. Pain and pleasure, dogs and men, life and death exist in equal measure: McClure is here, but absent; McClure has passed, but ‘Dogman Lives’.

Regina Agu | Museum of Contemporary Photography | 23 January–17 May

Regina Agu’s installation of panoramic landscape photographs is a work of transformative cartography. Photographs on view, such as the floor-to-ceiling installations ‘Sea Change’ (2016) and ‘Edge, Bank, Shore’ (2024), feature unpopulated scenes of the oft-overlooked agricultural American South. Agu’s work traces the buried histories of America’s Great Migration – when millions of Black Americans moved from the South to industrialized cities of the North and Midwest during the early to mid-twentieth century – and the safe houses and pathways of the Underground Railroad (the nineteenth-century network utilized by enslaved people making their way to the free states of the North). The visitors’ path through the installation – moving from images of Southern waters to Chicago beaches – resonates with the trajectory of families during the Great Migration. Agu’s talent for excavating material and ecological histories in response to racist desires to bury, forget and deny, opens boundless worlds and vast shores.

^{Main image: Yuge Zhou, Trampoline Color Exercises, 2024, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Boundary}