10 Art Exhibitions To Visit Now – Online Or In Person

Things like “booking a trip”, “making plans” or even just “looking forward to visiting an exhibition” have all become foreign concepts. Nevertheless, the fact that it is becoming harder to plan ahead isn’t preventing art from being created, collected and displayed. It’s just changing the way we access and view it. Today, we are just as likely to log on to a virtual exhibition tour as we are to visit an actual museum. Find out which new shows – real or virtual – are opening this season.

Unlike other art biennials and festivals that were cancelled or postponed, the Bienal de São Paulo had launched by the time the pandemic reached Brazil. Now the 34th biennial programme, which “had already aimed to expand beyond physical and temporal constraints, furthers its original approach by extending the edition’s timeline an extra year.” The group exhibition “Though it’s dark, still I sing” will take place in late 2021, but an intermediate programme with events to tide art lovers over is due to be announced.

Thanks to its decentralised concept, Manifesta – the “world’s only nomadic biennial” – was always a little lighter on its feet than others and has been able to adapt its programming accordingly. Currently, the three connected programmes are still scheduled to run through all of November in Marseille and several other locations in southern France.

OBJECT & THING, a new art and design fair that launched in 2019 has fled New York for a more intimate, bucolic setting. The smaller-scale event, hosted through November at the former home of the late designer and architect Eliot Noyes in Connecticut, is already sold out, but you can take a video tour and view selected works online.

The Audain Art Museum in Whistler, British Columbia is turning necessity into a virtue by offering a private guided tour experience. You can book your “bubble” – meaning yourself and your extended household contacts (up to 6 people) – in for a visit outside of public opening hours. For the winter months, in addition to the permanent collection, the Canadian museum features special exhibition “RESERVOIR” by First Nations artist Rebecca Belmore.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s annual exhibition seems to have accidentally created the perfect fashion commentary for our time. “About Time: Fashion and Duration” presents “a disrupted timeline of fashion history” in a year that disrupted everyone’s individual fashion routines, the schedules of the big fashion week events, as well as the timing of the exhibition itself. Originally planned to coincide with the cancelled Met Gala in May, it is now opening at the end of October and slated to run until early February.

While most large art fairs were cancelled this summer, Art Cologne is still hoping that its rescheduled event can take place from 18 to 22 November 2020. The extended hygiene concept includes mandatory pre-booking of tickets and an app to prevent large numbers of visitors congregating in any one place.

While many museums and galleries launched online viewing options or made their exhibitions online only, Beijing museum M WOODS went all-in on the concept with “Art Is Still Here: A Hypothetical Show for a Closed Museum”. Navigate the exhibition, peruse the floor plan and explore the works and accompanying texts here.

In London, a recently launched public art project is lighting up Europe’s largest billboard. For two minutes a day at 20:20 GMT, CIRCA.ART is showing commissioned work by big-name and emerging artists. The video art can also be streamed live from anywhere in the world at the same time on the project’s website, which also offers accompanying texts.

The soon-to-be Kunstinstituut Melly – the Rotterdam art institution formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, currently in a transitional phase – is putting its curation money where its mouth is. The renaming is designed to make the museum “a more welcoming and daring cultural institution into the future”. Current exhibitions include a solo exhibition of work by South African artist Usha Seejarim, as well as new work by Candian-born, Paris-based Kapwani Kiwanga, centred around issues of colonialism, resistance and liberation.

The Centre Pompidou’s Matisse exhibition, originally planned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth, opened in late October, despite restrictions in the French capital. Now scheduled to run through February 2021, it is sure to bring a much-needed splash of colour to winter in Paris.