What to See Across Europe This July

‘What if Women Ruled the World’ | The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ), Greece | 14 December 2023 – 10 November 2024

Installed on the North and South facades of The National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ), What if Women Ruled the World? – a 2016 neon work by the Berlin-based artist Yael Bartana – is intended as a provocation. ‘We’re a public museum,’ Katerina Gregos, the institution’s director, explains to me, ‘and I believe that means we should be putting issues that matter on the table in a very vocal way.’

The inspiration for a four-part cycle of exhibitions dedicated to female-identifying artists, Bartana’s installation has been a guiding light for Gregos during the almost one-year-long cycle, which started in December 2023 and has just entered its final phase. The cycle takes its name from Bartana’s rhetorical question. ‘To answer that requires a leap of imagination,’ Gregos says. ‘Can we imagine a world where there is a redistribution of power and a different kind of governance, in which women take key positions?’ – Chloe Stead 

Marianna Simnett | Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany | 17 May – 03 November

As a dancer-turned-critic who grew up in the rarest of places – a British household uninterested in team sports – I’ve never had much appreciation for football. Not only did the sport seem a world away from my interests in the performing and visual arts, its negative associations with hooliganism and domestic violence compounded my disinclination to engage with it. Yet, in ‘WINNER’ (2024) – a new multi-channel film installation commissioned as part of the German government-supported art and culture programme of the UEFA EURO 2024 – Marianna Simnett employs dance and choreography to dissect the social and cultural nuances of football, bringing together two seemingly polarized disciplines and offering sport sceptics a way into ‘the beautiful game’. – Emily May

Ebecho Muslimova | Bernheim, Zurich, Switzerland  | 07 June – 26 July 

Since her first appearance in 2011, Fatebe – the protagonist of the copious works of Ebecho Muslimova, an artist born in the Republic of Dagestan, educated in the US and now based in Mexico – has grown from a delicate, black and white ink figure displayed in A4 format to a character who fills two-metre-square, mixed-media canvases and stretches across whole walls of museums and galleries in larger-than-life murals. 

Cheerful, abject and crass, Fatebe is a counter-patriarchal version of Betty Boop, the oversexualized ‘baby vamp’ brought to life as an animated cartoon during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sharing the bold, celebratory shapes of Niki de Saint Phalle’s feminine figures, Fatebe engages in acts and scenes of sexual transgression that, if they have any precedent, are more likely to be found in the dark recesses of the internet than within the art-historical canon. Invariably nude, Fatebe (a portmanteau of ‘fat’ and ‘Ebe’, Muslimova’s nickname) is a protean character who is both a subject and an object, capable of impossible feats as well as withstanding the most perverse forms of torture. Seemingly never uncomfortable, she constantly has a grin pinned to her face. – Krzysztof Kościuczuk 

‘Ambienti 1956–2010: Environments by Women Artists II’ | MAXXI, Rome, Italy | 10 April – 20 October

One of the main sounds you hear while visiting MAXXI’s ‘Ambienti 1956–2010: Environments by Women Artists II’ is laughter, peppered by squeals of delight or surprise. The second chapter of Haus der Kunst Munich’s ambitious group show ‘Inside Other Spaces’, which spotlights radical environments created by pioneering female artists, this exhibition is the perfect playground for adults and children alike. Nineteen immersive spaces serve as anarchic portals into riotous experiments in scale, material and technology. A wall text invites viewers to engage: ‘Every experience is unique,’ it states. ‘Some transform us.’ – Ana Vukadin

Oliver Osborne | Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany | 6 July  – 17 August

From flora to humanoid faces to the art of painting, nothing is quite what it seems. This includes Osborne’s Old Worldliness, which is evidenced in his painting technique, whose extreme subtlety springs from The Netherlands between the 15th and 17th centuries. Then there are his backgrounds, dusky like those of 19th-century symbolism, and the glossy black stepped frames which encase each painting and are so stuffy that they’re fresh. This show is a masterclass in discipline by a new Old Master, and Osborne divulges his artistic influences with equal exactitude.

There’s an unlikely intimacy here as classical techniques are painstakingly interwoven with a desire to experience historical painting by reinventing it. Particularly idiosyncratic is Osborne’s technique of repeatedly layering and sanding, so that the undercoats of the paintings shimmer to the surface like mirages. – Mitch Speed

^{Main image: Susan Meiselas, Bruised woman who was a victim of domestic violence, San Francisco (detail), 1992, colour photograph. Courtesy: © Susan Meiselas; photograph: Magnum Photos}