5 offseen Exhibitions to See in September

by Rachel Cecília de Oliveira

09.09.2026

Five exhibitions, five problems. What happens when an artist turns his own importance into a joke? When growth and decay become part of the same process? What remains of a flower once we manage to keep it from wilting? How much of an installation survives a change of place? And what can vulnerability make visible once it no longer means weakness alone? In this selection, I look at five very different exhibitions through the lens of the problem each poses that is difficult to resolve.

“Gene’s Presents ‘Truckload of Art’ at Forms”

Artist: Joshua Abelow
Curator: Keith J. Varadi
Gene’s Dispensary at Forms, Hamtramck, USA
On view until September 12, 2026

In Truckload of Art, Joshua Abelow turns the power struggles embedded in the geography of the US art world into the material for a joke whose effectiveness depends on placing himself squarely at its center. The exhibition brings together more than thirty years of work. It takes its title from Terry Allen’s song about a truckload of New York art heading West, carrying its pretensions to cultural superiority, only to end up wrecked by the side of the road. Abelow’s persona casts the contemporary artist as a faintly ridiculous figure. He does so by playing self-promotion against a carefully cultivated appearance of incompetence. This is someone deeply invested in being seen while performing indifference to his own importance. Yet making fun of the artistic ego can also be an extraordinarily effective way to cultivate it. An exhibition spanning 31 years of work is inevitably an act of self-historicization. Abelow seems well aware of this and turns the contradiction into part of the joke. If New York established its authority by making it seem natural that art should pass through it, Abelow responds by turning his own departure from that center into yet another stage of his self-promotion. The joke, then, lands on the system and the artist at once.

Gene’s Presents ‘Truckload of Art’ at Forms exhibition views, ph Alivia Zivich, courtesy the artist and the gallery

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Burgeoning

Artists: Kai, Shao Annan, Wen Shuyu, Bill Wang Yi, Xu Ziyi, Yu Zeu, Yang Xi, Zeleo Zhao
Curated by: Liu Li
Gallery Fractal, Shanghai, China
On view until September 20, 2026

Burgeoning / 激增 is the first public exhibition by PATCH, a Shanghai-based collective made up of eight artists and curator Liu Li. The group makes its debut by asking how unlike things might grow together, turning its own existence into something of a test case for the exhibition. The title Burgeoning suggests sudden expansion, a proliferation. Across the exhibition, that proliferation takes different forms as biological processes are brought into contact with technological systems: memes replicate, bodies are duplicated, tools merge with bones, skeletons take on hybrid forms, and liquids circulate through artificial structures. Nature and technology appear as fields that bleed into one another. Technology takes on something like a metabolism, while organisms begin to resemble programmable systems. But in this world, systems also ferment, corrode, give off odors, and rot, so that the “growth” announced by the title contains its own threat from the outset. Proliferation can produce difference, but it can also lead to saturation, just as a system can expand even as it edges toward atrophy. The exhibition becomes more compelling precisely by allowing these contradictions to feed one another.

Burgeoning, exhibition views, ph Gallery Fractal, courtesy the artist and the gallery

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From a Faraway Meadow (Desde un prado lejano)

Artist: María Enríquez
Curated by: Diego González Gómez / Marco Valtierra
Espacio Cabeza, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
On view until September 27, 2026

In From a Faraway Meadow, we enter a space that resembles a greenhouse. Flowers populate a kind of garden maintained under special preservation conditions. María Enríquez’s greenhouse, however, shelters flowers made of porcelain. By reconstructing organic forms in porcelain, the artist preserves their appearance while removing precisely the processes that would define them as living organisms. Preservation thus coincides with the suspension of life, producing a kind of endless spring. Enríquez makes the flower last by taking away its possibility of continuing to live. The installation allows this contradiction to permeate the entire space. The more the room resembles a greenhouse, the stranger the absence of the processes that would justify such a structure becomes. The meadow has been turned into a collection, the organism into an object; the greenhouse now preserves a garden that will never bloom again.

From a Faraway Meadow (Desde un prado lejano) exhibition views, ph Agustín Arce Figueroa, courtesy the artist and the gallery

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Signal V — A Selection of Objects and Installations from the Robert Runták Collection

Artists: Milena Dopitová, Krištof Kintera, Roman Ondak, Anna Hulačová, David Možný, Jiří Příhoda Milena Dopitová
Curated by: Jan Kudrna
Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc, Czech Republic
On view until September 24, 2026

Signal V creates a deliberately uncomfortable situation by bringing works conceived to command much larger environments into a relatively small industrial space. Proximity, then, is not an installation problem to be corrected but the exhibition’s method. Reduced scale causes the objects and installations to press in on the body. Reinstalling works created for other spaces also means deciding which of their relationships will be preserved and which can be allowed to disappear. The exhibition therefore attempts to keep these installations and objects in circulation by accepting that they cannot be preserved in full. The installation produces relationships quite unlike those of the works’ original exhibition contexts. In Signal V, then, to reinstall is not to restore. Instead, the exhibition makes loss productive, allowing the works to enter into new relationships without erasing those they already carry.

Signal V — A Selection of Objects and Installations from the Robert Runták Collection exhibition views, ph Matěj Doležel, courtesy the artist and the gallery

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Artefici del Nostro Tempo

Artists: Elisa Capucci, Nicole Colombo, Jonathan Soliman, Rebecca Zen
Curated by the ‘Artefici del nostro tempo” jury and the Venice Pavilion
Padiglione Venezia, 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, Giardini della Biennale, Calle Giazzo, Venice, Italy
On view until November 22, 2026

In Artefici del Nostro Tempo, vulnerability runs through the work of all four participating artists. Conditions such as fragility, suspension, memory, and transformation are routinely devalued by a culture that privileges strength, permanence, autonomy, and control. Here, those conditions are constitutive of the works themselves. As a result, the works do not assert themselves through excess. They require viewers to come closer and to remain receptive to what is taking place. Vulnerability, in this sense, operates by reducing the force things are expected to project. In The Post-material Archive 03, Elisa Capucci creates a hybrid organism, giving precarity a new life by transforming materials understood as disposable waste into art. In Take a Deep, Deep Breath, Nicole Colombo suspends a ten-meter whip in space, interrupting the function of an instrument of aggression without dispelling either its threat or its representation of force. Jonathan Soliman Awadalla brings a fire down to an intimate scale, turning destruction into a trace by presenting it through two small Polaroids. Rebecca Zen makes a similar move in Il rumore di una foresta che cade, compressing an entire falling forest into a painting measuring just 40 × 40 centimeters. It is through these shifts in scale and intensity that the four works find their common ground. Vulnerability, here, has to do with exposure, dependence, the possibility of transformation, and the inability to remain intact. The works make these conditions perceptible without turning them into spectacle.

Venice Pavillion – Artefici del nostro tempo collective exhibition exhibition views, ph Osvaldo Di Pierantonio and Elena Andreato, courtesy the artist and the gallery

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Edited by Dobroslawa Nowak

Copyrights: the authors, offseen and partnering platforms;

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