This summer, the cultural landscape of Central and Eastern Europe is alive with exhibitions that not only reflect the times but also challenge us to rethink them. From bold retrospectives to cutting-edge group shows, these ten exciting exhibitions explore the tensions and transformations shaping the present. Whether grappling with political upheaval, environmental collapse, the digital revolution, or the fragility of identity, each show offers a unique lens on the complexities of the world we live in.
From the surreal, unsettling world of David Lynch to the material explorations of Jadwiga Miziarska. Along these icons – a new generation of emerging artists confronts viewers with provocative visions of fractured realities, hybrid worlds, and uncertain futures. This is more than a summer art guide – it’s a journey through the urgent questions of our time, told through the power of visual expression.
David Lynch: Up in Flames
June 19, 2025 – February 8, 2026
DOX, Prague, Czech Republic
Up in Flames marks the first-ever exhibition of David Lynch’s work in the Czech Republic, offering a rare and expansive view into the mind of one of the most enigmatic and visionary figures in contemporary culture. Known globally for his surreal, psychologically charged cinema, Lynch is presented here not only as a filmmaker but also as a visual artist whose practice spans drawing, photography, lithography, woodcut, and watercolour.
Curated by Otto M. Urban, the exhibition traces Lynch’s creative evolution from the late 1960s through to the final years of his life, culminating in works made before his death in January 2025. These pieces – some iconic, others rarely seen – are grouped thematically and formally to reveal the recurring motifs that haunted Lynch’s imagination: dreams and decay, industrial ruins and shadowy figures, duality and dread. There’s also a selection of short films that offer a cinematic counterpoint to the visual works, blurring the lines between medium and mood. It is the result of a close collaboration with the David Lynch Estate, Pace Gallery, Item éditions, and Lynch himself in the final stages of planning.
Taken together, the works in Up in Flames illuminate a singular artistic vision – one that is obsessive, unsettling, and strangely beautiful. They offer not just a retrospective, but a reintroduction to Lynch as a multidisciplinary artist whose dark poetics transcend genre and format, and whose legacy continues to burn with intensity.
From the Cosmos to the Commons. Between Stars and Signals
June 20 – August 17, 2025
Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany
At the Kunsthaus Hamburg, Between Stars and Signals invites visitors to look up and inward. Curated by Anna Nowak, this thought-provoking group exhibition considers our enduring fascination with the cosmos, probing not just the stars above but also the invisible systems that shape how we navigate and perceive our world. It’s a meditation on our place in the universe, seen through the lens of digital technology, planetary consciousness, and a shifting sense of time and space.
The exhibition unfolds through a constellation of immersive works – videos, installations, and spatial interventions that range from poetic to provocative. The artists, including Aram Bartholl, Zach Blas, Agnieszka Polska, and Trevor Paglen, among others, collectively map a terrain where technology meets myth, science meets art, and outer space reflects inner landscapes. Between Stars and Signals is part of From the Cosmos to the Commons, the inaugural chapter of a five-year curatorial program led by Joanna Warsza as Hamburg’s new City Curator. Each year focuses on one elemental theme – this year’s, fittingly, begins with the cosmos.
Fragments of Reality. Berlin – Tricity
June 7 – August 24, 2025
State Art Gallery in Sopot, Poland
In Fragments of Reality (Odłamki rzeczywistości), the hand reaches out – not to grasp something whole, but to touch what’s broken. Inspired by Dorota Masłowska’s novel “The Queen’s Peacock” (2005), the exhibition opens with this evocative gesture: a tactile metaphor for the fragmented worlds we live in and the often disjointed way we experience reality today.
Bringing together nearly thirty women artists connected to the Tricity region and Berlin, the show becomes a chorus of voices shaped by diverse, often migratory, backgrounds – Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, Afghan, Romanian, Polish, and Mexican. Each carries stories of displacement, identity, resistance, and resilience. Artists like Mehtap Baydu, Zehra Doğan, Alicja Kwade, Ayşe Erkmen, and Dorota Nieznalska don’t offer simple answers. Their works, spanning installation, painting, and performance, capture a world splintered by systemic oppression, gendered violence, and ideological conflict. And yet, amid the unease, they also gesture toward repair: the possibility of reassembling the broken, of finding coherence not in unity but in connection.
Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess. Second Sequence
June 14 – July 27, 2025
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland
The exhibition Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess. Second Sequence explores how the Anthropocene is fundamentally driven by the accumulation of both tangible goods like money, natural resources, clothing, and technologies, and intangible assets such as social status, influence, knowledge, and wealth. This relentless gathering leaves indelible traces, generating ecological waste, fuels inequality, and profoundly shapes political systems and cultural narratives.
At the heart of the exhibition is a critical reflection on the desire to possess – an impulse historically linked to colonial expansion and extractive power structures. Yet the artists here don’t simply critique accumulation; they imagine alternatives. Through diverse practices, they propose models rooted in care, shared responsibility, and a rethinking of value itself.
The exhibition brings together a wide range of voices and perspectives, including Bare Minimum Collective, Wang Bing, Rhea Dillon, Rindon Johnson, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sandra Poulson, Daniel Arnan Quarshie, and Raqs Media Collective. Together, they confront the modern chase for growth with works that call for slowing down, redistributing, and reimagining what it means to live and thrive collectively.
Freeing the Voices
February 2 – August 24, 2025
Kunsthaus Graz, Austria
In the exhibition Freeing the Voices, the visitor is immersed in a rich landscape of sound, ranging from soft murmurs to urgent screams, from human utterances to non-human signals. Amid the din of today’s information overload and against the silencing forces of censorship and cancel culture, the exhibition creates a space where individual voices can resonate. These are voices often pushed to the margins – women, people of colour, and those living on the peripheries of Europe – yet here, they are heard not as noise, but as presence. The show invites us not just to hear, but to listen with intent and care.
Spanning performance, sound, installation, and video, the exhibition brings together a diverse and powerful group of artists, among them Marina Abramović, VALIE EXPORT, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Saodat Ismailova, Selma Selman, Noor Abed, Mladen Stilinović, and Brandon LaBelle, alongside emerging voices like CO2… a couple of artists, Farhad Farzali, Ida Hiršenfelder, and Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec. Together, they shape a chorus that is both deeply personal and politically resonant.
Borders are Nocturnal Animals
June 12 – September 14, 2025
Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
The title of the exhibition, Borders are Nocturnal Animals, is drawn from Luba Jurgenson’s essay “When We Woke Up. The Night of 24 February 2022: Invasion of Ukraine”, in which she writes: “Borders are nocturnal animals, they move while we sleep. We should always be vigilant”. This haunting image sets the tone for a show shaped by the urgency of the ongoing war in Ukraine and a broader reckoning with colonial histories, both in Lithuania and globally.
Curated by Neringa Bumblienė and Emilie Villez, the exhibition revolves around the theme of energy, not only as a political and environmental force tied to natural resources and their exploitation, but also as a spiritual and cultural current flowing through rituals, beliefs, and identity. The participating artists respond to this complexity with approaches that span the documentary and the poetic, the speculative and the ancestral. Through their work, they confront anxieties about the future, question dominant narratives, and trace the shifting contours of memory and power.
Enter the Room
March 28 – September 14, 2025
GHMP, Prague, Czech Republic
Rooted in the legacy of the Bienále mladých (Biennial of the Young), the Enter the Room exhibition dives headfirst into gaming culture and its growing impact on the artistic language of a new generation. Here, emerging artists experiment with interactive systems, storytelling structures, and digital aesthetics, creating a dynamic space that evolves along with the presence and movement of its visitors.
This isn’t a conventional exhibition – it’s an immersive playground. Guided by the participatory logic of game mechanics, the show blurs the boundary between the physical and the virtual, inviting audiences into shifting narrative worlds that respond in real time. At its centre stands a recurring motif: the door, a symbol of agency and uncertainty, offering choices that can lead to new possibilities or hide unseen constraints. The artists like BCAAsystem, Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer, Herdek Kolektiv, OMSK Social Club, Tomáš Moravanský (INSTITUT INSTITUT), and Natália Sýkorová bring a wide range of voices and strategies to the table, each one hacking, questioning, or reinventing how we engage with art, play, and each other.
Jadwiga Maziarska: Assembly
June 15 – November 2, 2025
Susch Museum, Susch, Switzerland
Assembly marks the first exhibition of Jadwiga Maziarska’s art (1913–2003) outside of Poland, showcasing her most significant works. Based in Kraków, Maziarska was a key member of the so-called 2nd Kraków Group (Grupa Krakowska II), yet she maintained a fiercely independent approach to her artistic exploration. Recognised as a pioneer of matter painting and art brut, her innovative practice began in 1946 when she started experimenting with the texture of her paintings. Just a year later, she created her first textile work using irregular fabric scraps.
Maziarska’s process was one of constant experimentation – working with materials like wax, sand, and groats – approaching each piece with the mindset of both an “engineer and bricoleur”. Her multifaceted use of media and texture reflects a unique blend of intuition and craftsmanship, solidifying her place as a trailblazer in the postwar avant-garde movement.
The TWIST. Failing Empires, Triumphant Provinces
June 13 – October 10, 2025
MNAC Bucharest, Romania
Failing Empires, Triumphant Provinces is the second chapter of The TWIST series, an ongoing project that investigates the visual and cultural legacy of the twist motif across time and geography. This exhibition takes as its point of departure the richly layered histories of the Carpathian-Danubian-Pontic region, a crossroads of civilisations shaped by centuries on the fringes of empires – Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Hungarian, Austrian, Russian, and Soviet.
Rather than presenting history as a linear narrative, the show embraces complexity and entanglement. Modern and contemporary artworks are placed in dialogue with archaeological finds, traditional dress, ethnographic artefacts, applied arts, and mass-produced industrial objects, resulting in an unexpected and multifaceted constellation. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how cultural identity is twisted, knotted, and reassembled across time, power structures, and shifting borders.
