The 2025 Best Exhibitions List
- C-print
- Dec 30, 2025
- 12 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
As per tradition, C-print closes a year of travels and extensive exhibition visits with the annual best exhibitions list, this being the 11th edition since our start in 2013. This year, the C-print team is joined in compiling the list by contributors and writers Kasia Syty and Zachary Whittenburg.
Nicola Arthen and Rodrigo Red Sandoval, Eavesdrop, Platform, Stockholm
A hidden gem that many might have missed (fear not—the show runs until January 18, 2026) is the terrific duo exhibition with Amsterdam-based artists Nicola Arthen and Rodrigo Red Sandoval at artist-run Platform Stockholm, which, with this highly ambitious show, proves that it should not be overlooked as a space to be reckoned with. Mexican-born Sandoval's selection of witty sculptural assemblages, for which found material and objects have been used, including a locally sourced 3 m long lamp post (!), align surprisingly well with Arthen’s boldly patterned tapestry, installed impeccably like a psychedelic wave in a corner. An unexpected feature adding to the playfulness is exploring the underside of the tapestry, to which notes and images have been attached by way of a skateboard. Cowabunga!
Amine Habki, I will sew up all the petals of your garden, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm Paris-based artist Amine Habki continued to engage with his first solo exhibition I will sew up all the petals of your garden at the Stockholm space of Andréhn-Schiptjenko, following a preview of his work at this year’s Market Art Fair in May. That presentation paralleled a public conversation with C-print’s Ashik Zaman, generating anticipation for his Stockholm solo. Habki first exhibited with the gallery in Paris in the 2023 group exhibition Weaving, Stitching, Painting, alongside Linnea Sjöberg and Mukenge-Schelhammer, and has since presented a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz and participated in institutional group exhibitions at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris, the Institut Français in Tanger, Morocco, and FRAC Île-de-France. Habki’s practice is rooted in textiles, producing transformative works that sometimes depart from readymades and applied textile techniques while expanding through figurative imagery. His works explore softer masculinities and tender scenes, often placing the viewer in medias res in moments that exude intimacy without feeling confrontational. They instead portray subtle gestures and emotional nuance, moving beyond hypersexual clichés and common stereotypes about Arab men.
Carlos H. Matos, Finest Hour in Arcadia, PEANA, Mexico City
Brutalism was everywhere in 2025, from art-house cinemas to architectural preservation debates. As in years past, custodians of its exemplars who fail to maintain the lush greenery and water features meant to temper all that raw concrete continued to stymie defenders of the form. In his first solo exhibition at PEANA, TEZONTLE co-founder Matos turned those acts of sabotage-through-neglect inside out, referencing Edward James and Juan O’Gorman, among others, in creating an eclectic garden of industrial sculptures. In the spirit of Brutalism’s best practitioners (like Paul Rudolph, whose crystalline drawings graced New York’s Met Museum through mid-March), Finest Hour was deeply disciplined and precise. Two standing “worktables” under suspended lamps offered up for close inspection quizzical miniatures that recalled Brancusi, Giacometti, Miró, and Noguchi, while the monumental centerpiece Arcadia held high a finely finned, aluminum crown. Shown in a different space, this exhibition might have packed less punch, but PEANA’s tucked-away bunker in Roma Sur provided the perfect environment.
Kayo Mpoyi, Monster - en myt, Grafikens Hus, Stockholm
What a year 2025 Royal Institute of Art MFA graduate Kayo Mpoyi has had. It was evident that a new star was in the making at the spring degree show earlier this year, where Mpoyi presented one of the most memorable projects, with her monumental installation commanding both space and ceiling height. Since then, Mpoyi’s work has appeared at Liljevalchs and Uppsala Konstmuseum in the annual Anna-Lisa Thomson grant show as one of this year’s five recipients, and she is set to present her first gallery show at Saskia Neuman Gallery early next year. However, what really stood out for us was Mpoyi’s residency show at the temporary storefront site of Grafikens Hus in Farsta, which takes on the shape of a raw “open studio”. Inspired by the late Afro-Cuban artist Belkis Ayón, Mpoyi presents several wonderful individual works by way of collography, altogether creating an impressive unity.
Bartosz Kowal, Ferdindand Evaldsson and Øleg&Kaśka (group show), Secret Histories, Coulisse Gallery, CLAY.WARSAW, Warszawa
We visited Coulisse Gallery’s temporary exhibition Secret Histories at the hidden gem CLAY.WARSAW, as part of the extended program of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, and were immediately struck by how quietly it demanded attention. The pre-war building in Warsaw’s Praga district, once a military warehouse in the 1930s, feels like a contradiction made architectural, part socialist-realist school building, part forgotten ballroom, an improbable hybrid imagined by Polish architect Mateusz Baumiller. Spread across two rooms, the exhibition brought together Warsaw-based painter Bartosz Kowal (who last exhibited here in Stockholm earlier this year), Stockholm-based artist Ferdinand Evaldsson, recipient of the 2021 Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation grant, and the Polish artist duo Øleg&Kaśka. The result is a rare kind of visual coherence, almost disarmingly beautiful, without ever tipping into complacency. What lingered after leaving Secret Histories was not a single work, perhaps with the exception of Kowal’s Hear Me Out / Posłuchaj, but a sensation, the feeling of having briefly stepped into another rhythm of time, one in which history, myth, and matter are not cited or aestheticized, but quietly inhabited.
Lina Selander, One is Equal to One, Marabouparken, Stockholm
Lina Selander’s first institutional show in years left us in awe. Exhibited in the show is a disparate body of twelve video works (2023–2025) that blends her own footage with fragments from various sources. Installed to technical perfection, the films not only merge in the space but also amplify each other into an unparalleled visual feast. Kudos to Selander for also keeping things relevant by turning the gaze towards the atrocities in Gaza. A highlight in the midst is the heart-wrenching If We Were to Die, for which Selander has re-filmed a social media snippet of a young girl pleading with her cat not to eat her family should they get killed. Selander's show reaffirms that video-based exhibitions are what Marabouparken does best, bringing Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s It Was What Is Will Be to mind, which made our 2023 best list.
Miriam Cahn, What looks at us, Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Belém
Over the summer, Portuguese co-curators João Pinharanda and Sérgio Mah gave Basel-born Cahn a hefty and timely survey of her prodigious output from 1978 to 2024. What looks at us started slow with, in the first galleries, sections of tree trunks carved to reveal the bases of severed branches, each blunt knob appearing, perhaps, as the forced exposure of a denial. As in the original installation Schlachtfeld / Alterswerk, these flayed, wooden autopsies were paired with wall-mounted iPads showing closely shot footage of raw material being formed by hand into genitals and other body parts, then squashed. Cahn’s drawings and paintings, roughly grouped by similarity, comprised most of the rest of the exhibition, in gallery after gallery on two floors, and these works evoked speed. Velocity might have meant valor, value, or victory in the 20th century but, in the 21st, haste has been weaponized. Cahn’s images of fear, escape, rape, and humiliation are masterful at capturing the speed of panic, of our reflexes, of our survival instincts. While across the Atlantic, government agencies were being defunded and dismantled with astonishing alacrity, What looks at us reminded viewers how important it is to capture what’s happening, even when it seems there is barely enough time to run.
Lawrence Weiner, Volta ao Mundo/Around the World, c/o Cristina Guerra Contemporary, The National Pantheon, Lisbon
Unexpectedly stumbling across Lawrence Weiner at the Panteão Nacional de Santa Engrácia in Lisbon was one big moment of Eureka! this year. The late conceptual American artist and long-time favourite, whose work often reveals a deep affinity for the sea and navigational markers through word orchestrations of instantly evocative allusions that render a sum far larger than their word count, found a fitting home here. Weiner’s work, mounted on solid, timeless stone, powerfully amplified the already apparent monumentality of the National Pantheon. The exhibition consisted of a suite of four textual cardinal points interlaced around the central circle on the floor of the Panteão Nacional: PLACED ABOVE THE EQUATOR, PLACED BELOW THE EQUATOR, TO THE LEFT OF THE EQUATOR, TO THE RIGHT OF THE EQUATOR. The dome, while relatively young and completed in 1966, gestures toward histories far further back, with construction beginning in 1682. Its funerary nature reveals the site as one honoring “nation fathers” such as Vasco da Gama. As such, Weiner’s work served a silent yet potent confrontation with Portuguese colonial history, its circularity mirroring the repetition of history, as trade and commerce interests reiterate patterns of conquest and division.
Camille Henrot, A Number of Things, Hauser & Wirth, New York City
In February and March, even from the sidewalk across West 22nd Street, one could see through the windows that Hauser & Wirth was full of something unusual. Flooring in two shades of blue-green bathed the entire Chelsea gallery with wintry light, offsetting the deep reds and pops of yellow in Henrot’s freestanding sculptures (plus a few additions to her series of paintings, Dos and Don’ts, initiated in 2021). After acclimating to the surreal space, whose gridded carpet called all scale into question, this Number of Things began to tease the eye with familiarities. Near the entrance was a bronze cube with a round peg shoved into its square hole; to the right, one saw a pack of diverse “dogs” leashed to a staked stanchion; and in a corner was a warted hoop, like a septum piercing the size of a boat dock’s mooring ring, that held five kooky “keys” of different colors. The show’s main attractions were its large, opaline solids, partially encircled or supported by thick wires threaded through translucent rubber beads. The allusions to Kindergarten toys and abaci were acknowledged and immediate. Because some beads were suspended upward, Henrot’s assembly also defied gravity and froze time.
Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, Warsaw
Did the new Modern Museum of Art in Warsaw, which was one of Time magazine’s hottest places to visit for 2025, meet our expectations? Da, oui, yes, ja! Both architecturally and artistically. Behind the anonymous white box-like construction, only a stone’s throw from the majestic Palace of Culture and Science, hide spacious exhibition halls with lush wooden details and a dreamy study with large windows facing the street. During our visit, which coincided with the 15th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend in September, the inaugural exhibition The Impermanent was still on display, albeit in a slightly reduced form for the then-upcoming edition of the Kiev Biennale, which we hear was also very successful. Curated in four chapters involving several of the museum's curators, the show presented a small yet top-notch selection of works by Polish frontrunners such as Karol Radziszewski (soon opening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm) and long-standing C-print favorite Karolina Jabłońska, as well as international superstars like Sarah Lucas and Sylvie Fleury. One of the most beautifully curated rooms seen all year, which alone would merit a top spot on this list, presented a sparse juxtaposition of Sandra Mujinga’s Ghosting alluding to a deconstructed tent with a figurative painting titled Applause by Karolina Jabłońska depicting clapping hands, joined only by the color palette, proving that sometimes less really is more. The re-opening of this fine art establishment further cements Warsaw as one of the top art destinations in Europe.
Additional bests:
Best film of the year (per Kasia Syty)
Souleymane’s Story
France
Boris Lojkine
Speaking of rhythms of time, watching Souleymane’s Story, I became acutely aware of time, of how every second can carry the weight of survival. Souleymane has fled Guinea and arrived in France with little more than borrowed hope and a looming asylum interview that will determine the shape of his future. I felt the tension accumulate physically, not through spectacle, but through repetition, the routes, the waiting, the careful calculations of risk and reward. These are exactly the kinds of films I miss here in Sweden, and in 2025 I realized, almost urgently, how deeply I long for a shift in perspective. What struck me most was the film’s refusal to sentimentalize. Its compassion is precise, almost austere. At its center is Abou Sangaré, whose performance as Souleymane feels so alert, vulnerable, and painfully human. When Souleymane’s Story ended, it didn’t release its grip.
It still hasn’t.
Best album of the year Lily Allen West End Girl
Lily Allen’s much-praised comeback West End Girl has been called the most brutal album of the year, cementing itself as a full-blown zeitgeist and conversation-du-jour moment, much like Charli XCX’s Brat did last year. If Taylor Swift has previously come to be known for airing out her relationship history in subtle but thinly disguised ways, letting on her once suitors and later heartbreakers or heartbreakees, Lily Allen spun everything around several notches, setting a total new precedent for what broadcasting the unravelling of a relationship can look like, and more importantly, sound like. It's no secret that the culprit of the conceptual chronicling of a failed marriage is actor David Harbour (of Stranger Things fame, although he was as much news to us as to some of you). In contemporary dating, monogamy often gets to be the butt of a jab, a gag, marked by tired clichés deemed in dire need of scrutiny, but what’s fresh about Allen’s record is a pendulum swinging forward to reversing such scrutiny toward non-monogamy. "I'm so committed that I'd lose myself 'cause I don't wanna lose you," Allen shares with bittersweet lightness and later humour, framing being cornered into an open marriage that later proves fraudulent and riddled with lies, contrary to the "honesty" sometimes attributed to openness. “West End Girl” works so well because it’s cathartic, whether you ever found yourself wondering, “Who’s Madeleine?” or not, because this is a musical Kill Bill stint you can vicariously live through if you’ve ever been significantly lied to or deceived by a significant other at all. “Why should I trust anything that comes out of his mouth?” is all of us — and condolences to those yet to be.
Best television show Heated Rivalry Crave/HBO Max Based on the book series by Rachel Reid and adapted and created by Jacob Tierney
The other even more recent cultural bombshell dropdown has been a show about a clandestine love story between two rival hockey players. At first glance the optics might make it seem like a possibly cheesy but glossy formulaic Netflix fare far from the depth of, say, Brokeback Mountain. But...and that but is significant and it tells you everything you need to know. Heated Rivalry, yes it is spicy, or rather “horny,” which is the adjective being thrown around in much of the rapidly increasing media coverage it has garnered over just a few weeks, going from an obscure Canadian production to a sensation that calls to mind the snowball effect of The Bear or The White Lotus. There are fresh and unexpected turns in the writing that, over the six episodes of the first season, have you as surprised as the characters themselves. And there is something very satisfying about not being served a show of this theme and nature where the tension builds toward a “will they or won’t they” kiss, instead the salacious “kiss” happens literally right out of the gate. The show represents a heightened reality and heightened fantasy on par with something light-weight like The OC or Gossip Girl, but there is also a lingering sense of earthy Canadian realness that, in certain moments, despite the lush settings of lavish hotel rooms and urban apartments, brings to mind shows like Party of Five and My So-Called Life. If you know, you know. The actors do a fine job of making their secret union, which spans multiple years across their respective and parallel careers at the top of the hockey world, believable, which is impressive given the often fast pacing and the jumps between years in the episodes. The show’s marketing, surely making use of TikTok content creators to the fullest, and the actors, possibly strategically amping up their chemistry and extending their characters beyond the screen in press moments, is clearly working. Netizens are loving it, and so are we.
Team C-print consists of curators Ashik and Koshik Zaman, who founded C-print together in 2013. Ashik Zaman serves as the artistic director of Konstnärshuset in Stockholm and is a board member of Konstnärsnämnden. Koshik Zaman is an independent curator, and they are both regular contributors as critics to the international lens-based art publication Camera Austria.
Kasia Syty is a film critic, culture journalist, and translator specializing in film and contemporary culture. She has worked as film editor at Nöjesguiden and as a film critic for Upsala Nya Tidning and Filmrutan, among others. In 2023, she received the Filmpennan, awarded by Filmpublicisterna (the Swedish Film Publicists Association), in recognition of her ability to combine unexpected references with sharp cinephile observation and a distinctly personal critical voice. She has also served as artistic director of Bergman Week and as programme coordinator at Bio Aspen.
Zachary Whittenburg has been a journalist, administrator, photographer, and grantmaker in arts and culture since 2008. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine and former dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine, he has written for numerous additional publications including Critical Correspondence, Critical Read, Dance International, Flavorwire, Pointe, and Total Theatre UK.