Ten Exhibitions That Define November: From Lagos to Berlin

By James Calloway

The Lagos Biennial opens its fourth edition on 14 November under the title The Museum of Things Unseen, cocurated by Furen Dai, Sam Hopkins and Chinyere Obieze, and it arrives with an institutional gambit attached: a permanent pavilion housing the Àkéte Collection, drawn from the biennial's four editions since 2017. Eighteen artists and collectives — among them Ade Adekola, Olukemi Lijadu, Aki Sasamoto, Amie Siegel, Hito Steyerl and Kara Walker — will speculate on what a museum built without structural inequalities might look like, inside Eko Atlantic City, the reclaimed peninsula jutting into the Gulf of Guinea. The site itself, a decade of land-making sold as sustainability, complicates every answer on offer. Runs to 6 December.

What shifts for Nan Goldin in London?

At the Hayward Gallery from 24 November, You Never Did Anything Wrong marks a decisive turn in Goldin's five-decade practice toward abstraction and the natural world. The films include the brutal Memory Lost (2019–21), on her own addiction; You never did anything wrong, Parts I and II (2024, 2026), on animal consciousness and extinction; and Stendhal Syndrome (2024), which sets portraits of friends and lovers against contrived art-historical references. The open question is whether these disparate strands cohere as powerfully as the communities she has documented since the 1970s. Runs to 14 March.

Recovered paintings, a constitution and a quadrennial

In New York, Management gallery stages Beatriz Zamora's The Lost Works (6 November – 20 December), canvases recovered from a Brooklyn townhouse after a studio assistant vanished with them when Zamora was denied reentry to the US in 1988. The nonagenarian has made over 4,000 black monochromes from ground coal, graphite, obsidian and soot; she won Mexico's Salón Nacional in 1978 with El negro no. 4, a work a member of Peyote y la Compañía allegedly hurled down the stairs of the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Tokyo's The Constitution of Japan 2026 (4–29 November, at AOYAMA | MEGURO and MUJIN-TO Production) pairs each constitutional article with contemporary art, guest-curated by Greg Dvorak and Kenji Ono — and, for the first time, includes artists from the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. It opens as PM Sanae Takaichi pushes to revise Article 9.

Doha's inaugural Rubaiya Qatar quadrennial, Unruly Waters (21 November – 30 April), borrows its title from Sunil Amrith's 2018 book and curators Tom Eccles, Ruba Katrib, Shabbir Hussain Mustafa and Mark Rappolt promise over 30 new commissions from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sophia Al-Maria, Naeem Mohaiemen, Yuko Mohri and Marina Tabassum, aiming to 'redefine "globalism" through ecology and human movement'.

Portraiture's long reach

Dubai's Jameel Arts Centre surveys Salah Elmur in Just as the Heart of a Mango is a Stone (through 14 March). Elmur, who fled Khartoum in the 1990s after a cartoon of Omar al-Bashir's 1989 coup drew trouble and now lives in Cairo, builds figurative abstractions from photographs collected at his father's commercial portrait studio, with resonances of the Khartoum School.

Melbourne's NGV mounts the most comprehensive Atong Atem survey to date — over 65 works from the past decade, through 14 June. Passage includes Surat (2022), Scars and Constellations (2024) and the new large-scale installation As Above (2026), which fuses Dinka dance, beading and Catholic iconography.

Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof opens Sophie Calle's fifth solo this year, Is It Better? (13 November – 14 April): six bodies of work from three decades, from The Detachment (1996) to Les fantômes d'Orsay (2022), plus a new piece destined for the museum's collection. The Whitney, meanwhile, pulls its browser-based artport — founded 2001 — into physical galleries for a quarter-century internet-art retrospective from 21 November.

Mérida closes the month: Abraham Cruzvillegas curates the inaugural Bienal de Yucatán, VOCAL (26 November – 28 February), with 76 artists, linguists, poets and dancers occupying a sixteenth-century convent around the theme of language itself.