Digital Biennales and Restitution Wars Escalate

At the Venice Biennale, collateral exhibitions are making a strong case for digital art—especially if you’re willing to leave the most over-posted stops behind. The Art Newspaper points to shows hosted by VCUarts Qatar, the Autotelic Foundation, and the Berggruen Foundation as places where digital work feels inventive and unusually earnest. At VCUarts Qatar’s Aghrab Idrāk: Thresholds of Perception, there’s a dystopian cyclops robot by Mesh Lab, a breathing air-filtration sculpture called Chrysalis by Boost Lab led by VCU alumnus Syed Erzum Naqvi, and xLab’s Preceding Emptiness, a light installation that turns a fluorescent bulb’s clicking into an intentional sound element while questioning what gets lost when cultures built on ornament meet reductive display tech.

Elvira Dyangani Ose has been appointed artistic director of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, The Art Newspaper reports. She will take up the post in October, replacing Koyo Kouoh, the former executive director and chief curator, who died last year. As part of this shift, Zeitz MoCAA changed the title from “chief curator” to “artistic director,” with David Green, the museum’s co-founder and co-chair, describing a joint leadership model: Dyangani Ose focusing on the creative and artistic side, and managing director Fawaz Mustapha handling operations, finances, and governance. Dyangani Ose previously directed the Showroom London and served in curatorial roles at Creative Time and Tate Modern, where she contributed to a collecting strategy for art from Africa and its diaspora.

A feud over a huge shipping-container sculpture is now headed to court in East Montauk. The Art Newspaper reports that the town of East Hampton filed a lawsuit over Meditating Figure (2026), a nearly 60-foot-tall seated human-like figure by Los Angeles-based artist Matt Johnson, made from 12 decommissioned shipping containers that had traveled millions of miles by sea. The work is part of LA Monumental, on view until 15 November at the Ranch, a 16-acre property owned by art consultant Max Levai. East Hampton argues the piece qualifies as a “structure” requiring permits and inspection, and has brought four charges including failure to obtain a building permit and approvals. The town secured a stay on 31 July halting further construction or demolition.

A new, free video game is offering a virtual route into Michael Heizer’s City—an artwork that’s famously difficult to access in person. ARTnews reports that Tulsa, Oklahoma-based digital artist Lily Belmira created City by Michael Heizer [Free Version] to let anyone explore a simulation of the massive Nevada desert site, whose precise location has been kept secret to some degree since it opened in 2022. Only six people a day can visit City in person, paying a regular admission fee of one hundred fifty dollars. Belmira told ARTnews she made the game out of “a genuine interest in showing City to more people,” while also framing City as a “bourgeois scar on the earth,” though “beautiful.” Players begin behind a no-trespassing fence, then roam terrain modeled with online LIDAR data and Google Maps imagery.

At London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, union leaders are calling out director Tristram Hunt over contract negotiations. ARTnews reports that PCS and Prospect issued a joint statement criticizing Hunt’s absence from talks as “shocking” and “disrespectful,” amid disputes over pay, working conditions, and “dignity at work.” Staff at the V&A East Storehouse voted to strike in July, saying workers weren’t given enough time to use the restroom or even drink water, and calling for two paid breaks per shift. The museum rejected that characterization, saying staff had sufficient access to water and bathroom breaks, but it changed its paid break policy this month to grant the requested breaks. The union also says the museum has refused to negotiate better pay, including time and a half on bank holidays, while the museum says negotiations have been ongoing since February.

A Picasso that vanished in 1961 has reappeared—now the Guggenheim wants it back in court. Hyperallergic reports that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation filed suit in New York State Supreme Court against Massachusetts residents Lawrence Jay Handler and Wendy Cohen Handler over Femme dans un fauteuil (1918). The small oil painting went missing on February 6, 1961, while on loan to the University of Pittsburgh’s Students Union building, and the FBI investigated after the theft was reported. Court filings say the Handlers bought the work from Beadleston Fine Art in Manhattan in 1999, but the Guggenheim learned of its reappearance in July 2023 when a Christie’s researcher flagged it during work on a private sale consignment. The museum demanded its return in August 2023; that demand was refused, and the work has remained at Christie’s.

Technology is being folded into a very specific mission: tracking looted cultural property. ARTnews reports that the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project, founded in Berlin in 2016, has added AI capabilities to its provenance research tool, Legacy Explorer, which launched last year. Legacy Explorer can currently search five archives—including the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg archive at the Jeu de Paume in Paris—and the JDCRP says a sixth archive will be added later this month. Previously, users had to search each archive individually; the AI document-scanning tools are meant to help pull information about the same object from different sources at the same time. JDCRP board chair Wesley A. Fisher said the platform addresses an “urgent gap” by offering a single place to search across archival collections. Deirdre Berger said the expansion can help descendants trace stolen property.

A new High Line commission is shifting attention away from the park and toward a nearby landmark with a complicated past. ARTnews reports that the High Line and the Chanel Culture Fund commissioned artist Alison Nguyen to make Prior Occupants, a film examining the overlooked history of Westbeth Artist Housing. The work is the fifth installment in the High Line Originals series and the second produced with Chanel’s arts initiative. It premieres September 8 and will screen daily through early November on the High Line Channel, the park’s public video space at 14th Street. Westbeth, a former Bell Laboratories complex, is described as a site where talking movies, television, and other technological breakthroughs were developed, and where part of the Manhattan Project’s research for the atomic was once conducted. Converted into affordable artist housing in 1970, its past tenants include Robert De Niro Sr. and Diane Arbus.

BlackStar Film Festival’s 15th anniversary lineup is being framed as “a cinema for liberation,” and Hyperallergic singles out several films where art and resistance are inseparable. The festival ran in Philadelphia from August 6 to 9 with 91 films, including Haile Gerima’s Black Lions, Roman Wolves, a five-part documentary on Ethiopia’s resistance to Italy’s 1935 invasion. Also featured: Suneil Sanzgiri’s An Impossible Address, a poetic documentary on Indian and African freedom struggles against Portuguese colonialism, and Harlan Banks’s I Wonder Shall I Fly, weaving Black diasporic footage with 1940s interviews with formerly enslaved people. Hyperallergic also spotlights A Life in Art: Through the Eye of Dr. Leslie King Hammond (2026), directed by Ben Baker-Lee and Rassaan Hammond, and Aanikoobijigan (2026), by Adam and Zack Khalil, on Anishinaabe repatriation from Michigan State University.

In Washington, the Kennedy Center board has voted to close the center for renovations again—and to put President Trump’s name on the building—setting up a direct clash with a federal judge’s earlier order. ARTnews reports that the board voted Thursday to close the center for a second time while keeping a smaller, separate theater open, and also approved an inscription beneath the center’s name reading: “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” according to the New York Times. US District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled May 29 that the board acted unlawfully in renaming the institution, finding only Congress has that power, and also found the board acted unlawfully in approving a two-year closure. The board’s Thursday resolution reportedly directed officials to pursue “all legal means,” and Judge Cooper is expected to review the new decisions.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news, minus the fluff. Chinga la migra

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