designboom’s October 2026 exhibition radar is out, and this month’s selection has an unusually high concentration of work that belongs in this publication’s territory. Four shows are worth flagging in particular, and three of them run into 2027 — so this is a planning note rather than an urgent one.
teamLab: Everything Exists in Infinite Continuity
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago · 22 September – 21 February 2027
Digital images move across the galleries, with interactive installations exploring how technology changes the relationship between a viewer and an image.
The interesting thing about a teamLab show at a university art museum rather than one of their own permanent venues is scale and framing. teamLab’s Tokyo and elsewhere installations are enormous, purpose-built, and function somewhere between artwork and destination attraction — a mode that has earned them both huge audiences and a certain amount of art-world side-eye.
A university museum show is a different proposition: smaller, in a critical context, and with the work asked to make an argument rather than fill a building. For anyone who has only seen teamLab as a queue and a photo opportunity, this is probably the better place to assess what the practice actually is.
Longest run of the four — nearly five months.
Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing
Serpentine South, London · 8 October – 10 January 2027
Heat-sensitive pigment paintings that transform with temperature shifts, plus bronze bells with composed soundscapes amplified through the gallery architecture.
This is the one to watch most closely, for two reasons.
Thermochromic pigment in a painting context is a genuinely difficult material choice. It responds to ambient temperature — which in a gallery means body heat, sunlight through a window, the HVAC cycling, and how many people are in the room. So the work is not the same twice, and the variable is the audience’s own presence. That is a more elegant mechanism for responsiveness than most sensor-driven installations manage, because there is no sensor: the material is the sensor.
And the title is doing real work. Change ringing is the English bell-ringing practice in which a band of ringers sounds a tower’s bells in continuously varying permutations — mathematically structured sequences where no order repeats within a peal. It is one of the oldest examples of an algorithmic performance practice, predating computing by centuries, and it is a serious combinatorial subject. Bronze bells plus permutational structure plus paintings that change state is a tightly thought-out set of references.
Serpentine has been consistently good on technologically engaged work, and it is free.
Ann Veronica Janssens: 5 Chome 4-1 Ginza, Tokyo
Hermès Maison Ginza Le Forum, Tokyo · 11 September – 11 January 2027
Light installations — including “Rose”, formed from seven spotlights — and temperature-responsive furniture, creating perceptual experiences.
Janssens is one of the most important living artists working with light and perception, and she is the reference point for a great deal of contemporary immersive practice whether or not practitioners know it. Her mist rooms and coloured-fog works put the viewer inside a medium that defeats focus — you cannot resolve distance, edges dissolve, and the piece happens in your visual system rather than on a wall.
Seven spotlights making a form called “Rose” is characteristic: light as a sculptural material, built from theatrical equipment used with complete precision.
Anyone working in immersive or projection-based installation should know this work. The phenomenological approach — the piece as a condition you are inside, not an object you look at — is the tradition that immersive art belongs to, and it is much older and more rigorous than the current wave of it tends to acknowledge.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: clinamen
Onassis Mandra, Athens · 26 September – 5 December 2026
Porcelain bowls drifting across pools, producing delicate sounds and forming a changing composition influenced by weather.
We have written about Boursier-Mougenot before, and clinamen is one of the great sound installations of the last twenty years. White porcelain bowls float on a shallow pool of water; convection currents and air movement push them around; when they touch, they ring. The result is a continuously evolving composition with no composer, no score, and no electronics.
The mechanism is the point. The piece has no sensors, no code and no actuators, and achieves a more convincing emergent behaviour than almost any computational work attempting the same thing. It is the best available argument that generative art does not require a computer — and a useful corrective for anyone reaching for a microcontroller when physics would do.
The title refers to Lucretius’ clinamen: the minimal, unpredictable swerve of an atom from its path, invoked to explain how anything new can happen in a deterministic universe. For a piece about bowls drifting into each other, it is exact.
Shortest run — closes 5 December.
If you can only go to one
Boursier-Mougenot in Athens, because it closes first and because the gap between how simple it is and how good it is will change how you think about building things.
If you are in London, Caguiat at Serpentine is free and the material thinking is unusually sharp.