Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singapore museum. Taking its title from visual sensations that linger in a viewer’s field of vision, Afterimage highlights recurring concerns that run through Taniguchi’s practice, including repetition, time, and labour. The exhibition is anchored by Taniguchi’s brick paintings (2008–ongoing), which are made by individually filling hand-drawn rectangular cells. The subtle shifts in colour that accumulate document the days, weeks, or months devoted to each painting reflecting the time and effort required to make them. Untitled and unnumbered, Taniguchi’s brick paintings are best understood as individual parts of a single artwork that continues to grow with each new painting. Alongside these towering canvases, Afterimage presents a new version of Runaways, a series of wooden sculptures made up of straight lines and circles that function as three-dimensional drawings floating in the gallery. Carved from the wood of Java plum trees, known in the Philippines as duhat, the sculptures carry deeply personal associations of the artist’s mother who craved the fruit while pregnant. Four video works made between 2010–2026 demonstrate the development of Taniguchi’s relationship to space and materials. Key amongst these is a newly commissioned video, A painter, if black were a place (2026), which juxtaposes pixelated digital photos with fields of black painted by Taniguchi, inserting her subtle painterly style alongside images of her mother’s home, garden, and symbolic paintings. Together, these videos deploy the framing device of the camera and the screen to suggest our limited views of history, memory, labour, and the legacy of modernism.

With Kairos / Hauntological Variations, the work of Julie Mehretu makes its first ever appearance in Poland. In the show’s title, the ancient Greek notion of kairos—a critical turning point—accompanies Derrida’s hauntology—a state where the present is haunted by ghosts of an unresolved past. Mehretu’s work reimagines the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism, establishing her as one of the most influential artists of our time—making an impact in contemporary painting for more than two decades now. Her compositions draw on maps, poetry and literature, music and art history, and most recently, press photography and sociopolitical events; these varied sources act as intellectual and compositional points of departure for her practice in painting, drawing, and experimental printmaking. The exhibition is comprehensive, bringing pieces from different periods to Warsaw: from the analytical diagrams of the late 1990s to drawings and watercolours as well as works on paper and mylar dating to the 2000s, to the most recent, grand paintings whose dense layering acts as a seismographic record of today’s global tensions—all displayed in a way that provides deeper insight into the artist’s practice.