DIRECTIONLESS - Hauser & Wirth

Dates

21 June – 25 October 2026

Location

Opening this summer, ‘Directionless’ is a sweeping group exhibition organized by artist Rashid Johnson. The project begins with the recognition that we are living through a period marked not only by profound disorientation, but by exhaustion. Political certainties have frayed, collective narratives have weakened, ecological anxieties deepen, and inherited systems of meaning no longer provide stable points of orientation. In such a condition, directionlessness emerges not as a temporary loss of bearings but as a defining experience of contemporary life. The exhibition asks what forms of thought, feeling, and artistic practice become possible when certainty is no longer available and when exhaustion itself has become a shared social condition.

Rather than seeking resolution, Directionless considers how artists inhabit states of suspension, ambiguity, opacity, and fragmentation. The works gathered here do not offer maps out of uncertainty. Instead, they propose ways of remaining present within it. They explore what it means to navigate a world in which identities are increasingly unstable, histories remain unresolved, and the future appears both open and difficult to imagine.

Organized by artist Rashid Johnson, the exhibition adopts a deliberately polyphonic structure. Johnson invited artists Charles Gaines, Firelei Báez, and Cristina Iglesias to nominate peers from beyond the gallery’s roster, dispersing curatorial authority and allowing the exhibition to develop through affinity, divergence, and conversation. This artist-driven methodology reflects the exhibition’s central premise: that orientation is not fixed or inherited, but continuously negotiated through relationships, encounters, and acts of imagination.

The artist list includes: Lyle Ashton Harris, Firelei Báez, Yto Barrada, Georg Baselitz, Claire Chambless, Ali Cherri, Rineke Dijkstra, Latifa Echakhch, Teresita Fernández, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Charles Gaines, Todd Gray, Alteronce Gumby, Mona Hatoum, Hugh Hayden, Leslie Hewitt, Hanna Hur, Cristina Iglesias, Rashid Johnson, Michael Joo, Sigalit Landau, Hannah Levy, Julie Mehretu, Joiri Minaya, Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Rayyane Tabet and Meg Webster.

Loosely organized around each artist nominator’s selections, the exhibition brings together practices that are materially and conceptually distinct. Through their juxtapositions, broader constellations emerge around questions of deep time and material memory, migration and displacement, colonial histories and their afterlives, systems and improvisation, vulnerability and resilience. Across these works, one encounters subjects, landscapes, and forms that appear suspended between locations, identities, and temporalities, inhabiting states of becoming rather than arrival.

The exhibition is rooted in Menorca’s particular position within the Mediterranean. As Cristina Iglesias observes, the Mediterranean carries both the legacy of ancient civilizations and the ongoing realities of migration, movement, and uncertainty. Situated on its western edge, Menorca becomes a site through which to consider the sea not as a boundary but as a space of passage, encounter, and continual transformation. In this context, Directionless proposes that art may offer neither destination nor solution. Instead, it offers a set of practices for living with uncertainty, for confronting exhaustion without surrendering to it, and for discovering forms of connection, imagination, and possibility within conditions that remain unresolved.

‘We are all living inside a shared sense of disorientation right now—one that is evolving with increasing momentum. The artists here aren’t paralyzed by that condition; they’re animated by it. [...] What they offer isn’t a map, but a set of strategies for moving forward when the terrain is unfamiliar.’

Rashid Johnson

INSTALLATION VIEWS

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Education Lab: Bitácora

This year’s Education Lab, ‘Bitacora,’ is developed in collaboration with the University of the Balearic Islands and the University of Barcelona. The student-led program nurtures national connectivity between the universities, exploring what learning looks like beyond an institutional setting and facilitating a launchpad for creating, sharing and collaborative research. Responding to the themes of the group exhibition ‘Directionless,’ the Education Lab echoes the very concept set by Rashid Johnson, to find new creative pathways and orientations through artistic practice.

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