Art history is rarely shaped by isolated masterpieces. It is shaped by years in which artists across geographies begin to ask similar questions, often without coordination, sometimes without even awareness of one another. 2025 was such a year.
What connected the most significant exhibitions, fairs and institutional programs around the world was not a shared aesthetic, but a shared attitude: a decisive movement away from excess, certainty and spectacle toward precision, ethics and responsibility. This shift did not arrive through manifesto or rupture. It emerged quietly, through specific works that resisted immediacy and instead asked for time, attention and moral presence.
I experienced 2025 not as a calendar of events but as a continuous intellectual landscape, one in which contemporary art seemed less interested in declaring positions and more invested in holding complexity. The works that stayed with me were often restrained in scale yet expansive in implication. They did not attempt to summarize the world. They focused on fragments and trusted those fragments to speak.
This sensibility was particularly evident at the Venice Biennale. Among the most resonant works was the Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s multi-channel installation built from fragmented oral histories of Mediterranean migration. Rather than depicting bodies, borders or boats, images that contemporary art has arguably exhausted, Shawky removed the human figure almost entirely. Voices hovered over eroding architectural forms, turning migration into an environmental and historical condition rather than a spectacle of suffering. The absence of bodies was not formal minimalism. It was an ethical decision. The work quietly asked a question that art history has struggled with for decades: When does representation become repetition?
Nearby, Teresa Margolles from Mexico presented an intervention so restrained it was almost imperceptible, with water sourced from sites of unmarked graves, introduced into the exhibition space without dramatization. The work functioned less as an image than as evidence. It extended Margolles’ long-standing insistence that contemporary art can operate as a site of forensic accountability. Venice 2025 will likely be remembered not for what it showed, but for what it refused to aestheticize.
A comparable restraint appeared, perhaps more unexpectedly, within the commercial architecture of Art Basel. In an environment designed for speed and visual impact, some of the most compelling works were those that actively slowed the viewer down. Mona Hatoum’s small glass sculptures, etched with barely visible cartographic lines, required proximity and patience. Borders appeared fragile, almost ghost-like, suggesting geography as a human fiction rather than a stable truth.
Danh Vo’s presentation offered another form of resistance. Personal letters, religious objects and fragments of colonial furniture were arranged without narrative closure. There was no linear story, only accumulation. Meaning resided not in resolution but in refusal. From an art-historical perspective, these moments at Art Basel signal a subtle but important shift. The market itself is learning to accommodate ambiguity, to value works that unfold intellectually over time rather than announcing themselves instantly.
If Europe in 2025 was preoccupied with ethics and memory, Latin America offered an equally crucial intervention by rethinking the nature of knowledge itself. At the Sao Paulo Biennial, indigenous and Afro-diasporic epistemologies were not presented as thematic content but as structural logic. Denilson Baniwa’s large-scale floor drawing, created with traditional Amazonian pigments and designed to erode as visitors walked across it, rejected permanence altogether. The work proposed an art history based on cyclical disappearance rather than preservation, an idea that fundamentally challenges Western archival assumptions.
Grada Kilomba’s video installation approached history through language. Her spoken narratives, marked by repetition, pause and accent, turned speech into sculptural material. Trauma was not illustrated; it was spoken into space. These works matter historically because they insist that knowledge is never neutral and that form itself carries ideology. Sao Paulo 2025 will be cited as a moment when epistemology became a medium.
In Sharjah, the conversation moved toward interiority without retreat. The Sharjah Biennial foregrounded works that engaged spirituality without iconography or ornament. Otobong Nkanga’s layered soil installation, accompanied by handwritten reflections on extraction and care, functioned simultaneously as sculpture, archive and ritual. There was no visual excess, only material presence.
Similarly, Asma Kaouech’s sound installation, composed of whispered prayers interspersed with long intervals of silence, demanded duration rather than consumption. Viewers were not invited to look but to stay. From an art-historical standpoint, Sharjah continues to challenge the secular bias that has shaped institutional contemporary art since the late twentieth century, proposing spirituality not as an escape from the contemporary but as one of its most urgent methodologies.
Even events not physically staged in 2025 shaped the year’s intellectual climate. The influence of "Documenta" remained visible through projects rooted in collective authorship and institutional self-examination. Archive-based works documenting how art institutions are funded, censored and politically constrained circulated widely, often without individual authorship. These works did not seek aesthetic closure. They functioned as shared responsibility. This marks a decisive break from the mythology of the solitary genius and signals a structural shift that future art historians will likely identify as central to post-2020s practice.
This broader atmosphere of ethical attention and temporal sensitivity was also palpable in Istanbul. The Istanbul Bienali, long positioned as a bridge between geographies and discourses, resonated in 2025 through projects that emphasized fragility, archive and spatial memory rather than spectacle. Within this context, "Folia," staged at the historic Abdülmecid Efendi Köşkü, stood out as a particularly telling gesture. The exhibition’s engagement with the site’s layered history, its architectural delicacy, its intellectual legacy, and its quiet distance from the white-cube model mirrored one of 2025’s most consistent artistic impulses: to let place think alongside the work. Rather than imposing contemporary art onto a historical setting, "Folia" allowed the rhythms of the building's rooms, light and silences to shape meaning. In doing so, it aligned Istanbul with a global turn toward site-conscious, historically attuned practices, reinforcing the sense that 2025 was a year when contemporary art increasingly chose dialogue with memory over domination of space.
These resonances matter. They remind us that Türkiye is not merely responding to global trends but participating in a shared ethical recalibration. The same questions being asked in Venice, Sao Paulo and Sharjah, about silence, responsibility and care are being articulated here through different histories and materials.
By the time one arrived at Frieze London, the pattern was unmistakable. One of the most discussed presentations consisted of graphite drawings depicting imagined museum storage rooms: shelves, crates, labels, but no artworks. In a fair context where visibility equals value, this meditation on what remains unseen felt almost radical. Drawing and text re-emerged not as preparatory tools, but as critical forms in their own right.
Taken together, these works suggest that 2025 will not be remembered as a year of stylistic revolution. It will be remembered as a year of ethical consolidation. Artists across continents chose precision over noise, process over abrupt declarations, care over conquest. This was not a rejection of beauty, but a redefinition of it, beauty as responsibility, as attention, as refusal to simplify.
Toward the end of this global mapping, it would be incomplete not to acknowledge a body of work that, while emerging from my personal practice, resonates unmistakably with the broader ethical and aesthetic tendencies that defined 2025: "I Declare Peace" ("Barışı Ilan Ediyorum").
Positioned neither as a reaction to a single conflict nor as a symbolic gesture detached from material practice, "I Declare Peace" operates through sustained repetition. Each work declares peace anew. Each canvas carries a different geopolitical reference. This insistence on seriality places the project in dialogue with one of 2025’s defining undercurrents: the move away from singular, monumental statements toward durational commitment. From an art-historical perspective, this methodology is significant. Many of the most influential practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, conceptual, feminist and archival, derive their force not from isolated masterpieces but from cumulative insistence. In this sense, "I Declare Peace" aligns less with protest imagery and more with ethical conceptualism, where meaning accrues over time rather than erupting in a single moment.
Within the broader discourse of 2025, "I Declare Peace" can also be read as part of a renewed engagement with art as soft power. While contemporary art remains skeptical of universality, the project deliberately engages a shared linguistic gesture, peace, without erasing difference. Each declaration remains situated, aware of geopolitical asymmetry, and conscious of its own limitations. This tension between universality and specificity places the work in conversation with wider debates on cultural diplomacy and artistic responsibility across borders.
Crucially, the project does not present peace as a resolution. Like many of the works that defined 2025, it accepts incompletion as a condition. Peace is not achieved; it is repeatedly declared against its own fragility. In this sense, "I Declare Peace" reflects one of the year’s most defining characteristics, namely a shift from declarative certainty to ethical perseverance.
Years from now, 2025 is unlikely to be remembered for a single image, movement or manifesto. It will instead be recalled as a year in which contemporary art collectively slowed its pace and recalibrated its priorities. Rather than pursuing shock or novelty, artists, institutions and even markets turned toward responsibility, precision and sustained attention. In a world defined by fragmentation and acceleration, art in 2025 chose care over conquest, depth over immediacy, and ethical perseverance over declarative certainty. Art history will recognize this moment not as a rupture, but as a quiet turning point, one that cleared the ground and asked what might endure. And if 2025 was the year art learned to listen again, then 2026 will be asked a more difficult question: What will it choose to carry forward, and will this renewed sense of care become a lasting practice, or merely a pause before a permanent digital age revolution in art?
