hoha trips · a city dispatch
art's cooking: paris.
not everything worth seeing this week is inside the grand palais. luckily, paris has several other rooms.
art weeks have an unfortunate habit of making everyone sound as if they own a gallery. suddenly every dinner is a cultural encounter and every large object is a conversation starter.
i went through the program looking for something slightly more useful: the rooms i'd actually enter, the artists i'd like to discover, the books i might carry home and the dinners i'd be annoyed to hear about a week too late.
the fair is 23 to 25 october. the city, rather inconveniently, began earlier. this is the edited version with dates, maps and the links you will actually need.
these are picks. i haven't been to all of them yet, and i'll update the notes as i go.
the free public program, fair tickets and the map are in the art basel paris dispatch.
if you only do three
one meal that is also an artwork. one chapel full of images that refuse to sit still. and a fashion house letting a brilliant filmmaker use its runway building for something more interesting than a show.
harry nuriev takes over le dalí
le meurice
book ahead · 20 to 25 oct
read the note ↓02offscreen: ana mendieta
chapelle saint-louis de la salpêtrière
tickets / limited afternoon sessions · 20 to 25 oct
read the note ↓03alice diop x miu miu: geste de consolation
palais d'iéna
free / tours sold out · 21 to 25 oct
read the note ↓book these first.
booking needed means booking needed. i'll only say 'last tickets' when the box office does.
last checked 20 october 2026.
the edit.
four ways of making a very crowded week feel manageable. free public art stays in its own section because a good exhibition shouldn't require a €47 ticket.
art meets food
a restaurant can be an artwork. most restaurants are not.
harry nuriev takes over le dalí
le meurice
harry nuriev has put a luminous table in the middle of le dalí and convinced a palace hotel to let people eat around it. six nights, ten courses, alain ducasse and amaury bouhours, live interventions, dom pérignon. paris sometimes has absolutely no interest in restraint.
i like his work most when the object is not pretending to be precious. here, dinner literally happens inside the installation. book the dinner if that's your thing; breakfast or tea will get you into the room without the full performance.
before you go: 24 seats per evening, total.
dalad's x rirkrit tiravanija
we are ona
rirkrit tiravanija has been turning the act of cooking and eating into art for decades. this time he has built two stainless-steel boats that double as communal tables and steaming stations. chef dalad kambhu cooks thai food in the middle of it.
the secret location is the least interesting part. the work does not really exist without a table of strangers. one of the few dinners i would actually change my schedule for.
before you go: the exact address is shared with confirmed guests.
table manners at halo
sophie de mello franco
this is the sort of tip a friend sends before the press release has started doing laps. sophie de mello franco, whose earlier work includes alvorada at dover street market paris, is putting a project inside a restaurant instead of using one as a convenient backdrop.
table manners involves a performative meal and cory arcangel's pizza party.
chez sotheby's
with polimeno
for one week sotheby's turned a paris apartment into a selling salon, with picasso, matisse, warhol and a restaurant run by erika blu of atelier renata. the martinis came courtesy of colin field, formerly of the hemingway bar at the ritz.
there were a few complimentary lunch tables every day, reservation essential and non-transferable. keeping it here as a record of the week.
before you go: this one has ended. it closed at 6pm on friday 23 october.
free around paris
no fair ticket. no excuse.
alice diop x miu miu: geste de consolation
palais d'iéna
alice diop's first exhibition reads like a film edit: zanele muholi, a room full of books and carpets, performances, music and a monumental simone leigh. it is an investigation of who gets to look and how, which is a lot to ask of a fashion house and its very expensive room.
the fact that it takes place in auguste perret's palais d'iéna, where miu miu stages its shows, makes the whole thing more interesting.
before you go: guided tours are fully booked; the general exhibition remains free to enter.
cosima von bonin: dollys & beaux
petit palais
the stuffed leather octopuses, whales and st bernards made for loewe's autumn winter 2026 show have moved into the petit palais. in another context this could have been unbearably cute.
von bonin's work is stranger than that. the soft creatures become stand-ins for people, power and social theater, now sharing a room with nineteenth-century sculpture.
before you go: free installation access; no art basel ticket needed.
tracey emin on the trocadéro
parvis des droits de l'homme
three enormous bronzes on the platform above the seine. the scale is impressive, but it is the vulnerability of their forms that interests me. they look less like monuments and more like thoughts somebody refused to tidy up.
do this with the alice diop show. they are close enough to make one afternoon make sense.
kutluğ ataman: küba
chapelle des petits-augustins
forty screens, forty armchairs and forty people telling their stories. ataman's 2004 work becomes an intimate living room inside a beaux-arts chapel. it deserves time, which is inconvenient in art week and precisely why i want it on this list.
avenue winston churchill: an edited walk
outside grand palais
not every sculpture deserves a stop. i would actually look for the works by yinka shonibare, simone fattal, alicja kwade and keita miyazaki. four very different approaches to material, shape and memory in one short walk.
yes, the LOVE wall is there. no, it is not in my edit.
the other art week
the books, houses and temporary rooms i would rather not find out about on monday.
offscreen: ana mendieta
chapelle saint-louis de la salpêtrière
six films by ana mendieta inside the chapel. not just the architecture doing the heavy lifting. mendieta's body and landscape works are among the most important experiments in image-making from the 1970s, and offscreen has built this edition around them.
i would also look for andrea geyer's installation and the conversations on mendieta, waldemar cordeiro and the history of video art. an unusually good reason to leave the main fair.
before you go: official ticketing marks the 3pm slots on 23, 24 and 25 october as limited availability checked 20 october.
offprint paris
césure
independent art books, awkwardly specific photo books, beautiful paper, small publishers, zines, graphic experiments and the kind of books you will still be looking at a year later.
i suspect my greatest risk here is not losing an afternoon. it is convincing myself that a collection of books is a form of saving money because i did not buy a handbag.
katinka bock: high and dry
maison la roche
a le corbusier house and an artist interested in the way things live inside spaces. katinka bock works with photography and sculpture, with traces, balance and time.
the architecture is part of the question here, which is why it works. online booking is mandatory and the house takes twenty visitors at a time, so book before you get attached.
before you go: online booking is mandatory. the house admits only 20 people at a time.
private choice: kaleidoscope of talents
haussmannian apartment, palais-royal
one apartment, a temporary imaginary collection and over forty artists and designers brought together by nadia candet. much more useful than another art fair floor if the collection is as good as the setting.
the point is to see works the way someone would actually live with them, fluorescent lights optional.
before you go: address/details follow registration.
frith street gallery at le molière
40 rue de richelieu
dayanita singh's photographs refuse to behave like photographs. she builds mobile museums, so the archive becomes furniture, architecture and editing all at once.
there are also works by tacita dean and cornelia parker. this is the kind of small paris detour i would take over a second afternoon in the big fair.
paris internationale
187-189 quai de valmy
the independent fair i would keep. new galleries, fewer familiar names and the chance of leaving with a discovery instead of a photo of the grand palais roof.
more than fifty galleries, but my interest is in the solo projects and the rooms that feel like a statement.
also on view
if you have the time, paris has more to say.
irving penn: penn & fashion
maison européenne de la photographie
before fashion photography learned to scream, irving penn had already worked out how to make a silhouette feel like a whole personality. dior, balenciaga, courrèges and the improbable amount of information one photograph can hold.
not exclusive to art week. absolutely worth seeing while you are here.
lee krasner: works from the 1960s
gagosian
it took paris rather a long time to give lee krasner a solo exhibition. paintings from the 1960s when she was making some of her most radical work.
i would not walk in simply because she is important. i would go because these paintings still look very much alive.
ibrahim mahama: the harvest season
fondation cartier
mahama transforms reused materials into a story about labor, architecture and circulation. the scale matters here because the material has already lived a life before becoming an exhibition.
one of the institutional shows i would make time for, even this week.
design miami paris
hôtel de maisons
collectible design in the former home of karl lagerfeld. furniture can be as conceptually interesting as an installation, though i refuse to defend the entire design market as a personality.
i'm here for the objects and the rooms. the red carpet will manage without me.
art basel paris, selectively
grand palais
yes, art basel belongs in a guide to art basel. no, you do not need me to tell you it exists.
inside, i would concentrate on emergence for younger galleries and premise for historically curious, tightly edited projects. then leave while you still like art.
before you go: single entry only; no re-entry.
what i left off.
the LOVE sculpture. the generic immersive spectaculars. most of the 200 galleries you could theoretically visit.
some of those things might be excellent. but a complete calendar is just a spreadsheet in better lighting.
the map is next door.
every public address above has a google maps link. the free public program is pinned on one map in the art basel dispatch.
going somewhere?
if your trip currently exists as 47 tabs, three saved reels and one reservation on the opposite side of town, i can take over.