Shirin Neshat dreams of another country, Lars Eidinger of the Old Masters

From Friday, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich will be showing photographs by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who has been living in the USA for 40 years and has attempted to capture the questions of origin and identity that have arisen for her in photographs - with a personal touch and yet representative of millions of migrants who have to re-orient themselves between uprooting and departure. The result of this photographic journey can now be seen in the exhibition Living in One Land. Dreaming in Another.

Currently far less known than Shirin Neshat but definitely worth discovering is the »photo activist« Zanele Muholi, whose haunting photographs can also be seen from Friday in the Gropius-Bau in Berlin in her first large solo exhibition in Germany. Muholi photographically accompanies the lives of the black LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa and, through this mere visibility, challenges a society in which homophobia and transphobia as well as racism are part of everyday life, not only in South Africa, and lead to violence, exclusion and discrimination on a daily basis. A visit to the exhibition promises sensitive yet intimate insights into the life of a Black LGBTQIA+ community and offers the chance to sharpen one's own view and broaden one's perspective.

It is often enough to document scenes of coexistence to reveal social upheavals - and not infrequently this even happens involuntarily and quite incidentally. This is what the Hamburger Kunsthalle plays with in its bold juxtaposition of Old Masters of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish genre painting with contemporary photographs by the versatile Lars Eidinger and typefaces by Stefan Marx. So if you are spending the first weekend of Advent in Hamburg and don't want to study people of enlightened modernity in pandemic at Christmas markets, you can take an amusing stroll along the 200 exhibits, some of them very high-calibre, in the exhibition Klasse Gesellschaft and ponder how much living together has evolved since the 17th century.

What you can't do in Vienna this weekend, unfortunately, is visit the two exhibitions Huang Po-Chih. Blue Elephant and Wolfgang Tillmans. Schall ist flüssig (Sound is fluid) at the mumok. That would certainly have been worthwhile: Po-Chih, who will be shown here in his first major solo exhibition outside Asia, thematises the rise and decline of textile production in his home country Taiwan in his works. Tillmans, one of the photographic documentarians of contemporary social life, has a broad spectrum of very early as well as current works on show, which are always worth a visit - when the exhibition opens again, probably from 14 December.

And what do you do when you need a break from all the social mirrors, fractures and upheavals? We recommend a weekend in Ghent with a visit to the exhibition POP ART From Warhol to Panamarenko at the S.M.A.K., where, in addition to the two titular artists, works by Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Martial Raysse, Christo, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Broodthaers, Konrad Klapheck, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Arman, Gerhard Richter and others can be seen. But beware: you can't escape the social discourse here either, because what holds up a mirror to us more than Pop Art?