No Map, Only Strategies: Rashid Johnson Organizes “Directionless” at Hauser & Wirth Menorca

The reflex of the contemporary group exhibition is to resolve—to gather a dozen unrelated practices under a thesis tidy enough to print on the wall and call a position. “Directionless,” which Rashid Johnson has organized for Hauser & Wirth Menorca, does close to the opposite. It takes the condition the rest of the culture is busy panicking about—the feeling that the old coordinates no longer hold—and treats it not as an emergency to be managed but as a material to be worked.

The exhibition begins from the premise that we are living through a moment of profound disorientation, and then declines to offer a way out. Instead it asks how artists might productively inhabit that uncertainty—how they build new vocabularies and provisional orientations when the familiar bearings fail. “We are all living inside a shared sense of disorientation right now—one that is evolving with increasing momentum,” Johnson said in a statement. “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.”

“We are all living inside a shared sense of disorientation right now—one that is evolving with increasing momentum,”

Rashid Johnson

Coming from Johnson, that lands as method rather than mood. This is the artist who spent much of 2025 filling the Guggenheim‘s rotunda with “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” a three-decade retrospective—and who is, in the same breath, building a quieter long game on this island, with the Casa Gràcia residency he and Sheree Hovsepian are launching in Mahón. “Directionless” is the loud, expansive half of a single Menorca project; the residency is the still one.

An Exhibition Organized by Letting Go

The more radical gesture here is structural, and the press materials nearly bury it. Rather than curate from a fixed checklist, Johnson built the show as a chain of invitations: he asked three artists—Charles Gaines, Firelei Báez, and Cristina Iglesias—to each nominate a constellation of their own, drawn pointedly from beyond Hauser & Wirth’s roster. An organizer who declines to direct is, on a theme of disorientation, the most honest possible curatorial form.

The result is 28 artists from more than ten countries, the most extensive exhibition the gallery has mounted in Menorca, taking over every gallery and the full outdoor landscape of Illa del Rei. The range is the point: Georg Baselitz and Rineke Dijkstra in the same orbit as Alteronce Gumby and Hannah Levy; Julie Mehretu and Lorna Simpson alongside Joiri Minaya and Claire Chambless. Eight of them are making new work for the occasion, among them Johnson, Gaines, Meg Webster, Todd Gray, Hanna Hur, and Latifa Echakhch—a sign that this is less a survey of existing positions than a wager on what gets made under unfamiliar conditions.

Iglesias Takes the Grounds

For the first time at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, the outdoor presentation has been entrusted to a single artist’s eye. Cristina Iglesias’s selections move across gardens, façades, and pathways rather than settling onto plinths, and they refuse the fixed, monumental register that outdoor sculpture so often defaults to. She invited Ali Cherri, Mona Hatoum, and Rayyane Tabet to work in the open air, alongside Yto Barrada and Sigalit Landau, whose pieces enter the galleries from June. Encountered in motion, the works engage architecture, water, and landscape directly.

Iglesias frames the setting itself as the argument. “Today the Mediterranean, with the heritage of ancient civilizations and migrations, is also a space of suspension and uncertainty,” she said in a statement. “Menorca, with its geographical location on the western side of the Mediterranean, offers a privileged stage to rethink how the sea has united peoples and cultures, and should serve as a liquid forum, not a frontier.” It is the exhibition’s thesis rendered geographically: disorientation as a Mediterranean condition, and an island as the place to think it through.

The Whole of Illa del Rei

That the island can absorb a show this large is itself a recent development. Hauser & Wirth Menorca opened on Illa del Rei in 2021—the Paris studio Laplace converted a decommissioned 18th-century naval hospital into eight galleries, a sculpture trail, and a Piet Oudolf garden—and “Directionless” is the first project to claim all of it at once. The season is not only objects: this year’s Education Lab is developed with the University of the Balearic Islands and the University of Barcelona, drawing on creative pedagogy and experimental learning, and a school and public program of performances, festivals, workshops, and talks runs through the autumn.

Cantina, and the Long Game

Hospitality is not an afterthought in the Wirth model—it is part of the argument. Cantina, set in an olive grove beside the galleries with its kitchen in the former naval hospital’s cooking quarters, was awarded two stars this year by the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Food Made Good Standard, recognizing its responsible sourcing and island focus. Operated by Artfarm, the independent company Iwan and Manuela Wirth founded, it is of a piece with the gallery’s spaces in Somerset and Los Angeles: art and table treated as a single social gesture. Read alongside the residency taking shape across the water in Mahón, the picture is clear—Menorca is no longer a summer outpost for Hauser & Wirth but a permanent address, and Johnson is now part of its architecture.

If You Go

“Directionless” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei, from 21 June to 25 October 2026. The island is reached by shuttle boat (€10 for adults, €5 for children under 12, free under three, open return). Through 6 September, the galleries are open daily from 11 am to 10 pm, with Cantina serving until 11.30 pm; from 9 September, hours shift to Wednesday–Sunday, 10 am to 4 pm.