J.M.W. Turner and Ellen Gallagher. Joshua Reynolds and Yinka Shonibare. John Singleton Copley and Hew Locke. Past and present collide in one powerful exhibition. The exhibition brings together over a hundred major contemporary and historic works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future. Artworks by leading contemporary artists including Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien will be on display alongside works by artists from the past 250 years including Joshua Reynolds, J.M.W.Turner and John Singleton Copley – creating connections across time which explore questions of power, representation and history. Informed by the ongoing research of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and its colonial past, this exhibition engages around fifty artists connected to the RA to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.

In the years around 1900, before Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) created some of the most recognisable abstract canvases of the last century, he turned his eye to the characteristic sights of the Dutch landscape: canals, windmills, fields, flowers and trees. Mondrian’s earlier and lesser-known works reveal a restless and experimental artist who constantly reinvented himself, absorbing new influences and moving away from conventions of representation. Mondrian: Foundations presents twenty-eight paintings and works on paper, primarily from Mondrian’s early career, that trace the artist’s explorations as he progressed from realistic traditions to experimental abstractions. The exhibition shows Mondrian’s evolution from his earliest-known painting, The Large Ponds in the Hague Forest (1887) – made when he was just 15 years old – to his classic Composition with Blue, Yellow, and Red (1927). That work, with its white background, spare black lines, and blocks of color, seems strikingly different from Mondrian’s early works. But the early works show many affinities with his later abstractions: a strength of intuition and precision, an emphasis on the structure of natural forms, and innate feeling for rhythm and dynamism. Visitors can trace Mondrian’s journey toward abstraction and consider this icon of twentieth century modernism through a new lens.

WangShui works in video, installation and painting to explore the intimacies of human-machine entanglement. Bridging the virtual and the corporeal, the exhibition constitutes a live experiment exploring the ways in which technology transforms human consciousness. Window of Tolerance integrates human behaviour and artificial intelligence to question the everyday structures of our perception.

Marking the end of Brathwaite-Shirley’s year-long artist residency at Studio Voltaire, the REBIRTHING ROOM will demonstrate her ongoing research into the history of gaming, its role as an art form, path finder and educational tool with an innovative use of VR technology as a site for debate and critical discussion.

The Karlskirche is regarded as the most important baroque structure in Austria and is a Viennese landmark. Its architect, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, is the focus of the first special exhibition in the reopened Wien Museum.