Museums and exhibits will put mankind’s past, present and future on display in 2016

Jersualem, Degas, Instanbul, Bosch and human evolution will have starring roles.

Neanderthal skull, Homo neanderthalensis. The seven-million-year story of human evolution unfolds at the Natural History Museum in London. NHM, London

Seeing the past

In the way they interpret their contents, the most interesting exhibitions always tread a narrow line between ambition and hubris, but unless curators are careful, the temptation to extrapolate from objects generalisations about whole cultures and societies can sometimes be overwhelming.

See Manet's Olympia and know Baudelaire's Paris, comprehend the mosaic and travel back to ancient Rome.

That temptation, to use a fragment to justify a pre-existing narrative, is a danger that Chris Stringer knows all about. Research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, the professor is also the lead curator of the museum's new Human Evolution gallery, which opened on December 18. The gallery's opening exhibit consists of a wall of prehistoric skulls.

“The skulls will be placed in rough chronological order, but we will not try to connect these species and make an evolutionary tree,” Stringer said before the gallery’s opening. “We simply do not know how some of these finds relate to each other yet.”

Featuring the first adult female Neanderthal cranium ever discovered and the most scientifically accurate life-size Neanderthal model ever made, the gallery charts the whole seven-million-year story of human evolution, drawing connections where there is evidence and leaving blanks where there is not.

If you are looking for a sense of awe and wonder from your museum-going, there can be no better way to start the new year.

Human Evolution Gallery

Natural History Museum, London

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Seeing the future

An increasing number of architects, writers, planners and academics have asked whether Dubai offers lessons that might serve as a blueprint for the urban future of the Middle East. History, however, identifies Istanbul, one of the oldest cities in the world, with a rapidly expanding population of 14 million inhabitants, a refugee crisis, ethnic tensions and increasing political dissent as a more likely exemplar.

Starting out with the recent protests at Gezi Park, Istanbul. Passion, Joy, Fury uses the work of almost 50 contemporary artists and architects working in Istanbul to examine five themes that its curators believe define the contemporary city: urban transformation; political conflict and resistance; innovative models of production; geopolitical urgency; and hope. The effect is a fascinating snapshot of a city whose future, as always, has a bearing on the fate, not just of Turkey, but of the region as a whole.

Istanbul. Passion, Joy, Fury

MAXXI, Rome

December 11, 2015 to April 30, 2016

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Rare gathering for a Dutch master

Museum officials often laud the efforts they have made to secure the loans for a particular show, but few can match the curatorial coup that has been pulled off by Charles de Mooij, the director of the tiny Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands.

2016 is the 500th anniversary of the birth of Hieronymous Bosch, an artist who was known as the "devil's painter" and whose phantasmagorical works, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights, have produced some of the most instantly recognisable images in the history of art.

To celebrate the anniversary, de Mooij set himself the seemingly impossible task of gathering all of Bosch’s surviving works together in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the town of the artist’s birth.

The challenges facing de Mooij seemed insurmountable. Only 25 of Bosch’s panel paintings and 25 of his drawings survive: they were scattered in collections all over the world and many were in a state that meant it was impossible for them to travel.

Added to these challenges was the fact that de Mooij had nothing to offer to the loaning institutions in return.

Against all the odds, the museum director has managed to assemble 20 of the 25 surviving panels and 19 of the 25 drawings in the Noordbrabants Museum, a collection de Mooij believes will never be assembled again.

Hieronymous Bosch – Visions of Genius

Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

February 13 to May 8, 2016

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Portrait of an artist as an innovator

Long before the Romantics redefined art as the product of some mysterious kind of genius, the original Latin word, ars, combined ideas of craft and skill with notions of method and technique. All of those factors come together in the 170 works that will be displayed in Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty, an exhibition that will investigate the relationships between drawing and technology, modernity and a new sense of beauty that Degas explored using the monotype process from the 1870s onwards.

Degas used monotypes – ink drawings made on a metal plate that are run through a press and typically result in a single print – to develop radically new forms of representation for the very contemporary phenomena that fascinated him and his fellow Impressionists: figures in a crowd, dancers in motion, the radiance of electric light and the changing nature of the weather.

The result is a beguiling portrait of an artist who, for all of his experimentations with innovation and abstraction, never abandoned his dream of drawing with the same facility as Raphael and Michelangelo.

Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Museum of Modern Art, New York

March 26 to July 24, 2016

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Christo floats another bold idea

The phrase "once-in-a-lifetime experience" is used far too often, but when it comes to the latest installation by Christo, it's an accurate description. For two weeks in June the artist who made his name wrapping the Reichstag, the Pont Neuf and 11 islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay is scheduled to construct The Floating Piers, an installation that will literally allow visitors to know what's it's like to walk on water.

The installation is Christo's first since the 2009 death of his wife and career-long collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, and comes a decade after The Gates, a saffron-coloured river of 7,500 portals the couple placed along the walkways of Central Park in New York.

The 200,000 floatable cubes that will form the base of The Floating Piers will be covered in glittering, dahlia-yellow fabric made from tightly woven nylon and will allow visitors to walk for four-and-half kilometres across the surface of Lake Iseo in Italy. Germano Celant, an Italian curator, has described Christo's artworks "as a kind of dream, one that everybody can understand and everybody can participate in" but just like dreams, once they are over only after-images remain.

In Christo's case those images consist of the preparatory studies and photographs the 80-year-old will sell to fund what he hopes will be his next project, The Mastaba, a pyramid made of 410,000 orange barrels he has proposed for Abu Dhabi.

The Floating Piers

Lake Iseo, near Bergamo, Lombardy, Italy

June 18 to July 3, 2016

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Multitudes of the Middle East

Athens in the fifth century BC, Baghdad during the Islamic Golden Age, Paris in the 1920s: at various moments in history, certain cities have not only produced distinctive artistic cultures of their own but they have also acted as crucibles that have defined the contemporary imagination.

A city that famously exists twice – on Earth and in heaven – Jerusalem was more than the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths and the long-disputed prize of empires. A Babel-like medieval metropolis, it was also home to Persians, Turks, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Copts, Ethiopians, Indians and Europeans.

Using more than 200 objects, many of which have been loaned from the various religious communities based in the Middle East's very own eternal city, Every People Under Heaven emphasises Jerusalem's role in shaping world culture and history.

Every People Under Heaven: Jerusalem, 1000–1400

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 20, 2016, to January 8, 2017

Nick Leech is a features writer at The National.