Wayward names a straying, but from whose path? The path assumes a map, and the map assumes an authority. The word holds both the deviation and the sovereignty that named it. Through the stories this week, we ask which one to trust.

Sudhir Patwardhan draws Mumbai for five decades—not its skyline, but its people; the wayward line of a sketch escaping the composed painting. Refik Anadol's Latent City, on view in Bruges, perceives the city at a scale beyond individual human sight—data wandering into pattern, into feeling, into a

portrait no single eye could hold. At NGV Melbourne, 'Plant Life' recovers what the industrial brief deliberately left out; plants, wayward by nature, predate every boundary we drew around them. And at MCA Sydney, Tony Albert refuses the souvenir, reclaiming hundreds of kitschy aboriginalia objects not by erasing their offence but by congregating it, until kitsch becomes indictment.

To go wayward is not to lose the way. It is to find that the way was never yours, perhaps.