Exhibition
SAMSON BAKARE | LET THIS BE A SIGN
Nigerian artist and Gucci collaborator Samson Bakare is holding his first solo exhibition at the Dorothy Circus Gallery. Bakare describes his artworks as “time machines” that travel back to imagine African society as it would be had it not faced the injustices of colonialism. His work celebrates Black life and Pan-Africanism, depicting vibrant scenes of Black characters in powerful and regal positions. With influences that include the artists Kehinde Wiley and Peju Alatise and range from Coptic art to Victorian paintings, Bakare’s pieces are captivating and unique, offering a challenge to the narratives most prevalent in Western art.
SOULS GROWN DEEP LIKE THE RIVERS | BLACK ARTISTS FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH
The Royal Academy is showing some of the most spectacular works of art from Black artists from the American South over the last century with Souls Grown Deep Like The Rivers. The exhibition explores the unique tradition created by these artists, which uses materials available locally and encompasses topics like slavery, Jim Crow era politics, institutionalised racism, economic inequality and ancestral memory. There’ll be everything from sculpture and paintings to drawings and quilts on show, from artists like Thornton Dial, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, and Martha Jane Pettway.
ALADDIN SANE | 50 YEARS
The Southbank Centre is celebrating the 50th anniversary of David Bowie’s landmark album Aladdin Sane with an exhibition that will look into the creation of the album’s distinctive artwork. Aladdin Sane: 50 Years has been curated by Geoffrey Marsh and Chris Duffy, son of photographer Brian Duffy who worked with Bowie to create the album’s cover. Audiences will get a glimpse behind the curtain and into the relationship between Bowie and Duffy that led to the January 1973 photoshoot where the legendary portrait was taken. There’ll also be a separate, FREE exhibition looking at Bowie’s history with the Centre that spans 50 years.
HEADSTRONG | WOMEN AND EMPOWERMENT
The new British Centre of Photography is now open and, as one of its two inaugural shows, it’s hosting an exhibition exclusively dedicated to women artists and photographers based in the UK. Headstrong: Women and Empowerment, has been brought together with the help of Fast Forward, a research project designed to promote and engage with women and non-binary people in photography. The exhibition celebrates their playful, thought-provoking and often surprising work while exploring female identity and re-inventing outdated concepts.
Launching to coincide with London Fashion Week, Vogue and Snapchat have teamed up to create the free AR exhibition Vogue x Snapchat: Redefining the Body, curated by Edward Enninful OBE. The immersive exhibition explores augmented reality is changing the way we experience fashion, with six custom rooms based around a different designer (including Dior, Richard Quinn, Versace and Stella McCartney), including AR experiences and virtual try-ons.
THIN AIR
Thin Air is the new visual art programme for the Beams, the 55,000 sq ft venue in Royal Docks. The show will bring together the work of seven contemporary artists who use light, sound and experimental media to explore the boundary between art and technology, presenting them on a huge scale in the Beams’ interconnecting environments. The installations, including a piece by Matthew Schreiber in which hundreds of lasers that interact with light and haze in the space, Robert Henke’s work where rays of ultraviolet light paint temporary landscapes onto phosphorus dust, and sounds played at a specific frequency to encourage trance states and heightened imagination, offer a direct response to the massive warehouse setting, so it’s really going to be one to get lost in.
SPACES IN-BETWEEN
Visual light artist Rupert Newman and immersive experience studio Pixel Artworks are displaying the interactive body-movement artwork Spaces In-Between across the 360-degree, four-storey screens at Outernet London. Made up of three artworks, ‘Tessellations’, ‘Transcendence’ and ‘A Step Beyond’, the show will take you through a digital natural world and allow you to interact with the piece as geometric shapes respond to the movements of your body. It’s accompanied by audio from composer Sarah Warne to complete the immersive feeling.
DEAR EARTH | ART AND HOPE IN A TIME OF CRISIS
The Hayward Gallery is putting the climate crisis front and centre with its exhibition Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, which features art that’s intended to deepen our connection to the natural world. The climate crisis lingers in the minds of most people at this point, regardless of where they live or what they do, and art has long been linked to climate activism. So, Dear Earth sets out to reframe our responses with this collection of pieces that reveal a number of different perspectives on the crisis. The show is displaying new commissions in a range of media from artists and community groups including Hito Steyerl, Cornelia Parker, Daiara Tukano, Richard Mosse, Jenny Kendler, Grounded Ecotherapy and Ackroyd & Harve. Otobong Nkanga, a featured artist, suggests that “caring is a form of resistance”, and this sentiment is at the core of the exhibition.
THE FANS STRIKE BACK | A STAR WARS FAN EXHIBITION
Forget going to a galaxy far, far away, you’ll only need to travel to Old Brompton Road to get your Star Wars fix at this huge fan exhibition. Using a part of the largest private collection of fan items, the show will feature hundreds of unique collectables and figurines, famous costumes, life-size figures, one-of-a-kind sculptures, photographs and more – we’re talking Lego BB-8 models, lightsabers, Darth Vader figures, Stormtrooper helmets and everything in between. You’ll also be able to step inside the movies with a unique VR experience and live out your best Jedi fantasy in a green screen lightsaber battle, so it really is gonna be must-visit for fans.
UKRAINE | PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE FRONTLINE
This exhibition at the Imperial War Museum features the work of photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind from her time spent in Ukraine between 2014 – June 2022. She started to photograph protests in Kyiv in 2014, just before Russia annexed Crimea and escalated tensions in Donbas, and she has continued to document what life has been like for people living in eastern Ukraine. The exhibition also features images from the current Russian invasion, and also includes quotes from her friend, Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova, as well as from people Anastasia photographed, with Ukrainian language translations of the exhibition text and image captions.
DONATELLO | SCULPTING THE RENAISSANCE
The V&A is hosting the first major UK exhibition dedicated to Renaissance master Donatello, arguably the greatest sculptor of all time. The show will feature many works that have not been on display in the UK before, including his early marble David and bronze Attis-Amorino from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the reliquary bust of San Rossore from the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, and bronzes from the High Altar of the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua. Key pieces created by Donatello’s contemporaries and followers, as well as items from the museum’s own collection, will be presented alongside the master’s work to demonstrate his own innovations and his influence on the history of art.
MIKE NELSON | EXTINCTION BECKONS
The Hayward Gallery is hosting the first major survey of British artist Mike Nelson’s work, featuring his atmospheric installations that reference everything from science fiction and lost belief systems to countercultures and failed political movements. There’ll be sculptural works made from materials scavenged from junk shops, flea markets and salvage yards on show, alongside new versions of some of his key large-scale pieces, many of which are being displayed for the first time since their original presentation.
ALICE NEEL | HOT OFF THE GRIDDLE
The Barbican is hosting the largest ever UK exhibition on American artist Alice Neel, bringing together works from across her 60-year career. Painting figuratively during a time when the style was unfashionable, Neel developed a distinctive expressionistic style, which you can see in her portraits, which were often those marginalised in society, like civil rights activists, queer performers, Black and Puerto Rican children, labour leaders and pregnant women. As well as her paintings, archival material including photography, film and letters, will be presented in the exhibition, showing the politics of her work.
AI WEIWEI | MAKING SENSE
Ai Weiwei, a hugely prominent Chinese artist and activist, is opening his largest UK show in eight years at the Design Museum. Ai Weiwei: Making Sense will feature a range of works that have never been seen before in the UK alongside some major new pieces that are to be displayed for the first time. This also marks the first exhibition of Weiwei’s to focus on design and architecture. At the centre of the exhibition will be a series of large-scale, site-specific installations (or ‘fields’), featuring various objects in their hundreds of thousands, three of which are new commissions. One field comprises thousands of fragments of the remains of Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed by the Chinese state in 2018; another brings together a huge amount of Lego that was donated to Weiwei by the public when the brand refused to sell him a bulk order; and another features porcelain cannonballs from the Song dynasty. Also on display will be objects and artworks from throughout Weiwei’s career that explore several tensions: past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction.
Jorat (Courage) is a six-day exhibition showcasing the works of twelve Iranian artists. Hosted by the Espacio Gallery in Brick Lane, the show has been brought together by Anahita S and Emilia S, two young Iranian women, as a demonstration of support for the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom) movement in Iran and as a statement of solidarity with Iranians all over the world. Among the artists featured will be pop collagist Marziyeh Saffarian, filmmaker Saleh Kashefi, animation artist Sarah Saidan, Tehran-based painter Aliraza Elahi and Iranian-Greek architect Alexander Cyrus. Entry is £10 and there’ll also be a range of events including poetry readings and live music throughout the week.
ACTION, GESTURE, PAINT | WOMEN ARTISTS & GLOBAL ABSTRACTION 1940-70
Whitechapel Gallery is going beyond the male painters usually associated with Abstract Expressionism with this exhibition that celebrates international women artists working in the movement from 1940-1970. 150 paintings from 81 women working around the world will be on display, showing that the movement and its themes of materiality, gesture, and freedom of expression had a wide geographic breadth and were also explored within specific cultural contexts like the rise of fascism in South America and the influence of communism in Eastern Europe. Pieces from the likes of Lee Krasner, Bertina Lopes, Helen Frankenthaler, and Wook-kyung Choi will be exhibited, and it’ll be the first time that over half of the works have been shown in the UK.
STREETS OF NEW YORK
Featuring photography from the 40s through to the 70s, Streets of New York at David Hill Gallery captures a bygone era of the Big Apple. The show exhibits the work of five masters of street photography from what is considered the art form’s ‘golden age’ – Werner Bischof, Mario Carnicelli, Harold Feinstein, Larry Fink and Marc Riboud – including some never before seen images. Taking you on a journey through some of the most distinctive periods of the 20th century, in one of the world’s most recognisable cities, Streets of New York demonstrates the importance of the street photography genre.
FEEDING BLACK | COMMUNITY, POWER & PLACE
Museum of London Docklands is exploring the importance of the city’s African and Caribbean food businesses and showing how they become spaces of heritage, culture and politics as well as somewhere to buy and sell food. This free exhibition spotlights four places and their owners – Livity Plant Based Cuisine, African Cash & Carry, Junior’s market stall and Zeret Kitchen – and includes recipes, objects, recorded stories, Instagram and TikTok cooking videos, photographs from Jonas Martinez and an original soundscape from Kayode ‘Kayodeine’ Gomez.