Art shows to see in London, Amsterdam and Los Angeles in October 2023

A new ‘non fair’ is popping up in London titled Minor Attractions. With all eyes on Frieze and its mega-sales, Minor Attractions hopes to draw some of that attention back to the importance of the art itself. Across Minor Attractions in Soho and Cornershop in London Bridge, works will be on sale but the amount of money made won’t be the focus point. Instead, founder Jonny Tanna, also of Harlesden High Street, is looking to provide something more grassroots, low cost, and local. But that doesn’t mean the ‘non fair’ hasn’t drawn in international names like New York’s King’s Leap and Chicago’s Good Weather galleries. Entry is free – and open from 4pm til 1am for the night owls amongst us.

From 10 – 15 October 2023

Following the publication of her debut photo book Friends in Eternity, filmmaker and photographer Isobel Okoro introduces Constructing Eternity – which will open in Mexico City’s Fabrica gallery – the physical manifestation of its own stand-alone reality. Introducing new regions while continuing to develop those already existing in the Eternity realm, visitors will witness Okoro’s world-building through her portraits, landscapes and textures. “The title is pretty apt, as this is in no way supposed to be a full or finalised portrait of this world,” she explains. “I invite the audience to take a step in the process of it all, the ideas and the contradictions, the changes and the development through time.”

From 7 October 2023

Marina Abramović’s eponymous Institute (MAI) has been training students in her methods and nurturing a new generation of durational performance artists. Its aim is to “address the complexity of the present time in order to shift awareness and consciousness of human beings through performance”. Concurrent to the artist’s retrospective at the Royal Academy, Abramović is inviting her students to take over the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall – backstage and all – for a week of self-led, site-specific, long durational performances, all curated by Abramović and the Marina Abramović Institute. Endurance, presence, and participation are key, and Abramović, as well as artist Cassils, will even take part on certain days.

From 4 – 8 October 2023

For those who just can’t get enough of Abramović (me), Londoners also have the chance to experience the artist’s opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, for its UK debut. Maria Callas reigned as the 20th century’s prima donna, dubbed ‘The Tigress’ for the powerful arias that are her legacy, one in which Abramović herself is awe-inspired by. Alongside co-performer Willem Dafoe, Abramovič, embodying Callas, faces death seven times, as renowned arias and vocalists bring the story to life.

From 3 – 11 November 2023

Leo Robinson is a Glasgow-based artist exploring speculative spiritual practices, namely Psychic Architecture – “the act of projecting the inner world onto a physical architectural structure” – as well as The Sequence – “the binary and numerical codes that form such divination methods as I Ching and Ifa” – alongside digital drum programming and musical notation systems. 

Intriguingly, Robinson's work stands alongside tantric pictorial traditions, although it refrains from delving into specific aspects of cosmology. Instead, it draws inspiration from Yantra, a conduit for meditating upon various states of consciousness, and Mantra, the repetitive chant that grants access to the Absolute. These elements emerge from the rich tapestry of intuitive cultural imaginings. In October, a solo show titled On Exactitude will open at London’s indigo+madder. More details will be shared soon from the gallery directly.

From 7 October to 11 November 2023

Made in LA’s sixth edition and the brainchild of the Hammer Museum celebrates LA-based artists and their devotion to craft, materiality, performance and collectivity. The 2023 edition, Acts of Living, broadens art’s scope, intertwining it with daily life, community ties, queer emotions, and indigenous/diasporic legacies. It draws inspiration from Noah Purifoy’s words, etched on a plaque at Watts Towers: “Creativity can be an act of living, a way of life, and a formula for doing the right thing.” Watts Towers’ history, built by Simon Rodia over 33 years and preserved by the South LA community, symbolises this ethos, serving as a powerful metaphor for the biennial.

From 1 October – 31 December 2023

In her first LA solo exhibition Argentine-American photographer, Alessandra Sanguinetti takes us on a captivating journey through her career, from the dusty farmlands of western Buenos Aires to an eerie town named Black River Falls in Wisconsin. Sanguinetti is acclaimed for creating art that questions various mythologies while celebrating lives that often go unseen. Whether  the portrayal of female friendship in “The Adventures of Guille and Belinda” or her early explorations of rural farm life in “On The Sixth Day”, these bodies of works are uniting for the first time, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in Sanguinetti’s world, seen through her eyes.

Until 21 October 2023

British-Nigerian artist Ndidi Emefiele's solo exhibition The Gift of Fellowship debuts new works on paper, artworks that act as a vessel for the grief of the tragic loss of her sister. While her previous exhibition was a poignant tribute to her sister's memory, The Gift of Fellowship focuses on the significance of fellowship in the healing process, including relationships, friendships, spaces, and, most importantly, self-connection. Emefiele sees fellowship as a spiritual embrace that has aided her through profound mourning. Her deeply autobiographical works serve as a cathartic exploration of self, utilising ambiguous landscapes and intricate collages to peel away layers of concealed emotions.

From 13 October – 9 November 2023

Intersections of Africa Youth is a vibrant celebration of African creativity and style spanning generations. From Sanlé Sory's timeless portraits in the 1960s and 70s, capturing the exuberance and modernity of Burkina Faso's newfound independence, to Kyle Weeks, who, inspired by Sory, uplifts the vitality and agency of today's African youth, particularly in Ghana. Despite the decades between them, both artists unite in their mission to counter negative stereotypes and portray everyday Africa in a positive, uplifting light. For a deeper insight into the show, read Dazed Digital’s interview with Marie Gomis-Trezise, founder of Gomis-Galerie (previously Galerie Number 8). You can also read my recent interview with Weeks for his recent publication, Good News.

Those in London can also stop by the David Hill Gallery for Meeting at the Volta, which also unites the two photographers in dialogue with a joint show, and has been produced in conjunction with Galerie Gomis.

Until 28 October 2023

HOME WRECKERS is the UK debut solo exhibition of Berlin-based artist Anna Uddenberg whose sculpture, installation and performance, explores themes of taste, class, appropriation and sexuality within a tech-driven consumer culture. Faceless, hypersexualised female figures as sculptures challenge the absurd sexualisation of women in household project ads. Uddenberg situates them in banal domestic environments to emphasise how femininity and domesticity can be staged, tainting them with a performative quality and making these actions unnatural. Alongside these sculptures – which were created over a span of seven years – is Uddenberg’s debut film, co-directed with Thyago Sainte.

From 6 October – 22 December 2023

Judy Chicago's remarkable six-decade career, spanning a multitude of artistic mediums from painting to textiles, photography to printmaking, is honoured  in a comprehensive retrospective in New York City. Occupying three floors (as is only right), Herstory traces Chicago’s artistic evolution, from her 1960s minimalist experiments to her groundbreaking feminist art of the 1970s, and her narrative series of the 1980s and 1990s addressing environmental issues, masculinity, and more.

By contextualising her feminist methodology within various art movements, this exhibition underscores Chicago’s profound influence on American art and her vital role in reshaping art history to include women artists previously overlooked. The show also makes space for a unique dialogue between Chicago’s work and that of other influential women across centuries, aptly named The City of Ladies, the section features contributions from over 80 artists, writers and thinkers, such as Frida Kahlo, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, and more.

From 12 October 2023 – 14 January 2024

Also on at the New Museum is Nothing New, an exhibition-performance by Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, aka Puppies Puppies. Kuriki-Olivio is an artist who redefines the concept of readymades by imbuing everyday objects and actions with personal and political significance, challenging ableist norms in art and capitalism. In the past, this has included transforming common items like antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl cleaner, and even the colour green into thought-provoking installations. The artist often includes actionable elements, such as fundraising for a friend's transition or offering free HIV testing and counselling, within her exhibitions. 

Nothing New invites visitors into her daily life, turning the gallery into a space for such activities, including a replica of her bedroom. Using fogging glass to mediate access, she explores themes of visibility and representation in a world saturated with surveillance. She will be followed by cameras as she navigates between the museum, her apartment, and daily life, blurring the lines between public and private, online and offline existence, celebrating the complexities of her identity, rejecting tokenisation and simplistic narratives of race and trans identity.

From 12 October 2023 – 14 January 2024 

At Home, Everywhere and Nowhere is a solo exhibition from British artist Simeon Barclay brimming with ambitious sculptures, installations and wall-based artworks that spill over into two London galleries, Workplace and Gathering simultaneously. Extensive in its ideas, Barclay delves into themes of deconstruction, fandom and appropriation, as well as references to public architecture and the privatisation of urban spaces.

From 6 October – 11 November 2023

Co-curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and artist Paul Anthony Smith, Between the Seams brings together a diverse group of artists working in painting, sculpture, and installations. Its departure point is ‘interstices’, which serves “as a mechanism to inspire, contextualise, and guide the creation and presentation of contemporary art”. With the hopes to expand it beyond its root definition, a wide range of meanings can be drawn from this term, from social constructs to personal ideologies, mechanisms of artistic engagement, or descriptors for aspects of the artwork itself. Featured artists, including Brooklin Soumahoro, Carl E Hazlewood, and Samuel Levi Jones, amongst others, explore these multifaceted interstices, offering a thought-provoking exploration of contemporary art's rich and varied landscape.

Also in the gallery is Afro-Latinx visual artist Raelis Vasquez’s solo exhibition, which explores the profound cultural connection Dominicans have to water – from Mao’s indigenous roots to his family's modern experiences. His paintings reveal his deep cultural identity and personal journey, while reflecting “our own reliance, our own memories and experiences with this life-giving resource.”

Until 31 October 2023

HOME is a poignant online photo exhibition dedicated to aiding the persecuted Yazidi community in Iraq from London-based filmmaker and photographer Yad Deen, alongside collaborator Renas Babakir. Deen’s collection of 12 black and white photographs spotlights the Yazidi village of Kocho, severely impacted by the 2014 genocidal campaign of the so-called Islamic State in where it’s estimated that 12,000 Yazidis were massacred and kidnapped, and as many as 400,000 were forcefully displaced. The images are each accompanied by the words of Dawd Salim Bashar Loko, a Yazidi guardian of Kocho and a genocide survivor.

Importantly, the exhibition aims to raise funds for Yazidi families who have returned to Sinjar, striving to rebuild their homes after enduring nine years in IDP camps, with all proceeds from print sales going to support these families.

Available to view now

British artist Daisy Collingridge’s art centres on the human form, exploring it through sculpture, photography, and performance, exaggerating flesh and limbs, and imbuing them with tactile softness and alluring colours. Her fascination with the unseen aspects of our bodies is at the core of her work, and her debut solo show’s title, Splanchnic, is borrowed from an anatomical term that refers to the body's internal organs. 

Expect wall-based sculptures that take inspiration from Greek and Roman vases, Matisse’s “La Danse”, and choreographer Pina Bausch, hand-dyed jersey fabric that transforms into genderless, life-sized figures that use quilting and stitching to sculpt the body’s sinews and shapes. Visitors can even crawl inside a giant head, an act that makes the internal world external.

From 6 October – 11 November 2023

Paying respect to the ill-fated computer error message that would flash up on artist Farah Al Qasimi’s now-defunct family computer, and millions of our own around the world, Abort, Retry, Fail, serves as a catalogue of attempts to transcend or reject the confines of the real world, offering the allure of autonomy and disembodiment within the realms of fiction.

Numerous photographs focus on the intense concentration of gamers, locked into screens that allow them to step into alternate realities. These are punctuated by visuals of the overlooked facets of everyday life, and Al Qasimi’s continued exploration of “the entangled relationship between material culture and globalised societies”. We witness mundanity in objects and spaces, all converging around a recurring theme in Al Qasimi's work: our estranged relationship with the natural world. A seemingly idyllic sunset photograph reveals its true nature at the edges, marred by plastic bags and debris, clouding the sense of tranquillity. The sun’s ominous shade of orange reverberates throughout other photographs, manifesting in apricots, construction barricades, and synthetic flowers. It’s in the “stark, synthetic reproductions of the natural world (that) hold allusions to our accelerating ecological collapse, from which escape entices, but may not suffice.” In short: we might not be able to look to our screens to escape.

From 4 October – 20 November 2023

A celebration of its resident artist community, AGM is Somerset House’s annual night welcomes three guest curators for its 2023 edition. Studio residents, artist, educator, and composer, Joe Namy and writer, director and moving image artist, Akinola Davies, as well as interdisciplinary artist Rosa-Johan Uddoh, will take centre stage for a night of “energy, installations, and performances”. Attendees will also have late-night access to Sonya Dyer’s exhibition, an artist and writer creating speculative fiction with text, sound, moving image and sculpture.

On 13 October 2023, 7 – 11pm

Having cemented herself as one of the most exciting new gen fashion photographers, Amber Pinkerton is shifting gears into a fine art practice with her first solo exhibition Self-Dialogues: Hard Food. Split into multiple chapters, Hard Food launches us into Pinkerton’s most intimate space yet: her mind. It unravels through a six-part video installation, photographic works, poetry and a soundscape. Described as “personal meditations on themes traversing migrational loneliness, love and desire, family/household tension, coloniality, and cultural memory”, Pinkerton turns the camera on herself to better understand each and how each has impacted her since moving to London from Jamaica in 2016.

From 6 October – 11 November 2023

Rebecca Zephyr Thomas’ photographs of London’s Indie Sleaze era are being published at We Are Your Friends 01 to remind us of the golden era of trilby hats, American Apparel Double U dresses, and side fringes. Specifically, Thomas is digging up her snaps from the first two years of The Underage Festival (2007-2008), which took place in Victoria Park. Naturally, Princess Julia will be the DJ for the evening, with zines and prints available to buy on the night.

On 5 October 2023, from 5:30pm

NOW Gallery’s annual Human Stories returns to shine its spotlight on the captivating world of South African photography, uniting six talented photographers who skillfully capture the rich tapestry of their homeland. South Africa, marked by its intricate and at times tumultuous political, socio-economic, and cultural landscape, comes alive through the lenses of Bee Diamondhead, Fede Kortez, Aart Verrips, Nikki Zakkas, Anita Hlazo, Ben Moyo, and Karabo Mooki. Expect to see photo-documentation of the lives of Island Gals, a skateboarding community of Black women and queer identities, as well as a portrait of Nyanga, a township in the Western Cape and Cape Town, and more. 

From 11 October – 19 November 2023

Fashion photographer Carlijn Jacobs is renowned for her endless imagination which manifests in surreal shots that defy reality. Now, she is being celebrated by FOAM, who will stage a solo exhibition of her works that delves into her fascination with traditional forms of costume and disguise, such as the Japanese geisha and Venetian carnival. More recently, she has been experimenting with AI, which has only expanded the possibilities of her work to infinity.

From 6 October 2023 – 21 January 2024