Art shows to leave the house for in February 2024

Last year, I had the absolute honour of being a part of the jury for the Paul Huf Award. The winner was Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán, whose work documented the journey of a group of young Moroccan men who had arrived in Spain after a perilous journey at sea. Centring social issues such as the alienation and social inequality migrants face, Beltrán’s series Dialect follows the lives of young migrant men across three years as they exist “in a void”: far from their home but not accepted into this new land.

From 26 January – 1 May 2024

A new show at London’s Hayward Gallery will celebrate sixty years of contemporary sculpture. Twenty-one international artists, including Phyllida Barlow, Lynda Benglis, Franz West, and Paloma Bosquê, will have their practice highlighted, particularly how they have drawn on “familiar experiences of movement, flux, and organic growth”. When Forms Come Alive offers an alternative reality whereby “our encounters are increasingly digitised and disembodies” by calling to mind “the pleasures of gesture and movement, the poetics of gravity, and the experience of sensation itself.”

From 7 February – 6 May 2024

Designer and maker Dharma Taylor, previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Stuart Hall Library at London-based arts institution Inviva, will have a solo exhibition of works that explore personal memory and narrative building through objects, particularly textiles. Titled Materials Speak, the exhibition departs from Stuart Hall’s text, Constituting an Archive (2001). While in residence, Dharma explored the histories of tapestry and textiles, mainly how they help build identity and a sense of belonging in diasporic communities. Materials Speak will examine this “potential meaning for a ‘living archive’, and objects’ role in our daily lives”. 

From 25 January – 26 April 2024

Described as “a joyous queer cowboy romp”, Cowbois, written and co-directed by Charlie Josephine, will run for four weeks at London’s Royal Court Theatre. It follows the arrival of a handsome bandit named Jack Cannon to a “sleepy town” in the Wild West. With their husbands missing for a year, having gone to look for gold, Cannon inspires a gender revolution and “starts a fire under the petticoat of every one of the town’s repressed inhabitants.” For those attending the evening of Tuesday, 6 February, Travis Alabanza will host a post-show talk with Charlie Josephine.

Until 10 February

A collaboration between south London non-profit arts institution Forma and Plymouth gallery KARST, Oliver Frank Chanarin’s new exhibition and live research project, A Perfect Sentence, opens at the end of January and runs through to March. Following on from the publication of its book, A Perfect Sentence, the exhibition “interrogates the photographic image in the age of the algorithm”. Two machines, created by Oliver alongside Tom Cecil and Ruairi Glynn, will take up residency at KARST, tasked with repetitively hanging and rehanging a series of framed photographs stacked on the gallery floor. Chanarin made the photographs while travelling across the UK last year, “shaped by many spoken and unspoken exchanges with strangers”, and mediate on anxieties around being seen.

Until 23 March 2024

I was lucky to see Aria Dean’s Abattoir when it debuted in Chicago at The Renaissance Society, which commissioned the work. In February, it will come to London’s ICA. The main gallery will feature Dean’s animated film “Abattoir, USA!”, which journeys through an empty slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, the adjacent gallery will present a new object-based work. The slaughterhouse becomes a metaphor for the “collision of industrialisation, human and non-human actors, architecture, and death”, as well as “a response to “structural film, which prioritises the processes and materials of filmmaking over narrative content.” 

From 8 February – 5 May 2024

It’s wild to think it’s been over 20 years since American artist Barbara Kruger’s last solo institutional exhibition in London. But it has, and the city’s Serpentine is thankfully righting that wrong by hosting a site-specific exhibition of her iconic works, reconfigured in recent years as video works, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987/2019) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989/2019). Having journeyed from LACMA, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, will feature installations, moving image works, and multiple soundscapes. Naturally, outdoor banners will be included, too, as well as large-scale, immersive wraparound screens at Outernet Arts.

From 1 February – 17 March 2024

Embroidery is Palestine’s cultural cornerstone, a tradition known as tatreez in Arabic. It weaves a visual tapestry, each region expressing its identity through unique motifs and techniques. Currently showing at Manchester’s The Whitworth, Material Power traces a century-long journey, evolving from village traditions to political statements and contemporary reinterpretations. Beyond tactility, it symbolises resistance and resilience, etching an intimate human history onto fabric. Displayed in the UK after 30 years, the exhibit intertwines historical garments, the voices of the women embroiderers, and the works of contemporary artists.

Until 7 April 2024

Yoko Ono will be honoured as the avant-garde force she is across art, music, and activism at London’s Tate Modern in February. Tracing her career across seven decades and through more than 200 works, Music of the Mind will accumulate Ono’s instruction pieces (like those in her cult book, Grapefruit), scores, films, photography, and installations, all of which reveal “a radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.”

From 15 February – 1 September 2024

Born in Libreville, Gabon, and now based in Montreal, Yannis Davy Guibinga’s London exhibition, Children of Distant Suns, blends folklore and mythology from West Africa – including the Yoruba deity Olokun and the mermaid goddess Mami Wata – as well as the serpent in Christianity – creating a fictional realm where diverse legends coexist. A place from which we might also benefit in a contemporary age.

Until 23 March 2024

Developed during her year-long residency at London’s Studio Voltaire, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s The Rebirthing Room is a new immersive gaming experience and marks her first London institutional solo exhibition. Brathwaite-Shirley works across themes of digital space, archiving, and the potential futures of transgender Black and Brown bodies through video games and world-building. For The Rebirthing Room, she has “hacked” a VR headset, turning it into an audience-operated controller that shifts the individual experience into a collective one: a large-scale, projection-mapped forest environment where players will have to use teamwork to be “reborn in authenticity”.

From 31 January – 28 April 2024

On the heels of (Re)sisters, London’s Barbican will open Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, which looks at how artists have challenged power structures and reimagined the world through textiles, fibre, and thread. The exhibition will pay homage to the seemingly unsuspecting medium of textiles, and 50 international, intergenerational artists and their works will be explored throughout, focussing on how textiles can communicate ideas of power, resistance, and survival through narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion, as well as stories of resilience, love, and hope. The stellar list of artists involved includes Sanford Biggers, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Judy Chicago, Diedrick Brackens, Faith Ringgold, Tschalabala Self, and many more. Unravel will also travel to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in September 2024. 

From 13 February – 26 May 2024

LA-based artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya is renowned for his intimate studio portraits that examine the interplay of camera, subject, and viewer – capturing desire while simultaneously documenting the art of image-making. Friends, lovers, and his queer creative circle populate his work, with Sepuya often subtly present, reinforcing his role as the image creator. Meanwhile, mirrors, both practical and symbolic, layer fragments of his images and deflect direct gazes. In February, a major monographic exhibition (and his first UK institutional presentation) will see more than 40 works spanning 400 metres of Nottingham Contemporary. 

From 27 January – 5 May 2024

The joint exhibition, Sargasso Sea, at the ICA Philadelphia, sees Dominique White and Alberta Whittle delve into the lingering impact of transatlantic colonial legacies on contemporary notions of power, race, gender, and geography. Named after the Sargasso Sea, defined by currents rather than shorelines, it acts as a means to reflect on migration and Black feminist theory. Uniting White and Whittle’s work for the first time, Sargasso Sea places their work and practices in dialogue to explore the sea’s transformative dualities – disrupting colonial voyages while symbolising regeneration.

From 10 February – 2 June 2024

Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s inaugural solo show with the White Cube unfolds across two distinct bodies of work. It delves into the depths of literature, using Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A MERCY, as a point of departure to explore themes of interiority, performativity, and sanctuary. MERCY is a series of painted steel head gates, like those used to control livestock, “with their ability to provide a sense of security, metaphorically embody the paradoxical nature of finding mercy within frameworks of violence.” Whereas DUMMY takes inspiration from Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1958) and uses a leather dummy to examine the complexities of ‘suspension of disbelief,’ addressing the historical context of racial dynamics and violence, intertwining it with a series of leather paintings influenced by the silhouettes of African masks.

From 14 February – 24 March 2024