Art shows to leave the house for in September 2024

If you’re in New York City this week, you’re in for a treat! Thursday’s Child and Minute Shorts are hosting a one-night-only film festival exploring – and aptly titled – Points of View. Now, in full transparency, I have been curating this event with the Minute Shorts team, founder Janvier Wete and co-founder Regys Badi, to bring the most exciting line-up of rising directors together for your viewing pleasure. We’ll also have the pleasure of screening Skepta’s debut film, Tribal Mark. Tickets are available here – drinks, DJs and good vibes included.

Points of View will take place on Thursday 5 September 2024 at Littlefield, Brooklyn (635 Sackett St) from 6pm, screenings start at 630pm sharp

Artist and musician Lonnie Holley has been actively making art for over four decades. He is a pivotal figure in Black art from the American South, renowned for transforming overlooked and discarded objects and imbuing them with dignity and new life, a practice rooted in his childhood in Alabama where he scavenged for materials. Deeply influenced by American culture and the civil rights movement, Holley’s art critiques the failed promises of the American dream, using Americana’s cultural refuse as his primary material. The exhibition All Rendered Truth features works made during a recent residency in Suffolk allowed him to incorporate UK-sourced objects like brambles and Victorian apothecary bottles into his work, creating new narratives. Unseen sculptures made at The Mahler and LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy in 2023, are also included.

All Rendered Truth runs until 15 September 2024 at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK

In 2014, artist Theaster Gates acquired the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company – the publishers of Ebony and Jet magazines – including the company’s library, periodicals, ephemera and other materials. In When Clouds Roll Away, Gates transforms Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank into a reimagined Black publishing company, reflecting the spirit of JPC. The exhibition includes newly restored objects, vintage office furniture and memorabilia from the JPC archive, making it Gates’s most comprehensive celebration of this legacy. A highlight is Gates’s Facsimile Cabinet of Women’s Origin Stories, an interactive installation showcasing over 3,000 images of Black women. Complementing the 12,000 volumes in the JPC Library, the exhibition will conclude with a discussion about the future of decolonising Black archives.

When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive runs 13 September 2024 – 16 March 2025 at the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, USA

In Bitches in Heat, artists Lydia Pettit and Olivia Sterling explore raw, untamed desire on the margins. Pettit channels Paula Rego’s iconic ‘dog women’, crawling across a canvas with talon-like nails and bared teeth, while Sterling depicts playful legs dangling through a ceiling, with a hand offering a retro cocktail. Their work challenges contemporary clichés about desire, using animalistic imagery – Pettit’s feral self-portraits and Sterling’s symbolic food motifs – to express individual wants and needs unapologetically. Inspired by everything from The Evil Dead to the humour of Beryl Cooke and Otto Dix, they portray libido as a pure, chaotic force, free from judgement – as it should be.

Bitches in Heat runs from 13 September – 13 October 2024 at GUTS Gallery, London, UK

7700 entries have been whittled down to just 107 in this year’s Palm* Photo Prize. Having finished its opening showing at the Melkweg Expo, the biennial competition travels to London for a month-long showing of emerging and established photographers across varying disciplines from all around the world.

Palm Photo Prize runs from 5 September – 3 October 2024 at 1014 Gallery, London, UK

Established by the Whitechapel Gallery in 2008, Artists’ Film International is a touring film exhibition featuring a curated selection of artists’ films responding to the theme. London-based Forma has recently taken over as the custodians of AFI, and for 2024, that theme is Solidarity. Exploring solidarity as a form of collective resistance, togetherness, and interdependence, the 15 films in AFI’24 address how solidarity is sought, needed, and enacted on various scales, encouraging radical imaginaries with the potential to transform collective experiences. 

Having launched in July at Ireland’s Crawford Art Gallery, then moving on to India’s Project 88, and soon Lithuania’s Sapieha Palace, a branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), the London launch is also upon us. In total transparency, I had the absolute pleasure of being the Associate Curator for Forma’s contribution to the programme, selecting musician and artist Nadeem Din-Gabisi’s film MASS. The London launch evening will kick off with a live broadcast from Montez Press Radio, followed by the film’s London premiere, a live musical performance, and a Q&A with Din-Gabisi and myself. There will also be a screening room for students and recent graduates to present new works alongside a selection of material from the London Community Video Archive.

Artists’ Film International 2024 launches at FormaHQ at 15:00 on 26 September and will be open to the public Wednesday – Saturday until 26 October 2024

Looking at Andy Looking reinterprets Andy Warhol’s early film experiments as intimate, queer portraits. Curated by Greg Pierce, Director of Film and Video at the Warhol, the exhibition will feature 16 titles, with eight never before screened before. With his 16mm Bolex camera, Warhol created groundbreaking feature-length films that examined the depths of intimacy – from the bedside of his lover, the poet John Giorno in Sleep to the self-explanatory Blow Job and Couch, the latter described as an “entirely pornographic” series of sexual encounters on a couch at Warhol’s Factory. The exhibition also features portraits of Warhol’s lovers, offering a deeper, more personal insight into his work beyond the fame fixation he is best known for.

Looking at Andy Looking runs from 6 September 2024 – 9 March 2025 at The Museum of Sex, New York City, USA

Hot off the heels of his Turner Prize win last year, Jesse Darling delves into the complexities of the present and past with a solo show at Arcadia Missa. His multidisciplinary approach, including sculpture, drawing, installation and text, navigates between the familiar and the strange, reflecting on alternative histories and speculative presents. Central to Darling’s practice is an exploration of the agency, fragility and subversiveness of life as seen in both the living world and built environments. Using everyday materials and consumer goods, Darling connects individual and collective experiences, creating objects that resonate “somewhere between the tool and the relic and the commodity fetish.”

Jesse Darling runs from 7 September – 25 October 2024 at Arcadia Missa, London, UK

Ethan James Green’s BOMBSHELL is an exhibition of photographs that redefines the concept of the “bombshell”. Over a year, Green collaborated with his models, allowing them to style and pose themselves, expressing their subjective ideas on femininity, glamour and sex appeal. Known for his striking black-and-white portraits of New York’s creative community, Green deepens his exploration of the photographer-subject relationship in this series. Featuring iconic figures like Hari Nef, Connie Fleming, and Martine Gutierrez, BOMBSHELL highlights the collaboration behind contemporary portraiture.

BOMBSHELL runs from 5 September – 26 October 2024 at Kapp Kapp, New York City, USA

Australian artist Jess Cochrane’s figurative paintings explore contemporary culture through themes of consumerism, pop culture, and fashion. Drawing inspiration from Cézanne’s bathers and referencing Australian painter Grace Cossington Smith, Cochrane blends historical and cultural context with modern details like smartphones and contemporary fashion. Her thick, repetitive brushstrokes echo Impressionism, weaving together multiple subjects to explore the cyclical relationship between art and society that bridges past and present.

It Won’t Last Forever runs from 12 – 28 September 2024 at Gillian Jason, London, UK

Gori Mora’s solo exhibition Burning Desires examines queer identity, intimacy and belonging. Through his surreal approach, Mora crafts “safe spaces” that intertwine cosy interiors with nocturnal landscapes and motifs like bitten apples, body parts and constellations. By painting with oil on perspex, Mora imbues his works with a luminous quality that echoes the protective and intimate nature of these spaces.

Inspired by artists like Leonora Carrington and Philip Guston, Mora explores how queer people create environments to safely express their identities. Themes of desire, temptation, and rebellion against societal norms juxtapose each other, most notably in pieces like “Inferno Boulevard” – which reflects Mora’s interest in the coexistence of the sinful and the divine.

Burning Desires runs from 14 August – 23 September 2024 at Unit, London, UK