Art shows to leave the house for in October 2024

Hamedine Kane is a Senegalese-Mauritian artist and filmmaker who critically examines post-colonial borders and racialised identities through work rooted in the legacies of political activism and African literature. His first UK solo exhibition, Salesman of a Revolt will feature the site-specific installation, “Trois Américains à Paris” (2024), alongside works from his Salesman of a Revolt series (2018) to delve into overlooked experiences of exile and forced migration as well as the impact of colonialism and structural racism. Through a multidisciplinary practice – spanning moving images, print, sculpture, and textiles – Kane creates a visual library, inspired by his time working as a librarian in Mauritius, that traces the lives and connections of key African revolutionary figures.

From September 26 – December 1, 2024 at Auto Italia, London, UK.

Since being acquired by MoMA in 2022, Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing’s Dancing In Peckham (1994) will have its first public display at MoMA PS1 this month. In this 25-minute video, Wearing dances alone in a busy London shopping mall, without music or headphones, while passersby respond with indifference, amusement or bewilderment. The performance reflects Wearing’s provocative work, which often captures spontaneous, unguarded moments that question how we present ourselves in public and challenge the boundaries of self-expression. Dancing in Peckham exemplifies her fascination with voyeurism and the construction of identity in an ongoing exploration of personal identity, as well as the divide between public and private spaces. 

From September 26, 2024 – February 6, 2025 at MoMA PS1, New York City, USA.

More than 200 artists make up The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, which celebrates artists who have lived or held a studio in Brooklyn during the last five years. A committee featuring artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli selected works from a range of disciplines, from drawing and painting, sculpture, video, installation, and more, with themes that cover everything from migration and memory, identity and history, uncertainty and turbulence, healing and joy.

From October 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025 at Brooklyn Museum, New York City, USA.

Berlin-based artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst explore AI as a coordination tool, which they liken to singing’s role in human communication since time immemorial. Just as “call-and-response” techniques have historically helped shape social and civic rituals, Herdon and Dryhurst suggest AI too can transform individual into collective expression. Their collaborative exhibition, The Call, focuses on creating new protocols for choral AI models. To do this, Herndon and Dryhurst composed a songbook and recorded 15 UK community choirs, integrating them into a Data Trust experiment that shares power between contributors and users. The results will be presented as an immersive installation at Serpentine North and showcase a year of collaborative AI training materials, offering insights into the collective and networked nature of human creation today.

From October 4, 2024 – February 2, 2025 at Serpentine North Gallery, London, UK.

Chinese-American artist Amanda Ba draws on her diasporic heritage in Developing Desire, a new solo show that examines China’s cultural consciousness across new paintings, a three-channel video, and her first installation. In the lead up to the exhibition, Ba visited Hefei, her childhood city, where she filmed raw footage of its booming real estate and daily life. The resulting footage became “More Future Triptych” (2024), a video created with her partner Justine Cheng, blending real and staged scenes to explore China’s history and desires. The exhibition also features a billboard of 16 paintings, reflecting the dreams of the younger generation, with influences from socialist realism, pop art, and advertising. Across the gallery walls, Ba’s paintings depict goddess-like figures amongst Chinese urban landscapes, exposing the intersections of desire, capital, and nationalism, with rubble as a recurring motif symbolising cycles of construction and destruction.

Developing Desire runs from September 7 – October 26, 2024 at Jeffrey Deitch, New York City, USA.

In honour of a century since André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism was published, Lévy Gorvy Dayan in London will launch an exhibition exploring magic, alchemy and occultism in art from the 20th century to today, with a focus on Surrealism and its legacy. Enchanted Alchemies: Magic, Mysticism, and the Occult in Art will feature works by pioneering artists such as Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Ithell Colquhoun, as well as contemporary names such as Georg Wilson, Francesco Clemente, and Chitra Ganesh, the exhibition spotlights “magic as part of the intrinsic fabric of reality”.

From October 1 until December 21 at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, London, UK

British artist Sonia Boyce’s An Awkward Relation will launch this October in dialogue with Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s The I and the You. Both shows share themes of interaction, participation, and improvisation, with many works unseen or rarely exhibited. In The I and the You, Clark’s artistic evolution from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, a turbulent period in Brazil’s history, is traced. As a key figure in the Neo-concrete movement, alongside Amilcar de Castro, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, Clark sought to expand beyond geometric abstraction, emphasising experimentation, expression, and audience participation.

Boyce first encountered Clark’s work in the 1990s and immediately felt drawn to her participatory and experiential methods. An Awkward Relation delves into the feelings of both engagement and discomfort that arise from inviting visitors to interact with and experience the art in unscripted, often unpredictable, ways. The title of Boyce’s exhibition reflects this complex and sometimes challenging relationship between artists, their works, and the audience. It also acknowledges the similarities between Boyce’s and Clark’s practices while highlighting the distinct differences shaped by their cultural and socio-political contexts and artistic intentions. 

Both shows run from October 2, 2024 – January 12, 2025 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Un Oeuf Is Un Oeuf is a group exhibition centred on the egg as a symbol, object, and medium, featuring historic and emerging artists. The show opens with Sarah Lucas’s performance 1000 Eggs: For Women, inviting women, those identifying as women, and men dressed as women to throw 1000 eggs at the gallery wall on Tuesday,  October 8, ahead of the launch. Other artists like Christopher Chiappa, Roya Bahram, and Francesca Woodman explore the egg through varied mediums, whether sculpture, photography, and painting, and themes range from personal narratives, mythology, and political symbolism to humor and surrealism, creating an exhibition rich in diverse interpretations of the humble egg.

Runs from October 11, 2024 – November 16, 2024. For those wishing to participate in the egg throwing on 8 October, RSVP to hannah@tjboulting.com or sign up here.

This Glass House is British artist Lewis Hammond’s first UK public exhibition, coinciding with the city’s Frieze. Inspired by Baroque and Surrealist motifs, Hammond's work blends myth and reality, often depicting half-human figures in dark, fantastical worlds. His paintings explore existential themes of stasis, interiority, and the uncanny, reflecting the complexities of human relationships and global events. This exhibition, travelling from Kunstpalais in Germany, features new works and showcases Hammond’s mastery of oil paint. The paintings will also be accompanied by a soundscape from British electronic musician Darren J. Cunningham, aka Actress, heightening the immersive, unsettling experience.

Runs from September 13 – December 20 at the Perimeter, London.

A very special screening dedicated to the work of American artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary, who employs an intersectional Black feminist lens in her documentary films and experimental videos to explore race, gender, sexuality, and violence. The three films being screened – The Giverny Document (2019), An Ecstatic Experience (2015), and Quiet As It’s Kept (2023) – combine animation, interviews, archival footage, and montage editing. By blending historical and contemporary elements, Gary activates re-memory and restoration, examining Black womanhood, transcendence, and reclaiming lost histories. The films will be followed by a conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary and London-based writer and editor Derica Shields.

The screening and discussion will be held on Monday October 14 at 7pm at Ciné Lumière, Institut Français, made possible by Serpentine, London.

The first major UK survey of American artist Mike Kelley, who passed away in 2012, is opening at Tate Modern. Kelley’s work, spanning drawings, collages, videos, performances, and multimedia installations, merges “dark pop art” with elements of media, pop culture, philosophy, and history, and his radical practice questions societal belief systems and institutional structures.

Ghost and Spirit will explore his lifelong fascination with absence, ritual, and identity, influenced by his Catholic upbringing, with highlights including Kelley’s early performance pieces, his unsettling Poltergeist (1979), and iconic installations like Monkey Island (1982–3) and Half a Man (1987–91). Kelley’s later works, such as the Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000–2011) and the Kandors series (1999–2011), will also feature, offering an immersive exploration of memory, desire, and the uncanny.

From October 3, 2024 – March 9, 2025 at Tate Modern, London, UK.

Minor Attractions returns, running parallel to Frieze as a free, week-long art fair bringing together global commercial galleries and not-for-profit art spaces. The fair merges art and nightlife, providing a space for international collectors, artists, and art workers to connect while showcasing the depth and breadth of London’s art scene.

Runs October 8 – 13 , 2024 at The Mandrake, London.

This landmark exhibition of American contemporary artist Glenn Ligon features 15 original paintings, sculptures, and prints alongside his signature interventions throughout the museum. Ligon, known for his text-based works incorporating the words of writers like James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, explores the social and political constructions of race. All Over The Place includes site-specific installations, such as the large-scale neon “Waiting for the Barbarians” (2021) and Ligon’s commentary on select artworks, offering visitors a new perspective on history and meaning within the museum’s collection.

Runs from September 20, 2024 – March 2, 2025 at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Nan Goldin’s You never did anything wrong debuts two new moving-image works alongside an extensive body of her evocative photographs. The first film, Stendhal Syndrome (2024), juxtaposes Goldin’s photographs of classical, renaissance, and baroque masterpieces with intimate portraits of her friends and community to explore both visual and emotional connections. Whereas You never did anything wrong, Part 1 (2024), an abstract film dedicated to Saeed Al Err and Sulala Animal Rescue in Gaza, captures a solar eclipse in its entirety, scored by Mica Levi. Both films are shown in pavilions designed by Goldin in collaboration with Lebanese-French architect Hala Wardé.

Runs from September 12 – October 19, 2024 at Gagosian West 21st Street, New York City.

Lydia Blakeley’s next solo show at Niru Ratnam, Hold On For Dear Life reflects on the corporate capitalist culture of the 1980s and 1990s through the lens of office workers engaging in stress-relief exercises. Inspired by a 1988 stress management book, Blakeley’s paintings depict figures performing stretches amidst plants, evoking a subtle tension between the sterile office world and the possibility of an alternate reality. Through her ambiguous gaze, Blakeley captures the allure and precariousness of this era, where economic globalisation promised endless progress, though cracks in the system were already forming.

Runs from October 2 – November 9, 2024 at Niru Ratnam, London.