Art shows to leave the house for in August 2025

From skipping school to touring with Bob Marley and capturing the chaos of the Sex Pistols, Dennis Morris has always been where the action is. Music + Life spans decades of raw, intimate photography – charting not just music history, but the social currents it rode in on. Alongside iconic portraits of Marley, Faithfull and punk’s wildest moments, the show spotlights Morris’ early documentary work capturing Black-British life in post-war London.

Dennis Morris: Music + Life runs from 27 June – 28 Sept 2025, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK

Dreaming as resistance – memory as myth. The 18th edition of Artists’ Film International brings together moving-image works from 16 global artists who use film as a portal – bending time, history, and truth. Co-presented by Forma and Southwark Park Galleries, the UK premiere of Sin Wai Kin’s The Fortress anchors the programme, which spans two chapters across the Lake and Dilston Galleries. From CGI to archival cut-ups, these films reimagine what’s real, but also what’s possible.

Artists’ Film International 2025 – Dream States runs from 19 July – 21 September 2025 at Southwark Park Galleries, London

Design as disruption, adaptation and assertion. The V&A’s Design and Disability charts how Disabled, Deaf and neurodivergent people have shaped design from the 1940s to now – not as users but as originators. From protest ephemera and Paralympic tech to tactile artworks and bespoke fashion, the show reframes disability as a site of creativity and resistance. Featuring over 170 objects by artists, designers, and communities – including Christine Sun Kim and Sara Hendren – it asks urgent questions: Who is design for? Who gets left out? 

Design and Disability runs from 7 June 2025 – 15 February 2026 at the V&A, London

Reframing photography as a shared act, this show gathers historical and contemporary works from the collection alongside the groundbreaking book Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. Curated by Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, Laura Wexler, and others, the show interrogates authorship, memory, and power, and is grouped thematically around community, violence, care and coercion. It’s photography reimagined as process, dialogue, and accountability, asking: what happens when the photographed speak back? How are images remembered – or misremembered – on either side of the lens?

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photographyruns 30 May – 16 August 2025 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, USA

Marking ten years of their iconic #friendsonfilm series, LMK WHEN U REACH is Bernice Mulenga’s first major institutional solo show. The exhibition honours Black queer joy, kinship, and nightlife as radical acts – where dancefloors become spaces of care, resistance and memory. With deep intentionality, Mulenga documents the everyday and the ecstatic, spotlighting the faces and gestures that shape queer BIPOC club culture in the UK and beyond. Reclaiming the camera as a site of connection, not capture, this is a love letter to chosen family, celebration, and the power of presence.

LMK WHEN U REACH runs from 17 July – 26 October 2025, Auto Italia, London, UK

Bronze bodies, strip club clips, glitched soundscapes, Christelle Oyiri’s new commission for Tate Modern’s Tanks is a shape-shifting meditation on identity in the age of endless remix. Drawing from DJ culture, cosmetic surgery, and internet aesthetics, her installation loops desire, distortion, and self-fashioning into an urgent, high-gloss pulse. Speakers double as plinths, beats morph to match sculptural forms, and a video flickers through memes and surgery footage – collapsing the virtual and material into a single body.

In a perpetual remix where is my own song? runs from 17 June – 25 August 2025, Tate Modern, London, UK

Across 300 bus shelters, Paul Anthony Smith’s grayscale portraits interrupt the glossy vibrancy of ad space with something quieter, sharper. Using his signature picotage technique, Smith punctures the surface of his photographs, fragmenting Caribbean memory into grids, patterns, and spirits. His subjects – including artist Zachary Fabri and Olympic fencer Daryl Homer – slip between visibility and erasure, caught in landscapes that resist fantasy and invite reflection. In these urban portals, Smith offers a spectral, layered resistance.

Melodies from a running spring run from 9 July – 7 September 2025, Public Art Fund, USA

A tribute to the power of love, resistance and community care, It’s A Love Thing charts three decades of queer health activism through bold archival posters and new commissions by Jesse Glazzard and Pank Sethi. Spanning 1987 to 2015, the exhibition shines a light on safer sex messaging that’s fierce, tender, and unapologetic, from “fuck safely” to “take pride in who you are.” Organised with Spectra CIC, it’s a love letter to those who’ve fought for visibility, dignity, and joy, and a reminder that queer survival is a public health issue.

It’s A Love Thing: 30 Years of LGBTQIA+ Health Advocacy runs from 4 June – 17 August 2025, Studio Voltaire, London, UK

Weaponised images, warped masculinity, and the myths of digital ‘community’, Simon Lehner’s UK solo debut is a visceral reckoning with the ideologies that fester online. Through puppeted avatars, animatronics, and paintings rendered via robotic routers, Lehner excavates how the manosphere forges identity, feeding boys Bateman, algorithms and toxic validation. His avatars are digitally manipulated, surgically marked, eerily breathing – trapped between simulation and reality. The exhibition traces today’s digital echo chambers back to the aristocratic tradition of commissioning peasant paintings, reframing users as both subjects and datafied labourers. It’s a compelling, discomforting interrogation of what tech has done to us – and who it’s made us worship.

Of Peasants & Basterds runs from 6 June – 22 August 2025, Edel Assanti, London, UK

Slick, sun-soaked, and slightly feral, this posthumous survey of Milly Thompson’s late works celebrates pleasure as resistance. Best known as part of anarchic 90s collective BANK, Thompson’s solo practice revelled in satire, sensuality, and middle-aged desire. With emojis, lobster, cellulite, and Shirley Valentine as her muses, she skewers luxury culture’s obsession with youth and beauty. Her paintings and graphic works drip with heat and humour – part feminist manifesto, part holiday fantasy. Sincere and ironic in equal measure, the show reminds us that the female gaze can be glamorous, libidinal, unruly, and political.

My Body Temperature is Feeling Goodruns from 5 June – 24 August 2025, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK

Forty years after The Thin Black Line rewrote the rules at the ICA, this landmark exhibition reunites the original eleven artists, including Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Veronica Ryan, and Lubaina Himid herself, for the first time since 1985. Curated by Himid, it blends early works, recent pieces, and new commissions to spotlight four decades of radical practice. Alongside the show, a programme of talks, screenings and performances reactivates the spirit of the original multi-disciplinary Black arts festival. It’s a vital celebration – and continuation – of the legacy of Black and Asian women who have shaped British art.

Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025 runs from 24 June – 7 September 2025, ICA, London, UK

This long-overdue survey of Hamad Butt – queer, British Pakistani, and gone too soon – resurrects the radical vision of an artist who made beauty out of danger. Think: lethal gases in delicate glass, ultraviolet light illuminating scripture, and ladders laced with poison. In Apprehensions, the AIDS crisis becomes alchemical: sex, science and spirituality collide in seductive, high-risk sculptures. Butt’s works aren’t just conceptual, they hum with threat and tenderness, refracting his diasporic experience into something gothic, queer, and electrifying. It's a potent reminder that the personal is political, and the political can be deeply poetic.

Apprehensions runs from 4 June – 7 September 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK

Amy Sherald’s portraits are striking in their stillness, poised yet loaded with presence. American Sublime brings together everyday Black Americans, imagined through a realist lens that centres their individuality, intimacy, and inner life. Painted from Sherald’s own staged photographs, the works blur fiction and documentary – ordinary yet monumental, they offer a counter to art history’s exclusions. Anchored by her iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, the show expands realism’s canon — tracing a lineage through HBCUs rather than Hopper. Now on view inside the Whitney and on a billboard across from it – this is a public ode to presence.

American Sublime runs from 9 April – 10 August 2025 at the Whitney Museum, New York City, USA