Art shows to leave the house for in September 2025

From Pedro Almodóvar to Luca Guadagnino, Derek Jarman, Tim Walker, and Joanna Hogg – Tilda Swinton’s art-world address book is elite. For this major exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum, the Scottish icon showcases new and existing works created with these long-time collaborators, among others, blending film, fashion, memory, and myth. 

Tilda Swinton – Ongoing runs from 28 September 2025 – 8 February 2026 at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

A dialogue in gesture, grief, and ground. Cartographies of Presence brings together Shirin Neshat and Sarah Brahim – two artists a generation apart whose practices use the body as a site of memory, ritual, and quiet resistance. Neshat’s Passage (2001) anchors the show, while Brahim’s new film In Search of an Honest Map maps selfhood through movement and sand. Across desertscapes and diasporas, their works trace how presence – whether felt, performed, or withheld – can be a form of protest.

Cartographies of Presenceruns from 6 September – 4 October 2025 at Albion Jeune, London, UK

Confesiones is a confession booth-turned-collaborative ritual by Electra Simon that blurs the line between intimacy and art-making. Held inside Madrid’s Bate Social Store, visitors are invited into private one-on-one sessions – sharing a memory, emotion, or thought through a screen, while Simon listens, takes notes and sketches in real time. Curated by Martin Mayorga, the project transforms testimony into the tangible.

Confesiones runs from 11 – 20 September 2025 at Bate Social Store, Madrid, Spain

Marking 150 years of one of London’s most iconic traditions, Still Suited and Booted documents the Pearly Kings and Queens, famed for their hand-stitched suits gleaming with mother-of-pearl buttons and a legacy of charity, community, and pure Cockney spirit. Curated by Alex Kurunis and The Original Pearly Kings and Queens Association, the show combines powerful new portraiture by Kurunis with archival material to celebrate this proudly working-class tradition.

Still Suited and Booted runs from 5 September – 4 October 2025 at the Crypt, St-Martin-in-the-Fields, London, UK

Surrealism meets the ruins of universalism in Hannah Black’s first UK solo show since 2020. Presenting a new body of conceptual paintings, Black twists the text of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights into surrealist poetry – at once playful and damning. Anchored in radical Black and communist traditions, the works draw on Duchamp, revolution, and astrology to probe how colonialism warped the very idea of “human rights.” 

Hannah Black runs from 19 September – 1 November 2025 at Arcadia Missa, London, UK

For two days, the ICA becomes a hub for artist-led publishing, zine-making, and urgent discourse. GLUE is the ICA’s brand-new art book fair spotlighting 70+ publishers working across visual arts and contemporary culture. Expect talks, workshops, and exhibitions, like Hot Potato’s searing critique of media bias against Palestinians and Sana Badri’s work on gentrification in Shepherd’s Bush Market. 

GLUE Art Fair runs 13 – 14 September 2025 at the ICA, London, UK. All events are free

Liza Jo Eilers dissects American girlhood, good times, and the glitchy machinery behind them. Her paintings flicker between intimacy and performance – cropped frames, censor bars, and thermally reactive veils destabilise the image, refusing a single read. She asks: who’s really enjoying the show?

Starland silver sashruns from 5 September – 1 November 2025 at GRIMM, New York City, USA

Erin M. Riley threads together trauma, memory, and digital residue into raw, large-scale tapestries. Snapshots of girlhood, grief, and emotional wreckage – including car crashes, childhood homes, selfies, and SexandtheCity heartbreaks – are woven into haunting textile collages with hand-dyed yarns. Across it all, Riley asks what we inherit, what we perform, and what survives when a home collapses – psychologically, emotionally, structurally. 

Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours runs from 5 September – 18 October 2025, P·P·O·W, New York City, USA

Ahead of his Frieze London debut, This Time Around marks Toby CATO’s first solo show with a new body of work that balances his signature airbrush collages with looser, more painterly flourishes. Mining the personal and the imagined, CATO reconstructs family narratives from found photographs – relinking distant relatives and strangers by name through visual memory and dream logic. 

This Time Around runs from 26 August – 21 September 2025 (closed 9 – 16 Sep), London, UK

soft enclosures is a two-day programme of screenings, conversations, and poetic interventions. Co-curated by Old Mountain Assembly, Rebecca Edwards and Rina Meta, it explores surrealism, political fiction, and post-war realities. Held at FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, it features artists including Laurent Azemi, Nora Bzheta, Astrit Ismaili, Saodat Ismailova, Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Radical Sense, Miloš Trakilović and Jelena Visković. 

As an auxiliary to Artists’ Film International: Dream States, the project shares its non-hierarchical, borderless approach while deepening its focus on tenderness, resistance, and reconstruction. Through film, print, and performance, these works imagine freedom not as a declaration but as something quietly assembled within shifting geographies, intimate gestures, and porous histories. It will also launch Radical Sense’s new reader!

soft enclosures runs 26 – 27 September at FormaHQ and Peveril Gardens, London, UK

Bringing together over 60 artists born between the mid-90s and early 2010s, Gen Z: A New Look captures the visual pulse of a generation coming of age in a world on fire. From reframing gender and identity to documenting family, digital life, and inherited trauma, these works reflect the mess, beauty, and urgency of growing up now. 

Gen Z: A New Look runs from 19 September 2025 – 1 February 2026, Photo Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland

The inaugural edition of Undercurrent champions ESEA artists working across sound, performance, and moving image. Curated by Erika Song and TRA Collective, the day-long programme spans experimental live works, sonic installations and embodied reflections on heritage, identity, and migration. 

Undercurrent takes place on 13 September 2025 at Copeland Gallery, London, UK

Encounters: Giacometti places Mona Hatoum’s politically resonant installations in dialogue with the late Swiss sculptor Giacometti’s iconic forms. Exploring the aesthetics of control, fragility, and containment, Hatoum activates Giacometti’s cage-like structures to reflect on displacement, borders, and the body under threat. 

Encounters: Giacometti – Mona Hatoum runs from 3 September 2025 – 11 January 2026, Barbican Centre, London, UK

Systems on Paper brings together 12 artists whose works on paper examine the visible and invisible structures that shape our lives. From the bureaucratic to the bodily, the exhibition unpacks how systems – technological, political, social – organise behaviour, enforce control, and codify identity. Featuring historic works by Roberta Booth, Mirtha Dermisache, and Sorel Etrog alongside new pieces by Farley Aguilar, Dale Lewis, Lonnie Holley, Jenkin van Zyl and more, the show explores resistance and reinvention through language, repetition, abstraction, and symbolic gesture.

Systems on Paper runs from 12 – 27 September 2025, Edel Assanti, London, UK

In his first UK institutional show, New York-based artist Grant Mooney’s sphere music transforms Chisenhale Gallery into a nervous system. Centred on tactility, transformation, and the porous boundaries between form and atmosphere, the exhibition spans aluminium wind harps, dormant fan blades, and exposed window frames, inviting elemental forces – wind, light, air – into the gallery. Sculptures hum with latent energy, stripped to their raw geometry. The result is a multi-sensory experience of material as conduit, resonance, and quiet resistance.

sphere musicruns from 26 September – 7 December 2025, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK

In Soft Exchanges, Drea Cofield continues her long-term project Send Me Your Selfies, translating intimate self-submitted images into slow, tender paintings. The portraits resist the traditional male gaze by foregrounding agency – each sitter is both subject and author – while everyday domestic details ground them in reality. Across the works, bodies oscillate between performance and rest, asserting that pleasure, vulnerability, and presence can coexist on their own terms.

Soft Exchanges runs from 17 September – 31 October at Soho Revue, London, UK

The Gaza Biennale is a global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists who have continued to create throughout the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In the face of unimaginable loss, these artists persist – bearing witness through their work and asserting art’s essential role in survival and resistance. Launched in 2024 by artists in and beyond Palestine, the Gaza Biennale is a decentralised exhibition unfolding in cities around the world, inviting us to reckon with art’s ability to confront genocide, break the silence, and ignite a global movement. A list of participating Pavilions is here, and a list of the participating artists is here.

The Gaza Biennale runs from 10 – 14 September, returning in abbreviated form from 18 September – 20 December 2025 at various locations globally

One of Berlin’s newest art spaces, Rosegarden, continues its programme with two shows. In Silicon Jelly, Joep van Liefland transforms obsolete media into artefacts of uncanny reverence: bronze-cast VHS towers, silkscreened static, and sculptural ruins that glitch the boundary between digital present and analogue past. Then, on 13 September, VOID LOGIC will gather artists including Lesley Moon, Sissel Tolaas, Adrienne Herr, Jenna Sutela, and others, for an evening of readings and performances circling the ineffable. 

Silicon Jelly runs from 11 September – 4 October 2025, and VOID LOGIC takes place on 13 September 2025, Rosegarden, Berlin, Germany