Art shows to leave the house for in October 2025

Marina Abramović returns to London, specifically to Saatchi Yates. Taking two of her most charged works, Blue Period and Red Period, the performance legend cracks them open into 1,200 photographic stills, offering a slowed-down, frame-by-frame encounter. Abramović here explores the symbolic resonance of colour: red as vitality, seduction, and energy; blue as coldness, vulnerability, and introspection. Originally part of her Video Portrait Gallery (1975–2002), these works are reborn in a strikingly different format. Openning on 1 October and running for one month, the exhibition not only invites viewers to engage with Abramović’s most intimate gestures but offers each still as a collectable artwork to take home – price tbc.

Maria Abramović runs from 1 - 31 October at Saatchi Yates, London, UK.

A major new commission by Naeem Mohaiemen revisits the fractured spirit of 1970s America. Shown at Albany House – a former police HQ nestled in the shadow of Whitehall – this three-channel film loops between the Kent and Jackson State shootings of May 1970, mapping the racialised contours of protest memory. Mohaiemen fuses archival footage with modern commemorations, exposing how state violence and its remembrance are unevenly inscribed in history. Moving from Ohio to Mississippi, Nixon’s America to today's Trumpian authoritarianism, the work is a haunting lens on what time forgets, distorts, erases – and what also returns.

Through a Mirror, Darkly runs from 21 September to 9 November 2025 at Albany House, London, UK.

Technically, this one is in November, but because demand to attend is sure to be high, consider this a solid heads-up so you don’t miss out!

The Messy Truth teams up with the ICP for a one-day deep dive into photography’s shifting ground – pulling apart the image world we think we know, where photo equals evidence, and the one that actually governs us now, where an image’s power isn’t tethered to truth at all. 

Across four sessions, host Gem Fletcher convenes some of the sharpest voices in the field: Farah Al Qasimi, Charlie Engman and Gideon Jacobs tackle what “contemporary art” even means today; Caroline Tompkins, Alexander Coggin and Avion Pearce probe portraiture in the selfie age; Abdul Kircher, Rhiannon Adam and Sinna Nasseri debate the state of documentary; before Kathy Ryan closes the day with a vision for future storytelling. 

Between Two Worlds: Photography’s Unfixed Future takes place on 1 November 2025, at the ICP Library, New York City, USA. Tickets are here

Australian-Iranian artist Hoda Afshar flips the colonial archive into a site of power in her first exhibition in France. Performing the Invisible centres The Fold, an installation reworking Gaëtan de Clérambault’s early-20th‑century Moroccan photographs, revealing how the photographic gaze has shaped, constrained, and consumed bodies, especially veiled ones. Alongside it, Speak the Wind echoes ritual, myth, and wind across Iran’s southern islands. Presented through sound, mirrors, photography, and drawing, the show resists the fixed while surfacing disruption to offer what has been hidden in plain sight.

The Fold is also materialised in a new publication from one of my favourite publishers, Loose Joints, in a 228‑page stitched collection of over 960 photographic reappropriations, with essays and conversations, which launches in Paris at Delpire & Co on 2 October at 6pm.

Performing the Invisible runs from 30 September 2025 – 25 January 2026 at Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Huis Marseille rethinks the retrospective with Memento, a sweeping, depot-style installation spread across two 17th-century canal houses. Featuring over 100 works from its formidable photography collection, the show dissolves chronology to foreground resonance, pairing artists like Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Viviane Sassen, and Dawit L. Petros in a layered meditation on time, memory, and visual culture. 

Memento runs from 28 June to 12 October 2025 at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Following a mother and daughter as they walk from London’s Old Kent Road into the Kent countryside, Open Country is a lyrical road movie infused with longing, memory, and care. Shot across sites like Canterbury and the Red House in Bexley, Amaal Said’s film maps a tender route between generations, tracing a cassette-taped message to a grandmother back in Somalia. Blending diaristic storytelling with a sharply attuned visual eye, Said transforms everyday movement into ritual in this meditation on diasporic presence, imagination, and the quiet strength of women’s voices.

Open Country launches 2 October 2025 at the Red House at Bexley, UK

A titan of American art, Kerry James Marshall rewrites the art canon with The Histories. It’s the UK’s largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s epic paintings – 70 in total – including “Knowledge and Wonder” (1995), a monumental mural never before loaned. Known for centring Black life in all its complexity and glory, Marshall pulls from art history, comics, civil rights, and memory to reimagine the possibilities of historical painting. 

The Histories runs from 20 September 2025 to 18 January 2026, Royal Academy of Arts in London, UK

History doesn't sit still in Onyeka Igwe’s work, it flickers, loops, fractures. In our generous mother, the London-based artist revisits Nigeria’s University of Ibadan, where her mother studied in the 1970s. The film, presented across Perspex sculpture, slide projection, and cinematic wall, folds together personal memory, colonial residue, and radical reimaginings. From tropical modernist architecture to reworked scripts once used to train colonial officers, Igwe deconstructs a singular place through many lenses.

Art Now: Onyeka Igwe runs from 19 September 2025 – 17 May 2026, Tate Britain in London, UK

Adham Faramawy conjures a lush, queer ecology of resistance and belonging. Across two films, a sculpture, and new paintings, the artist’s world unfurls: birds become metaphors for exile, mothers turn into rosebushes, and riverbanks swell with grief and ritual. Birds of Sorrow and Daughters of the River ripple with dance, spoken word, and ancestral echo, tracing how bodies – human and otherwise – carry history. Set across sites from Barking & Dagenham to the Nile, it’s a deeply personal, poetically charged show where nothing stays still.

Adham Faramawy: The earth laughs in flowers runs from 12 September – 25 October 2025, Niru Ratnam Gallery in London, UK

What happens when a farewell becomes a curse? In Le Sale ka Kgotso (“stay in peace” in Sesotho), South African artist Lebohang Kganye twists the warmth of parting words into something uncanny. Housed in a spectral reconstruction of an RDP home – a post-apartheid housing model – this large-scale installation blurs oral histories, folklore, and national memory. Five theatrical scenes unfold inside: from a bathtub-bound mermaid to a street sweeper-turned-tokoloshe, myth and intimacy collapse into a haunted domesticity. 

Le Sale ka Kgotso runs from 12 September 2025 – 25 January 2026, Fotografiska in Berlin, Germany

Tai Shani transforms Gathering into a two-floor phantasmagoria. Upstairs, crimson carpets and violet windows conjure a throne room for her jewel-toned paintings. Below, a velvet-darkened chamber hides “Epilogues”, an eerie diorama viewed through a peephole, soundtracked by Maxwell Sterling’s Requiem. Referencing Duchamp’s “Étant donnés”, Shani’s tableau explores desire, spectacle, and power, casting viewers as voyeurs in a surreal, feminist theatre of the uncanny.

Cardinal runs from 26 September to 8 November 2025, Gathering, London