Art shows to leave the house for in November 2025

Launching on 6 November, ArtFilm Festival Stockholm makes its debut under the theme SHAME. Founded by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg and curated by Silvana Lagos, the festival transforms a vacant office building into a charged, cinematic landscape featuring site-responsive works from artists such as Cory Arcangel, Julianknxx, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, Ryan Trecartin, and more. Through moving image, fantasy, and performance, artists dissect shame as both social construct and spectacle, collapsing the boundaries between truth, illusion, and vulnerability.

ArtFilm Festival Stockholm: SHAME runs from 6 November 2025, Stockholm, Sweden. Register here

This group show brings together Marco Bizzarri, John Divola, Varvara Uhlik, and Zearo in a haunting study of how architecture absorbs human presence. Through painting, installation, and photography, each artist explores rooms and objects emptied of bodies yet thick with memory.

The Flesh of Space runs from 12 November – 20 December 2025 at The Sunday Painter, London, UK

Danish artist Michella Bredahl’s first museum solo, Rooms We Made Safe, turns the camera inward. Through photography, film, her mother‘s photographs and a collaboration with stylist Lotta Volkova, Bredahl revisits the charged spaces of her youth in Copenhagen’s social housing blocks – homes shaped by colour, love, and her mother’s addiction. Each room becomes an archive of survival and care, spanning family photographs to intimate portraits of dancers and friends in Paris, tracing themes of femininity, motherhood, and self-expression. 

Rooms We Made Safe runs until 8 February 2026 at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands

With all eyes on The Histories at London’s Royal Academy, I’d suggest heading over to The Tabernacle in Notting Hill to see Kerry James Marshall’s Rythm Mastr: The Chronicles – the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to his long-running comic series. 

First unveiled at the 1999 Carnegie International, Rythm Mastr imagines a Black Metropolis where African artefacts awaken as superheroes through rhythm and drumming. Mixing myth, philosophy, and everyday Black life, the series reclaims visibility through a medium often dismissed as low culture. Curated by Nikita Sena Quarshie and Mark Godfrey, the show spans original newsprints, magazine inserts, and new works.

Rythm Mastr: The Chronicles runs until 14 December 2025 at The Tabernacle, London, UK

It’s your last chance to see Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel film Through a Mirror, Darkly, which revisits May 1970, when US student protests against racism and the Vietnam War met deadly state violence. Weaving archival footage with contemporary memorials, the work juxtaposes the well-documented Kent State shootings with the largely forgotten tragedy at Jackson State, exposing racial and class disparities in how history remembers grief. Set within a former police headquarters, the installation becomes a meditation on violence, memory, and political amnesia – how what we choose to memorialise reveals just as much as what we try to forget.

Through a Mirror, Darkly runs until 9 November 2025 at Albany House, London, UK

At a moment when droughts and floods define our age, Thirst: In Search of Freshwater dives into humanity’s fragile relationship with the world’s most precious resource. Spanning ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Singapore, the exhibition traces how water shapes health, ecosystems, and survival – and what happens when it runs out. Pairing historical material with new commissions by Raqs Media Collective, Karan Shrestha, and Feifei Zhou & Zahirah Suhaimi (SEACoast). Artists, including Gideon Mendel, Dala Nasser, Adam Rouhana, and M’hammed Kilito, to explore scarcity, contamination, and resilience.

Thirst: In Search of Freshwater runs until 1 February 2026 at Wellcome Collection, London, UK

Visionary artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa unveils an immersive new chapter in his lifelong study of Black life, sound, and image. The show premieres two major moving-image works alongside paintings, silkscreens, and cutouts, expanding his concept of “Black Visual Intonation” – a rhythmic fusion of music, emotion, and montage.

Sourcing and reworking decades of found and personal footage, Jafa constructs a cinematic pulse that oscillates between ecstasy and grief, memory and myth. From the ghostly presence of cultural icons to his first foray into painting, the exhibition reveals a fluid architecture of Blackness that is both personal and planetary.

GLAS NEGUS SUPREME runs until 20 December 2025 at Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK

A reimagining of the life and legacy of Dominican-born British writer Jean Rhys through the eyes of artists, writers, and thinkers who share her preoccupation with exile, longing, and displacement. Curated by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als, the exhibition assembles works by Kara Walker, Hurvin Anderson, Gwen John, Somaya Critchlow, Celia Paul, and others to trace Rhys’s interior world and its colonial inheritance. Through painting, photography, and literature, Postures becomes a collective portrait of “a world in which politics is not inseparable from the ways in which women live their lives.”

At the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Between a Memory and Me marks a profound chapter in Rahim Fortune’s ongoing meditation on lineage, loss, and belonging. Raised in the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Texas-born photographer turns his lens toward the American South – its people, land, and histories carried in both body and soil. 

Black and white works from his Hardtack series intertwine tender portraits and vast landscapes, while new colour photographs, inspired by the Texas African American Photography archive, expand his exploration of memory and inheritance. A short film traces rural roads and fields with quiet reverence, revealing a South shaped as much by love as by loss.

Between a Memory and Me runs until 11 January 2026 at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, USA

Duo Blommers & Schumm’s major retrospective spans 25 years of their playful, illusionary image-making. Known for collapsing the divide between fashion photography and art, Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm have spent their careers creating quietly subversive images. Meticulously staged but never digitally altered, their work captures fleeting moments of balance and tension: a glass suspended mid-fall, a face conjured from everyday objects. It’s both a deep archival dive and a celebration of creative control on the edge of chaos.

Mid-Air runs until 23 February 2026 at Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

At Serpentine North, artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley transforms the gallery into a multiplayer world where gaming meets community theatre. Brathwaite-Shirley invites players into a fractured future known as “Peace by Isolation”, where humanity splinters into factions clinging to conflicting truths. Mixing satire, horror, and co-operative gameplay, the work confronts polarisation and censorship while offering space for dialogue and repair. Developed with Brathwaite-Shirley’s Black Trans and Queer community, the installation, created with Lydia Chan, fuses spiritual symbolism, personal memory, and digital world-building to ask how we reconnect in times of division.

THE DELUSION runs until 18 January 2026 at Serpentine North Gallery, London, UK

Rounding out the list with one important and overdue institutional show, Nigerian Modernism, the first UK exhibition to chart the rise of modern art in Nigeria from the 1940s to the 1990s. Spanning colonial rule to independence and beyond, the show celebrates more than 50 artists, from pioneers Aina Onabolu, Ben Enwonwu, and Ladi Kwali to later innovators Bruce Onobrakpeya, Uche Okeke, and El Anatsui. Through over 250 works of painting, sculpture, ceramics, and textiles, the exhibition traces how artists merged Indigenous traditions with European techniques to forge a distinct vision of African modernity. 

Nigerian Modernism runs until 10 May 2026 at Tate Modern, London, UK

Art history is rewritten through a queer lens, tracing over a thousand years of desire, devotion, and coded expression across the Islamic world. From 11th-century Egyptian gold plates and 13th-century tiles to new commissions by Kasra Jalilipour, Rah Eleh, Sa’dia Rehman, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Damien Ajavon, the exhibition explores how sexuality has long been inscribed in ornament, pattern, and myth. Blending the explicit with the symbolic, it asks: what happens when we read history’s embellishments as acts of resistance, pleasure, and possibility?

Deviant Ornamentsruns from 27 November 2025 – 15 March 2026 at the National Museum of Norway

Viscose turns up the volume with Issue 08: SOUND, an exploration of how fashion moves and reverberates beyond the visual. Edited by Jeppe Ugelvig in collaboration with Montez Press Radio, the issue traces the audible frequencies of style, from runway scores, and studio playlists to the rustle of fabric and the hum of a sewing machine. Featuring contributions from Mark Leckey, Carrie Stacks, Terre Thaemlitz, Women’s History Museum, Hanne Lippard, Aisha Devi, and Frédéric Sanchez, among others, SOUND asks what happens when fashion is experienced not only through sight.

On Saturday 15 November, Berlin’s Rosegarden will host the Berlin launch of the issue, with more details to be announced soon. Sign up here to be the first to find out.

Viscose Journal: Issue 08 – SOUND is out now, published in partnership with Montez Press Radio