Art shows to leave the house for in December 2025

Dalia Al-Dujaili’s curatorial debut, ‘Ard: To Belong to Land, gathers eight Palestinian photographers to reflect on homeland, memory, and the unbreakable bond between people and the earth. Featuring work by Dean Majd, Zach Hussein, Kholood Eid, Samar Hazboun, Sakir Khader, Adam Rouhana, Maen Hammad and Jenna Masoud, with poetry by Yahya Alhamarna, the show turns towards the everyday: kinship, labour, tenderness, and resistance. Rather than a reactive response, it stands as an act of honour and solidarity – a tribute to Palestinians martyred since 1948, and a reminder of the stories, lives, and landscapes that persist across borders and exile.

‘Ard: To Belong to Land runs 14 – 30 December 2025 at Galleria Gola, Milan

At Baxter St, Spark of a Nail highlights photographer Morgan Levy’s collaborative portraits of women and non-binary tradespeople, reframing who gets to occupy and shape the built environment. Mixing documentary, staged photography, and performance, Levy works closely with apprentices and professionals to restage acts of labour, revealing tenderness, skill, and solidarity within spaces they construct together. 

Spark of a Nail runs 20 November 2025 – 28 January 2026 at Baxter St, New York, USA

Shadi Al-Atallah’s COBRA is an ambitious departure from his signature figurative painting into a fully immersive world of video, sound, light, and sculptural intervention. Centred on two large-scale projections cast onto serpent-like curtains, the exhibition draws from archival footage of queer men and transfeminine people dancing in Saudi Arabia – fleeting gestures of joy, defiance, and community now rendered as “digital ghosts”. These abstracted, flickering forms sit alongside uncanny objects and new paintings, creating a portal where queer histories are resurrected and reimagined. 

COBRA runs 28 November 2025 – 24 January 2026 at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Deptford, London, UK

At Sadie Coles HQ’s newly opened Savile Row townhouse, Lisa Brice draws on art-historical depictions of violence to turn passive feminine subjects into active agents of defiance in Keep Your Powder Dry. The show is a charged new body of work that recasts her familiar interior scenes as sites of collective resistance. Working in a stark palette of blacks, reds and greys, Brice’s figures stand alert: women at bar counters gripping improvised weapons, judogi-clad fighters inspired by Honor Blackman’s 1965 self-defence book, and a smoky fight-club arena where protagonists prepare for battle in mirrors.

Keep Your Powder Dry runs until 20 December 2025 at Sadie Coles HQ, London

Foam Talent alum Hajar Benjida’s first solo show centres on her series Atlanta Made Us Famous. Centred on Magic City – the legendary Atlanta strip club that helped shape global hip-hop – Benjida spotlights the women who drive the city’s cultural scene. Her portraits honour dancers as entrepreneurs, community leaders, and gatekeepers, revealing networks of care and ambition that cut through stereotypes.

Atlanta Made Us Famous runs from 14 November 2025 – 25 March 2026 at Foam, Amsterdam

A landmark of New York art history is honoured in Keith Haring’s FDR Drive Mural, which presents 14 surviving panels from the 300-foot frieze painted along the East River in 1984. Originally created on-site using quick, fluid spray-paint gestures, the mural captured Haring at his best – figures leaping, spinning, radiating energy like an urban hieroglyphic filmstrip glimpsed from passing cars.

Now reinstalled at their original height, the panels return as vibrant artefacts of Downtown culture, political urgency, and Haring’s belief in art as a democratic medium.

FDR Drive Mural runs 13 November 2025 – 15 January 2026 at Martos Gallery, New York. Opening 13 November, 6-8pm

Karlijn de Lange and Gabriella Achadinha come together to offer a tender, incisive study of memory, mourning, and the landscapes that hold them. De Lange transforms a family photo album into a drifting, cartographic fiction – reworking aerial views of Monument Valley through drawing, painting, and ceramics to explore how memory shifts shape over time. Achadinha’s Deixem Passar moves between Madeira and South Africa, tracing diasporic masculinity, inherited mythologies, and the political forces that shadow family history. Alongside the exhibition, Varia hosts a community-led Death Café, inviting open conversation around death, grief, and remembrance.

Geographies of Return runs 4 – 11 December 2025 at Varia, Rotterdam. Death Café on 5 December, 7–8:30pm. Free entry

The UK’s largest-ever retrospective of Lee Miller traces her extraordinary career. Bringing together 230 prints and previously unseen archival material, the exhibition reveals how Miller consistently reinvented photography’s possibilities – from her Paris collaborations with Man Ray and groundbreaking solarisation experiments, to her sharp, uncanny street work, Vogue editorials, war reportage, and surrealist visions made in Cairo.

Lee Miller runs from 2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026 at Tate Britain, London, UK

Islamic Relief UK partners with the Sudanese Diaspora Network for a one-night programme and week-long exhibition tracing four decades of humanitarian work in Sudan. The evening brings together archival photographs, ephemera, panel discussions, creative workshops, and a pop-up shop, alongside a special artist-led collection by Sarah Elawad, Jameela Elfaki, and Hassan Kamil raising funds for ongoing relief efforts, alongside food by Sudanese restaurant Toteil.

Are Your Eyes on Sudan? opens 4 December 2025, with the exhibition running 8–12 December at Islamic Relief UK, London

Art director and author Scott King will be reading – followed by a Q&A – from his recently published book The New Space, the razor-sharp follow-up to the cult favourite The Debrist Manifesto. Presented in King’s unmistakable Futura Bold Condensed aesthetic, the book follows a lone culture worker waging an “information war” against the Culture Industry’s shadowy overseers, known as “Space Control”. Part-novel, part-manifesto, The New Space skewers relevance, gatekeeping and the absurd choreography of trying to “break in” on platforms built to shut you out. It’s a darkly funny, painfully accurate portrait of creative life today.

4 December 2025, 6:30–8:30pm at Rosegarden, Berlin

More than three decades after its debut in Düsseldorf, Richard Serra’s Running Arcs (For John Cage) returns – this time to Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, marking its first-ever showing in the US. At 52 feet long and 13 feet high, it’s peak Serra: austere, architectural, and dedicated to one of his key influences, composer John Cage. 

Serra regarded Cage as a philosophical counterpart whose ideas about time, chance, sound and perception shaped his own thinking about space, duration and attention. Installed exactly 33 years to the day since its original unveiling, the sculpture unfurls across the gallery in three monumental weatherproof steel plates, each inverted and staggered to create a slow, bodily rhythm of mass and void.

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage) runs from 12 September – 20 December 2025 at Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York

Rick Owens and Michèle Lamy turn oxidation into a philosophy with Rust Never Sleeps. Titled after Neil Young’s 1979 anthem, it unfolds as a manifesto for creative endurance, where decay isn’t collapse but metamorphosis. Owens pushes his sculptural furniture into new elemental territory with the debut of several new works. For Owens, rust is proof of life.

Rust Never Sleepsruns from 14 October 2025 – 14 February 2026 at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

Taiwanese artist Val Lee’s first UK solo is a subtle, slow-burning encounter with solitude as both shelter and rupture, unveiling a quiet, multidisciplinary study of isolation, longing, and resilience. Co-founder of the influential collective Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel, Lee merges film, installation, and performance into atmospheres where political history bleeds into intimate memory. New iterations of Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Tea (2025) anchor the show – one tracing the uncanny calm of transitory “non-spaces,” the other confronting the psychic weight of Taiwan’s White Terror.

The Presence of Solitude runs from 7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026 at Hayward Gallery, London

Chinese photographer Guanyu Xu turns domestic interiors into charged, collage-like landscapes of migration. Resident Aliens – begun in 2019 and unfolding across homes in the US and China – follows immigrants caught in the bureaucracy of visas and shifting borders. Xu invites participants to select personal photos, then builds temporary installations inside their living spaces, merging his images with theirs before photographing the results.

The final works are dense, disorienting constellations where memory, paperwork, family archives, and state scrutiny collide. Intimate yet political, they reveal the immigrant home as both refuge and battleground.

Resident Aliens runs from 30 October – 20 December 2025 at YanceyRichardson Gallery, New York