Art shows to leave the house for in January 2025

Olukemi Lijadu’s first institutional solo exhibition unfolds sound as a carrier of history, memory, and movement across the Black Atlantic. Anchored by a new film commission developed between Chicago, Lagos and the UK, the exhibition traces how West African rhythms reverberate through Chicago house and UK electronic music. Drawing on audio feedback, looping beats, and drum patterns, Lijadu moves between archive and autobiography, poetry, and club culture.

Feedback runs 31 January – 3 May 2026 at Spike Island, Bristol, UK

Photography is no longer tethered to truth – and that’s exactly the problem (and possibility) this one-day salon wants to address. Presented by the ICA, WePresent, and Gem Fletcher’s podcast The Messy Truth, Between Two Worlds brings together artists, editors, and critics to ask what photography is now – and what it could still become. Across four sessions, speakers including Rene Matić, Elle Pérez, Jack Davison, Hanna Moon, Ronan McKenzie, and Emily Keegin debate image-making beyond evidence: from photobooks and publishing models to community, authorship and future storytelling.

Between Two Worlds is a one-day-only event on Saturday 31 January 2026, the ICA, London, UK

Meriem Bennani brings Life on the CAPS to Morocco for the first time, staging the trilogy inside a boxing gym in Essaouira. Set on a fictional island where illegal teleportation leads to detention, CAPS uses humour and stylised chaos to examine borders, surveillance and life under control. Bennani’s hybrid visual language – CGI, live action, phone footage – shifts between the absurd and the unsettling. What begins as playful world-building soon sharpens into a study of displacement, collective life, and resistance.

Life on the CAPS Trilogy runs 13 December 2025 – 8 February 2026, Essaouira, Morocco

The Design Museum opens its doors to Wes Anderson’s meticulously hoarded universe. The Archives brings together over 700 objects from across his career: storyboards, notebooks, puppets, costumes, miniature sets and props that reveal how his films are built from inception to execution. From Bottle Rocket (1996) to The Phoenician Scheme (2025), the show tracks Anderson’s obsession with craft, control and collaboration, foregrounding the designers, artists and technicians BTS. Less of a nostalgia trip than exhibitions-past, instead, it presents a kind of forensic deep dive into world-building as practice.

Wes Anderson: The Archives runs 21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026 at the Design Museum, London, UK

MONUMENTS brings ten decommissioned monuments – many Confederate – into the gallery. Staged across MOCA Geffen and The Brick, the long-developing exhibition sets these objects in conversation with newly commissioned and historical works by artists including Kara Walker, Bethany Collins, Stan Douglas, Cauleen Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Davóne Tines, and Julie Dash. Removed from public squares and reframed indoors, the statues are demoted, stripped from their pedestals, to raise questions around power and commemoration. 

MONUMENTS runs 23 October 2025 – 3 May 2026 at MOCA Geffen and The Brick, Los Angeles, USA

What happens when the UK floods, and power sinks to the murky depths? In NAR MARRATU, Sarah Al-Sarraj imagines a near-future Britain reclaimed by wetlands, where rising seas dissolve borders and open space for insurgent forms of solidarity. Drawing on ancient Mesopotamian cosmology and contemporary climate collapse, Al-Sarraj presents a sweeping charcoal panorama that immerses the gallery into a speculative world of water-based resistance, technopolitics, and shared survival. It’s part future archive, part manifesto, a work that reframes climate crisis as a moment for reworlding rather than ruin.

NAR MARRATU runs 24 January – 4 April 2026 at Eastside Projects, Birmingham

Unveiled Desires traces a counter-history of Surrealism through fetish, fantasy, and the erotic, centring women and queer artists. Curated by Maudji Mendel of RAW, the two-part exhibition moves from Max Klinger’s proto-Surrealist glove obsession to contemporary practices. Across painting, photography, sculpture, and performance, artists including Meret Oppenheim, Penny Slinger, Helen Chadwick, Pierre Molinier, Ajamu X, Sin Wai Kin, and Anna Sampson reclaim desire as power. Part two opens on the 13th of January.

Unveiled Desires runs 13 October 2025 – 28 February 2026 at Richard Saltoun, London, UK

Created over two years in South Korea, photographer Marcin T. Józefiak’s Fearless Flowers is a quietly radical portrait of gender, identity, and selfhood under pressure. Moving away from the country’s pop-cultural image, the project turns towards the private experiences of fear, loneliness, and the daily negotiation of not fitting in. Each person who appears in front of Józefiak’s camera was invited into a slow, trust-based process, with flowers chosen specifically for them – symbols of vulnerability, care, and resistance against rigid social norms. Tender but not sentimental, the work frames visibility as a political act. 

Fearless Flowersruns until the end of January 2026 at PIX.HOUSE Gallery, Poznań, Poland 

This first UK exhibition of Paper Tiger Television resurrects a radical experiment in democratic media, born on US public-access TV in the early 1980s. Across some forty programmes, PTTV hijacked prime-time television to dismantle corporate media from the inside out – blending theory, activism, humour and DIY aesthetics. Featuring sharp readings by figures including Martha Rosler, Donna Haraway, Judith Williamson, and Renee Tajima, the works expose how images, power, and ideology circulate. 

It’s 8:30. Do You Know Where Your Brains Are? runs 30 January – 19 April 2026 at Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK

Four artists from Azerbaijan and the surrounding region – Agil Abdullayev, Ulviyya Iman, Farhad Farzali, and Ramina Saadatkhan – present works that blur everyday life with the symbolic language of folk tale and myth. Across painting and moving image, domestic interiors, nighttime parks, and Caspian shorelines become sites of emotional and social transformation. A subtle feminist and queer undercurrent also runs through the exhibition.

Tales from the Caucasus runs 23 January to 14 March 2026 at Gazelli Art House, London, UK

Jane Hayes Greenwood: Weird Weather

Born out of grief and transition, Weird Weather sees Jane Hayes Greenwood turn landscape into an emotional barometer. New paintings and drawings fold the hills and skies of her West Yorkshire childhood into a charged internal climate, where anthropomorphic clouds swell, rainbows become bodily, and valleys strain under atmospheric weight. Inspired in part by a rare sighting of mammatus clouds over London – ominous, pendulous, and strangely tender – the works sit between the sublime and the unsettling. 

Weird Weather runs 23 January – 7 March 2026, Ione & Mann and Castor, London, UK

Opening not long after Martin Parr’s passing, Global Warning reads less like a retrospective than a diagnosis. Across five decades, Parr photographed leisure, tourism, and consumption with deadpan wit. Sunburned bodies, artificial beaches, and endless mobility coalesce into a portrait of excess edging toward collapse. What once passed as satire now feels prophetic. 

Global Warming runs from 30 January 2025 – 24 May 2026 at Jeu de Paume, Paris, France

Shown in full for the first time in the UK, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency gathers all 126 images from Nan Goldin’s genre-defining photobook – a raw, intimate record of love, sex, addiction, friendship, and survival. Made between 1973–86, these photographs collapse the distance between art and life. Forty years on, Goldin’s “diary” still cuts deep.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency runs from 13 January – 21 March 2026 at Gagosian, Davies Street, London, UK

Sam Lipp’s latest exhibition pares the image back to its material and political core. Working primarily in oil on steel, bodies appear mediated through systems of authority and circulation, where the digital image dominates, and the physical work remains behind as evidence. Rust, frottage and abrasion become formal tools, mirroring how desire, power, and visibility erode amongst our contemporary image economies.

Sam Lipp runs 17 January – 14 March 2026 at Soft Opening, London, UK