February’s shows raise questions of power, memory, labour, image-making, and who gets to be seen. Moving between archive and absence, spectacle and refusal, we see fashion stripped of performance, photography untethered from truth, monuments pulled from their pedestals, bedrooms relocated into galleries, and bus shelters repurposed as sites of intimacy. But there’s also a shared impatience with nostalgia, with perfection, and with accepting easy narratives. Instead, these shows sit in the mess of bodies under pressure, images that leave a residue, and histories that won’t stay quiet. Until next month!

AMERICAN BACCHANAL, LONDON, UK

Curated by Mavourneen Dooley, American Bacchanal treats US identity as something to be sweetened, staged, and consumed. Taking cues from Roman bacchanalia, the group show – including Dooley, Jordan Kelly, Juliet Cook, Paige Miller, Zakkiyyah Najeebah, Ester Freider, Mickey Demas, and Isaac Harris – leans into excess to probe decadence, imperial appetite, and the soft-focus nostalgia that props it all up. Sugar, steel, dolls, and flags recur throughout as loaded materials, exposing how violence is often disguised as innocence. On 13 February, the exhibition tips into full revelry with a live bacchanal fundraiser with performances, readings, and music. Proceeds will go to the National Immigrant Justice Center, which is doing important work in the face of all the atrocities being committed by ICE by giving immigrants much-needed access to legal representation.

American Bacchanal runs 12–14 February 2026, 162 Holloway Road, London, UK

HELMUT LANG: SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005, VIENNA, AUSTRIA

Drawing from the MAK’s Helmut Lang Archive, Séance de Travail tracks how the designer reprogrammed fashion between 1986 and 2005 – stripping it of spectacle and rebuilding it as a system of ideas. Presented as a mixed-media installation rather than a runway replay, the exhibition follows Lang’s thinking across identity, space, media, collaboration, and backstage process. Clothes sit alongside images, interventions, and architectures, revealing fashion as a method as opposed to a product. Cool without irony, rigorous without nostalgia, it’s a reminder of how much contemporary visual culture still borrows from Lang’s refusal to perform.

Séance de Travail 1986–2005 runs 10 December 2025 – 3 May 2026 at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria 

DAVID LYNCH AT PACE GALLERY

Stripping David Lynch back to his first love: the image as material problem. Bringing together paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and early short films, the show foregrounds the uneasy logic that runs beneath Lynch’s entire practice. Smokestacks, lamps, bodies, and text hover between narrative and abstraction, charged with a mood that can only be his. Lynch’s Berlin factory photographs from 1999 anchor the exhibition in place, tracing his attraction to decay, industry, and latent menace. On the heels of the one-year anniversary of the legend’s passing, it’s a must-see pilgrimage to pay your respects.

David Lynch runs 29 January – 29 March 2026, at Pace Gallery Berlin, Germany

MING SMITH: JAZZ REQUIEM – NOTATIONS IN BLUE

Tracing the legend that is Ming Smith’s early years as an artist moving between the US and Europe in the 1970s and 80s, Jazz Requiem features works many printed for the first time. The exhibition foregrounds Smith’s intuitive, jazz-inflected approach to photography, where blur, motion, and abstraction resist fixed narratives of Black life. Shaped by travel, music and dance, her images slip between visibility and disappearance, refusing photography’s demand for clarity or proof.

Jazz Requiem runs 6 February – 7 June 2026 at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, USA

ON THE FLIP SIDE, NYC, CHICAGO, BOSTON

On the Flip Side turns the city into a gallery, hijacking JCDecaux bus shelters to showcase fine art photography where ads usually live. Featuring a stellar line-up of Kennedi Carter, Lougè Delcy, Camila Falquez, Ruby Okoro, Dana Scruggs and Juan Veloz, the exhibition brings intimate, personal work into the public realm through spaces usually reserved for advertising. 

On the Flip Side runs 4 February – 5 April 2026 across New York City, Chicago, and Boston, USA

BOUCHRA KHALILI: CIRCLES AND STORYTELLERS, LONDON, UK

In Circles and Storytellers, Bouchra Khalili turns theatre into a rehearsal space for alternative civic life. Her first UK public solo exhibition revisits the radical legacy of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes and its theatre collectives Al Assifa and Al Halaka, active in 1970s France. Through film and installation, Khalili focuses on the overlooked 1974 presidential run of Djelalli Kamal, a “candidate of those who cannot vote”. Circular formations structure both the works and the gallery, proposing storytelling as a political technology.

Circles and Storytellers runs 18 February – 14 June 2026 at Mosaic Rooms, London, UK

AKINOLA DAVIES JR., MY FATHER’S SHADOW + LIVE SCORE, LONDON, UK

A single day, a city on edge, and a family trying to hold together, My Father’s Shadow – the debut feature by Akinola Davies Jr. – lands at Tate Modern for a live-scored screening, just in time for the film’s much-anticipated UK release. Set during Nigeria’s 1993 election crisis, the semi-autobiographical film follows a father and his two sons moving through Lagos as unrest closes in. The original score will be performed live by Duval Timothy and collaborators.

My Father’s Shadow + Live Score screens 7 February 2026, 19:00–21:00 at Tate Modern, London, UK

KARIMAH ASHADU: TENDERED, LONDON, UK

For the artist’s first UK institutional solo, Tendered brings together three films that sit inside labour, masculinity, and performance. From the Makoko abattoir (King of Boys) to a lone horseman (Cowboy), Ashadu films work as something bodily, durational, and shaped by place. A new commission MUSCLE turns its gaze on Lagos bodybuilders, tracing patriarchy, aspiration, and survival at close range. Ashadu’s strength lies in restraint, letting gesture, rhythm, and environment do the work here.

Tendered runs 10 Oct 2025 – 22 Mar 2026 at Camden Art Centre, London, UK

B-SIDES, LONDON, UK

b-sides is a group show devoted to the work that usually stays off-record. Organised by Hannah Perry, it brings together studio pieces made between projects, outside deadlines, and art markets. With artists including Jesse Darling, Mark Leckey, Tai Shani, Hannah Perry and Jenkin Van Zyl, the works on show are described as “made between projects, alongside exhibitions, are the outlaws of the studio”. With the intention of being more experimental, unresolved, or searching than what we might be used to seeing from each.

b-sides runs 24 January – 27 February 2026 at Calcio, London, UK

GUANYU XU: I DREAMT OF THIS AND THERE WILL BE MORE, SAN FRANCISCO

A regular on this list, in photographer Guanyu Xu’s I dreamt of this and there will be more,  borders, homes, windows and paperwork become quiet instruments of control, shaping how queer and migrant bodies learn where they can – and can’t – exist. Collage and photographic fragments slide between public and private, fantasy and administration to expose a condition of managed freedom where identity and intimacy are constantly renegotiated. 

I dreamt of this and there will be more runs 10 January – 28 February 2026 at re.riddle, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, USA

KALPESH LATHIGRA: THE LIVES WE DREAM IN PASSING, MUMBAI, INDIA

London-based Kalpesh Lathigra brings his quietly searching photographic practice back to India for his first solo exhibition there. Spanning three interlinked bodies of work, the exhibition moves between Mumbai’s streets, found studio portraits from Gujarat, and the interior spaces of Junagadh hotels – places where memory, migration and inheritance overlap. Working between documentary and fiction, Lathigra resists neat ideas of home, nostalgia or belonging. Instead, photographs drift, repeat, and reappear, carrying the weight of family history while alert to distance, dislocation, and the impossibility of return.

The Lives We Dream in Passing runs 12 February – 3 March 2026 at NCPA Photography Gallery, Mumbai, India

JOSH ARONSON, PHOTOBOOK SPEED DATE, SAN FRANCISCO

Photobook Speed Date flips the awkwardness of networking into something genuinely worth leaving the house for. Devised by Miami-based artist Josh Aronson, the format borrows from speed dating, but instead, participants bring a photo book or art book and rotate through short, timed conversations. Here, the photo book isn’t simply a commodity or status object; it’s a social tool to meet new people over shared interests.

Photobook Speed Date takes place on 12 February 2026 at SF MoMA, San Francisco, USA

LAISUL HOQUE: THE GROUND BENEATH ME, LONDON, UK

Laisul Hoque relocates his bedroom into the gallery, built to the exact footprint of the original; the room becomes a holding space for a year spent moving between London and Dhaka, amid political unrest and a father’s failing health. Here, its absence that does most of the work: the unmade bed, a lampshade shaped like Bangladesh’s parliament, boarding passes drawn over with fragments of memory. Part installation, part archive, part confession, The Ground Beneath Me treats domestic space as a pressure point where grief, migration and politics coalesce.

The Ground Beneath Me runs 6 February – 12 April 2026 at The Nunnery Gallery London, UK

CHRIS GLICKMAN: THE LAST AMERICAN PASTORAL, LONDON

An exhibition of new works by Chris Glickman dissects how American identity is rehearsed, staged, and endlessly re-performed. Drawing on photo-conceptualism and the visual afterlife of the Classical Western canon, the images move from civic architecture to artists’ colonies and curated nostalgia, tracing the myths that prop up empire long after belief in it has thinned. It’s sharp, funny, and uncomfortable by design, treating spectacle as both subject and symptom. An exhibition of the works will be shown at (lab)oratory, a new space by photographer Jordan Hemingway and Purple Martin Studio. While the book launch will take place at the beloved Reference Point.

The Last American Pastoral (exhibition) runs 13 February 2026, Ezra Street, London, UK. The book launch takes place on 6 February at Reference Point, London, UK

EMPIRE, NEW YORK CITY, USA

Curated by Jed Moch, Empire looks at what power leaves behind when its centre slips away.  The exhibition threads together works by Sarah Charlesworth, Richard Prince, Sam Lipp, Nicholas Sullivan and Valentina Vaccarella to probe how images circulate, settle, and linger. Drawing a line from the Pictures Generation to now, appropriation becomes a tool for exposing the seams in mass media, identity and control. 

Empire runs 23 January – 28 February 2025 at Anonymous Gallery, New York City, USA

ASAMOTO: GRILLED DIAGRAMS, LONDON, UK

Aki Sasamoto’s first UK institutional solo turns cooking into choreography and systems into hazards. The site-specific exhibition centres on a custom-built, oversized griddle – part sculpture environment, part performance set – activated through live performances where ingredients are turned into temporary compositions, and Sasamoto continues her exploration of the poetics of everyday actions. Drawing from street food carts and televised kitchens, here, any attempt at control is immediately undermined. 

Grilled Diagrams runs 4 February – 19 April 2026 at Studio Voltaire, London, UK

ANGÉLIQUE HEIDLER: ANGER ABBEY, LONDON, UK

Anger Abbey brings together sculpture, printmaking, painting, and Paris-based artist Angélique Heidler’s first short story in her most expansive exhibition to date. Anchored by her largest painting so far, the show unfolds across image, object, and text.

Anger Abbey runs 30 January – 27 February 2026 at Dorp Projects, London, UK