From staged interiors and constructed landscapes to live portraits and long-term collaborations, this month’s exhibitions examine how things are created, whether that’s images, communities or identities. Across London, New York, Marrakech, and beyond, there’s a mix of approaches, with some works made over years while others come to life in real time. What connects many of these shows is a shared focus on process – how something can come into being, and what changes and evolves as it does. Until next month!

CHRISTELLE OYIRI, RUN IT BACK, LONDON, UK

In Run It Back, artist and DJ Christelle Oyiri treats the body like a track to be sampled, stretched, cut, and looped. Flesh, data, and desire coalesce into one another as BBL corsetry meets crinoline and avatars bleed into bronze. A central film splices internet detritus with surgical close-ups and DJ logic, folding Black cultural production into a lineage of extraction and remix. Around this, cast bodies mutate mid-state: part-human, part-render, caught between permanence and upload. Here, Oyiri asks who owns the image when identity is endlessly re-edited. 

Run It Back runs from 29 April to 13 June 2026 at Gathering, London, UK 

VINCA PETERSEN, HULALA, LONDON, UK

Photographer Vinca Petersen maps four years living on the Isle of Skye, off Scotland’s northwest coast. Just shy of her 50th birthday, Petersen made the decision to sell everything, start again, and build a home by hand with the support of others around her. In this portrait of home and collectivity, curated by Gem Fletcher, photographs sit alongside text and ephemera, exploring “change and upheaval… the space between independence and living in community, strength and vulnerability and old traditions and new rituals”.

HULALA opens 15 May 2026, 6pm as part of Peckham 24 at Rabbet Gallery, London, UK

ARTHUR JAFA & RICHARD PRINCE, HELTER SKELTER, VENICE, ITALY

Helter Skelter is a collision between Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince – two artists who handle images as things to take, borrow, change, reclaim, and weaponise. Drawing from film, music, tabloids, and the endless churn of the internet, both pull from the same cultural debris but arrive somewhere different. Jafa’s lens is anchored in Black life and its afterlives; Prince circles the mythology and rot of white America. What’s offered is a portrait of a culture built on appropriation, contradiction, and repetition.

Helter Skelter runs from 9 May to 23 November 2026 at Fondazione Prada, Venice, Italy 

AGNES LLOYD-PLATT, MAKE ME SALINE, LONDON, UK

Photographer Agnes Lloyd-Platt’s debut exhibition make me saline explores an island – both literal and internal. Shot over seven days in Menorca, the black and white images move between distance and intimacy, using landscape to trace isolation, connection, and the pull of the self. The images are paired photographs with sculptural furniture and objects from Monument’s collection. 

make me saline runs 14 – 28 May 2026 at Monument, London, UK

LE MAI DE LA PHOTO 2026, MARRAKECH, MOROCCO

After a 20-year hiatus, Le Mai de la Photo Marrakech was revived in 2024 and now unfolds as a city-wide programme, sprawling across the city. First launched in 2000 by Sakina Rharib, the programme spans institutions, independent spaces, and places in between, bringing local and international practices in a month-long celebration of photography.

Le Mai de la Photo 2026 runs 29 April – 31 May 2026 in Marrakech, Morocco 

ÅSA JOHANNESSON, THE QUEERING OF PHOTOGRAPHY, EDINBURGH, UK

Shot on a large-format plate camera, Åsa Johannesson’s portraits borrow the language of classical studio photography – pose, composition, control – and gently unpick it. Figures, props, and even Roman statues shift between roles, rehearsing identity as something performed, not fixed. Developed over a decade with London’s LGBTQ+ community, the work accumulates through subtle shifts in gesture, gaze, and proximity. Here, “queering” is a method to play and rework how bodies are staged, while also asking how desire sits within the frame.

The Queering of Photography runs 1 May to 27 June 2026

MARTIN WONG, POPEYE, NYC, USA

Late Chinese-American painter Martin Wong’s Popeye centres on a rarely seen body of work where the famed cartoon sailor becomes a recurring cypher, pulled through Wong’s wider visual language of text, symbol, and subculture. Nine motorised Popeye sculptures anchor the show, looping somewhere between shrine and spectacle, cartoon, and totem. Around them, drawings and paintings trace Wong’s long-standing fascination with comic books, tattoo iconography, and vernacular image-making, where “low” and “high” collapse into the same register. 

Popeye runs 18 April – 30 May 2026 at P·P·O·W, NYC, USA

DEVLIN CLARO, CRUSHING, NYC, USA

American photographer and director Devlin Claro stages New York City through an uncanny lens. Shot largely in Queens, the work leans into the outer borough as a “middle world”. Parks, bridges, and empty streets become sets that are carefully constructed or subtly reenacted, hovering between documentation and fiction. 

Crushing runs 30 April to 13 June 2026 at Donald Ryan Gallery, NYC, USA

CLÉMENTINE SCHNEIDERMANN & CHARLOTTE JAMES, FFASIWN, CARDIFF, UK

Working as Bleak Fabulous, Schneidermann and James have collaborated with young people in the South Wales valleys since 2015 – building images together that sit between fashion, portraiture, and performance as a way of rewriting how the region is seen. Ffasiwn traces that evolution, from early workshop-led shoots to more recent work, alongside films and a reconstructed working men’s club that puts the process on display. It’s collaborative at its core, with skills shared, images co-authored, and authorship stretched. But what holds it together is continuity: the same people, growing up inside the work itself.

Ffasiwn runs 23 May 2026 to April 2027 at the National Museum Cardiff

CARRIE MAE WEEMS, THE LONG GOODBYE, LONDON, UK

The seminal Carrie Mae Weems traces migration through water’s movement and memory. Commissioned for V&A East, The Long Goodbye follows the emotional and material currents that shape how people arrive, leave, and begin again. Rivers, tides, and crossings hold the weight of separation, encounter, and reinvention. Set against East London, the film expands local histories into wider, transatlantic routes, where identity is continually formed through movement. 

The Long Goodbye runs 18 April to 18 October 2026 at V&A East Museum, London

HOW BEAUTIFUL THIS LIVING THING IS, NYC, USA

Taking the late artist Peter Hujar as its centre, How Beautiful This Living This Is unfolds through the artists who moved around him: friends, lovers, collaborators, those he mentored and those who influenced him in return. Through this network of images and practices held together by intimacy as opposed to chronology, portraiture, collage, performance, and photography all blur into something shared. 

How Beautiful This Living Thing Is runs 22 April to 30 May 2026 at Ortuzar, NYC, USA

SHANIQWA JARVIS, ONLY LOVE WILL BREAK YOUR HEART, LONDON, UK

The first UK solo exhibition by American artist Shaniqwa Jarvis, bringing together 15 new works that push photography beyond a flat image. Using floral motifs, layered compositions, and reflective surfaces, the work moves through grief, memory, and resilience while questioning how we look and what looking does. Images are treated as objects: handled, built up, and encountered physically rather than passively viewed. In the basement, an installation reconstructs two of Jarvis’ childhood spaces, while a short film weaves archival footage with reflections on labour, health, and making a life in New York. Throughout the show, Jarvis treats spectatorship as active, something that is constantly shaping the work in real time.

Only Love Will Break Your Heart runs from April 30 to June 7, 2026, at Public Gallery, London, UK

JERMAINE FRANCIS & LINN PHYLLIS SEEGER, CHIRAL DEFLECTIONS, LONDON, UK

Building on an ongoing collaboration, the exhibition brings together the two distinct but aligned approaches of Jermaine Francis and Linn Phyllis Seeger. Francis’s “CYMKISS_BLACK_0: REGISTER FUGITIVITY” breaks the image apart, using fragmented stills to refuse a singular, readable body, and pushing against the idea of the Black subject as fixed or easily consumed. Seeger’s “true idle” takes a different route, working through video sculpture to unsettle how we move through images. Her focus is on the navigation of them – scrolling, looping, drifting – where time flattens and leaves the user in a kind of suspended continuous motion that ultimately goes nowhere.

Chiral Deflections runs from 11 to 19 May 2026 at the Meadow Conservatory Exhibition Space, Mason & Fifth, London, UK

THE INSTITUTE OF QUEER ECOLOGY, I WISH WE HAD MORE TIME, VIENNA, AUSTRIA

34 artists, scientists, writers, and performers explore loss across ecological collapse, queer history, and intimate life. Here, climate breakdown, broken symbioses, missed connections, and fading relationships converge on the same site of inquiry. Rejecting both anthropocentrism and one-dimensional apocalypse narratives, the show instead leans on relation, care, and continuity to create an archive of what disappears but also what could remain.

I Wish We Had More Time runs 10 April to 9 August 2026 at KunstHausWien, Vienna, Austria

MAKING APPEARANCES, LONDON, UK

Making Appearances curates a cross-generational lineup – from Cindy Sherman and Helen Chadwick to Zanele Muholi and Martine Gutierrez – tracing how the image has been used to construct, distort, and reclaim identity. The earlier works push against fixed ideas of femininity, the body, and the domestic, and what follows builds on that, asking questions of race, queerness, memory, and self-mythology. Each work reminds us to refuse an image at face value: that identity is something rehearsed, performed, and continuously rewritten.

Making Appearances runs from  26 April to 27 September 2026 at The Arts Club, London, UK