From woven family archives in London and diasporic self-portraiture in Milwaukee to feminist histories in Switzerland and speculative futures in Memphis, many of this month’s strongest shows are concerned with how people hold onto culture, community, and selfhood at a time of increasing instability.

Elsewhere, artists interrogate nationalism, motherhood, digital overload, and the commodification of identity, while others find moments of joy, ritual, and tenderness. Collectively, they remind us of the ways art and photography can both preserve and reimagine the worlds we live in. Until next month!

JOY ZINE LAUNCH

Freya Reeves’ zine, JOY, is a “love letter to the extraordinary people” she met during TransWeek, held in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Alongside an article on trans youth by writer Max Keller and contributions by Trans advocate Dallas Denny and respected photographer Mariette Pathy Allen, JOY brings together unique personal stories from within the trans community.

The launch will be accompanied by an exhibition showcasing a curated selection of stills from JOY, and will take place at Allotment, Ability Plaza, Arbutus Street, E8 4DT on June 3, 7-9.30pm. The zine will also be available in a limited-edition run of 200 copies, available to order here.

TONY ALBERT, NOT A SOUVENIR, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Indiginous artist Tony Albert confronts the ongoing commodification of Aboriginal identity through a powerful survey spanning sculpture, installation, photography, painting, and assemblage. Taking its cue from the museum’s location at Tallawoladah and Sydney’s tourist-heavy Rocks precinct, Not a Souvenir examines how Indigenous culture has been distorted through colonial imagery and kitschy “Aboriginalia.” Yet despite working in a context of oppression and erasure, Albert refuses victimhood. Reclaiming these objects with sharp wit and emotional force, the exhibition transforms stereotypes into acts of resistance, survival and cultural pride, reminding us why Albert as one of the defining voices in contemporary Australian art.

Not a Souvenir runs 21 May – 19 October 2026 at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney

WIDLINE CADET, CURRENTS 40: SEREMONI DISPARISYON (RITUAL [DIS]APPEARANCE), MILWAUKEE, USA

Los Angeles-based Haitian artist Widline Cadet presents her first solo museum exhibition in the US, unfolding a deeply personal meditation on migration, memory, and diasporic identity. Rooted in photography but expanding into video, installation and family archives, Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) began as an attempt to document the artist’s extended family in Haiti before evolving into a living archive. Through repetition, doubling, and carefully staged imagery, Cadet opens up space where presence and disappearance can coexist simultaneously.

Currents 40: Seremoni Disparisyon (Ritual [Dis]Appearance) runs 8 May – 9 August 2026 at Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, USA

AASHA JOHN, AS I WEAVE, LONDON, UK

London-based artist and educator Aasha John’s As I Weave transforms family photographs and oral histories into intricate woven works. Developed during the gallery’s Visible Practice Residency, the exhibition traces connections between Trinidad and London through images that are cut apart, threaded together, and partially obscured. To John, memory is unstable, something carried, reshaped, and occasionally lost through migration and retelling. What emerges is a quietly affecting meditation on inheritance, absence, and the labour of holding family histories together across generations.

As I Weave runs 3 June – 6 September 2026 at Autograph, London, UK

MARIUCCIA SECOL, UNRAVELING, SUSCH, SWITZERLAND

This is the first major institutional retrospective dedicated to Italian artist and activist Mariuccia Secol, a figure whose radical feminist practice has long existed outside dominant art historical narratives. Spanning over 70 years, the exhibition traces Secol’s evolution from post-war paintings haunted by trauma to her iconic textile works, where threads are painstakingly removed rather than woven together. Using aprons, cloth, and domestic materials as tools of refusal, her work explores themes of patriarchy, labour and violence.

Unraveling runs 11 June – 1 November 2026 at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland

SOPHIE GREEN, TANGERINE DREAMS: RITUALS OF BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LIFE, BRISTOL, UK

London-based photographer Sophie Green documents a Britain built through gathering – from traveller horse fairs and Irish dance clubs to banger racing circuits, African spiritualist churches, and beachside subcultures. Shot over more than a decade, the exhibition approaches these communities not as spectacle but through the lens of joy and self-definition. Green’s saturated, immersive images reject narrow ideas of British identity, instead revealing a country shaped by ritual, performance, and collective belonging. 

Tangerine Dreams: Rituals of Belonging in Contemporary British Life runs 4 June – 6 September 2026 at The Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK

CROSS LENS, AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

Cross Lens brings together eight Moroccan and Moroccan-Dutch photographers exploring what it means to belong across borders, languages, and generations. Initiated by Atay Atelier, the group exhibition moves between intimate family scenes, football culture, landscapes, and moments of everyday stillness to examine identity as something lived, not fixed. Previously shown in Marrakech and now arriving in Amsterdam, the exhibition traces the emotional terrain between homeland and diaspora, revealing how memory, ritual, and small gestures quietly shape our cultural identity.

Cross Lens runs 12 June – 12 August 2026 at MAQAM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

FRANCESCA ALLEN, KONKURSAS, BRISTOL, UK

British photographer Francesca Allen turns her camera towards Lithuania’s annual longest-hair competition, where ritual, performance, and femininity collide in unexpectedly surreal ways. Konkursas follows girls and women as their meticulously maintained hair is measured, displayed and ceremonially shaken before judges, transforming a beauty pageant into something closer to contemporary folklore. Balancing humour with tenderness, Allen’s photographs explore how hair functions as identity, aspiration, and cultural inheritance, while questioning the expectations projected onto women’s bodies.

Konkursas runs 2 May – 6 July 2026 at SERCHIA, Bristol, UK

SARA CWYNAR, BABY BLUE BENZO BETA, TORONTO, CANADA

Canadian artist Sara Cwynar transforms the gallery into a collision of showroom, film set, and digital archive. Anchored by the Canadian premiere of her film Baby Blue Benzo (2024), the exhibition spirals outward from the world’s most expensive car into a wider meditation on capitalism, image culture, and the manufactured logic of desire. Combining stock imagery, AI-generated visuals, and fragments pulled from online search culture, Cwynar exposes the instability of value in an era shaped by endless scrolling and algorithmic seduction.

Baby Blue Benzo Beta runs 15 May – 16 August 2026 at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Canada

STILL JOY, KYIV, UKRAINE & VENICE, ITALY

Presented across both PinchukArtCentre and Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Still Joy marks the Ukrainian institution’s 20th anniversary with a group exhibition exploring resilience, intimacy, and collective endurance in the face of ongoing war. Bringing together newly commissioned and existing works by contemporary artists, the exhibition positions joy not as escapism, but as an act of survival. 

Still Joy runs May – November 2026 at PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, Ukraine, and Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy

UNDER THE SKIN, MONTPELLIER, FRANCE

This group show explores the body as both surface and site, where memory, politics, identity, and desire become physically embedded. Bringing together contemporary artists – including Jenkin van Zyl, Tala Madani, Issy Wood, and Sandra Mujinga – working across a range of mediums, the exhibition considers what lies beneath appearances, tracing the emotional and social forces carried within skin itself.

Under the Skin runs 13 June – 11 October 2026 at MO.CO. PANACÉE, Montpellier, France

DAVID UZOCHUKWU, BODIES OF WATER, MEMPHIS, USA

Austrian-Nigerian, Berlin-based photographer David Uzochukwu presents a speculative world where Black bodies become fluid, mythic, and untethered from fixed identity. Bringing together surreal photographic works populated by hybrid figures with scales, fins, and aquatic features, Uzochukwu draws on fantasy, migration, and diasporic histories to imagine transformation as survival. Moving between dreamscape and political allegory, he rejects narratives of displacement and instead propose new possibilities for belonging, resilience, and collective rebirth through water itself.

Bodies of Water runs from 10 June 2026 at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, USA

KEITH PIPER, RED FLAGS, LONDON, UK

Pioneering British artist Keith Piper surveys four decades of work examining race, power, and historical narrative. Red Flags brings together early works from the 1980s Black Art Movement alongside more recent installations and digital pieces, tracing how Piper has continually confronted racism, nationalism, and systems of exclusion across shifting political eras. Moving between archival fragments, protest imagery, and speculative futures, the exhibition reveals an artist persistently questioning who controls history – and whose stories are permitted to survive within it.

Red Flags runs 6 June – 25 July 2026 at Niru Ratnam.

SKYE ALGOSAIBI-JONES, A WAY OF RETURN, LONDON, UK

Saudi-British and Armenian photographer Skye Algosaibi-Jones traces a deeply personal map between the deserts of Arizona and the landscapes of the Gulf, exploring how identity moves across geography, memory, and inheritance. Shot entirely on film and hand-printed in the darkroom, the photographs move through ranches, Bedouin communities, and cowboy subcultures, revealing unexpected echoes between seemingly distant worlds. 

A Way of Return runs 11–21 June 2026 at Wild Trumpets Gallery, Notting Hill, London, UK

BONNES MÈRES, MARSEILLE, FRANCE

This expansive group exhibition explores motherhood not as a universal ideal, but as a shifting cultural, political, and emotional construct shaped across centuries of Mediterranean history. Spanning over 4,000 years, the exhibition moves between ancient fertility figures, religious iconography, and contemporary artworks to examine the cultural depiction of maternal bodies. Featuring artists including Zineb Sedira, Joana Vasconcelos, and Prune Nourry, the artists resist sentimental depictions of motherhood, instead revealing its entanglement with labour, gender expectations, care, and power.

Bonnes Mères runs 18 March – 31 August 2026 at Mucem, Marseille, France

LONDON GALLERY WEEKEND, LONDON, UK

Returning for its sixth edition, London Gallery Weekend once again transforms the city into the world’s largest gallery walk, bringing together more than 120 contemporary galleries across three days of exhibitions, performances, talks, and late-night openings that span London’s major gallery districts – from Fitzrovia and Mayfair to Peckham and the East End.

London Gallery Weekend runs 5–7 June 2026 across participating galleries in London