Tate Britain

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories.  To walk into the London-based artist’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches; you’re safe here, protected, just like Barrington felt as a kid with his grandmother. You’re brought into her home, her embrace. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. But the fun soon stops. The final space houses a dilapidated shop, built to the dimensions of an American prison cell, surrounded by chain link fencing. Its shutters creak open and slam shut automatically. This is a violent shock, a testimony to the dangers facing Black lives in the West: the police, the prison system, the barely concealed injustice.  After all the music and refuge of the rest of the installation, here, it’s like Barrington’s saying: ‘You want this? You want the carnival, the music, the culture? Then acknowledge the pain, the fear, the mistreatment, the subjugation too.’ I don’t think the paintings here are great, but painting’s not Barrington’s strong suit. He excels when he’s collaborating, sampling,...

Like a blast of hairspray to the eyes, the Tate is about to blind you with the ’80s. This expansive, exhaustive and exhausting exhibition features dozens of photographers and hundreds of photographs depicting all the turbulence of that most turbulent of decades. It opens with Greenham Common, the miners’ strike, Rock Against Racism, the poll tax and the gay rights movement. Dozens of black and white images depict riots, protests, banners, shouting and marches. At first it hits all the right spots: anger, resistance, a nation in turmoil and all these amazing photographers there to capture it. But then you realise that half of these photos, these events, are from the 1970s, and it all falls apart. What it does do however is set the tone of the show: by 1980, Britain was so broken, divided and impoverished that the coming decade was going to be a wild ride. The second room is maybe the best in the show: Martin Parr hobnobs with the comfortable classes as they chit chat at soirées and art openings and Anna Fox infiltrates offices to watch deals getting done; while Tish Murtha captures the abject dereliction of life on the dole and Paul Graham brilliantly snaps candid images of filthy, miserable waiting rooms at the Department of Health and Social Security. From there we’re taken on a journey through all the big issues of 80s Britain. The troubles are here in the work of Paul Graham, environmental destruction in Keith Arnatt photos, the everyday reality of poverty rears its...

‘Know thyself’ it says in thick red letters on a wall at this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. Those words, a directive from Ancient Greek priestess Pythia, are a common thread running through all four artists’ work: this is art about the urge, the desperate need, to figure out who you are. Pio Abad comes first, with a display exploring colonial history, lost narratives of oppression and the role of museums in perpetuating both. Abad spent time in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, diving into the archive and store rooms for hidden stories. Here he combines objects from the collection with his own reactions to them. There's a bloody, violent watercolour from an 1897 expedition to Benin, a vast drawing of a deer hide, marking the first contact between Native Americans and British colonists, there are recreations of jewellery from the collection of kleptocrats Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, bladed weapons from Mindanao in the Philippines. Taken together, this acts as an archive of centuries of global upheaval, colonial violence and political unrest. But in trying to take in everything from Pocahontas to Benin to Tsarist jewellery to museum collections to contemporary conflicts, it ends up pretty unfocused and unclear, like eight different exhibitions happening at once. Glasgow-based Jasleen Kaur’s installation is a space for gathering. A huge carpet sits under a false ceiling littered with objects: bottles of Irn Bru, Scottish money, pamphlets for the Indian workers union of Glasgow....

Over the past few years we’ve been awash with Wicca, wallowing in witchcraft and overwhelmed with the occult. To capitalise on the trend for all things pointy hatted and spiritual, Tate Britain is finally giving much-overlooked radical English artist Ithell Colqhoun a major show. Colqhoun was a practicing occultist who used myth, magic and surrealism to explore the idea of divine feminine power through painting, drawing and tarot.

A career-spanning exhibition of video and animation artist Ed Atkins, in which visitors will be able to explore paintings, writing, embroideries and drawings, alongside the acclaimed artist’s moving image works.

2025 will see the launch of the most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s photography in the UK, celebrating the trailblazing surrealist as one of the 20th century’s most urgent artistic voices. Around 250 vintage and modern prints will be on display – including some previously unseen gems – capturing the photographer’s vision and spirit.

This exhibition will put the work of two rivals – and two of Britain’s greatest painters – J.M.W. Turner and John Constable side by side. Although both had different paths to success, they each became recognised as stars of the art world and shared a connection to nature and recreating it in their landscape paintings. Explore the pair’s intertwined lives and legacies and get new insight into their creativity via sketchbooks, personal items and must-see artworks.