Tate Modern

‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture. An earlier incarnation of the exhibition in 2020 fell prey to Covid restrictions after only five weeks and in the intervening time its narrative has grown, reflecting Muholi’s importance as a creative force for change. Muholi was born in South Africa in 1972, during the apartheid era, a time of rigid racial and social segregation. The exhibition explores the harsh implications of having binary divides imposed on people; whether of race, gender or sexuality, and the scars those leave. As you progress through the rooms, there’s a sense of travelling towards a sense of the subjects’ (and Muholi’s) healing and wholeness. The first room is not for the faint-hearted. ‘Aftermath’ is a black-and-white print of a close up of an anonymous torso, gender undisclosed, hands protectively clasped in front of genitals. The pants displaying the legend ‘Jockey’, at odds with the angry scar running down the right thigh, held together by numerous stitches. But even in such bleakness there’s wit. ‘Not Butch but My Legs Are’ points the camera at Muholi’s slippered feet cradling a black coffee, with hairy l

Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed. He came out of west coast art school CalArts in the 1980s with countless ideas about performance, minimalism and humour. He howls into rickety wooden megaphones, builds impossible birdhouses, advertises himself as a medium with ectoplasm spurting from his nose. He uses cardboard and whoopie cushions, creates an installation about a mythical monkey island. All of it surreally explores dozens of clashing ideas about belief, psychology and behaviour. It's the project he’d spend the rest of his career pursuing. In the late 1980s he got into the idea of adolescence. He plays with heavy metal imagery in amazing, juvenile banners, he defaces history textbooks, he draws piles of garbage, he recreates images from high school yearbooks, he makes installations out of stuffed toys that are filthy and gross (some of which were used for the cover of Sonic Youth's 'Dirty'). Adolescence is an in-between place where people are still being moulded, still have potential to undo the damage. The past is a place that’s constantly longed for, but impossible

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space. The Korean artist’s machine isn’t useless, it produces, it makes products. Hung from the ceiling of the Turbine Hall, stretched taut on metal frames, are countless ‘skins’; ripped, clay-coloured fabrics which look like leather made from some unknown creature…maybe even made from humans. And that’s the point. By dragging the Turbine Hall’s industrial past back into the present, reanimating the corpse of Britain’s power, she’s talking about the human cost of industry, the shocking violence of manufacturing, the exploitative drive of capitalism. This is where it ends up: a broken, rusting machine spewing out vile, useless products at shocking human cost. Over the course of the exhibition, more skins will be produced and hung grimly from the ceiling. Does it look a bit like a steampunk laundrette, or the world’s least appetising butcher shop? Totally, but it’s still the best Turbine Hall installation for years. The machine itself looks like a flayed body, its flesh suspended from the rafters, its blood and plasma splashing on the concrete, its turnine a faltering, exposed heart; these are the remains of industry, the decrepit, shattered limbs of a manufacturing past that has been left to rot. It’s like all of modern society being forced to look in the mirror, and finding only a corpse staring

Emily Kam Kngwarray is a renowned artist hailing from Australia who pours her experiences as a senior Anmatyerre woman from the country’s Utopia region into her works. This exhibition will take you into her homelands through textiles, paintings, film and audio, covering both land and ancestral heritage.

Celebrating the centenary of one of modern art’s most iconic works, ‘Picasso: Three Dancers’ aims to bring the Spanish painter’s masterpiece to life in this exhibition.

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

Pictorialism îs known as the first international art photography movement and this exhibition will take curious minds inside the scene, exploring how it developed around the world between the 1880s and 1960s.