Tate Modern

There was a sense that anything could happen in turn-of-the-century Germany: a fizzing, crackling energy of potential. When it did finally burst into life, it was in the form of brutal, global warfare. But on the walls of Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is another kind of potential: radical, beautiful artistic expression. The Blue Rider was a Munich-based art collective revolving around Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, the original modern art power couple. Artists from countless backgrounds and disciplines congregated around them from all over Europe, drawn to their borderlessness, openness, genderlessness. The Blue Rider embraced everything new. As a result, there’s not a whole lot of aesthetic cohesion going on here. The opening rooms feature blocky semi-abstraction by Robert Delaunay, shimmering hot pink interiors by Kandinsky, stark architectural geometricism by Lyonel Feininger, beautiful vulnerable portraiture by Elisabeth Epstein, neatly composed street photography by Münter and everything in between. Portraits play on ideas of gender, interiors are intimate and private, street scenes show the encroaching tide of modernity; some artists strive for emotion and movement, others for pushing the form of painting as far as humanly possible. The Blue Rider was a mishmash, a hodgepodge, and sure, a bit of a mess.  And that was by design. Because what was happening in 1911 Munich was the forging of new possible paths towards the future. They were figuring things out.  Th

‘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

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.