Things to do in London today

Having debuted in 2024, it looks like Kew’s Halloween trails – from the producers of Kew Gardens’ beloved Christmas trail – is here to stay and a permanent seasonal fixture. It’s a light trail, basically, but a souped up one: we’re promised eerie illuminated trees, ghoulish installations, fire performers and more, with a troupe of actors on hand to stoke up our horrors (in a family friendly way, of course). There are three timeslots: only available in half-term week, Daylight sessions run during the daytime and are intended for younger audiences who want an absolute minimum of spookiness (or simply not be out too late); Twlight slots are between 6pm and 7.30pm and things are definitely getting a bit scarier (ie darker); finally the Moonlight slots run after 7.30pm when it should be fully dark. It’s worth stressing that the trail is suitable for all ages at all times, but certainly there are ways a means of managing the spook factor and fitting it around the bedtime of younger audiences. If none of that’s your bag, there will be a host of activities themed around beloved Julia Donaldson children’s book Zog-themed running at Kew until November 3. Halloween at Kew opening dates Halloween at Kew 2026 begins Friday October 16 and runs until Sunday November 1. From October 16 to October 24 it will run 6pm to 10pm; from Octover 24 to Novemeber 1 it will run 4pm to 10pm. Tickets and pricing Tickets for Halloween at Kew cost £19.50 for adults during off-peak times, or £24 during...

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from Victorian child bereavement to anthropodermic leather. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a bat skeleton mounting workshop, a magic shadow show in West Norwood Cemetery, a five hour immersive forensics workshop, a screening of eerie classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne, and creepy Halloween festival A Danse Macabre. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! Check out the full programme here. 

Bloomsbury has got a formidable reputation for artsy goings on, with bohemian artists and writers making it their stamping ground a century ago. But this neighbourhood's relationship with creativity isn’t just in the past – it’s right here in the present too, as is more than evident with the Bloomsbury Festival, a haven of music, theatre, talks, walks and much more. The festival celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026, with a month-long edition featuring 150+ events at more than 40 venues around WC1, under the theme of ‘Create and Celebrate’.  Keen to learn more about the area? There’ll be a variety of fascinating walking tours throughout the month, including a Trailblazers of Bloomsbury tour (Fri Oct 2), a behind-the-scenes tour of Cockpit Studios (Fri Oct 2), a Dickens-themed musical walk (Sat Oct 3), a Bloomsbury bookshop crawl (Wed Oct 7) and a poetry-focused walk featuring the works of William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, Rimbaud and the Romantics (Fri Oct 9). You can even put your newfound knowledge to good use at a Bloomsbury-themed quiz night (Sun Oct 4).  With the 200th birthday of UCL coinciding with this year’s edition, there’s plenty going on across its sprawling Bloomsbury campus, including ‘Two Centuries Here’, an exhibition exploring the legacy of London’s oldest university. There’s a slew of performing arts events too, including a one-night-only stop at City Lit for fringe theatre hit PATIENT:SOLDIER (Sun Oct 11).  And the festival concludes with some...

A hat in the shape of an upside-down shoe; a dress resembling an inside-out human body; embroidered jackets covered with gorgeous pink roses, sparkling zodiac symbols and vibrant vegetables. Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes that were as surprising as they were beautiful. The V&A has plundered the well of ingenuity that is Maison Schiaparelli in its latest landmark fashion exhibition – the first British exhibition dedicated to the Italian designer, who rose to fame in Paris between the World Wars – and there are some real treasures to be found.  With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019.  Excitingly, many of Schiaparelli’s 20th-century creations appear astoundingly contemporary. Knits from 1927, some of the designer’s first works, are patterned with pretty bows that the TikTok girlies of today would die for. There’s also an incredible gold chainmail headdress which wouldn’t look amiss on Florence Pugh in Dune, or on a ‘medievalcore’ Pinterest board. A shirred form-fitting dress with a visible zip – a...

K-pop, K-beauty, the films of Bong Joon Ho; for the past few years, South Korea has been having a main character moment. The Korean Wave (or hallyu) has already been the subject of a major V&A exhibition in recent years, and is no doubt the inspiration for the British Museum’s new show all about the peninsula. Spanning 2,000 years, from the Bronze Age to the 2010s, Korea is the first major exhibition on Korea’s art and history at the British Museum in over 40 years. Mainly focusing on art and crafts, Korea documents the development of ideas from 300BC up to today. It begins with the golden age of Buddhism during the Goryeo Dynasty (918 – 1392 AD) and takes us right up to the present day, via the Neo-Confucian ideals of the Joseon period (1392 – 1910), and the Korean War in the 1950s. Of course, there are many stunning objects to be seen here, including more than a few treasures not usually seen outside of South Korea. Much of the display comes from the collection of Lee Kun-Hee, the late chairman of Samsung (also the exhibition’s corporate partner). Other bits are loaned from the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.  The olden days stuff is classic British Museum fodder, with many a beautiful ceramic, chonky piece of jewellery and stunning silk painting on display. An enormous and intricate bronze temple bell from 900 AD bulges with carvings of dragons and plants. Orb-like moon jars are mesmeric in their simplicity, their...

Turn picking your pumpkin into a whole seasonal extravaganza at Berkshire's Wasing Estate, which has laid on plenty of fun add ons to the main event. Cast your wish at a wishing well, explore a mysterious witches apothecary, and spot woodland creatures at this whimsical October spectacular. There's also a dining tent on offer, serving up locally grown delights including, naturally, pumpkin soup.

A giant tent is once again springing up on Clapham Common this autumn, ready for locals to get their fill of Bavarian fun. Oktoberfest On The Common is a big operation, with nine sessions packed with live oompah music, DJs, crowd games and a huge Oktoberfest dancefloor. And it's not as sedentary as most beer festivals; guests can take on fairground rides, axe throwing, keg tapping, photo booths and traditional games including hammerschlagen.  The food’s also levelled up this year, with a Bavarian feast on offer featuring everything from bratwurst sausages in brioche buns with sauerkraut and mustard to Bratkartoffeln, pretzels, schnitzel and frikadellen pork burgers. Vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options will also be available.

South London’s World Heart Beat Music Gardens is cementing its credentials as a hidden gem venue in the capital, with its inaugural Silk Road Music Festival. Across three months, the programme will span genres across continents, cultures and centuries with sets from internationally acclaimed artists all celebrating the rich artistic traditions that flourished along the historic Silk Road.  The festival opens with a Sufi Qawwali Night – a traditional, devotional musical gathering – (Oct 3) performed by the Khan Brothers with Ustad Haji Ameer Khan. Other highlights include a fusion of Bengali song and London jazz with Sahana Bajpaie (Oct 4); Anatolian folk music performner Olcay Bayir (Oct 17), Chinese classical traditions with pianist Siqian Li and Guzheng player Kang Yang (Oct 30), American folk music duo Lucine Musaelian & The Khio Trio (Nov 6), South-Asian classical masters Ustad Kamal Sabri and Ustad Tari Khan (Nov 7), an intimate evening with Sudanese singer-songwriter Amira Kheir (Nov 19), a collaboration between jazz pianist Julian Joseph and tabla maestro Alok Verma (Nov 20), and a hybrid of Baroque opera and Persian poetry from Lydia Shariff (Dec 12). 

At Between the Bridges, you'll find a campy spin on Oktoberfest tradition, hosted by drag queen Miss Leigh Ding. Over four weekends of boozy fun, you’ll be entertained by either the tweed-clad ten-piece brass crew Old Dirty Brasstards or high-energy brass band Atomic Brass, blasting out covers of 00s pop hits and 80s classics. There’ll be more music from DJs on the decks. Meanwhile, the kitchen and bar will be pumping out the goods to line your stomach with. Every ticket comes with a free stein. We’re talking two-pint steins of delicious beer and street food so good it’ll make you say, ‘Hell ja!’

Before I enter The Music is Black: A British Story I’m handed a pair of headphones with a sensor on top. These will be my auditory guide through an exhibition that tells the story of Black British music from the past 125 years. As I move through the show, my ears are blessed with the sounds of composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ‘Silly Games’ singer Janet Kay, Sade, jungle pioneer Shy FX and Little Simz. What is a music exhibition without the melodies, after all?  Kicking things off with a bang, the V&A East’s first exhibition explores the trailblazers, visionaries and unsung heroes of Black music in the UK from the 1900s to the present day. From swing and jazz, to jungle, grime and trip hop, no genre goes uncovered. More than 200 objects from the V&A’s collection are displayed, with photographs, instruments, fashion, sheet music and artworks on show.  The Music is Black doesn’t shy away from the murky past. At the beginning, you are confronted with the horrifying realities of slavery and colonialism – from a graphic showing the volume of slave ship voyages through the 16th to 19th centuries, to the 1633 Royal charter legalising the trade of enslaved Africans. There are items, like an Ethiopian prayer book, marked as looted by British troops (although there’s no mention of returning it). The stark opening is a grave reminder that early protest music paved the way for the tunes we listen to today.  It’s a comprehensive and triumphant ode to some of the best...

A baker, a witch and a boy with a cow walk into the woods. It sounds like the set-up to a dodgy Christmas cracker joke, but plenty of Londoners already know how this one ends, given Jordan Fein’s lavish revival of Sondheim’s subversive fairytale musical Into the Woods spent last year packing out the Bridge and hoovering up Oliviers. Now it’s crossed the river to the Noël Coward with a mostly new cast, and it’s every bit as good.  Sondheim and book writer James Lapine throw Cinderella, Jack, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood into the same forest as a childless baker and his wife, and then ask what happens after ‘happily ever after.’ It’s the show’s first West End run since 1991, and if your only previous encounter with it is Meryl Streep and James Corden on Disney+, you’re in for a much stranger night.  Kate Fleetwood is back as the Witch and she owns every inch of stage. She first appears looking thoroughly fed up, like the cynical aunt you only see at Christmas who’s had beef with your parents for decades. She stands on the kitchen table barking orders at the Baker and his Wife, then sprawls across the counter to finish the job, lounging as if she’s on a sunbed while they scurry about beneath her. The Baker and his Wife are petrified, but Fleetwood keeps slipping in moments where she’s a bit ridiculous, even a bit sad, and those are what makes her more memorable than a panto baddie.  John Dagleish and Laura Pitt-Pulford are new as the Baker and his Wife, and they’re a...

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward nouveau riche interloper Lopakhin.

The thrill of slogging up three flights of steps to the Royal Court’s tiny experimental Upstairs studio is that you never know what you’ll find at the top. Happily, debut playwright Joy Nesbitt’s excellent ancestry drama has a scenario that bites from the get-go, and never relaxes its grip. It unfolds in a slave cabin on a cotton plantation in South Carolina, which is now a trendy Airbnb complete with Live Laugh Love poster and a pregnant White superhost Nora, (‘I’m a sympathetic vomiter!’) who is painfully anxious to welcome Talulah, a young Black Londoner into this devastatingly awkward space. Tallulah claims she has come to the slave cabin to ‘really disconnect and, you know, find purpose I guess’. But actually she's here to commune with her ancestress, Ginnie Good, a slave who birthed eight children in this very cabin. In a stirring invocation, Tallullah hangs bottles on the blossoming tree in the dirt patch outside and summons her, chanting ‘I have a right to the tree of life’. Back in 1862, the US Civil War is raging audibly and Ginnie is trying to soothe her baby girl. The women face powerful dilemmas in different eras while briefly sharing the same space.  Nesbitt conjures up all the drama you can find in a slave cabin-turned Airbnb, which is a lot: cringe comedy; morally bankrupt personal drama; cultural satire; pathos and female heroism; hair-raising spiritual connections. Tonally that’s also a lot and, when I saw it early in the run, Tatenda Shamiso’s lively...

There are some plays that you watch and immediately know what you feel about them, whether that’s a star rating or simple thumb directed north or south. Then there are shows like Nina, Caroline Williams’ metatheatrical, oftentimes absurdist play set in the audition room for an ‘experimental’ production of The Seagull (confusingly also called Nina), where so much thinking is required to understand the production that personal opinion can fall by the wayside.  Exploring huge concepts around power and gender and art, the Battersea Arts Centre’s production twists and ricochets at lightning speed. When I did take that beat to catch my breath, it became clear that whether I enjoyed Nina was the wrong question. I felt infuriated, heartbroken and deeply moved; I’d also laughed more than I had at the theatre in quite a while, those absurd switches from tears to chuckles only making the latter louder. The feeling, instead, was of being jolted – into action, or tears, but definitely into something. A play in six acts, each marked with the drawing of a red velvet curtain and blaring of dramatic orchestral music, Nina gives the audience a peek into the elusive audition process. The four actresses (Maya Bartley O’ Dea, Samantha Begeman, Nina Bowers, Gemma Barnett) are all named, but are listed in the programme as Nina 01, Nina 02, etc. As legendary stage director Goran (Rowan Polonski) encourages the women to mine their lived experiences for truth, the boundaries between reality and...

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard. Well actually maybe ‘plot twist’ isn’t right: it’s more that writer-director Sandberg is obsessed with the idea of bamboozling us, with each new scene in his play determinedly defying expectations and eliciting a bigger WTF than the last. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Especially if your expectation was that you were going to see Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp in the lead role of Dylan, an American teenager who kills two people in a drink driving incident and whose parents agree to the outlandish defence that he was simply too cocooned by privileged to understand the gravity of his actions. And to be fair Schnapp does play Dylan, who is based on real-life Texan teen Ethan Couch. But it’s a supporting role – in the first scene he wanders briefly through his parents’ posh living room while they talk to the very expensive New York lawyer they’ve flown out. Then there’s one set in his bedroom. And that’s kind of it for this version of Dylan. It’s odd: you have to think that having a not-too–big role may have been what tempted Schnapp into making his stage debut. But he’s perfectly good here and could clearly have handled more. Affluenza then abruptly leaps ahead to after the trial, where Dylan successfully escaped with a slap on the wrist. It certainly subverts our expectation of a courtroom drama with a juicy role...

The key to what makes Daniel Bailey’s touring revival of August Wilson’s 1985 play – now at the Lyric Hammersmith – so good is how intimately devastating it is. The sweep of the generational and national tragedy so deftly portrayed by Wilson is always anchored by its impact on one family. At this production’s heart is Ray Fearon as Troy, a fiercely proud Black man whose struggle to support his family and anger at the racism of 1950s America, on the cusp of painful postwar change, becomes destructively entangled with his inability to let go of the past. As he relentlessly builds a fence around his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is he keeping the world out or trapping his family inside? Lily Arnold’s gorgeous set – a two-story house façade, with peeling paint and fading features – is a richly realised domestic space in which the drama feels real and rooted. As characters laugh, argue or fight in the yard, we see others at bedroom windows, on the stairs or answering the phone. At some points, the house pivots 360 degrees – briefly revealing, almost in tableaux, the interior. These small, telling moments, coupled with Khalil Madovi’s soulful sound design and the moments when the cast interrupt the naturalism to sing alone to us, add to the production’s richly textured emotional authenticity. Fearon gives a tour-de-force performance as Troy, his face quickly switching from easy charm to ugly menace when his character feels his authority challenged. He conveys the deep...

It’s shaping up to be a good year for Brit auteur Rob Icke: his superb take on Oedipus wrapped up an acclaimed Broadway run in February and was rewarded with seven Tony nominations; his idiosyncratic version of Romeo & Juliet is a hit and further shows his pull with big names by bagging the UK stage debut of Sadie Sink; and now he’s got a second original West End show lined up for 2026 in The Lives of Others.  If you’re reasonably au fait with global cinema you’ll recognise that this is an adaptation of the Oscar-winning 2006 German film about a playwright and his mistress being surveilled by Stasi agents in ’80s East Germany. It’s the first time Icke – who has adapted many a classic play – has done the same for a film, but the clautrophobic source material built around a small number of characters feels perfect for adaptation, and Icke is an expert with human emotions, often deepeningthe classics. He’s also got some bloody good names here: Bridgerton man Luke Thompson will play playwright Georg Dreyman, with Stephen Dillane as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, the agent somewhat reluctantly spying on him. But the big coup is Keira Knightley, returning to the stage for the first time in 15 years to star as Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman’s actress lover. It’s the big class celebrity drama of the autumn.

Helen Edmundson’s new play Some Woman is described as a thriller, but the experience of watching it is more like a slow strangulation – one that leaves you feeling thoroughly shaken and queasy on the other side.  The ever luminous Anne-Marie Duff plays Julie, a downtrodden mother and divorcee, who puts everyone before herself to such a degree her own needs and opinions are barely a footnote in the minds of her family.  Her ex-husband, Richard (Geoffrey Streatfield), is attempting to chivvy her through the sale of the family home so that he can do it all again with a younger woman. Elder daughter Kate (Hannah Onslow in a cracking stage debut), is sharp-tongued and dismissive – she’s on the fast track to conventional success with a swanky corporate job in Spain, and keen to put as many miles between herself and her dysfunctional family as possible. Younger daughter Ginny (Grace Doherty) is the polar opposite: her mental health struggles make the thought of her leaving home for university seem like an impossibly big mountain.  Stuff’s not much better at Julie’s demanding but dead-end job doing admin in a school. She’s just been overlooked for a promotion that went to some young guy with letters after his name but no common sense.  If it sounds amazingly pedestrian thus far, that’s the point: Julie is an every-woman! But to top it off, she’s had a bad day. An 11-year-old boy called her a ‘fucking bitch’ out of the blue, and Julie takes this as the moment to prove to herself...

The first major West End revival of Edward Albee’s classic play in a decade has a cast to die for, as Billy Crudup and Gillian Anderson play the iconically awful George and Martha, an acidic middle aged couple who invite George’s young colleague Nick and his wife Honey over for a bizarre evening of weird and problematic game playing. And @sohoplace is a wonderfully intimate venue to watch the horrors unfold. The catch is that the show is heavily sold out, though at time of writing there were a decent number of more expensive tickets available across the run. The great Marianne Elliott will direct a cast that’s rounded out by Josh Dylan as Nick, and Phoebe Horn as Honey.

Taking place across The Place, Sadler’s Wells, the Barbican and online, the massive annual contemporary dance festival returns to London this October, bringing groundbreaking artists from South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon, Britain and the Netherlands. Spanning live performance, artist talks, film screenings and more, highlights include Dance is Not for Us at the Barbican Pit, a rare UK performance from Lyon-based Lebanese choreographer Omar Rajeh. Legendary British choreographer Akram Khan will be in conversation with Kevin O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet alongside English National Ballet lead principal Erina Takahashi and first soloist James Streeter. South African dance artist and recipient of the 2026 Venice Biennale Silver Lion Mamela Nyamza will be in town to put on a brand new work at Sadler’s Wells East. Plus much more across the month.     

Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the late Argentinian artist spent seven pioneering decades making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works, and was still making art at the ripe old age of 97 before his death this past May. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.

Got a pesky neighbour who keeps pinching your parking spot? Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s father knew the feeling. In car-clogged Taipei, he came up with an ingenious solution: an inflatable decoy of his Toyota Corolla E100. Whenever he drove off in the morning, he’d leave the blow-up Corolla in its place. When he returned later from work, he’d deflate the decoy, roll it up, stow it in the boot and reclaim his space. He might have to fight for his spot for the next six weeks, though, as his trusty decoy is currently parked at the Hayward Gallery as part of his son’s exhibition, A Life of Navigation. It’s one of four works exploring the strange and ingenious ways we navigate our busy, high-stress urban lives. Working across installation, video, photography and sculptural objects, and often incorporating performance, Chihying approaches those pressures with a sense of humour. Another (literal) aisle Chihying explores in this urban obstacle course is the supermarket. ‘The Jog’ (2014), a two-channel video, sees Chihying don his running gear and jog against the checkout conveyor belt as if it were a treadmill, while an unimpressed cashier looks on. It’s an entertaining take on the endless cycles of consumerism and the repetitive grind of city life. On a more immediate level, all the stretching and athleisure makes it a silent, considerably less sexed-up version of Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ music video. It’s an entertaining take on the repetitive grind of city life...

There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd. The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these...

2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor At the Fire...

Serpentine North will host a major solo exhibition by Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar. The New Delhi-based artist is best known for his body of lyrical films, which move between documentary, travelogue and visual essay while exploring the legacies of decolonisation on the Indian subcontinent, incorporating the themes of violence, power, labour, indigenous rights, memory and censorship.  

A woman pushes a shopping trolley across a cracked, weed-strewn car park beneath an apocalyptic sky. In the distance, a crater has ripped through the tarmac, while in the foreground of the painting, four thuggish military types are crammed into a car. They’re helmeted, masked and donning wraparound shades. Menace tips into farce as their gun-laden belts sag to expose piggy pink builder’s bums. Welcome to the United States, 2026.  This is Parking Lot of Violent Forces and Depressive Positions, one of ten new works in Nicole Eisenman’s latest show at Sadie Coles HQ on Savile Row. The French-born American artist has spent decades turning the mess of contemporary life into cartoon tragicomedy. Eisenman emerged as an artist in New York in the early 1990s, amid the AIDS epidemic and culture wars, and by the late 2000s her work had shifted from the introspective towards the explicitly political: war, recession, protest, climate crisis and the increasingly rancorous state of American public life. This is Eisenman at her most viciously effective. Those sinister goons in the carpark aren’t explicitly identified as ICE agents, but the fistful of zip ties one of them holds suggests as much. It wouldn’t be unfamiliar territory: following Trump’s election in 2016, Eisenman began making paintings about the American right, part of a political commentary that stretches back through the Iraq War and George W Bush’s re-election and, more recently, includes the protests following the murder...

Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery will be filled with apples, hats, pipes and clouds this autumn as it hosts a free exhibition on Belgian surrealist René Magritte. A first major London exhibition of Magritte’s subverside artwork in more than 30 years, it will feature works on paper, sculptures and photography from Magritte’s four-decade-long career, many of which have been loaned by museums and private collectors. These include ‘La Lampe Philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp)’, made shortly before the International Surrealist Exhibition that took place in London in 1936, and last displayed in a landmark Magritte exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 20 years ago. Gagosian’s exhibtiion will also explore Magritte’s legacy via works created specifically for the exhibition by several contemporary artists, including painters Harold Ancart, Allison Katz and Dana Schutz. 

Right, this one is good. But it’s not easy. Then again, I don’t think any of Jenkin van Zyl’s films – or performances, or sculptures, for that matter – are meant to be. The worlds he creates aren’t easy to make sense of, and they’re not places you’d want to live in. They’re grotesque, chaotic, and filled with technologies, rituals and systems that seem to have taken on lives of their own.  His latest creation, Enclosure, has taken over a wing of Somerset House, and comprises of a film and narrative installation that spills out from the screen and into the surrounding rooms, filling them with the signage, photographs and general detritus of a fictional universe. In this world, people known as ‘Donors’ can have replicas of themselves made, called ‘Cherubs’, grown from a single tooth. Stay with me. These doubles were once the basis of a strange kind of tourism where visitors could temporarily inhabit somebody else’s life (‘a little holiday inside someone extraordinary’), as one of the facility’s workers (dressed in a pink milkmaid outfit) puts it. The installation's narrative focuses on Mercy, a former starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, and appears to have been something of a Cherub sensation. ‘Never before has a Cherub attracted such attention’ reads one peeling poster bearing five stars. But by the time Mercy returns to the facility, the good times are over. The place is decaying, the programme has become obsolete, and Mercy is there to terminate her contract –...

New-York based artist Autumn Knight constructs installations and performances inspired by her background in theatre and psychology. In I Can’t Complain, her first major presentation in the UK, she explores the act of complaining and the ways in which it can be cathartic, frustrating and politically empowering. At the centre of the show is an audio installation that collates coversations about everyday irritations, exposing how minor things like food quality can be indicative of deeper inequalities. On select days (October 1,12 and 15), Knight will be in the space for solo performances that delve further into the concept of complaining, asking questions about who gets to complain? And how are those complaints received?