Things to do in London today

Join the biggest Chinese New Year celebrations outside Asia at this massive street party. Hundreds of thousands of revellers will flock to the West End for festivities that kick off with a colourful lion and dragon-filled parade that progresses down Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue and through Chinatown. Then, head to Trafalgar Square for free stage shows including martial arts displays, traditional dances, and Chinese pop performances. There's also a family zone in Leicester Square for activities including arts, crafts and dressing up. The festivities culminate with fireworks and techno lion dances as darkness falls.

Yes, nobody – apart from possibly children – looks forward to the February half-term, but at least it’s invariably blessed with the Southbank Centre’s Imagine festival, a mix of family-oriented shows and workshops, play experiences and exhibitions, music, art and literature that’ll keep youngsters diverted February 11-21. There are events for kids of all ages (from babies to pre-teens) with many of them free, ranging from communal singalong sessions to dance workshops.  Highlights of the 2026 edition include the self-explanatory An Evening with Jaqueline Wilson and Rachael Dean (Feb 15) where the legendary childen’s author and her illustrator will discuss their works; Quentin Blake’s Mrs Armitage on Wheels (Feb 18-21) is a new puppet-based musical based on Blake’s book; the Unicorn’s fun The Princess and the Pea (pictured) will be calling in Feb 14-20; The Show for Young Men (Feb 13-15) is a funny, heartfelt physical theatre show for older children about contemporary masculinity; and for young ’uns there’s a day of musical performances from CBeebies stalwarts Andy and the Odd Socks (Feb 15). There’s plenty more besides including a significant number of free shows – check the Southbank Centre website for full listings.

Did you know that the samurai believed gender and sexuality were fluid, and that they practically invented the concept of being non-binary? Because I certainly didn’t. This progressive view was one of many riveting – and surprising – things I learned at the blockbuster Samurai exhibition at the British Museum.  You don’t have to be a history buff to find Samurai intriguing – I’m not a medieval period obsessive, but like a lot of Zillenials I am a big fan of all things Japanese. This exhibition of treasures from Nihon, therefore, understandably appealed to me, and I suspect this will be the case for anyone who has spent hours trawling the internet for the perfect santoku knife or vintage Comme des Garçons jacket. There’s a lot crammed into the exhibition, which outlines the past 1,000 years through 280 objects and pieces of digital media, following the rise of the samurai from fierce mercenaries in the 1100s, through to their reign as an aristocratic social class from the 1600s to the 1800s. Examining the enduring legacy of the Japanese warriors in the present day, Samurai illustrates how the image of the noble fighter has been mythologised, altered and co-opted over the years, sometimes for nefarious means (as seen in a chilling Nazi pamphlet promoting the relations between Japan and Germany).  an incredible selection of ornate helmets resemble sculptures more than headgear Many of the artefacts on display are stunning – from intricately decorated partition screens, to...

Did you know London’s original Chinatown wasn’t located in its current spot next to Soho, but was actually a bit further east in Limehouse? Celebrate the Lunar New Year a stone’s throw from Chinatown's roots at the London Museum Docklands, who’ll be running a free festival on the February that’s suitable for all the family. You’ll be able to immerse yourself in Chinese folktales, try your hand at crafts and workshops, and sit back and marvel at the dragon dance. While the event is free entry, booking is required for some workshops.

The Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew Gardens is taking a voyage to China this February, courtesy of the latest annual mind-bending orchid display that takes over the iconic glasshouse each year. As ever, the exotic display will celebrate the natural beauty and biodiversity of its subject country: China is home to thousands of varieties of orchid, plus vast amounts of other flora and fauna besides.   Look out for sculptures of dragons and Chinese lanterns, as well as intricately woven plant installations. There’ll also be  ticketed after-hours events with live Chinese music, food, cocktails and dance performances.  Entry to the display is included in general entry to Kew Gardens.

A new free photography exhibition illustrates the beauty and fragility of the Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland that sprawls across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Over 60 images, captured by two of Brazil’s leading documentary photographers, will be displayed. Visitors will discover the Pantanal’s wonderful biodiversity – which includes jaguars, howler monkeys, caiman and marsh deer – alongside the ravages of wildfires and deforestation. 

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

Old Spitalfields Market for Lunar New Year with a weekend packed full of workshops, performances and shopping. On the programme will be all sorts of activities suitable for adults and children, including an Asian makers market, traditional Lion Dancing, dumpling making, lantern making and calligraphy workshops. All of the art workshops are free, and there are also plenty of independent shops, street food and restaurants to explore throughout the weekend.

The Natural History Museum is capable of turning in some pretty giddy exhibitions: notably, the recent-ish Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature revolved around a series of fictional magical animals invented by JK Rowling. Fair warning, though: the venerable museum’s first ever space-based exhibition is pretty sober stuff, that steadfastly refuses to sensationalise its subject. If you want to know what an alien invasion might look like or how realistic Star Wars is then there isn’t a lot for you in Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? But if you’re interested in the actual question ‘is there life out there and how would we detect it?’ then this is the exhibition for you, made with the usual sophistication and care that defines the NHM’s temporary exhibits (which are always considerably less faded and more contemporary than its permanent collections). The entire exhibition is dimly lit, with soothing background music playing everywhere – the vibe is serene spaciousness, graceful emptiness and cosmic stillness. We begin on Earth, with the first galleries examining the extraterrestrial origins of life here. Nobody can exactly say how life on Earth first came to be, but there’s little doubt that its building blocks – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and water – were brought to us by asteroids, of which there are several bits here, some of which you can even touch. The carefully curated exhibition instils an appropriate amount of awe Correctly contextualised, it’s hard not...

This review is from 2023. Power Up prices have gone up slightly and the games are changed occasionally. There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There's a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there's 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.If it seems a bit familiar, it should be: Power Up isn't new. The Science Museum did a version of this for Easter half-term every year for a while, but this new version of Power Up is permanent and costs just £10 to access for unlimited, all-day gaming. But even better than that, you can get an annual pass for £15. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to invest in a new Playstation, plus you...

Man and Boy is never going to displace The Deep Blue Sea or The Browning Version or even French without Tears as the quintessential Terence Rattigan work. But this is a truly extraordinary revival, that in its way has a significance that transcends the actual choice of play. Anthony Lau’s production is the first Rattigan I’ve seen that throws off the shackles of naturalism. Even amazing productions of his plays have basically been set in some variant of a period drawing room. But with Lau’s Man and Boy, Rattigan finally joins Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen et al in being deemed a playwright whose work can be given a batshit staging and still stand tall.  Staged in the round, designer Georgia Lowe‘s distinctly Brechtian, wilfully anachronistic set is a billiard table-like spread of green with a smattering of period decor (a wireless, a dial phone). The centre is dominated by a series of metal legged, Formica-looking tables of the sort that I don’t think existed in 1934, the year in which the play is set. And the very long dot-matrix printed financial report deployed at one point is definitely not right. Oh, and on the back wall in an alluring retro font is an actual cast list that illuminates the names and roles of whoever is on stage at the time (aesthetics aside, this is just a bloody good idea.). I don’t think every part of the design is loaded with meaning. But collectively it sets Rattigan free from chintzy tradition, and when combined with Angus MacRae’s wild, jazzy...

Arcadia is just another play you can stage in the same way that the sun is just another thing floating in the sky. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece is a work of burning, ravenous intelligence, and while almost universally acknowledged as his best work, I get why it’s not staged very often.  I think part of the reason is that the late, great Stoppard probably gatekeepered it from half-baked revivals. But it does definitely involve a lot of people talking about maths, and as much as anything else you really need to be able to pull together a cast who can make discussions about the statistical implications of a country estate’s 200 year-old gamekeeping logs really sing. It’s obviously not a play about gamekeeping logs. It’s a play about the unpredictability of humanity, how we’re defined by our transience, our sex drives, and our desire to understand. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is not an attempt to radically reconfigure Arcadia and I doubt anyone would be so foolish as to try – it’s an incredibly specific play. She and her team - notably designer Alex Eales - have however leaned nicely into the Old Vic’s current in-the-round configuration. A bit of furniture aside, they've forgone any attempt to make it look like the country estate on which the play is set, which we visit in the early 19th century and again in the present. Instead we’ve got a revolving circular stage and lights that look like a mobile of the stars – a specific allusion to some lines in the text but also a neat...

‘So… we think this is based on a true story.’ Opening Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads, these words instantly instil a sense of nervousness in the audience, a scepticism in what they’re about to watch. I mean, the cragged stone wall that spans the length of the stage seems pretty realistic. This is a show about cavepeople; caves are to be expected.  Don’t be fooled. It might be set tens of thousands of years in the past, but The Shitheads couldn’t be further from some historical re-enactment where characters dress in animal hides and communicate only in grunts. Instead, Nicholls, along with directors Aneesha Srinivasan and David Byrne, have created a strange, macabre, properly funny piece of theatre about the human condition that ponders on the future as much as the past. The concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘history’ are disrupted almost as soon as The Shitheads starts, when a majestic, ghostly puppet elk canters onto stage. Designed by Finn Caldwell and Dulcie Best and controlled by the cast, it is a breathtaking sight: huge in scale, eerie in look, with fabric trailing from its antlers and suggesting decay. The elk is being chased by strong-headed Clare (Jacoba Williams), and frenetic, jumpy Greg (Jonny Khan). The pair have only just met but bicker like old friends, Greg gleefully goading Clare while also warning her that she should be moving south. ‘The country’s going to die,’ he says. ‘The weather’s going to kill it.’ Clare is uninterested in his premonition of ‘ice...

I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever heard proper walk-on applause in this country before. But the Shadowlands audience erupted as soon as star Hugh Bonneville walked out on stage. Either our stiff upper lipped standards are slipping, there were a load of Americans in, or Bonneville fans are simply very, very thirsty people. Of course I choose to believe the latter, and it’s emblematic of Bonneville’s peculiarly English middle aged charm that the role that’s getting his base so hot under the collar is that of the extremely low thirst CS Lewis. A revival of Wiliam Nicholson’s 1989 play, Shadowlands stars Bonneville as the devoutly Christian Chronicles of Narnia author, and traces his real life romance with the younger American poet Joy Davidman. And it’s largely delightful, not an odd couple meet cute, but a story about a genuine, real connection between two somewhat lost souls. He is a man in his late fifties who lives a life of scholarly bachelorhood, in rooms he shares with his doddery older brother Major WH Lewis (Jeff Rawle). But Lewis – or ‘Jack’ to most people, though his real name was Clive – is also kind and amusing. He’s hardly a monk, and indeed we learn that his inability – or lack of desire – to form attachments with women can in part be traced to trauma at the early death of his mother. Maggie Siff’s Davodman is self-possessed and fiercely intelligent. She is brave but vulnerable, travelling the world with her sweet young son Douglas, her promising start as a...

Everyone knew there was more to the late Chadwick Boseman than Black Panther, but even so it was somewhat startling when Deep Azure – a play he wrote in 2005 – popped up on the winter programming schedule of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Boseman’s playwriting career fell by the wayside as his acting one took off, and from recent interviews with his widow Taylor Simone Ledward – who had tragically little time with him before his death from cancer – it’s apparent that she wasn’t especially familiar with this work until the Globe asked to stage it. And why would she be? Deep Azure was, relatively speaking, his most successful play, but it only received one staging in Chicago. There is undeniably something random about how by far its biggest production to date is at a candlelit Jacobean playhouse in London, 21 years on. Actually, though, the fit with the Globe makes sense beyond being a show that director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu was keen to stage. Boseman’s play is not only written in street poetry-esque rhyming verse, but it features a ghost (kind of), a revenge plot and even actually quoted passages from Hamlet. Like Hamlet, it’s set in the aftermath of a death, that of Deep (Jayden Elijah), the free-spirited lover to Selina Jones’ intense Azure. He was killed by a cop, and she’s now stuck in a spiral of despair, compounded by her own underlying body image issues. She lives with Deep’s friends Tone (Elijah Cook) and Roshad (Justice Ritchie) because she doesn’t trust herself to go home...

I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot. Rosie Elnile’s set is divided into two rooms of the same unremarkable house, with a corridor in the middle. In the lounge, Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is silently playing on a console with his random mate Mel (Alec Boaden). In the kitchen, his teenage sister Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and her friends Jess (Alla Bruccoleri) and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards) are getting ready for a big night out.  The boys are not the focus here. The girls – clever, wordy, neurotic, virgins – are painstakingly crafting a plan to go out and get… snogged. They are smart and irrational, sweet and maddening as they try to naively micromanage their journey to adulthood. They’re treating kissing boys – and maybe more than kissing if it comes to it – as a sort of military operation to be planned, accomplished and ticked off. Deploy troops, storm the building, bring them home. But in part that’s their brains denying their actual horniness – for starters Jess is certainly incapable of vocalising the fact she obviously has a crush on Joel.  It’s hard not to see The Inbetweeners as casting a bit of a shadow here: I’m not saying Battye has even seen or been directly influenced by the C4 sitcom about a similarly aged, similarly neurotic group of boys, but at the least it’s a pretty good reference point for...

Read our review of Dracula HERE.  Kip Williams is not a massive name in British theatre (yet), but the Aussie writer-director is starting to make some serious waves over her. His dizzyingly high tech, Sarah Snook-starring one woman Dorian Gray was a big West End hit last year, this autumn he directs a version of Jean Genet’s The Maids at the Donmar. It seems questionable as to whether we’ll get part two of his one woman Victorian horror trilogy over here – a version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde received mixed notices Down Under – but part three is coming our way in the new year as his take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula lands on our shores. In her first full London stage role since her career making turn turn in The Color Purple over a decade ago, Cynthia Erivo will return home to (hopefully) triumphantly take on 23 different roles in a tech enhanced solo romp through Dracula that plays clever visual homage to the early years of horror cinema.

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

Jim Hacker is finding negotiating old age as baffling as government in this follow up by writer-director Jonathan Lynn to 2010’s Yes, Prime Minister – a stage rendition of the seminal Westminster-set TV satire he co-wrote with Antony Jay. Ex-prime minister Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones), now in his eighties, is master of an Oxford College which he bankrolled and bears his name. We meet him hiring – and immediately clashing with – Black, working-class care worker and Oxford graduate Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John). He’s facing attempts by the college populace to oust him after a series of idiotic remarks. So, of course, he turns to his former permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Clive Francis) for assistance. If the TV series, its sequel Yes, Prime Minister and Lynn’s previous play took aim at the state of British politics, that feels more like window dressing here. Yes, there are some funny takedowns of Brexit and the crassly self-serving nature of the modern political class, but these don’t feel hugely new. Instead, where the play works best is the elegiac tone it strikes. Beneath the wit is a warning: be careful of reaping what you’ve sown. Hacker and Humphrey are still monstrous in their own quippy way – respectively buffoonish and manipulative, they are privileged political dinosaurs of an extinct era. But they are also old men who have fallen foul of the system they helped to create, friendless and family-less. We learn that Humphrey has been shunted into an institution...

This review is from 2017. See official website for the current cast. Okay, let’s just get this out of the way. ‘Hamilton’ is stupendously good. Yes, it’s kind of a drag that there’s so much hype around it. But there was a lot of hype around penicillin. And that worked out pretty well. If anything – and I’m truly sorry to say this – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the US Treasury, is actually better than the hype suggests. That’s because lost in some of the more waffly discourse around its diverse casting and sociological import is the fact that ‘Hamilton’ is, first and foremost, a ferociously enjoyable show. You probably already know that it’s a hip hop musical, something that’s been tried before with limited success. Here it works brilliantly, because Miranda – who wrote everything – understands what mainstream audiences like about hip hop, what mainstream audiences like about musical theatre, and how to craft a brilliant hybrid. Put simply, it’s big emotions and big melodies from the former, and thrilling, funny, technically virtuosic storytelling from the latter. ‘Alexander Hamilton’, the opening tune, exemplifies everything that’s great about the show. It’s got a relentlessly catchy build and momentum, a crackling, edge-of-seat sense of drama, and is absolutely chockablock with information, as the key players stride on to bring us up to speed with the eventful life that Hamilton – the ‘bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a...

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.

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

‘Fun’ is a quality which seems to be all too frequently forgotten by curatorial teams. But it certainly takes pride of place at the Saatchi Gallery’s The Long Now, an expansive, nine- room retrospective which aims to both celebrate its past and reiterate its commitment to championing innovation in the present and future. The show is curated by Philippa Adams, who previously served as the gallery’s Senior Director for over 20 years, and is divided into spaces dedicated to key themes which have underpinned its exhibitions over the last four decades. Abstraction, landscapes, AI and technology, and climate change are all given their own rooms. They’re populated with works, old and new, by artists with whom the gallery shares a long-running history, as well as commissions from emerging artists.A reinvention of the wheel, conceptually speaking, it may not be, but it’s a bona fide feast for the eyes. Across two floors, each room has been curated and installed with care to ensure every piece in the room can shine - no space feels overstuffed. Adams has clearly given careful consideration to how the works will complement each other, both in terms of colour and scale, which enhances the viewing experience and makes you want to linger in every room. It’s a rarity that you find yourself at an exhibition where you genuinely don’t know where to look. However, starting from the very first room, dedicated to mark making and boasting Rannva Kunoy’s marvellous, luminescent,...

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

You could say that Marie Antoinette was the original celebrity. The last Queen of France worked with personal stylists, had her barnet done by celebrity hairdressers, and set the agenda for the fashion of the day. She had her own personal brand – an elegant ‘MA’ monogram – which she plastered all over her jewellery, furniture, belongings, and even most intimate toiletries. Like many celebs today, the queen’s dodgy reputation, founded on obscene rumours of debauchery, promiscuity and gorging on cake, was created by tabloid sensationalism. So it’s only fitting that a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the style of the world’s most fashionable and infamous monarch should be just as fabulous, bold, sparkly and, at times, salacious. Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today. Alongside the myriad guffaw-inducing riches on display (a replica of the most expensive necklace ever made in France is particularly astonishing), mysteries surrounding the queen are confidently dispelled. Did she really say, ‘Let them eat cake’? (No.) Was the coupette glass actually modelled on her breast? (No, but a very realistic porcelain ‘breast bowl’ commissioned by Antoinette is on display.) What appears...

Photography fans are in for a real treat this month, as Nan Goldin’s seminal series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency goes on display in full for the first time ever in the UK. Staged at the St Davis Street branch of Gagosian, the exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of Goldin’s formative photobook, featuring 126 photographs shot between 1973 and 1986. An intimate, wistful portrait of Goldin’s downtown NYC community it includes photographes of pop culture icons like Cookie Mueller and Greer Lankton, shot in Goldin’s signature saturated, moody hues. Don’t miss a very rare chance to see it in all its glory.

‘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.

The radical work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee – known for her fantastical and overtly sexual sculptures made from woven fibres – is at the centre of the upcoming RA exhibtion that spans a century of South Asian art. Telling the story of Indian Modernism, more than 100 works comprising sculpture, painting, drawing, textiles, ceramics and printmaking, from a constellation of avant-garde artists, many whom were Mukherjee’s mentors, friends and family, will be on display. 

Celebrating the centenary of one of Picasso’s most iconic artworks, The Three Dancers, this exhibition explores the Spanish artist’s fascination with performers – including dancers, bullfighters, musicians, acrobats and other entertainers – via more than 45 works ranging from paintings and sculpture to textile and works on paper, some of which are being exhibited in the UK for the first time. They’ll be exhibited in an appropriately theatrical environment too, courtesy of courtesy of contemporary artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, who will transform the Tate Modern’s exhibition rooms into a theatre space that will host a variety of dance and performance pieces throughout the exhibition, including an excerpt from Carmen presented by interdisciplinary arts collective Moved by the Motion, and a site-specific work by flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves.  Picasso exhibitions might be ten a penny in London these days, but this one sounds like it might stand out.   

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.