Tate Britain

Multimedia performance duo Hylozoic/Desires – aka Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser – use their work to explore both the past and the future via experimental poetry, music and moving images. This new Tate Britain exhibition sees them dive into the lost archive of the Inland Customs Line, a 2,500 kilometre hedge grown by the British Empire in the 1800s that separated the British-occupied Bengal Presidency from independent states in a bid to prevent smuggling – and keep the Brits at their most powerful. Cast through Hylozoic/Desires’ lens, the hedge becomes a poetic and political space with continued relevancy in our own divided timeline.

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.

Regarded as one of the UK’s most influential contemporary artists, this new exhibition at Tate Britain surveys Ed Atkins’ career to date, showcasing 15 years of work spanning computer-generated videos, animations, sculpture, installation, sound, painting and drawing. At the heart of it is a series of 700 drawings on Post-It notes, each delicately stuck in place by its adhesive strip, arranged and framed in grids. The intimate sketches – sometimes in coloured biro, sometimes in graphite – range from messages of devotion (‘I love you x’) to surreal images, like a bird’s claw clutching a log, a giant match struck between two terrified faces and a human mouth revealing a sharp canine tooth. Created for his daughter during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Atkins describes the on-going Post-It drawings as ‘the best things I’ve ever made’, and you can sense the deep affection and care that went into making them. These heart-warming works serve as emotional anchors, showing the deeply personal yet universal concerns that underlie Atkins’ broader exploration of technology and identity.  Throughout the exhibition, Atkins’ voice is unmistakable. He even writes the wall labels in the first person. In many of his video works, Atkins is represented by digital avatars in life-like renders, as visitors are guided through a landscape of CGI projections, installations of moving bed sheets, corridors of period costumes hanging on clothing racks and a muted 24-hour television broadcast of Sky...

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image. In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed. In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra’s career, everything is voluminous. It’s not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra’s hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room’s many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra’s subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today’s context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it’s a style that feels a little...

Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show. Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group’s British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn’t join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave. Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun’s output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour. Standout moments are...

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.