Top ten museum exhibitions in London
The best museum exhibitions in London
I am Ashurbanipal: King of the World, King of Assyria
The great king Ashurbanipal was seriously not into lions, absolutely hated the things. The first of many gorgeously detailed Assyrian wall reliefs in this mesmerising exhibition depicts the king firing arrows at fleeing lions and shoving swords through their rearing chests. Lions, you see, represented power and savagery, and no one could hold power but Ashurbanipal, and his savagery, though gruesomely brutal, was anything but wild.
Home Futures
William Morris famously advised: ‘have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’. The Design Museum’s latest exhibition is filled with over 150 domestic designs both useful and beautiful, all created with the intention of revolutionising how we conduct ourselves behind closed doors.
Shadows of War: Roger Fenton's Photographs of the Crimea 1855
In 1855, Roger Fenton arrived in the Crimea on a commission from publisher Thomas Agnew & Sons to photograph scenes and figures from the ongoing Crimean War. After he returned to London, the images were exhibited at four venues in the capital and… that was it. There hasn’t been a London show of Fenton’s creations since 1856.
Living with Buildings
Let’s talk about loos. Internal plumbing. Ventilation systems. Running water. Double-glazed windows and all the other things that make where we live helpful to our health. If you’ve ever found yourself with a household emergency, a bust boiler two days before Christmas or a hole in the ceiling ten mins before a thunderstorm, you’ll know that it’s oh so easy to take a functioning home for granted until the moment it stops working.
Night and Day: 1930s Fashion and Photographs
‘Everything is designed to serve its purpose in the most efficient way,’ intones the Pathé news broadcaster at the start of this exhibition of glorious, glamorous fashion and photography from the inter-war period. Strolling around the galleries of the Fashion and Textile Museum you wonder if that efficiency was directed at creating a new type of woman: streamlined, feminine, modern yet domestic and proficiently beautiful.
Videogames: Design/ Play/ Disrupt
Hearing the title of this exhibition, you’re either going to think: What a great excuse to play eight hours of Journey, just to re-familiarise myself with the NPCs, or: What? Video games? Like Pac-Man?
I Object
Curated by Ian Hislop, this exhibition is the alternative version of Neil MacGregor’s 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' and it's about the age-old urge to fight the powers that be.
Fashioned from Nature
This is the V&A doing what the V&A does best: staging world-class exhibitions of immaculately preserved and presented fashion. This new spring blockbuster covers the way clothing has been inspired by the beauty of nature, but has also exploited and damaged the natural world.
Oceania
Oceania is vast. Hundreds of islands spread out across thousands of square miles of ocean, each filled with countless cultures that lap and overlap. Trying to sum up the whole artistic production of a single culture, let alone multiple, is a stupid, insurmountable task. But here we are, doing just that at the Royal Academy.
Russia: Royalty & The Romanovs
There’s an episode in Matthew Weiner’s series, ‘The Romanoffs’, where descendants of Russia’s last royal family get together on a cruise ship and re-enact the glory days of grand balls and staged entertainment. Those with Romanov DNA lap it up, while two married-in relations find the entire event slightly perplexing. Russia, Royalty and the Romanovs, a new exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery, has the potential to inspire a similar division of response.
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