Things to do in London today

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 16, with bookings opening on August 20. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury. Five iconic London buildings you’ll be able to access for free in Open House 2025 10 Downing Street is opening to the public for exclusive tours during Open House London 2025

London is widely recognised as one of the design capitals of the world. Cementing this title is the annual Design Festival, a colourful and thought-provoking celebration of some of the world's best designers, who interrogate the boundaries of design through events, exhibitions and installations.  This year, the fest will showcase how contemporary design intersects with technology, sustainability, and our shared cultural heritage. Phew. Look out for landmark projects including What Nelson Sees by Paul Cocksedge, which will let you see London from Nelson’s vantage point on top of his Trafalgar Square column and Beacon by Lee Broom, a site-specific sculpture at the entrance of the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, inspired by the area’s Brutalist architecture and the 1951 Festival of Britain that will illuminate when Big Ben strikes the hour across the river. Plus, there’ll be fairs within the fair, like Material Matters, which will take over a whole floor of Space House with designers, brands, and thinkers to explore the importance of materials in design and architecture. As ever, the festival is spread across 11 Design Districts including spots like Chelsea College of Art and the V&A Museum, where the events will reflect the unique identity of each area.

The late Peter Jones’ labyrinth of polychromatic tunnels is returning for another UK tour, stopping in Clapham Common this September for a 36th year. Never been to Colourscape? Self-described as ‘Europe’s most unusual festival’, you wander around its big inflatable neon maze to see what musicians you can find inside. You might happen upon a flautist, a classical guitarist or, new this year, a Balinese gamelan accompanied by a troupe of Indonesean dancers. Who knows!? Those kaleidoscopic innards are designed to surprise. 

Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This year, look out for Rekindling by Compagnie Carabosse (Sep 25-26), a huge fire installation on and around Royal Victoria Dock inspired by the Royal Docks’ role in London’s story. There’ll also be dance performances in the atmospheric Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (Sep 17) and gigs in Crossness Pumping Station (Sep 13).  Old favourites will also be making an appearance, including the Great River Race (Sep 20) from Tower Hamlets to Richmond, where 330 crews from across the world spending the morning speeding down the Thames on wooden rowboats, many of them in fancy dress costumes. While St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sep 6) will let you clamber aboard ancient vessels. You can also visit a mudlarking exhibition, walk and masterclass, take boat tours and listen to special lectures.  Other events include guided walks, photography classes, talks, cabaret, and more: each weekend's activities revolve around a different hub, in the locations of Brentford, The Royal Docks, London Bridge, Greenwich and Kingston upon Thames. Check out the Totally Thames schedule for full details.

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to...

Forget the same old, same old. The annual Future Of Food Festival, hosted by the culinary hotspots of Regent Street and St James’s, has got events galore that are all about the newest, most exciting, and most sustainable bits of the restaurant industry. Join panel talks with industry experts to get some insight into where food is heading in the coming years, tuck into some unique dining experiences and meet some of the most innovative chefs, restaurateurs and suppliers in the country. This year, there’ll be exclusive dining experiences from chefs including Alex Dilling and Rafael Cagali, an 11-course seafood fiesta at Bentley’s Ocean’s Eleven, masterclasses from sustainable booze brands including Sapling Spirits, and On-Street Feasts where you can dine outdoors, enjoying dishes from four different restaurants at the same time. Across the whole of September, the area will be a treasure trove of promotions, with select restaurants offering discounts, while the Discovery Zone will take you on a journey via taste, smell and touch to find out what the future of food is.

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...

During the big men’s sports tournaments, you can count on practically every pub in the city to broadcast matches and fill up with fans. When it comes to the upcoming Women’s Rugby World Cup, though, public places fans can gather at to watch matches remain relatively few and far between. But this year, there is at least one place where you’re guaranteed to catch every single game: the brand new Asahi Open Arms. The fan-focused pub, backed by Women’s World Rugby Player of the Year Ellie Kildunne, is taking residency at The Queen’s Head in Shoreditch for the duration of the tournament. Besides the live screenings, it promises to host grassroots events, like Q&As and exclusive launches. A full programme is on its way soon.

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...

It feels a bit like Oktoberfest all year round at Munich Cricket Club, but it really takes the Bavarian joy up a notch as the season approaches. From mid September til the end of October, the spirit of the fest will take over its Canary Wharf, Tower Hill and Victoria locations. Expect foaming steins, platters of sausage and a live oompah band to get the vibes flying. Dancing on tabletops is encouraged – just be careful not to slip on any saus. The festivities also include the ceremonial tapping of the Oktober barrel, straight from Munich, plus games, silliness and surprises. There's also a bottomless cheese fondue brunch for anyone looking to test their digestive system to its very limits. 

Let’s first acknowledge that there is not a person alive who is currently torn between spending their birthday theatre vouchers on a choice between either Mamma Mia! or Cow | Deer. Even if you have never heard of the great avant-garde director Katie Mitchell, it seems inconceivable that you would book into her Cow | Deer – a play whose publicity information clearly states that it is about a cow and a deer and features no dialogue – and go expecting a night of high-octane commercial theatre lulz.  The caveat, then, is that if you do think Cow | Deer sounds like a horrible idea then I am not here to convince you otherwise. Don’t take a risk on it! You would probably hate it. See Mamma Mia! Admin over, let’s get down to business. For Mitchell devotees and open-minded souls who think the premise sounds wild enough to be interesting, Cow | Deer is a virtuosic foley performance in which a quartet of actors (Pandora Colin, Tom Espiner, Tatenda Matavai and Ruth Sullivan) deploy a colossal array of objects – from hay bales to hot water bottles – to create the sounds of a cow and also a deer.  They’re augmented by sound design from co-creator Melanie Wilson that is heavy on animal noises (lots of birdsong, lots of cows, ie the actors don’t have to moo) and a script from Nina Segal that imposes a degree of discipline and direction and ultimately a rather haunting ‘story’ about humanity’s disruption of ordered nature. An audacious technical exercise the likes of which you’re unlikely...

Ibsen’s 1888 play about a woman named Ellida at the heart of a love triangle between her safe husband Edward and a dangerous ex-lover referred to only as The Stranger gets staged relatively frequently: the last major London production was at the Donmar back in 2017. But it rarely gets the full West End celebrity Hedda Gabler/A Doll’s House/The Master Builder treatment – you’re probably lookig at a late-’70s production at the Roundhouse starring Vanessa Redgrave for its last and really only really big outing in this country. Until now. In a year otherwise dominated by musicals and Shakespeare plays, the Bridge’s big autumn show is a new version of Ibsen’s play but Aussie auteur Simon Stone, that will mark the professional stage debut of Swedish screen star Alicia Vikander as Ellida, joined by big name Brit Andrew Lincoln as Edward (his first show in front of an audience in 16 years, although he did the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol to a webcam and an empty theatre in 2020). It’s hard to know exactly what to expect: Stone’s adaptations are modern, radical and often rather blunt – his Yerma for the Young Vic was explosively good; his Phaedra for the National Theatre was a bit silly; much of his prolific output simply hasn’t been seen in this country. Whatever the case, he’s a good get for the Bridge and if this production could probaby go either way, then that’s part of the Stone magic. 

Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel is a tiny bit like a British feminist version of The Lehman Trilogy, if the three Lehman brothers were replaced by the Roman siblings - three seemingly immortal, semi-allegorical, deeply damaged brothers whose brutal childhoods in the Victorian era have disastrous consequences for the next 150 years of humanity. The first new play in aeons from the author of modern classics Anatomy of a Suicide and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, Birch’s Romans is a bleakly irrelevant epic drama with a touch of Pyncheon-esque humour that centres on Kyle Soller’s Jack – undoubtedly the protagonist – plus his brothers: the sadistic, hugely successful Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) and the gentle, fucked up, possibly a serial killer Edmund (Stuart Thompson). They exist between the Victorian age and the present day without ever seeming to get past middle age. ‘My father wanted only sons – he had to get through three dead daughters to get to us’ intones Jack at the beginning. Wrapped in a huge scarf the Andor star kicks matters off playing Jack as a sweet young boy: a little hooked on the gung ho propaganda of the British Empire, but fundamentally a charming little thing who loves his mum and can’t imagine a world without her. Alas, she dies in childbirth, just as he has a strange encounter with his uncle John, an unsettling, blood-soaked figure returned from an unspecified Victorian war.  Things go downhill: Jack and his brother Marlow are sent away to boarding school...

Stereophonic playwright David Adjmi recently wrote an article for a major British newspaper in which he waxed effusively about how his Broadway smash had been inspired by the band Led Zeppelin. I wonder if his lawyer was holding a gun to his head as he wrote it, because while the Zep may have been a tertiary influence, Stereophonic is very very very very very very very clearly about Fleetwood Mac. There are Fleetwood Mac fan conventions less about Fleetwood Mac. Hell, there are incarnations of Fleetwood Mac that have been less about Fleetwood Mac.  Specifically, it’s a lightly fictionalised account of the recording of the Anglo-American band’s mega-selling Rumours album, and while not every detail is the same, many are identical, from the cities it was recorded in (Sausalito then LA) to the gender, nationality and internal-relationship makeup of the band, to details like female members ‘Holly’ (aka Christine McVie) and ‘Diana’ (aka Stevie Nicks) moving out out the studio accommodation they were sharing with the band’s menfolk in favour of their own condominiums.  Which l hasten to say is all to the good, even if it frequently feels like a miracle that Stereophonic has stormed Broadway – becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time – without being derailed by legal issues (though there is a lawsuit against it from Rumours producer Ken Caillet, who has accused Adjmi of ripping off his memoir).  Of course, it is a great subject for a play. The story of how erstwhile...

Packed your fascinator? Rehearsed your most attractive crying face? Well, good; over in Mansfield – by way of the Theatre Royal Haymarket – the wedding of the year is about to take place. Local girl Sylvia (Sinéad Matthews) is marrying Polish lad Marek (Julian Kostov), and the audience, some of whom are sat directly on the stage, are all invited.  The ceremony plays out in real time at Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down, now running in the West End after debuting at the National Theatre early last year. Director Bijan Sheibani sucks you right into this world through fast-paced dialogue and artfully constructed tableaus. It is heady, hilarious and emotional; the wedding itself might be a car crash, but this imaginative production is anything but. As the lights come up on Samal Blak’s set, little of the grandeur associated with getting hitched is visible. There’s a huge disco ball hanging overhead, whizzing fragmented stars across the theatre, but this romantic image dissipates when it comes face to face with  the realities of the working class family wedding: the electric fan, the TK Maxx shopper, the extension cord. Here, the sublime and the mundane exist in constant opposition; some characters dream aloud about the enormity of space and the universe, while others discuss their greying pubes. Matthews’s Sylvia, our scratchy voiced bride, is getting ready for her big day. Buzzing with nervous energy, she is something of a supporting figure to her conversation-dominating...

It’s one of those Fringe successes people dream of mimicking. Since debuting in Edinburgh in 2014, Duncan Macmillan Every Brilliant Thing – co-written with its original star Jonny Donahoe – has earned rave reviews, been translated into numerous languages, including Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin, and performed all across the globe. Last year, it returned to the Fringe  for a triumphant victory lap marking its tenth anniversary. But until now, this strangely uplifting show about depression had never received a West End run — perhaps because it was always deemed too intimate to upscale. If there’s any larger venue fit to house Macmillan’s mini masterpiece, it is @sohoplace. In a co-production between Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, the play is once again performed in-the-round, with the audience on all sides encouraged to join in and play their part. Over the course of its three-month stint, Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins and Minnie Driver will all take the lead role, but tonight’s performer is Lenny Henry. Dressed in a colourful patterned shirt, he sends smiles soaring across the crowd from the outset. Still, in the larger space, it’s harder to build the same rapport. With a much greater capacity and the audience spread across three tiers, creating the world of the play feels less like a communal endeavour and more the responsibility of a select few. Henry is a gentle guide: first as the seven-year-old boy desperate to show his mum – who has depression – all the goodness in...

Last year, the Menier Chocolate Factory felt like the perfect place to revive The Producers. Mel Brooks’s gleefully bad-taste musical was a ’00s phenomenon, which sold out the massive Theatre Royal Drury Lane for the best part of two years, and did even better on Broadway. But the sheer scale of its success was never going to be repeated: the zeitgeist had long moved on.  But the bijou 180-set Menier was so small it never felt like it was trying to compete with the success of the original production. And there’s a pleasure in seeing a blockbuster scaled down. You could really feel the touches of grit and grime applied by director Patrick Marber to Brooks’s adaptation of his classic 1967 screen comedy about Max Bialystock, an amoral Broadway producer who comes up with a plan to fleece his investors by staging an appalling tasteless, surefire flop musical called Springtime for Hitler.  After sellout success at the Menier, it felt inevitable that The Producers would return to the West End. And here it is that time begins to catch up with it.  Virtually the entire Menier cast is back and on similarly good form, foremost Andy Nyman as Bialystock, a haunted little man who looks like one of Beckett’s tramps, riding his luck recklessly from day to day. It’s a very pleasurable show, that has a fundamentally funny central premise, and genuinely great songs from Brooks himself. But even though the Garrick is on the smaller side of West End theatres, the revival inevitably loses the...

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...

Former Young Vic boss David Lan is arguably the most important British artistic director of the twenty-first century, with his embrace of avant-garde and European directors arguably responsible for the leftwards drift of the West End and beyond in recent years. He’s been involved in various projects since – notably producing the travelling refugee advocacy artwork-slash-festival The Walk – but The Land of the Living marks his first major British production since leaving the Vic. He returns in playwright guise with a story about Ruth a UN aid worker who adopts Thomas, an Eastern European child who was abducted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Years later, Thomas confronts Ruth about the decisions she made as a young woman that changed his life.  Juliet Stevenson will star as Ruth and German actor Tom Wlaschiha as Thomas. In a rather luxury production, Stephen Daldry will direct.

This is a bold opener for Indhu Rubasingham’s first season in charge at the National Theatre: first time playwright (though he’s got decent pedigree as an actor) Nima Taleghani offers up what sounds like a racously modern – and probably quite foul-mouthed – adaptation of Euripides’s shockingly violent Ancient Greek tragedy. Rubasingham herself will direct the show, which has a cast including James McArdle, Clare Perkins and Ukweli Roach. Following its NT run a version of the show – probably without the famous people in it – will tour to secondary schools.

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...

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...

To reach Life on the Land, the National Gallery’s exhibition on the nineteenth century French artist Jean-Francois Millet, you have to walk through rooms of the museum filled with centuries’ worth of grand portraits of society’s upper crust. On arrival, surrounded by dusky-toned renderings of outdoor labour, it might take a moment to adjust. Stoicism abounds here, its head bowed and its eyes averted. You won’t find any grandeur or pomp in this concise exhibition of 15 muted and unflashy works, but you’ll experience an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility in the adjacent rooms. Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land. The former can be found in the scenes’ wide horizons and the figures that punctuate them. The latter is best distilled in a detail of The Winnower (c. 1847–8), whose subject’s clogs are stuffed with hay to keep his feet warm. The exhibition’s centrepiece, L’Angelus (1859), is here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Like most of the work here, its ornate gilded frame feels incongruous with the painting itself, in which two shadowy figures stand statuesque in a twilit field, a basket of potatoes sitting on the ground between them. They could be staring at the ground, though their eyes, obscured by the enclosing darkness, might be closed. Just visible through lacy mist on the horizon is a church spire. The...

Us humans can be pretty selfish, and that’s especially true when it comes to design. It’s probably not something you’ve really thought about much before now (see, selfish!) but the world of design has historically neglected the needs of the animals, plants and other living organisms with whom we share our planet, in favour of catering to the whims and demands of us homosapiens. But not anymore. Created in collaboration with Future Observatory – the Design Museum’s national research programme championing new design innovations around environmental issues – this groundbreaking exhibition brings together art, design, architecture and technology to explore the concept of ‘more-than-human’ design, which embraces the notion that human activities can only flourish alongside those of other species and eco-systems. 

‘Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.’ So it’s surprising that until 2025, the UK has never had a major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. This year the Imperial War Museum is hoping to shed light on the topic that remains widely under-discussed.  Through first-person testimonies, objects, artwork, propoganda posters and papers, Unsilenced will investigate the different ways in which sexual violence in conflict can manifest. It will span the untold stories of child evacuees, victims of trafficking, prisoners of war, and survivors from the First World War to present-day conflicts, and highlight the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. It’s expected to be a sobering, ground-breaking exhibition.  NB: This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. IWM advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.   

‘Instagram face’, CGI influencers and AI sex dolls are all going under the microscope in the new Somerset House exhibition, Virtual Beauty.   Through more than 20 works, this pay-what-you-feel show explores the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The exhibition traces the origin of the digital selfie from the first flip phone with a front-facing camera, to today’s minefield of deepfake pornography, augmented reality face filters and Instagram algorithms. It’s primarily concerned with the ‘Post-Internet’ art movement, a 21st-century body of work and criticism that examines the influence of the internet on art and culture. In the first room, we encounter early artworks that comment on society’s gruelling beauty standards, like ORLAN’s disturbing 1993 performance that saw her going under the knife live on camera, and taking recommendations by audience members over the phone. Famous celeb selfies like Ellen DeGeneres’ A-lister packed Oscars snap are shown on a grainy phone screen, then we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of digital artworks, each one providing some sort of comment on beauty, society and the online world.   There’s a lot in Virtual Beauty that is pretty on the nose. We are shown a Black Mirror-style satirical advert for a pharmaceutical company called ‘You’, that offers people the chance to alter their appearance without plastic surgery – simply have a chip inserted into your brain, and the technology makes you appear different,...

Young painter Rachel Jones has become one of the most powerful voices in contemporary abstraction, using her hyper-colourful visual language – filled with references to mouths and teeth – to explore ideas of identity. We’ve reviewed her many times, and even had her as one of ‘Future of London Art’ stars back in 2023. And now, she’s going to be the first ever contemporary artist to have a solo show in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s main exhibition space.

How many people does it take to put on a solo exhibition? When I visit akâmi-, the Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater’s show at Camden Art Centre, three technicians are packing up their tools as a photographer takes installation shots. The show was curated by this year’s New Curators fellows, a group of 11 aspiring exhibition makers. It includes work by Linklater’s son and grandmother as well as his wife, Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he works under the moniker Grey Plumes. As we approach twenty contributors, I wonder whether the term solo exhibition might be inaccurate. Throughout the show, Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His message, uniting the three disparate bodies of work on show here, is as clear and simple as it is defiant. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show; it takes a village. The first room contains a series of arresting, moody canvases awash with the colours of plums, sand and sunsets. Though spartan, they provide plenty to look at. Many are irregular in shape and comprise multiple sheets of linen sewn together. Some are painted with disembodied ornate window frames while others contain rorschach-like splatters. You might imagine Linklater alone in his studio, mixing the colours that make these haunting images, but you’d be wrong. They’re painted with natural materials including tea, sumac and tobacco: in other...

The Cosmic House is one of those rare places deserving of the name ‘hidden gem’. A Victorian villa on a residential street near Holland Park station, it’s the former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks, who renovated the building in the late 1970s with his wife Maggie and the architect Terry Farrell to earn its Grade I-listing. Remodelled into a liveable collage of cosmic references and playful mind-games, it can be interpreted as a mediation on our place in the universe via quantum physics, architecture and philosophy. But it’s also just an extraordinarily beautiful building; a masterpiece of light, shadow and symmetry.  Since 2021, the house has operated as a museum, and each year, the Jencks Foundation commissions an artist to respond to the surroundings. This time round, it’s a video work by Lithuanian-born musician Lina Lapelytė, composed of 12 screens dotted around the house to be hunted down like a game of hide and seek. Created in collaboration with five other artists, each screen shows a video of a musical performance taking place in the home, often right where you’re standing. In one film, singers assemble around the central spiral staircase: a dizzying kaleidoscopic shot of bodies circling a descending, twisting railing. On another screen, in the gallery basement, a performer sings a capella, sitting on the polished jade floor as light reflects in shards like a static disco ball. There is even a screen in the ‘Cosmic Loo’, complete...

Part of an ongoing exhibition series of group exhibitions featuring artists not represented by the gallery, this show will see three painters – Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips – fill Hauser & Wirth’s vast Savile Row space with windows into imagined interiors. All taking domestic architectures as their starting point, each artist’s work becomes a meditation on the psychology of space.