Things to do in London today

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...

Your landlord might disagree, but there really is no excuse for boring white walls. Pick up original work from local artists to brighten up your bedroom for as little as £100 at this accessible alternative to (the many) stuffier and more expensive fairs on the London art circuit. Over 150 independent artists will be exhibiting work at the annual event at the Truman Brewery, presented by Saatchi Art. There’ll also be immersive installations, performances, creative workshops, DJs and a fully stocked bar to entertain you. Tunes will be supplied by notorious Ibiza club night Manumission and London based collective Club Lune Bleue. Think of it as art served with a side of party.

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...

Set up by Charles Cooper from a room in Soho in 1951, legendary film distributor Contemporary Films has been bringing international cinema to Brits for 75 years. To celebrate its three-quarter-century, a few of its most iconic films are being screened in London cinemas in September and October. Among those on the slate are Spirit of the Beehive, intro'ed by Time Out alumnus Geoff Andrew; David Hockney doc A Bigger Splash with director Jack Kazan in conversation; and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries presented by 16mm stalwarts Ciné-Real. London venues showing Contemporary's landmark releases include The Castle Cinema, The Rio, Phoenix in East Finchley, and ICA.

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.

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.

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...

Soho beer palace Albert’s Schloss is going all out for Oktoberfest this year, serving Bavarian-themed revelries to central London crowds. The Alpine-themed beer hall and ‘cook haus’ is offering three weeks’ worth of festivities, including a traditional keg tapping ceremony, a sausage-eating contest, oompah brass band performances, a best Lederhosen competition, loads of games and all the usual daily performances from the resident Haus band. It also promises to be one of the only places outside Munich where you can try all six Oktoberfest beers. Entry is free; just turn up and get ready to fröhlich. On Saturday’s the place will also host an Oktoberfest Kabaret Bottomless Brünchen, with 90 minutes of bottomless prosecco, mimosas, bier, Bloody Marys, spritz cocktails, and a ‘cook haus’ dish for £60pp. Between 12:30pm and 3:30pm.

Although End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland isn’t even the first Haruki Murakami adaptation to play at the Barbican, I nonetheless maintain that his works are unadaptable. By that I mean that it’s almost impossible to replicate Murakami’s tone, wherein his protagonists – typically deadpan thirtysomething male loners from Tokyo –  live boring lives that are encroached upon by baffling metaphysical forces. It’s magical realism, but it’s magical realism where beautifully precise descriptions of the protagonist making lunch are as important as the strange alternate worlds they find themselves entering. Put it on stage, and it’s inevitable that the magic overrides the mundane. French director-choreographer Philippe Decouflé heads an otherwise Japanese adaption of 1985 classic Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (I have literally no idea why the name has been swapped around) that does an impressive job of conjuring the twin, cryptically interlinked strands of the novel. The End of the World is a mysterious walled town – revisited by Murakami in his recent The City and Its Uncertain Walls – populated by herds of unicorns and people without shadows. We witness it through the eyes of regular guy Boku (Kiita Komagine), who has his shadow (Shuntaro Miyao) severed by the town’s Gatekeeper (Shinya Matsuda). Decouflé deploys dreamy projected backdrops and stilt-augmented dancers to play the unicorns. They look great, and both director and adapting writer Ako...

As You Like It is mostly a play about a large assortment of oddballs living in a forest for some reason. It definitely has a plot, but it also kind of plays out like an eccentric Tudor sketch show. And I’ve seen a lot of productions get lost in the woods (badoom) of its teeming character and their largely low-stakes adventures – you can watch this show a dozen times and not be entirely clear who, say, Silvius is if the director doesn’t lead you through it. Fortunately dual directors Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine – plus their creative team headed by designer Paul Wills – are excellent guides though the trees.  This is not a production that (as far as I can tell) comes with a high concept. I don’t think the reason why the opening court-set scene sees the characters dressed in a sort of eye-poppingly absurd 17th century style – big wigs; insanely silhouetted dresses; vaguely kinky; general Marie Antoinette-on-acid vibes – comes with any great point other than that it looks awesome and it sets up a contrast with the longer more rustic sequence that follows when most of the key cast are banished or have run away to the Forest of Arden. It is very fun to spend time in designer Paul Wills’ whiteboard forest But by making every character as vivid as possible, visually and personality-wise, it’s just a great, boisterous production where you don’t find yourself questioning ‘and who is THAT guy?’ two hours in. From Lola Shalam’s highly strung romantic lead Rosalind and Grace...

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.     

This revival of Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Truman Capote monologue was initially staged in the stunning House of the Redeemer in New York, the sort of opulent old Manhattan building of your wildest dreams. How would a London transfer work? Well, as the saying goes: if you can’t bring the mountain to Mohammed, then bring Mohammed to a lavishly detailed copy of the mountain. A huge part of the joy of the London Tru is how designer Paul Farnsworth has transformed the entire Menier space into what I’m going to call a faithful recreation of Capote’s New York apartment. Sure, if you look too hard at the panelled ceilings or the tapestry covered walls you’ll realise they’re just printouts on fabric. But one, well, yes, obviously; and two, it still looks incredible. While presumably Capote’s lounge didn’t look exactly like this (I’m sure it had less seating capacity for starters), the level of detail is astounding, from vintage rugs and sofas to shelves groaning with knickknacks, books and even handwritten letters. The actual play can’t really live up to the magnificence of the setting. That’s not the fault of performer Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who offers a funny, often very poignant channeling of the Alabama-raised author and socialite. That distinctive voice could so easily fall into parody – it was half a parody already. But Ferguson brings Capote to life, aided by the fact that the play is set at a very painful time in his life. It’s 1975, and he has recently published a chapter of...

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...

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...

This review is from 2025. An Oak Tree returns yet again for 2026 as part of a season at The Other Palace curated by producer Francesca Moody. Guests this time include Hammed Animashaun, Bessie Carter, Rosalie Craig, Sacha Dhawan, George Fouracres, Clare Perkins, Tom Mothersdale and Gemma Whelan. New shoots keep growing from Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, its legend quietly bubbling away for 20 years and its strange, unsettling magnificence never wavering. First performed in 2005, it was a solid rejection of stuffy plays where the actors say their memorised words each night in the same way. Instead, every performance has a different actor performing alongside experimental theatremaker Crouch, now almost 400 of them, including Hugh Bonneville, Mike Myers and Alanis Morrissette. They come on stage, follow Crouch’s instructions, take on the part of a grieving father and generally look very nervous while doing it. The actor has never seen or read the play before, and the audience doesn’t know which star guest they’ll get. For this twentieth anniversary production, the list of actors eager to submit themselves to this grief-laden improv show is impressive: David Tennant and Indira Varma are on the roster, while on press night it was Jessie Buckley pulled up from the front row.The performer is instructed very precisely by Crouch what to do and say. She is Andy, a middle aged man, grieving the recent loss of his daughter who was killed by a driver. The driver was a stage hypnotist –...

This pungently named immersive horror experience has been terrifying the good people of Dublin since 2009, and now it lurches across the sea to London. The large scale independent production – with a cast of over 70 – will occupy Avery Hill Mansion in Greenwich and broadly speaking it sounds like it’ll be divided into three areas. Two will be story based and contain an original plotline each: Avery Hill Asylum, which invites guests into a Victorian mental institution in which Dr Thorne has been conducting disturbing experiments; and Sundown Manor, about an ancient Irish family that has arrived in London looking for victims. In the middle is Halloween Town, a ‘living village’ to explore with presumably a slightly more chilled out vibe plus snacks. Although these things can go either way, it has to be said that its longeivity in Ireland plus numerous awards over the years do rather get our hopes up.

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

In an era where even Andrew Lloyd Webber has concluded he needs to move with the times, West End super producer Cameron Mackintosh remains obstinately grounded in the twentieth century. That’s not to say the man’s a dinosaur: he’s the UK producer of Hamilton, for starters. But he has a core of shows that have been in his stable for decades, that he returns to semi-frequently and sometimes claims to be reinventing. Really, though, the new takes on Miss Saigon, or Mary Poppins, or Les Mis are the equivalent of giving an old trophy a good buff and polish – you might make it sparkle a bit more, but it’s the same trophy.  Mackintosh was not the first producer of Lionel Bart’s all-singing Charles Dickens smash Oliver! – he was 13 when it opened – but he did produce a 1977 revival that was totally faithful to the original 1960 incarnation, down to using the same sets. He revived it once again in the ’80s, then did a new version in 1994, which was brought back in 2008. Now we have a ‘fully reconceived’ take from two old Oliver! hands: Mackintosh and director Matthew Bourne, the choreographer on the last incarnation.  Bourne is best known for sexy gothic dance pieces, and he certainly brings his full gothic sexiness to bear here: a cumulonimbus-worth of dry ice seeps through the inky recesses of Lez Brotherston’s brooding multilevel Victorian London sets. Sweeney Todd’s barbers could plausibly be just ariound the corner. Bourne’s choreography is not very ostentatious, but there are...

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...

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes. 

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...

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?     

You may not have realised, but at some point in your life you’ve probably encountered the work of Es Devlin. If you’ve been to an Adele concert, watched a Super Bowl half-time show, or tuned in to the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony, you will most likely have come face to face with creations by the British artist and stage designer.  To call Es Devlin impressive would be an understatement. The designer’s contact book is like a who’s who of the world’s biggest A-listers  – she’s conjured up ingenious staging for the Weeknd, Lorde, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, the Pet Shop Boys and U2. Devlin has made otherworldly sets for some of the world’s most esteemed theatres and opera houses, from the National Theatre to Milan’s La Scala. She’s also the proud owner of three Olivier Awards, one Tony, three Emmys, one Ivor Novello, the London Design Medal… you get the picture.  With such an illustrious career, it’s no wonder the Design Museum has deemed Devlin worthy of a retrospective, staging her first European solo show as its big autumn opening. But how does all this awe-inspiring stage design come across when it’s not actually on a stage? We enter into a recreation of Devlin’s studio, with messy bookshelves and drawings strewn all over the place. In a video projection Devlin tells us her life story: she was named after a witch, whose name her parents found in a crossword puzzle; her great-grandfather was an architect; she studied literature at university and then her mind was awakened at art...