Sofia Hallström

Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha is on fom May 8 until August 10 2025, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026.  In the Barbican’s new, light-filled gallery, the City of London skyline provides a fitting backdrop for the tall, wiry works of Alberto Giacometti beside the hybrid, fragmented figures of Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha.  For ‘Encounters’, the Giacometti Foundation lent some of the Swiss artist’s most elemental figures for an exhibition that will evolve in the coming months with responses from other artists, including Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum and American sculptor Lynda Benglis. In the first of the three, Bhabha’s sculptures focus on the fragmented body – but where Giacometti’s figures are stretched and attenuated, expressing solitude and existential suffering, she fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart. Though separated by decades – Giacometti shaped by postwar Europe and Bhabha by postcolonial trauma and global violence after 9/11 – their works share a profound interest in the aftermath of war and the psychological scars left behind, speaking to the bruised and battered bodies that exist beyond the immediate experience of conflict.  Bhabha fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart The exhibition demands a slow and meditative engagement. As visitors move throughout, the sculptors’ works are arranged at shifting heights: frozen in mid-stride or suspended in stillness, some rise

Reflecting on themes of memory, migration and the home, South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh is internationally renowned for his vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. This year, he’s finally presenting a major exhibition at Tate Modern, in the city he currently lives, showcasing three decades of his work including brand-new, site-specific pieces.  The exhibition begins with Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home (2013–2022), a full-scale rendering of Suh’s childhood hanok house in Korea, made of delicate off-white paper. Created through traditional rubbing techniques, the imprint of every surface, from the walls, floors, and fixtures, is captured in the material. This isn’t simply a house – it’s a lived experience, transposed onto graphite and fibre. The structure feels both solid and spectral, as if memory itself had drifted into the gallery and taken form.  As the exhibition progresses, Suh leans further into his exploration of the spaces we carry within us. In Nest/s (2025), visitors walk through a corridor of interconnected translucent ‘rooms’ in vivid colours, where every detail, from light switches to radiators, is precisely rendered. Suh allows the viewer to activate the work through their movement, transforming it into a shifting, porous membrane. This structure leads to Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), a life-size outline of Suh’s current home in the UK, filled with domestic fixtures from the many

Chaotic explosions of wood, scrap metal and cotton cascade through the gallery in the work of Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew. Known for using found natural materials that are oxidised, burned, and left to decay, Drew creates visceral, large-scale installations that reflect on the cyclical nature of existence. His sculptures evoke the scars of America’s industrial past, while also suggesting forces beyond human control. At the South London Gallery in London, Drew will unveil a new site-specific work that engulfs the walls and floor of the main space, with fragmented wood appearing as if battered by extreme weather, natural disasters, or what he calls ‘acts of God.’

From British photography icon David Bailey to Antony Cairns, Jamie Hawkesworth and Joy Gregory – as well as emerging photography talents such as Keiran Perry, Vladimir Khorev and Wing Shya – this year’s Photo London will span the established and the emerging, the documentary and the experimental. Returning to Somerset House from May 15 to 18, ​​expect a particularly diverse edition of the photography fair, with a noticeable presence of photographers from the Global South as well as queer perspectives and work that interrogates identity, surveillance and post-internet aesthetics. With galleries and exhibitors travelling from New York, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Hsinchu City, Photo London 2025 is set to showcase a global snapshot of today’s most compelling photographic practices.

British artist Lubiana Himid’s work is characterised by paintings of bright interior scenes, as well as depictions of contemporary everyday life and landscapes showing overlooked aspects of history. In June, the Turner Prize-winner will curate ‘Connecting Thin Black Lines’ at the ICA, an exhibition that marks 40 years since ‘The Thin Black Line’, the landmark 1985 exhibition at the ICA in London that foregrounded a collection of young Black and Asian women artists in Britain. This iteration will bring together new and historic works by the original 11 artists, including Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson and Veronica Ryan, exploring legacy, collaboration, and cultural visibility, alongside archival works and new commissions.

At first encounter, Croatian-born Nora Turato’s solo exhibition pool7 at the ICA in London appears sparse, offering little of the spectacle we might expect from a contemporary installation. Entering the lower gallery, the environment feels stark, cold and clinical. Around 1,800 A4 sheets of white paper cover the walls in uniform tiles. The room feels like an empty swimming pool. On the sheets, in plain black Arial font, Turato has printed sporadic notes to self, fragments of overheard chatter and intimate overshares: ‘I’m looking to art to save me / can it’ she writes. ‘if u aint dirty / u aint here to party’, ‘girls just wanna have fun / no fun allowed it seems’.  There is nothing mundane about this unfiltered, spiralling mass of language, brought together by a mind constantly processing and reacting to the world.  In the room, I feel like I’m endlessly doom scrolling in slow-motion. pool7 is the seventh iteration of Turato’s ongoing text-based work, a continuation of her pool series in which Turato creates yearly iterations of pools lined with collections of found language drawn from media, conversations, advertising, and online content. In the next room, the tone shifts dramatically. Lit only by a warm orange glow from a ceiling light, the space is fitted with plush carpets and cushions, with a nonsensical monologue playing out in jarring screams, unhinged sobs and guttural cries throughout the room. It's the kind of reaction we are taught to suppress, except in moments of

Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has had a meteoric rise in the art world over the past couple of years – thanks, in part, to his eyebrow-raising commission of three portraits which were sent into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship in 2021. Tech bros aside, Boafo is interested in subverting Western views of Africa and the diaspora through his brightly coloured oil and paper transfer paintings, and is becoming recognised for his portraits and figurative works. In some pieces, the figures elegantly recline, in others, they sit contemplatively, always with their eyes transfixed on the viewer. Inspired by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, this exhibition at Gagosian will be Boafo’s first solo show in the UK.

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 News. H