Curator at Large: London Exhibitions

Recently Opened

A Collection of Behaviours

LAMB, London

Artificial light has long carried meaning beyond mere utility, an historical and thought-provoking concept explored through LAMB’s examination of light’s lineage. Curator Stephanie Ruth presents ‘sculptural lamps’ by twelve artists who treat light as a living material. Experience the gallery morphs into a stretching, swelling, illuminated organism; each work subtly reshapes or responds to the behaviour of light, allowing the space itself to continually shift and mutate.   

Fri 12 Dec 2025 to Sat 28 Feb 2026, 32 St. George Street, W1S 2EA

Stacey Gillian Abe: Garden of Blue Whispers

UNIT, London

Stacey Gillian Abe marks summer’s passage into autumn through a sensual investigation of gesture, femininity, and inheritance. Employing a craft historically transmitted through maternal lineages, Abe positions embroidery as an act of continuity, hand-stitching silk thread directly onto canvas to elevate domestic ritual into a contemplative, embodied practice. Here, indigo blue, which Abe describes as evoking “a new breed of Black,” operates as both a chromatic and conceptual threshold, registering seasonal liminality while articulating a decisive transcendence of inherited socio-cultural boundaries.

Wed 3 Dec 2025 to Sat 31 Jan 2026, 3 Hanover Square, W1S 1HD

Ongoing and Unmissable

Peter Doig: House of Music

Serpentine South Gallery, London

Stop, look and listen at Peter Doig’s multisensory installation, House of Music. Transforming the gallery into an immersive listening space, the exhibition brings sound and painting into dialogue to explore Doig’s long-standing relationship with music, sound-system culture and cinema. Drawn from his decades-old archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes, the work centres on shared listening, building a resonant soundscape shaped by memory, atmosphere and collective experience.

Fri 10 Oct 2025 to Sun 8 Feb 2026, Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA

Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2025

National Portrait Gallery, London

The prestigious photography portrait prize returns with an esteemed judging panel comprising author and art historian Katy Hessel, Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Portrait Gallery, and photographer Tim Walker. Featuring many works shown publicly for the first time, the selection celebrates a rich diversity of portraiture, revealing the compelling stories behind each image; from formal commissions to spontaneous, intimate moments shared between friends and family.

Thu 13 Nov 2025 to Sun 8 Feb 2026, St Martin's Place, WC2H 0HE

Karimah Ashadu: Tendered

Camden Art Centre, London

Camden Art Centre presents the first UK institutional solo show by artist, filmmaker, and Silver Lion Winner, Karimah Ashadu. Bringing together three moving-image works and new sculptures, The CAC offers a compelling introduction to her practice, foregrounding labour, masculinity and lived experience in Nigeria. Highlights include MUSCLE (2025), shown for the very first time, alongside earlier films King of Boys (2015) and Cowboy (2022). Visceral and quietly powerful, the show is a rare chance to encounter Ashadu’s incisive filmmaking in London.

Fri 10 Oct 2025 to Sun 22 Mar 2026, Arkwright Road, NW3 6DG

Closing Soon 

Shadi Al-Atallah: Cobra

Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Deptford

Al-Atallah’s practice resists fixed binaries, presenting bodies that are fragmented, genderless, and perpetually in transformation. Drawing on religious mythology, literature, science, and gender theory, COBRA centres on three emotionally charged video projections cast onto suspended, rippling fabric that moves through the gallery like a serpent’s body. Sourced from digital archives of queer men and transfeminine people dancing together in Saudi Arabia, the footage captures fleeting gestures of intimacy, joy, and defiance, evoking lost histories and fragile visibility. Named after the online alias of one figure later discovered to have passed away, the exhibition carries a quiet, elegiac weight.

Fri 28 Nov 2025 to Sat 24 Jan 2026, Fuel Tank, 8-12 Creekside, SE8 3DX

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude

Soundbank Centre, London

Encounter newly reworked chapters of Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Team (2025), two resonant works that move between the overlooked and the oppressed. The former lingers in the anonymity of transitory “non-spaces,” while the latter confronts the lived realities of political repression in Taiwan during the White Terror. Together, they reveal Val Lee’s acute sensitivity to how power, memory and movement shape everyday experience. This exhibition marks her first solo presentation in the UK and is staged as part of the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, with support from the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.), and additional backing from the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.).

Tue 7 Oct 2025 – Sun 11 Jan 2026, HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery

Curator’s Pick

Ayla Dmyterko: Ring Around the Sun & We Rage On

Alma Pearl, London

If you are short on time this season, head to Alma Pearl for Ayla Dmyterko’s first London solo show. The Canadian-Ukrainian artist builds visual narratives shaped by eco-feminist perspectives and a deep engagement with her community, alongside broader cross-cultural references. Conceived as a total installation, the exhibition draws in part on Svetlana Boym’s notion of the ‘off-modern’ — attentive to forgotten or unfinished experiments — and the nursery rhyme Ring a Ring o’ Roses, a playground game steeped in pagan myth and folklore. Dmyterko describes the show as a “tornado of semiotic warning”, using meticulous bricolage and ritualised material storytelling to explore erased memory and the possibility of reparation.

Thu 13 Nov 2025 to Sat 10 Jan 2026, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, 2-10 Hertford Road, N1 5ET