From a Japanese installation artist in Prague to a Swiss Argentine painter in Lisbon and a Brazilian artist in São Paulo, let art take you around the world this month.
From fashion to politics, from the trendy to the turbulent, the ever-changing relationship between photography and protest, or fashion and law, is thrown into light via these exhibitions. This is Citizen Femme’s guide to the exhibitions to visit this November.
As We Rise: Photography From The Black Atlantic, Saatchi Gallery
As We Rise: Photography From The Black Atlantic is placing incredible photographs from the Wedge Collection, Canada’s largest privately-owned collection of art by Black artists, into public view this winter. Curated by Elliott Ramsey – assistant curator at The Polygon Gallery -who describes the collection as celebrating “the nuanced approaches of Black photographers in representing these scenes of love, leisure, and resistance”, the exhibition celebrates community, identity, and power while also grappling with themes of inclusion and exclusion in both art and culture. The exhibition spans work by Black artists from Canada, United States, Great Britain, The Caribbean, and Africa, boasting an expansive array of civil rights documentary, fashion photography, and self-portraiture.
Anastasia Samoylova: Adaptation, Saatchi Gallery, London
Also on at the Saatchi Gallery this winter is Anastasia Samoylova: Adaption, the first major survey of the contemporary American photographer. The American visual artist, Anastasia Samoylova, who works predominantly through photography, is know for both her documentary and studio photography styles the capture current environmental concerns and their impacts on local communities. Recently, this includes documenting the rising sea levels in South Florida. This exhibition, Adaptation, is curated by art historian Taous Dahmani and presents a selection of Samoylova’s work from five of her recent series: Floridas, FloodZone, Landscape Sublime, Image Cities, and Breakfasts. Named a modern-day Flâneuse, Samoylova travels around these shifting landscapes – whether urban or rural – to capture the underlying socio-political geographies that are interwoven into these tumultuous locales. The result is a quirky examination of fleeting moments from real lives in the world’s ever-changing spaces.
Masquerade, Make-up & Ensor, Mode Museum, Antwerp
Belgian painter James Ensor is internationally known for his canonical work within modernist painting, the movement that dominated the art world during the early 20th century. Fusing the momentary natural of impressionist art with the carnivalesque, Ensor’s paintings are colourful yet often portray sinister subject matter and unsettling nightmare-like narratives, from clowns to jesters, masks, skeletons and more. Starting in September this year, several Antwerp museums including KMSKA (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp), Museum Plantin-Moretus, FOMU (Museum of Photography) and the Fashion Museum (MoMu) are collectively spotlighting both his work and the influence of his work on both contemporary and modern artists spanning many disciplines. MoMu, Antwerp’s Mode Museum examines how Ensor’s exploration of masquerade has influenced makeup trends used in fashion editorial and pop culture today. The relationship between makeup and deception, suspicion, and exaggeration has always been disputed, as cosmetics are experimented with to change and enhance facial features, age, and perpetuate or challenge fluctuating beauty standards. This exhibition showcases work by James Ensor – exploring the painter’s own use of cosmetics in his work – as well as Issy Wood, Cindy Sherman, Peter Philips, Martin Margiela, Christian Lacroix, and more including painting, editorial photography, sketches, collage, and journalism.
Fashion In The Making: Photographs Of 1920s And 1930s Designs, Musée Des Arts Decoratifs, Paris
Fashion in the Making, or La Mode en Modèles, spotlights the Musée des Arts Decoratifs’ illustrious archives pertaining photographs of fashion models and sketches. Too often, it is the final garment debuted on the runway or worn on the street that absorbs all of fashion’s attention. Instead, MAD Paris is honing in on the time, work, and overlooked process behind designing clothes for major couturiers including Jeanne Paquin, Jeanne Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Patou, and the Callot sisters. So, over 100 photographs, drawings, films, and haute couture sketches spanning the inter-bellum period from 1917 to 1939 are on display to champion the drama and art-like designs of fashion during this flamboyant era. Rather than discarded, these sketches are integral to fashion houses as interestingly, many of the works on display are kept and upheld in fashion archives to support lawsuits against counterfeit and copied garments. From design registrations to photographs, this exhibition is an in-depth examination of the unseen work behind fashion.
The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain
Britian’s years under Thatcher rule in the 1980s were known to be turbulent ones. And this exhibition forms a body of photographs that documents the social and cultural impact of the shifting political legislation. From miner strikes and gentrification to the AIDS pandemic, protest defined the voice of the British public facing this strife. The 80s: Photographing Britain highlights how photography gave voice to social change led by the people, and consequently became a tool for loudening marginalised voices.
The Unsettled Soul By Chiharu Shiota, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague
Internationally-renowned Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is debuting her impressive installation art in the Czech Republic’s Kunsthalle this winter. Titled The Unsettled Soul, the exhibition is ‘a journey into the human condition’ and explores themes of life, death, memory, through large-scale, immersive works. Webs of thread decorate the Kunsthalle’s large exhibition spaces to physically map the invisible bonds – whether emotional or spiritual – between people and place for haunting and eery-feeling finishes, that call to the artist, Shiota’s interest in absence and loss and how material these feelings paradoxically are. An exhibition highlight includes an installation around a burnt piano that calls to childhood memories of loss and destruction.
Disco, Vivian Suter, MAAT, Lisbon
Swiss Argentine artist Vivian Suter is debuting her first ever solo exhibition in Portugal this winter, at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology. The exhibition spans over 500 paintings, 163 of which are on display for the first time, that span four decades of Suter’s work. The artist paints from their home in Panajachel, Guatemala and uses these landscapes as inspiration, not only for the feel and abstract subject matter but also as a source for the painting materials themselves as the oil and acrylic abstract paintings incorporate natural materials from the Guatemalan forest. These earthy tones from burnt orange to khaki greens and soiled browns to bring a glimpse of wilder surrounds to the Portuguese capital.
The Imaginary Institution Of India, Barbican, London
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975- 1998 at London’s Barbican is the first exhibition in the world to chart the growth of Indian art across this significant period of cultural change. Tracing two historic movements – the declaration of the State of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975 and the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998 – the art on display explores themes of rapid urbanisation and social instability. Across the exhibition, paintings, photographs, and installations both directly chart these political shifts as well as document their human impacts, from religion to family to love and loss, in order to navigate the disintegrating boundaries between politics and home life.
Renata Lucas: Domingo No Parque, Pinacoteca, São Paulo
Renata Lucas: Sunday in the park, exhibits a large selection of one of Brazil’s most celebrated modern artists, Renata Lucas, in her home town of São Paulo. Lucas is know for her large-scale work that raises questions around how architectural spaces are used to govern and determine social behaviour, while also challenging viewers to encounter spaces via news paths through her work. With titles taken from Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil’s songs, this is a celebration of the contemporary artist’s relationship with her surrounding spaces.
Still Showing …
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, The Photographers' Gallery, London
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.” – Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker, 2011.
Five women stand in a bathhouse, idly and elegantly poised, with only one looking at the camera. We know this photograph is staged, but it feels like we’ve walked straight into the women’s locker room. No-one can quite manage to capture the transient richness of a passing moment like Deborah Turbeville. This image, taken for Vogue in 1975, controversially shifted the standards of fashion photography: Deborah Turberville’s style was a far from the clean-cut, sharp editorial that graced glossy magazine pages in the late 20th century. In her shots, clothes take a backseat and a whimsical, wintry atmosphere comes first. There’s an element of the female psyche that rings through her atmospheric compositions – something that until then had been altogether excluded from fashion editorial. The Photographers’ Gallery is revisiting the impact of Turberville’s work with this retrospective exhibition featuring some of her most iconic editorial and advertorial work. To accompany it, lots of Turberville’s personal, vintage photocollages will be on display; the artist was known to experiment – just like she did with her composition, colour, and lighting – in the darkroom, ripping up sketchbooks and photographic novels, and collaging them with her own images for striking results.
A Group Exhibition, Cadogan Gallery
Founded in 1980, Cadogan Gallery has brought contemporary artists to the forefront of London’s Belgravia, as well as Milan, for the past forty years. To coincide with Frieze London taking over Regent’s Park this week, Cadogan have opened their new flagship gallery on Harriet Street in South Kensington, inaugurating the space with an impressive group exhibition featuring 21 artists defining current art trends. The focus of Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition is on the rich materiality of abstraction in contemporary art, meaning the variety of ways in which artists express non-representational – or abstract – forms. From surreal landscape paintings to sculptures fashioned from marble, the exhibition spotlights the innovative creativity of the artists of our time.
The Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, Fashion And Textile Museum
It’s 1985 and Taboo nightclub has just opened in London’s Leicester Square. The venue by designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery, known for their flamboyant costumes and conceptual art, was nothing short of a scene in London’s nightlife – a work of art itself. The ‘dress as though your life depends on it’ dress code drew the city’s avant-garde, sartorial crowds from far-flung boroughs – and now the evidence is strung on the gallery walls of Bermondsey’s Fashion and Textile Museum. Rare pieces from John Galliano, John Fleet, Stephen Lenard and more are on show, displayed next to the music scene that helped bring the clothes to life.
Vanessa Bell: A World Of Form And Colour, MK Gallery
100 years on from the 1920s, when modernist art grappled with the tumultuous social and economic landscape, painter Vanessa Bell has been at the forefront of many exhibitions in the UK this year, from Charleston House in Lewes to the Courtauld in the capital. The latest to celebrate her pioneering impact on the widely popular period of art is MK Gallery with Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour. What makes this exhibition so special? Despite Vanessa Bell’s art hung in most of the UK’s prestigious modernist exhibits, this marks Bell’s largest ever solo show, including drawings, paintings, ceramics, and furniture.
Making A Ruckus! Black Queer Histories Through Love And Resistance, Somerset House
Filmmaker, writer, and artist Topher Campbell, know for his exploration of sexuality, masculinity, race, the city, and more, is bringing these rich themes to Somerset House with Making A Rukus! Black Queer Histories Through Love And Resistance. Two hundred archive materials, contemporary artworks – including some commissioned just for the exhibition – will walk through the jubilant, complicated, and deeply personal experiences of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans activism and creativity. The multi-disciplinary installation displays a celebratory snapshot of queer history and contemporary art, moving from film to artist; collaborations to community; then club scenes and music culture, and back to film and video.
Silk Roads, British Museum
Silk Roads at the British Museum maps the complex web of trade route networks as spice merchants and silk traders journeyed from east to west, across more than 500 years. These paths are mapped out by camels and foot passengers alike, through barren desserts and hostile settings, and paint an image of the dialogues between Asia, Africa, and Europe. Over 29 national and international museums, galleries, and institutions have loaned artefacts from across the word to help paint this comprehensive snapshot of a multi-continent-spanning story.
Lead image: James Barnor, Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London, 1966, from As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic (Aperture, 2021). Courtesy Autograph ABP
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