February’s exhibits increase questions of energy, reminiscence, labour, image-making, and who will get to be seen. Moving between archive and absence, spectacle and refusal, we see vogue stripped of efficiency, pictures untethered from reality, monuments pulled from their pedestals, bedrooms relocated into galleries, and bus shelters repurposed as websites of intimacy. But there’s additionally a shared impatience with nostalgia, with perfection, and with accepting straightforward narratives. Instead, these exhibits sit within the mess of our bodies beneath strain, pictures that go away a residue, and histories that gained’t keep quiet. Until subsequent month!
Curated by Mavourneen Dooley, American Bacchanal treats US identification as one thing to be sweetened, staged, and consumed. Taking cues from Roman bacchanalia, the group present – together with Dooley, Jordan Kelly, Juliet Cook, Paige Miller, Zakkiyyah Najeebah, Ester Freider, Mickey Demas, and Isaac Harris – leans into extra to probe decadence, imperial urge for food, and the soft-focus nostalgia that props all of it up. Sugar, metal, dolls, and flags recur all through as loaded supplies, exposing how violence is usually disguised as innocence. On 13 February, the exhibition ideas into full revelry with a reside bacchanal fundraiser with performances, readings, and music. Proceeds will go to the National Immigrant Justice Center, which is doing essential work within the face of all of the atrocities being dedicated by ICE by giving immigrants much-needed entry to authorized illustration.
American Bacchanal runs 12–14 February 2026, 162 Holloway Road, London, UK
Drawing from the MAK’s Helmut Lang Archive, Séance de Travail tracks how the designer reprogrammed vogue between 1986 and 2005 – stripping it of spectacle and rebuilding it as a system of concepts. Presented as a mixed-media set up quite than a runway replay, the exhibition follows Lang’s considering throughout identification, area, media, collaboration, and backstage course of. Clothes sit alongside pictures, interventions, and architectures, revealing vogue as a technique versus a product. Cool with out irony, rigorous with out nostalgia, it’s a reminder of how a lot modern visible tradition nonetheless borrows from Lang’s refusal to carry out.
Séance de Travail 1986–2005 runs 10 December 2025 – 3 May 2026 on the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria
Stripping David Lynch again to his past love: the picture as materials downside. Bringing collectively work, drawings, sculptures, pictures, and early brief movies, the present foregrounds the uneasy logic that runs beneath Lynch’s whole observe. Smokestacks, lamps, our bodies, and textual content hover between narrative and abstraction, charged with a temper that may solely be his. Lynch’s Berlin manufacturing unit pictures from 1999 anchor the exhibition in place, tracing his attraction to decay, business, and latent menace. On the heels of the one-year anniversary of the legend’s passing, it’s a must-see pilgrimage to pay your respects.
David Lynch runs 29 January – 29 March 2026, at Pace Gallery Berlin, Germany
Tracing the legend that’s Ming Smith’s early years as an artist shifting between the US and Europe within the Nineteen Seventies and 80s, Jazz Requiem options works many printed for the primary time. The exhibition foregrounds Smith’s intuitive, jazz-inflected method to pictures, the place blur, movement, and abstraction resist fastened narratives of Black life. Shaped by journey, music and dance, her pictures slip between visibility and disappearance, refusing pictures’s demand for readability or proof.
Jazz Requiem runs 6 February – 7 June 2026 on the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, USA
On the Flip Side turns town right into a gallery, hijacking JCDecaux bus shelters to showcase effective artwork pictures the place adverts often reside. Featuring a stellar line-up of Kennedi Carter, Lougè Delcy, Camila Falquez, Ruby Okoro, Dana Scruggs and Juan Veloz, the exhibition brings intimate, private work into the general public realm via areas often reserved for promoting.
On the Flip Side runs 4 February – 5 April 2026 throughout New York City, Chicago, and Boston, USA
In Circles and Storytellers, Bouchra Khalili turns theatre right into a rehearsal area for different civic life. Her first UK public solo exhibition revisits the unconventional legacy of the Mouvement des Travailleurs Arabes and its theatre collectives Al Assifa and Al Halaka, energetic in Nineteen Seventies France. Through movie and set up, Khalili focuses on the missed 1974 presidential run of Djelalli Kamal, a “candidate of those who cannot vote”. Circular formations construction each the works and the gallery, proposing storytelling as a political know-how.
Circles and Storytellers runs 18 February – 14 June 2026 at Mosaic Rooms, London, UK
A single day, a metropolis on edge, and a household attempting to carry collectively, My Father’s Shadow – the debut characteristic by Akinola Davies Jr. – lands at Tate Modern for a live-scored screening, simply in time for the movie’s much-anticipated UK launch. Set throughout Nigeria’s 1993 election disaster, the semi-autobiographical movie follows a father and his two sons shifting via Lagos as unrest closes in. The unique rating can be carried out reside by Duval Timothy and collaborators.
My Father’s Shadow + Live Score screens 7 February 2026, 19:00–21:00 at Tate Modern, London, UK
For the artist’s first UK institutional solo, Tendered brings collectively three movies that sit inside labour, masculinity, and efficiency. From the Makoko abattoir (King of Boys) to a lone horseman (Cowboy), Ashadu movies work as one thing bodily, durational, and formed by place. A brand new fee MUSCLE turns its gaze on Lagos bodybuilders, tracing patriarchy, aspiration, and survival at shut vary. Ashadu’s power lies in restraint, letting gesture, rhythm, and atmosphere do the work right here.
Tendered runs 10 Oct 2025 – 22 Mar 2026 at Camden Art Centre, London, UK
b-sides is a gaggle present dedicated to the work that often stays off-record. Organised by Hannah Perry, it brings collectively studio items made between initiatives, exterior deadlines, and artwork markets. With artists together with Jesse Darling, Mark Leckey, Tai Shani, Hannah Perry and Jenkin Van Zyl, the works on present are described as “made between projects, alongside exhibitions, are the outlaws of the studio”. With the intention of being extra experimental, unresolved, or looking out than what we is perhaps used to seeing from every.
b-sides runs 24 January – 27 February 2026 at Calcio, London, UK
An everyday on this record, in photographer Guanyu Xu’s I dreamt of this and there can be extra, borders, houses, home windows and paperwork develop into quiet devices of management, shaping how queer and migrant our bodies be taught the place they will – and might’t – exist. Collage and photographic fragments slide between private and non-private, fantasy and administration to show a situation of managed freedom the place identification and intimacy are consistently renegotiated.
I dreamt of this and there will be more runs 10 January – 28 February 2026 at re.riddle, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, USA
London-based Kalpesh Lathigra brings his quietly looking out photographic observe again to India for his first solo exhibition there. Spanning three interlinked our bodies of labor, the exhibition strikes between Mumbai’s streets, discovered studio portraits from Gujarat, and the inside areas of Junagadh resorts – locations the place reminiscence, migration and inheritance overlap. Working between documentary and fiction, Lathigra resists neat concepts of residence, nostalgia or belonging. Instead, pictures drift, repeat, and reappear, carrying the load of household historical past whereas alert to distance, dislocation, and the impossibility of return.
The Lives We Dream in Passing runs 12 February – 3 March 2026 at NCPA Photography Gallery, Mumbai, India
Photobook Speed Date flips the awkwardness of networking into one thing genuinely value leaving the home for. Devised by Miami-based artist Josh Aronson, the format borrows from velocity relationship, however as a substitute, members convey a photograph ebook or artwork ebook and rotate via brief, timed conversations. Here, the photograph ebook isn’t merely a commodity or standing object; it’s a social software to fulfill new individuals over shared pursuits.
Photobook Speed Date takes place on 12 February 2026 at SF MoMA, San Francisco, USA
Laisul Hoque relocates his bed room into the gallery, constructed to the precise footprint of the unique; the room turns into a holding area for a 12 months spent shifting between London and Dhaka, amid political unrest and a father’s failing well being. Here, its absence that does a lot of the work: the unmade mattress, a lampshade formed like Bangladesh’s parliament, boarding passes drawn over with fragments of reminiscence. Part set up, half archive, half confession, The Ground Beneath Me treats home area as a strain level the place grief, migration and politics coalesce.
The Ground Beneath Me runs 6 February – 12 April 2026 at The Nunnery Gallery London, UK
An exhibition of latest works by Chris Glickman dissects how American identification is rehearsed, staged, and endlessly re-performed. Drawing on photo-conceptualism and the visible afterlife of the Classical Western canon, the pictures transfer from civic structure to artists’ colonies and curated nostalgia, tracing the myths that prop up empire lengthy after perception in it has thinned. It’s sharp, humorous, and uncomfortable by design, treating spectacle as each topic and symptom. An exhibition of the works can be proven at (lab)oratory, a brand new area by photographer Jordan Hemingway and Purple Martin Studio. While the ebook launch will happen on the beloved Reference Point.
The Last American Pastoral (exhibition) runs 13 February 2026, Ezra Street, London, UK. The ebook launch takes place on 6 February at Reference Point, London, UK
Curated by Jed Moch, Empire appears to be like at what energy leaves behind when its centre slips away. The exhibition threads collectively works by Sarah Charlesworth, Richard Prince, Sam Lipp, Nicholas Sullivan and Valentina Vaccarella to probe how pictures flow into, settle, and linger. Drawing a line from the Pictures Generation to now, appropriation turns into a software for exposing the seams in mass media, identification and management.
Empire runs 23 January – 28 February 2025 at Anonymous Gallery, New York City, USA
Aki Sasamoto’s first UK institutional solo turns cooking into choreography and techniques into hazards. The site-specific exhibition centres on a custom-built, outsized griddle – half sculpture atmosphere, half efficiency set – activated via reside performances the place elements are was momentary compositions, and Sasamoto continues her exploration of the poetics of on a regular basis actions. Drawing from road meals carts and televised kitchens, right here, any try at management is straight away undermined.
Grilled Diagrams runs 4 February – 19 April 2026 at Studio Voltaire, London, UK
Anger Abbey brings collectively sculpture, printmaking, portray, and Paris-based artist Angélique Heidler’s first brief story in her most expansive exhibition up to now. Anchored by her largest portray to this point, the present unfolds throughout picture, object, and textual content.
Anger Abbey runs 30 January – 27 February 2026 at Dorp Projects, London, UK