Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.


All, Art, Auctions, Exhibitions, Travel & Hospitality, Initiatives

Viewing Lauren Halsey: emajendat at Serpentine Gallery

Visitors to the Serpentine South Gallery will find an unexpected transformation: for Lauren Halsey’s first solo exhibition in the UK, the Californian artist has created a ‘funk garden’, responding to the surroundings of Kensington Garden and bringing the outside in.

That translates to a range of mediums arranged in a genuinely immersive display that includes sand dunes, a prismatic floor and walls made from CD’s, as well as a live water fountain. There are also maxi versions of her mini sculptures, usually arranged in intricate tableau, here scaled up to life-size. These installations are also blueprints for Halsey’s dream project: to build a sculpture park in her neighbourhood in Los Angeles, South Central.

Halsey is also known for the community centre she founded in South Central in 2019 – Summaeverythang – ‘dedicated to the empowerment and transcendence of Black and Brown folks socio-politically, economically, intellectually and artistically.’ Much of Halsey’s work relates back to South Central, where her family has resided for generations, and its community, capturing its vitality.

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Dates
11 October 2024 — 02 March 2025

Viewing Frieze & Frieze Masters

It’s a bumper edition of The Wick List this week, as the biggest week in the contemporary art calendar kicks off. Of course, at the undisputed centre are Frieze London (for contemporary art) and Frieze Masters (where you’ll find everything from millennia back to the present). This year is especially exciting for visiting Frieze as it reveals a brand new layout, with natural light and a new flow around the booths.

Returning to the main fair is the recent popular recent addition, Artist-to-Artist, where well-established names select up-and-comings to exhibit at the fair: look out for our favourites, Nengi Omuku, selected by Yinka Shonibare, and Peter Uka, selected by Hurvin Anderson, both exceptional painters with a knack for group portraits and incredible storytelling. There’s also the curated section, this year titled Smoke and devoted to ceramic works from non-western practitioners of the ancient art form.

At Frieze Masters, we’re looking forward to seeing Sheen Wagstaff’s curated section Studio, returning for a second year, and in an expanded form, reflecting on the process of making with presentations by the likes of Nathalie Du Pasquier and Doris Salcedo. There are also solo presentations by radical 20th century masters in a showcase titled Spotlight, focused this year on artists from the 1950s – 1970s; Judy Chicago, Balraj Khanna, Kulim Kim, Donald Locke, Nabil Nahas and Nil Yalter. We can’t wait to see.

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Dates
09 October 2024 — 13 October 2024

Viewing 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair

Of course, there’s so much else going on to coincide with Frieze week. One of the most popular satellite fairs is 1-54, the fair – led by Founding Director Touria El Glaoui – dedicated solely to contemporary art from the African continent and its broad diaspora. Bringing together galleries from around the world in a range of mediums at Somerset House, 1-54 continues to lead the way forward in an international market that is still weighted towards the west.

This year’s fair will see 37 international galleries from 17 countries showcase work by more than 110 artists – a significant representation of the very best contemporary African artists working today. This year’s courtyard installation has been created by none other than Slawn, the young London-based Nigerian artist also known as Olaolu Akeredolu-Ale. His project, Transition, involves two iconic London double-decker buses – over 10 metres long and 4 metres high.

Also worth visiting is a partnership between Somerset House and 1-54, a retrospective exhibition devoted to the late Leila Alaoui, the French-Moroccan artist, photographer and activist who died in 2016 while working on a women’s rights campaign with Amnesty International. Alaoui was caught in gunfire during a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and three days later died of her wounds. Honouring Alaoui’s photographic practice, the exhibition includes three of Alaoui’s defining series of works – Les Marocains, No Pasara and Natreen, as well as Alaoui’s final unfinished video work L’Île du Diable (Devil’s Island), exploring the lives of a 1960s generation of dispossessed migrant workers in France.

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Dates
13 October 2024 — 16 October 2024
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