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Viewing Lubaina Himid & Magda Stawarska: Zanzibar at Lisson Gallery

Echoes of home.

This June, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska bring painting, sound and memory together in a new iteration of Zanzibar at Lisson Gallery. The exhibition pairs nine diptychs painted by Himid in 1999 with a 38-minute sound work composed by Stawarska in 2023.

This exhibition marks an unusual chapter in Himid’s practice. Known for her figurative storytelling, in Zanzibar she turns to abstraction, using bright cuboid forms and zigzag patterns to recall her birthplace and the early events that brought her to London as a baby. Fishing nets, shells, shutters, rosewater and cloves surface across her paintings, fragments of family history and later journeys back to Zanzibar.

Stawarska’s eight-channel soundtrack, meanwhile, is woven through the paintings in the same freeform rhythm as their arrangement across the gallery. Taarab music from Zanzibar, fragments of opera, archival BBC broadcasts, orchestral passages and Himid’s own voice meet narrated sections from a guidebook given to Himid’s mother by her father. Stawarska describes the process as a careful choreography of layered sound, building a shifting landscape of emotion. Together, the paintings and soundtrack draw on both artists’ experiences of displacement and belonging, moving between past journeys, present desires and imagined futures. With their long-running collaboration also continuing at the British Pavilion in Venice this summer, Zanzibar is a moving reflection on home and the memories that stay with us, however far we travel.

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Nothing is as it seems at the Hayward.

Twenty-eight years after the Hayward Gallery staged his first major UK survey at a public gallery, British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor returns this summer; this time to take over the whole gallery and its terraces. A centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary programme, this exhibition brings together new and seminal works across sculpture and painting, curated by Ralph Rugoff as a fitting final flourish to close off his remarkable 20-year tenure as Director of the Hayward.

For more than forty years, Kapoor has pushed the possibilities of sculpture through bold experimentation with colour, scale and materials. His works are shrouded in mystery, often blurring the line between presence and absence and challenging our perception of reality. In exploring what he calls “the space of the object”, the artist asks viewers to look twice and reconsider how they experience the world around them.

Kapoor’s work has also always had a taste for spectacle. A vast, inflated PVC membrane fills one of the Hayward’s six-metre-high galleries, while another new installation sets a dark mountainous form above a sprawling red landscape. Elsewhere, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto descends from the ceiling to hover just inches above the floor, turning the Hayward into a place where your sense of scale, gravity and space all begin to waver.

Throughout the exhibition, Kapoor’s famous voids, Vantablack sculptures and mirrored steel works continue the visual trickery, while recent paintings and sculptures made from silicone, resin and pigment bring a more visceral edge to the show, conjuring associations of split bodies and internal organs. A must-see this summer: just be prepared to lose your bearings.

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Viewing Alvaro Barrington: 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’ at Emalin

The art of survival.

Alvaro Barrington returns to Emalin for his third solo exhibition with the gallery. 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’ presents a new body of work examining the devastating impact of the crack cocaine epidemic on Black communities in the United States during the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Across four distinct environments, Barrington traces the cultural responses that emerged during this period, exploring how fashion, music and other art forms gave communities space for expression and connection as the epidemic affected families and neighbourhoods across America.

Community has long been central to Barrington’s work, from his paintings and collaborations to his 2024 Tate Britain commission, GRACE. In 92-01 ‘In Livin Color’, he turns to a difficult chapter in recent history and to the cultural forms that grew around it. A timely show from an artist who understands that personal history is rarely separate from the wider world.

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The Wick Culture - Anuk Rocha, 2026
Spotlight

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The Wick Culture - Yeonjoon Yoon, Gavin Poole, Conrad Shawcross, Tristram Hunt at UMBILICAL

Happenings Conrad Shawcross: UMBILICAL at Here East

Happenings
The Wick Culture - Gallery view of the 2025 Summer Exhibition
Photo: © David Parry/ Royal Academy of Arts

Happenings RA Summer Party

Happenings
The Wick Culture - Katy Wickremesinghe at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Happenings Rachel Jones at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Happenings
The Wick Culture - Katy Wickremesinghe at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Happenings Rachel Jones at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Happenings
The Wick Culture - The Weston Collections Hall at V&A East
Storehouse, including over 100 mini
curated displays ‘hacked’ into the ends
and sides of the storage racking. Image by Hufton + Crow for V&A

Happenings V&A East Storehouse

Happenings