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 The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s dazzling array of more than 1200 artworks

The Summer Exhibition is a unique event: every Royal Academicians sift through thousands of entries to select 1,200 works for display in a mammoth and meandering show, where hierarchies between famous and anonymous are dissolved. And all the works are for sale, too – from as little as £250.

An unbroken annual tradition since 1769, the Summer Exhibition takes a loose theme and is led by an RA coordinator – Ann Christopher for 2024 – alongside a committee of RA artists and architects, this year including Cornelia Parker, Veronica Ryan, Assemble, and Hurvin Anderson. The theme for this year is ‘making space’, taken literally in some cases, and moving into the metaphorical for others.

The Summer Exhibition always provokes the critics but it is a much loved tradition, and anticipated moment for many gallery goers, the chance to truly see everything people are making art about, not only those educated in institutions like the RA itself. A welcome break from the curatorial preciousness of most programming, whether you love it or loathe it, there is always something interesting on show and the potential to discover something new, too. Long may it continue!

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Dates
18 June 2024 — 18 August 2024

Viewing Minsuk Cho’s imaginative Serpentine Pavilion of five timber islands

Minsuk Cho noticed something when looking at the past 22 pavilions put up at the Serpentine – they tend to be realized as a single central structure on the Serpentine South lawn. Cho decided to do it differently: the centre becomes a void, riffing on the Korean madang, or central courtyard space. Around this open space, Cho has constructed five unique timber ‘islands’ each conceived as a ‘content machine’ housing collaborations with other artists, researchers and creatives.

One structure titled the ‘Gallery’ is home to a six-channel sound installation, by musician and composer Jang Young-Gyu, while the largest structure, the ‘Auditorium’, is an area for public gathering, performances and talks, with built-in benches; there’s also a ‘Play Tower’s for antics on brightly coloured nets, and a tea house – a nod to the Serpentine South’s previous life as a tea house before it became an art gallery in 1970. Our personal favourite, though, is the ‘Library of Unread Books’, an installation by artist Heman Chong and archivist Renée Staal. This ‘living’ reference library consists of donated unread books to form a pool of common knowledge.

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Dates
07 June 2024 — 27 October 2024
Project Art Divvy is an exciting platform for South Asian art, promoting the practices of artists working in the region and as part of its diaspora. Their latest endeavour is an exhibition at Shahnaz Gallery, where thirteen artists explore experiences of migration and the indelible mark these journeys have, even generations on.

The joys and traumas of navigating new cultures are evoked, for example, in poetic films by Sophia Balagamwala, a Karachi based artist, who looks to children’s books and animations to explore Pakistan’s history. A poetry and sound piece by Akanksha Kamath, meanwhile, delves into her grandmother’s experience of India and Pakistan’s partition in 1947 and Kamath’s own experience of home. Family and national histories intertwine too in the work of Bangladeshi artist Palash Bhattacharjee, who focuses on the Kalurghat bridge in Chittagong, a site with a long history of crossings, dating back to prehistoric times, later a point for troops of the Burma Front to cross the river during World War I, and an important location in the Bangladesh Liberation War.

The exhibition also takes a critical approach to objects themselves in stories of migration and displacement – included are several antique objects that have traveled across continents and through time carrying with them their own narratives. Legacies of Crossing is a contemplative and engaging deep dive into a global subject from perspectives rarely seen and heard in the UK.

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Dates
21 May 2024 — 21 June 2024
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