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


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London gets a real treat with this breathtaking, uplifting, seriously good touring exhibition of works drawn from the Wedge Collection. Based on the Aperture publication of the same title, and brilliantly curated by Elliot Ramsey, As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic brings together portraiture of Black subjects authored by Black subjects from the mid 20th century to today.

Major draws include a chance to see vintage prints by the likes of West African masters Malick Sidibé, Sory Sanlé, Seydou Këita, through to Jamal Shabazz, an early work by Carrie Mae Weems, and a rare black and white documentary portrait by Aïda Muluneh. There are also portraits by more recent superstars in the photo world, such as Kennedi Carter, the youngest photographer to ever shoot a Vogue cover, (aged 21 in 2020).

You might come for the famous names – but you’ll stay for the less celebrated: the Wedge Collection’s Dr Kenneth Montague has a sensibility and sensitivity for histories untold across the Black Atlantic, introducing Canadian artists like Tayo Yannick Anton, and Jamaican artists such as Ruddy Roye, whose bold visions of his homeland are revealed through striking portraits of Jamaicans taken on the beaches of Montego Bay.

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Dates
05 November 2024 — 20 January 2025

Viewing Electric Dreams Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern

Tate Modern’s newly-opened bonanza group show takes you back to a place unimaginable from where we are now: a time pre-internet. This long running survey of early era digital art moves from the psychedelic 1950s to the beginning of the internet era in the 1980s, taking you through the experiments of artists who wanted to innovate with the way we see and sense.

Tracing a trajectory through kinetic, optical and digital works, inspired by mathematical principles, and making use of new tech and industrial processes, artists this is an ambitious examination of how we got to here, and how visual language was pushing perception long before the network as we know it.

Look out for Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress, a sculpture, painting, installation and costume originally created for a performance in 1956. This wearable artwork crafted from hand-painted industrial bulbs and incandescent tubes was hot and heavy – and wearing it could have been fatal in the event of a short circuit. The Zero Group’s founder Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) is another unmissable work, a key piece in understanding artistic approaches to technology of the time. The installation comprises five light-emitting sculptures, each fitted with motors, synchronised to perform a theatrical light play or ‘ballet’.

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Dates
28 November 2024 — 01 June 2025
The Bogota-born, Brooklyn-based María Berrío also returns to London this week with her solo exhibition, End of Ritual, opening at Victoria Miro. The artist has become known for her large-scale, laboriously-crafted collaged paintings, using the most delicate Japanese and watercolour. Her semi-fictional scenes draw on the familial and folkloric, often depicting women and children in fantastical and richly narrative scenes.

For the works created for this exhibition, Berrío collaborated with dancers from the New York City based GALLIM dance company, who improvised movements, wearing props and costumes from the artist’s personal collection. These sessions inspired the final works, where characters move through crowded interiors.

These scenes mark a distinctive new direction for the artist, with more urgent and immediate concerns for the enviroment, and the impact of geopolitical forces on women and children. “It’s almost aggressive – an interpellation. The tumult on canvas proceeds from a compositional method but addresses the tumult of the world,” writes Siddhartha Mitter in a new publication accompanying the show.

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Dates
21 November 2024 — 18 January 2025
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