Things to do in London today

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 16, with bookings opening on August 20. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury. Five iconic London buildings you’ll be able to access for free in Open House 2025 10 Downing Street is opening to the public for exclusive tours during Open House London 2025

London is widely recognised as one of the design capitals of the world. Cementing this title is the annual Design Festival, a colourful and thought-provoking celebration of some of the world's best designers, who interrogate the boundaries of design through events, exhibitions and installations.  This year, the fest will showcase how contemporary design intersects with technology, sustainability, and our shared cultural heritage. Phew. Look out for landmark projects including What Nelson Sees by Paul Cocksedge, which will let you see London from Nelson’s vantage point on top of his Trafalgar Square column and Beacon by Lee Broom, a site-specific sculpture at the entrance of the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, inspired by the area’s Brutalist architecture and the 1951 Festival of Britain that will illuminate when Big Ben strikes the hour across the river. Plus, there’ll be fairs within the fair, like Material Matters, which will take over a whole floor of Space House with designers, brands, and thinkers to explore the importance of materials in design and architecture. As ever, the festival is spread across 11 Design Districts including spots like Chelsea College of Art and the V&A Museum, where the events will reflect the unique identity of each area.

Its been nine long years since Brick Lane last hosted its Curry Festival, but E1’s curry houses are once again coming together for this free festival taking over Brick Lane and nearby streets this September, with the aim of reestablishing this East End neighbourhood as the curry capital of the UK. The main event is on Sunday 21, when visitors can expect street food stalls and chef demonstrations outside the stretch of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurants on the corner of Brick Lane and Hanbury Street, alongside a host of family-friendly fun including DJs, stilt walkers, magicians and live graffiti presentations, plus some opportunities to get stuck in at henna and bangla dancing workshops. You can also get 20% off your bill at a host of participating restaurants all weekend by reserving a free ticket here.  Very tasty indeed.

Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This year, look out for Rekindling by Compagnie Carabosse (Sep 25-26), a huge fire installation on and around Royal Victoria Dock inspired by the Royal Docks’ role in London’s story. There’ll also be dance performances in the atmospheric Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (Sep 17) and gigs in Crossness Pumping Station (Sep 13).  Old favourites will also be making an appearance, including the Great River Race (Sep 20) from Tower Hamlets to Richmond, where 330 crews from across the world spending the morning speeding down the Thames on wooden rowboats, many of them in fancy dress costumes. While St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sep 6) will let you clamber aboard ancient vessels. You can also visit a mudlarking exhibition, walk and masterclass, take boat tours and listen to special lectures.  Other events include guided walks, photography classes, talks, cabaret, and more: each weekend's activities revolve around a different hub, in the locations of Brentford, The Royal Docks, London Bridge, Greenwich and Kingston upon Thames. Check out the Totally Thames schedule for full details.

Forget the same old, same old. The annual Future Of Food Festival, hosted by the culinary hotspots of Regent Street and St James’s, has got events galore that are all about the newest, most exciting, and most sustainable bits of the restaurant industry. Join panel talks with industry experts to get some insight into where food is heading in the coming years, tuck into some unique dining experiences and meet some of the most innovative chefs, restaurateurs and suppliers in the country. This year, there’ll be exclusive dining experiences from chefs including Alex Dilling and Rafael Cagali, an 11-course seafood fiesta at Bentley’s Ocean’s Eleven, masterclasses from sustainable booze brands including Sapling Spirits, and On-Street Feasts where you can dine outdoors, enjoying dishes from four different restaurants at the same time. Across the whole of September, the area will be a treasure trove of promotions, with select restaurants offering discounts, while the Discovery Zone will take you on a journey via taste, smell and touch to find out what the future of food is.

You don't see many festivals billing themselves as a blend of ‘philosophy and music’ but that's exactly what you get at HowTheLightGetsIn. Over 300 talks, discussions, debates, musical performances, comedy sets and documentary screenings are on the bill this year. Alain de Boton, Brian Cox, Ash Sarkar, Mary Trump, Cathy Newman, Alastair Campbell, Roger Penrose and John Gray are just some of the thinkers on the line-up, while performances come from the likes of Alex Farrow, The Orb, Lucy Beaumont, Deptford Northern Soul Club, Alexandra Harrow and Kadialy Kouyate on the entertainment bill. Your centrist dad will love it.

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to...

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

Bermondsey Bierkeller claims to offer 'London's most authentic Oktoberfest celebration,' and while that's not something we're necessarily qualified to adjudicate on, it does sound pretty damn Bavarian. This underground cellar is serving up a revolving programme of Munich-style fun from September 20 til the end of October. On Thursdays and Fridays, that means Oompah bands and DJs, while things get a bit more glitzy on Saturday nights, with fire-eaters, stilt-walking German wenches, jugglers and more. Or head over on Saturday afternoon for a bottomless Bavarian brunch with beer and bratwurst galore. 

It feels a bit like Oktoberfest all year round at Munich Cricket Club, but it really takes the Bavarian joy up a notch as the season approaches. From mid September til the end of October, the spirit of the fest will take over its Canary Wharf, Tower Hill and Victoria locations. Expect foaming steins, platters of sausage and a live oompah band to get the vibes flying. Dancing on tabletops is encouraged – just be careful not to slip on any saus. The festivities also include the ceremonial tapping of the Oktober barrel, straight from Munich, plus games, silliness and surprises. There's also a bottomless cheese fondue brunch for anyone looking to test their digestive system to its very limits. 

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...

This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.  This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.   Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited....

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

This review is from 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical...

Like Hamlet, Twelfth Night is one of those god-tier Shakespeare plays that pops up so much at 'regular’ theatres that it feels relatively underproduced at the Globe. It’s a stretch to say it’s actually not suited to the Bankside playhouse (which is probably something you could say about Hamlet). But this new production feels like an object lesson in what can go wrong with a Globe Twelfth Night. Robin Belfield’s production falls into a very Globe-ish trap of having a lot of fun individual turns but failing to really cohere into a whole that makes much sense. And the lack of set changes leaves it without any sense of place, just groups of characters mucking about in front of Jean Chan’s unhelpfully abstract sun-ray set design. It starts off very well, mind. As Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́’s Viola shipwrecks on Illyria she witnesses a vibrantly weird carnival, equal parts Notting Hill and The Wicker Man. This is Duke Orsino’s court, which is contrasted beautifully with the subsequent appearance of the moribund Olivia and her extravagant mourning garb. These costumes – by Chan again – are wonderful, and give the main parties on the island a sense of identity. But then it loses steam. The carnival-versus-funeral thing never comes to anything and certainly doesn’t result in the sort of joyous, movement-soaked production that is briefly threatened.  Instead it lets itself get bogged down in the various drunks, oddballs and assorted other comic characters in Olivia’s household - which is...

This review is from 2021.  This long-gestating musical version of ‘Back to the Future’ – it has literally taken longer to bring to the stage than all three films took to make – is so desperate to please that the producers would doubtless offer a free trip back in time with every ticket purchase if the laws of physics allowed. It is extra as hell, every scene drenched in song, dance, wild fantasy asides, fourth-wall-breaking irony and other assorted shtick. You might say that, yes, that’s indeed what musicals are like. But John Rando’s production of a script by the film’s co-creator Bob Gale is so constantly, clangingly OTT that it begins to feel a bit like ‘Back to the Future’ karaoke: it hits every note, but it does so at a preposterous velocity that often drowns out the actual storytelling.  As with the film, it opens with irrepressible teen hero Marty McFly visiting his friend ‘Doc’ Brown’s empty lab, where he rocks out on an inadvisably over-amped ukulele. Then he goes and auditions for a talent contest, hangs out with his girlfriend Jennifer, talks to a crazy lady from the clock tower preservation society, hangs out with his loser family… and takes a trip 30 years into the past in the Doc’s time-travelling DeLorean car, where he becomes embroiled in a complicated love triangle with his mum and dad. It is, in other words, the same as the film, with only a few minor plot changes (the whole thing about Doc getting on the wrong side of some Libyan terrorists is the most...

To drink, or not to drink? The Sh!t-faced Shakespeare crew resprise their production of the Bard’s greatest play: as ever, with one member of the company smashed out of their faces. Is it going to be a ‘Hamlet’ for the ages? Absolutely not. Is it going to be a fun, short ‘Hamlet’ best watched over a few beers? Aye, there's the rub.

Come Alive is a tricky one to review because the question here is less ‘is this a good example of a mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ and more ‘what the hell are the criteria for a good mash up of a circus and the songs from The Greatest Showman?’ Conceived and directed by Simon Hammerstein, the brains behind posh strip club The Box, Come Alive occupies a huge building in Earl’s Court dubbed the Empress Museum, formerly called the Daikin Centre and home to an immersive David Attenborough documentary.   The actual big top-style performance space is comparatively intimate: 700 seats is not tiny, but if an obvious point of comparison is Cirque du Soleil’s annual shows at the Royal Albert Hall, then Come Alive offers similarly skilled acrobats at appreciably closer range – you can see each muscle contort and flex. The rest of the building has been given over to a sort of Greatest Showman-themed mini-mall: overpriced food, overpriced drinks, overpriced fancy dress clobber - but done in high travelling-circus style and there’s a little bit of gratis pre-show acrobatics in one corner of it that’s well worth catching. Anyway. Circus. And the songs from The Greatest Showman. I think one basic point here is that presumably literally every person who has bought a ticket to Come Alive will love the Benj Pasek and Justin Paul tunes from the film already. They’re done well – performed live and with personality, but also very faithfully, ie no drastic sonic...

Though you can buy all of Michael Bond’s books in the gift shop, let’s be clear here: the Paddington Bear Experience has very little to do with the first 50 or so years of the marmalade-loving ursine’s existence. Rather, the lavish new central London immersive experience makes no bones about fact it’s a live extension of the world of the two (soon to be three) StudioCanal movies. Theoretically I suppose that’s a shame. Debuting in print in 1958, Paddington has a rich history and London’s first proper attraction dedicated to him doesn’t explore it at all. But who are we kidding here? The Paul King films are modern masterpieces, and Paddington would be left as a beloved but past-his-prime nostalgia character if it weren’t for them. He’d have his little statue at the station. But nothing like this. You don’t absolutely need to have seen the films, but there are countless callbacks to them in this gentle adventure, which essentially an immersive theatre show. As we begin by waiting at a small recreation of Paddington Station to board our train to Windsor Gardens, we’re serenaded by a pre-recorded version of the band from the films playing ‘London is the Place for Me’; when we make it to Windsor Gardens for this year’s Marmalade Day Festival, designer Rebecca Brower has faithfully recreated the entire downstairs of the Brown’s boho Notting Hill pad. And then of course there’s Paddington himself - constantly teased as just out of full sight, his prerecorded voice would seem to...

Edinburgh had its turn in August: in September the UK comedy world revolves around Greenwich. Across five nights and weekend afternoons in September, top-tier comedians will descend on the National Maritime Museum for London’s largest and longest-running comedy festival. Take your pick from stellar line-ups fronted by a sucession of proper comedy A-listers. Television faves Frankie Boyle and Sara Pascoe are probably the biggest names here, but you can’t swing a cat without hitting a famous comedian – they’ll be joined by the likes of Tim Key, Fern Brady, Bridget Christie, Nish Kumar, Phil Wang and Bridget Christie. Inevitably several of the shows are sold out, but really you can’t go wrong whatever you choose.  The setting is pretty spectacular, too – performances take place in an outdoor stage with the Royal Naval College as the backdrop. Get there early to take advantage of the food stalls, bars and breezy end-of-summer vibes.

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

To reach Life on the Land, the National Gallery’s exhibition on the nineteenth century French artist Jean-Francois Millet, you have to walk through rooms of the museum filled with centuries’ worth of grand portraits of society’s upper crust. On arrival, surrounded by dusky-toned renderings of outdoor labour, it might take a moment to adjust. Stoicism abounds here, its head bowed and its eyes averted. You won’t find any grandeur or pomp in this concise exhibition of 15 muted and unflashy works, but you’ll experience an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility in the adjacent rooms. Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land. The former can be found in the scenes’ wide horizons and the figures that punctuate them. The latter is best distilled in a detail of The Winnower (c. 1847–8), whose subject’s clogs are stuffed with hay to keep his feet warm. The exhibition’s centrepiece, L’Angelus (1859), is here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Like most of the work here, its ornate gilded frame feels incongruous with the painting itself, in which two shadowy figures stand statuesque in a twilit field, a basket of potatoes sitting on the ground between them. They could be staring at the ground, though their eyes, obscured by the enclosing darkness, might be closed. Just visible through lacy mist on the horizon is a church spire. The...

Us humans can be pretty selfish, and that’s especially true when it comes to design. It’s probably not something you’ve really thought about much before now (see, selfish!) but the world of design has historically neglected the needs of the animals, plants and other living organisms with whom we share our planet, in favour of catering to the whims and demands of us homosapiens. But not anymore. Created in collaboration with Future Observatory – the Design Museum’s national research programme championing new design innovations around environmental issues – this groundbreaking exhibition brings together art, design, architecture and technology to explore the concept of ‘more-than-human’ design, which embraces the notion that human activities can only flourish alongside those of other species and eco-systems. 

Young painter Rachel Jones has become one of the most powerful voices in contemporary abstraction, using her hyper-colourful visual language – filled with references to mouths and teeth – to explore ideas of identity. We’ve reviewed her many times, and even had her as one of ‘Future of London Art’ stars back in 2023. And now, she’s going to be the first ever contemporary artist to have a solo show in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s main exhibition space.

‘Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.’ So it’s surprising that until 2025, the UK has never had a major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. This year the Imperial War Museum is hoping to shed light on the topic that remains widely under-discussed.  Through first-person testimonies, objects, artwork, propoganda posters and papers, Unsilenced will investigate the different ways in which sexual violence in conflict can manifest. It will span the untold stories of child evacuees, victims of trafficking, prisoners of war, and survivors from the First World War to present-day conflicts, and highlight the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. It’s expected to be a sobering, ground-breaking exhibition.  NB: This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. IWM advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.   

‘Instagram face’, CGI influencers and AI sex dolls are all going under the microscope in the new Somerset House exhibition, Virtual Beauty.   Through more than 20 works, this pay-what-you-feel show explores the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The exhibition traces the origin of the digital selfie from the first flip phone with a front-facing camera, to today’s minefield of deepfake pornography, augmented reality face filters and Instagram algorithms. It’s primarily concerned with the ‘Post-Internet’ art movement, a 21st-century body of work and criticism that examines the influence of the internet on art and culture. In the first room, we encounter early artworks that comment on society’s gruelling beauty standards, like ORLAN’s disturbing 1993 performance that saw her going under the knife live on camera, and taking recommendations by audience members over the phone. Famous celeb selfies like Ellen DeGeneres’ A-lister packed Oscars snap are shown on a grainy phone screen, then we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of digital artworks, each one providing some sort of comment on beauty, society and the online world.   There’s a lot in Virtual Beauty that is pretty on the nose. We are shown a Black Mirror-style satirical advert for a pharmaceutical company called ‘You’, that offers people the chance to alter their appearance without plastic surgery – simply have a chip inserted into your brain, and the technology makes you appear different,...

How many people does it take to put on a solo exhibition? When I visit akâmi-, the Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater’s show at Camden Art Centre, three technicians are packing up their tools as a photographer takes installation shots. The show was curated by this year’s New Curators fellows, a group of 11 aspiring exhibition makers. It includes work by Linklater’s son and grandmother as well as his wife, Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he works under the moniker Grey Plumes. As we approach twenty contributors, I wonder whether the term solo exhibition might be inaccurate. Throughout the show, Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His message, uniting the three disparate bodies of work on show here, is as clear and simple as it is defiant. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show; it takes a village. The first room contains a series of arresting, moody canvases awash with the colours of plums, sand and sunsets. Though spartan, they provide plenty to look at. Many are irregular in shape and comprise multiple sheets of linen sewn together. Some are painted with disembodied ornate window frames while others contain rorschach-like splatters. You might imagine Linklater alone in his studio, mixing the colours that make these haunting images, but you’d be wrong. They’re painted with natural materials including tea, sumac and tobacco: in other...

Peter Doig is one of the greatest living painters, an artist whose approach to hazy, memory-drenched figuration has had an enormous impact on the visual landscape of today. For his show at the Serpentine, he’s going well beyond the canvas, filling the gallery with speaker systems to explore the impact of music on his work. Does DJ-set-meets-art-exhibition sound like your idea of hell? Mine too, but it’s Doig, so it just might work. Maybe.

Part of White Cube’s ongoing series that sees them present solo exhibitions with emerging artists from outside of their roster, Korean painter Suzanne Song’s forthcoming show will comprise a selection of her precise, illusory abstract paintings. Expect intricately painted geometric patterns disrupted with the appearance of shadows, creases and folds, paradoxically creating three-dimensional space within flat patterns and images. 

Turner Prize-nominated video artist Hilary Lloyd will present a major new commission at Studio Voltaire this autumn. Her new piece is centred all around the work of the playwright and TV writer Dennis Potter. Best known for his TV serials, Potter’s Brechtian techniques helped bring experimental and surreal television into the mainstream. Hilary Lloyd’s installation will combine audio and visual elements with archival materials and performative interludes. Central to the show is a series of short films featuring actors, producers and collaborators connected to Potter’s work and life, featuring Melvyn Bragg and Ken Trodd. Lloyd will explore themes central to Potter’s work including chronic illness, death, sex, abuse of power and class.