Ailin Khassen
Five shows, one city — London’s art scene is loud, political, and impossible to miss right now. From major retrospectives to emerging voices, these are the exhibitions setting the tone this year
Home to renowned galleries, independent art spaces, and emerging institutions, London continues to cement its status as a global cultural hub — rivalling other art capitals like New York and Paris. With over 800 galleries and 100 museums, the city has so much visual art to offer that the sheer amount of choice can feel overwhelming at times. This year’s programme is particularly compelling: from Beatriz González’s highly anticipated exhibition at the Barbican Centre to expansive group shows spotlighting the fresh voices of a new generation at the Saatchi Gallery and South London Gallery. Navigating the city’s art scene this season means encountering exhibitions that are unapologetically engaged with the politics of everyday life — grappling with power, protest, ecology, and technology. Here are five politically charged exhibitions we’re most looking forward to:
In a new commission for Somerset House, multidisciplinary artist Aziza Kadyri draws on her experience of growing up as an immigrant to examine how identity is shaped and reshaped through displacement. Free to visit until 15 March, the exhibition follows a trail of fragmented childhood memories and an evolving sense of belonging across Russia, China, Uzbekistan, and the UK.
Play Nice invites visitors into a vivid, multi-sensory experience shaped by sound, scenography, and tactile detail. Through this layered approach, Kadyri brings a playful, childlike sensibility to complex questions of belonging, adaptation, and identity — resulting in a viewing experience that is as inviting as it is thought-provoking.
If you’ve ever wanted to step into the electric energy of 1980s London, the Design Museum’s Blitz exhibition is your chance. Offering an immersive and sharply curated experience, it’s anything but a period piece. Instead, it presents Blitz, the famed Covent Garden club, as a genuine cultural engine — where fashion, music, design, and nightlife collided to shape a new visual language and set the tone for a wider cultural shift.
Open until 29 March, the reimagined club space brings the era’s fearless experimentation into sharp focus through more than 250 objects and archival pieces. Crucially, the show also foregrounds Blitz as one of the city’s early, self-made safe havens where queer and artistic youth could take risks, find community, and shape culture in real time. Standard tickets start at £14, with 20% off on Thursdays for visitors who arrive in Blitz club or 80s-inspired looks, which is reason enough to dress up and lean into the spirit of the show.
Marking Saatchi Gallery’s 40-year anniversary, The Long Now is an expansive group exhibition, with tickets from £10, that pairs new works by artists closely tied to the gallery’s history with standout voices from a new generation. Spanning two floors and nine major exhibition spaces, it delivers a wide-ranging view of contemporary art, and it runs until 26 April.
Across the show, expect political art that speaks directly to the moment — spanning the fragility of our surroundings and the pressures shaping community, as well as environmental uncertainty and the growing influence of surveillance, automation, and AI. If you’re looking for a single exhibition that captures the breadth and urgency of what’s being made right now, this is an easy place to start.
South London Gallery has partnered with New Contemporaries, the long-running organisation known for spotlighting some of the most compelling emerging artists working in the UK. Bringing together 26 artists, the exhibition moves from imagined dystopias to urgent responses to the climate crisis, gentrification, displacement, and entrenched systems of power.
Across painting, sculpture, moving image, and installation, the show traces how relationships are formed and fractured across time and borders — linking personal histories with memories and digital technologies. On view for free until 12 April, it offers an early look at the next wave of UK-based artists and the ideas they’re testing, questioning, and pushing right now.
The Barbican Centre is set to present a major showing of Colombian artist Beatriz González through 10 May, bringing together more than 150 works spanning her celebrated career. Often associated with the Pop Art movement, González draws on found imagery such as postcards, newspaper clippings, and reproductions of Western art, translating them into bold colour and graphic form.
What makes her work so compelling is its tonal range. With wit and precision, she plays with ideas of taste and “the popular” while offering a clear-eyed critique of power. At the same time, her images bear witness to violence and carry moving reflections on grief, displacement, and community. It’s a rare chance to see how González turned everyday images into an urgent record of the political and social realities of her time, with standard tickets at £19 and Pay What You Can entry every Thursday (5–8pm) and Friday (10am–12pm).
