There are lots of great museum exhibitions opening in 2025 – We’ve decided to focus on London and choose some of the most interesting exhibitions coming in 2025.
New Contemporaries, 15th January – 23rd March 2025, ICA London
Marking 75 years of New Contemporaries, the annual exhibition returns to the ICA, having had a regular presence here in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and more recently in the 2010s. New Contemporaries is a unique platform, which provides emerging and early career UK-based artists with a wider audience to their work. This edition features 35 artists who have been selected through an open call by artists Liz Johnson Artur, Permindar Kaur and Amalia Pica.
The works on show offer an overview of urgent lived concerns, interests and social realities from this generation of artists. Themes include the fluctuations and cycles in the natural world, sustainability and decay; boundaries, borders and fragmented memories; the commodification of mindfulness, self-care, pop culture and consumerism. Other works explore kinship amongst communities, juxtaposed with those that suggest an alienation or ambivalence towards a digitally accelerated world.
The exhibiting artists are: Motunrayo Akinola, Libby Bove, Max Boyla, Molly Burrows, Fergus Carmichael, Mya Cavner and Edith Liben, Karen David, Roo Dhissou, Beverley Duckworth, Georgia Dymock, Tom Fairlamb, Farzaneh Ghadyanloo, Sara Graça, Dageong Han, Síomha Harrington, Anna Howard, Fi Isidore, Asmaa Jama and Gouled Ahmed, Laura Kazaroff, AC Larsen, Sophie Lloyd, Hazel O’Sullivan, Sun Oh, Sara Osman, Saul Pankhurst, Varshga Premarasa, Elliott Roy, Millie Shafiee, Sai Stephenson, Valentino Vannini, Joshua Whitaker, Danilo Zocatelli Cesco, and Yang Zou.
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, 11th February to 5th May 2025, Hayward Gallery
Linder’s first London retrospective showcases 50 years of the pioneering feminist artist’s work, dissecting our fascination with the body and its representation.
From the early photomontages made while she was part of the punk scene of 1970s Manchester, to new work in digital montage shown for the first time, the exhibition presents the breadth of Linder’s artistic output across montage, photography, performance and sculpture.
The body and its photographic representation, from early glamour photography to digital deep fakes, is central to Linder’s approach to image-making.
Often working with a medical grade scalpel, she draws on the creative and violent power of the cut in her forensic examination of our shifting attitudes to aspirational lifestyles, sex, food and fashion.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, 20th February – 18th May 2025, National Portrait Gallery
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift, celebrates iconic fashion images and portraits from The Face, a trail-blazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond.
From 1980 to 2004, The Face played a vital role in creating contemporary culture. Musicians featured on its covers achieved global success and the models it championed – including a young Kate Moss – became the most recognisable faces of their time. The magazine also launched the careers of many leading photographers and fashion stylists, who were given the creative freedom to radically reimagine the visual language of fashion photography and define the spirit of their times. Relaunched in 2019, the magazine continues to provide a disruptive and creative space for image-makers, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design.
This exhibition will bring together the work of over 80 photographers, including Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, Corinne Day, David Sims, Elaine Constantine and Sølve Sundsbø, and will feature over 200 photographs – a unique opportunity to see many of these images away from the magazine page for the first time.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift is curated by Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, together with Curatorial Consultants Lee Swillingham, former Art Director of The Face from 1992 to 1999, and Norbert Schoerner, a photographer whose work featured in the magazine throughout the nineties and noughties. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same name, with contributions from Ekow Eshun, Sabina Jaskot-Gill, Jamie Morgan, Pete Paphides and Matthew Whitehouse, and interviews between Nick Logan and Lee Swillingham; Neville Brody, Jill Furmanovsky and Sheila Rock; Elaine Constantine, Glen Luchford and Nancy Rohde; and Norbert Schoerner and Stéphane Sednaoui.
Leigh Bowery! 27th February – 31st August 2025, Tate Modern
Tate Modern to celebrate the provocative and boundary-pushing career of Leigh Bowery – one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century.
In his short but extraordinary life, Bowery (1961-1994) forged a truly unique path. Known variously as an artist, performer, club kid, model, TV personality, fashion designer and musician, Bowery took on many different roles but always refused to be limited by convention. He reimagined clothing and makeup as forms of sculpture and painting, tested the limits of decorum, and created a new form of performance art to explore the body as a shape-shifting tool with the power to challenge norms of aesthetics, sexuality and gender. For the first time, Tate Modern will bring together Bowery’s outlandish and dazzling costumes alongside painting, photography and videos to explore how he changed art, fashion and popular culture forever. Charting the journey of a young boy from the quiet suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne, Australia, who became a globally recognised cultural figure, Leigh Bowery! offers a portrait of an outrageous, complex and creative figure who left a distinct and undeniable mark on contemporary art and beyond.
Moving from the club to the stage, to the gallery and beyond, visitors are invited to step inside Bowery’s dynamic creative world. Opening with his arrival in London from Australia in 1980, the exhibition will delve into Bowery’s impact on the city’s infamous nightlife scene. Emerging alongside a network of notable figures such as Scarlett Cannon, Boy George and Princess Julia, Bowery cemented his international reputation with the launch of his own club night called ‘Taboo’ in 1985 – a liberating space offering Bowery and friends the freedom to explore their identity and transform themselves. Famously asking “How many meanings has “Ok” got?!” Bowery thrived on appearing exceptional. He quickly learned the social currency of turning a ‘Look’ and set himself apart from the crowd through his bold and distinctive style. Visitors will be able to get up close to the intricate costumes he hand-crafted with collaborator Nicola Rainbird, who later became his wife, and corsetier Mr Pearl, while photographs by Fergus Greer illustrate how Bowery brought these to life in animated ways. A music and video installation by filmmaker and DJ Jeffrey Hinton, made especially for the exhibition, will convey the frenzied excitement of the Taboo-era, transporting audiences back to a vibrant underground community.
With the energy and reverie of Taboo still echoing in the distance, Bowery pirouetted out of the nightclub and onto the stages of the dance and art worlds. In 1984, Bowery was invited to design the costumes for Michael Clark’s dance works, beginning a collaboration that would last almost a decade. His work with Clark will be represented in the exhibition through excerpts of Charles Atlas’s quasi-fictionalised documentary Hail the New Puritan 1985, and the film Because We Must 1989. Bowery’s exhibitionism came to the fore when staging his ‘mirror’ performance in 1988, where for five days he dressed up and posed in front of a two-way mirror, allowing viewers to watch him while he was oblivious to their gaze. Staging not just his body but the very act of looking, Bowery reimagined the sterility of the gallery scene as a social space. Filmmaker Dick Jewell’s (What’s Your Reaction to the Show? 1988) will reveal the honest opinions of the cast of friends, colleagues and passersby who witnessed this ambitious performance.
It was Bowery’s close friendship with Lucian Freud that marked a turning point in his relationship with the contemporary art world in the late 1980s. Several of Freud’s personal portraits of Bowery will be displayed at Tate Modern, showing how the renowned artist presented a fresh view of this flamboyant performer. Prompted by the intimacy of posing for Freud, Bowery increasingly began using his body as raw material, notably stating “flesh is the most fabulous fabric”. Portraits by photographers including Nick Knight and films by Charles Atlas will show how Bowery was able to use his body as a form of contemporary surrealism, reimagining himself as an alien-like creature. This extended to his notorious ‘birth’ performances, in which Bowery strapped Nicola Rainbird to his chest and gave ‘birth’ to her on stage, showing just how much he pushed the limits of the human form.
The exhibition will culminate with Bowery’s foray into music with his band Minty. Uniting his love of performance, shock value and humour, it enabled him to achieve the full expression of his creative ideas, showcasing his constant desire to experiment, take risks and create a space for questions. Bowery’s final performance at London’s Freedom Café in November 1994 was attended by a young Lee ‘Alexander’ McQueen and Lucian Freud, demonstrating how far-reaching his influence on the worlds of both art and fashion had become.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Opening September, Serpentine North
In Autumn 2025, Berlin and London-based artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) will present a major new collaborative video game, exhibition and R&D project, commissioned and produced by Serpentine Arts Technologies, at Serpentine North.
Working predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development, Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories.
Encouraging the active participation of the visitor-player in her installations, the artist highlights the role of individual choices in shaping narratives and histories. The project will bring together artists, technologists, interaction designers and specialist researchers to expand the artist’s exploration of the creative and civic potential of video game technologies.
Building on her love of retro choose-your-own-adventure games, improv theatre and new research into online communities, digital democracy and the extreme polarisation of today’s world, this project implicates the ‘audience as medium’ to activate and complete the work. At the core of the project will be a new game that will be developed over the course of the next year. Conceptualised as a ‘performance machine’, or performance infrastructure, the game will be activated throughout an immersive exhibition, which will function as a live playtest, ‘social experiment’ and living archive, where players’ inputs determine how the story – a speculative future fiction – continues.
Serpentine Arts Technologies has been working with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley since 2021, when she was invited to contribute to Future Art Ecosystems 2: Art x Metaverse, a report that examined how the metaverse represents a fundamental shift in our notion of digital systems and the impact of the video games industry on art and culture. Since then, Serpentine Arts Technologies has collaborated on R&D, developing prototypes and experimental hybrid gaming projects including WE CAN’T DO THIS ALONE, YOUR PRESENCE ALONE CHANGES HOW OTHERS BREATHE, and THE LACK.
WE CAN’T DO THIS ALONE hosted in 2022, was an interactive playtesting event in the form of a live improv play, where the audience became the actors. YOUR PRESENCE ALONE CHANGES HOW OTHERS BREATHE, in 2022, was conceived as an interactive murder mystery and conversation hosted via Twitch. THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE was commissioned in collaboration with Art Night and NeON Digital Arts for Art Night Dundee in 2023. In this dystopic, interactive art video game, audiences shaped a new world through their interactions, highlighting the urgency of choices in a time of meteoric change.
This marks the continuation of Serpentine Arts Technologies’ ongoing commitment to video game technologies, in particular game engines, through commissions such as Ian Cheng, Bad Corgi (2015) and B.O.B. (2018), Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Catharsis (2020); Trust, Hivemind (2022) and Gabriel Massan & Collaborators, Third World: The Bottom Dimension (2023). As with the current exhibition, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst: The Call, the project will be supported by the Future Art Ecosystems initiative in the development of technical, legal and creative R&D to be shared with the wider cultural sector that explores how to embed technological spaces with ethical and community-focused infrastructures.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Danielle’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions including Fundació Joan Miró (2024); LAS (2024); Studio Voltaire (2024); SCAD (2023); ArtNight (2023); FACT (2022); David Kordansky, LA (2022); Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022); Arebyte Gallery (2021); QUAD (2021); Albright-Knox (2021); and Science Gallery, London (2020). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including WSA (2024), Julia Stoschek Foundation (2022); Les Urbaines (2019); Barbican (2018).
Candice Lin, 8th October 2025 – 11th January 2026, Whitechapel Gallery
The 2025 Whitechapel Gallery annual commission is from LA-based artist Candice Lin. This commission represents Lin’s return to London, nine years on from her first solo exhibition System for a Stain, held at Gasworks, London in 2016. Lin’s practice of telling stories through multisensorial environments has developed significantly through site-specific projects at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2024); Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2024); 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennale (2021 and 2023); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2023); Spike Island, Bristol (2022); and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021).
Lin’s art explores marginalised histories, colonial legacies and the materials that connect them. Through a research-based practice, she invokes and interrogates these themes, giving them sensuous reality through an eclectic mix of substances like tobacco, lard, opium poppies or cochineal bugs. In each case, Lin activates the audience within her layered installations, bringing detailed histories and research to life and encourages viewers to question the past, present and future.
Candice Lin has been generously supported by the Whitechapel Gallery Commissioning Council: Dorota Audemars, Erin Bell, Émilie de Pauw, Irene Panagopoulos and Nicole Saikalis Bay; and The Ampersand Foundation.
