If you're in the mood to see something new this December - we've got you. This is our curated list of art shows and exhibitions that have just opened or are opening soon, and we think you should add them all to your calendar.
ELECTRIC DREAMS
TATE MODERN
Southwark I 28 November to 1 June
Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.
One of Tate Modern’s most ambitious exhibitions to date, Electric Dreams offers visitors a rare chance to experience incredible works of vintage tech art in action – a look back at how artists imagined the visual language of the future.
More details and tickets here.
NDAYÉ KOUAGOU: A MESSAGE FOR EVERYBODY
GATHERING
Piccadilly Circus I 29 November to 22 February
Ndayé Kouagou is an artist and performer based in Paris, and his practice begins with self-authored text, which is expanded upon through performance, film, textiles, sculpture and installation. Through this, Kouagou manipulates the language of aphorism espoused by online influencers and self-help gurus. Using screens, plexiglass, resin and aluminium, Kouagou presents the viewer with elliptical statements and open-ended, existentially leading questions, simulating the meandering dialogue that dominates platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Surface and depth, humour and sincerity, clarity and confusion are granted equivalent significance in Kouagou’s work as he playfully explores the forms and effects of mediated communication.
Find more information here.
ELSA ROUY: A SCREAMING OBJECT
GUTS GALLERY
Hackney Downs I 29 November to 21 December
A Screaming Object is a solo presentation of ambitious, boundary-pushing new work by London-based artist Elsa Rouy. Her works are provocative, they interrogate perceived notions of gender, sex and feeling and they intrude and stick themselves irreversibly onto the psychology of their viewers. In this new work, Rouy continues to explore and navigate the unsettling boundary between hellish, visceral brutality and soft, tender beauty. The result is a complicated, transgressive and labyrinthine emotional landscape in which the repressed, troubling elements of the human subconscious are explored. The exhibition is accompanied by an original score composed by Oscar Defriez. This soundtrack provides an all-encompassing, unsettling sensory experience and serves to accent the harrowing drama of the colossal central painting.
Find all details here.
MARTIN PARR: NO SMOKING
ROCKET
Cambridge Heath I 11 December to 31 May
This solo exhibition of photographs by the internationally renowned British photographer Martin Parr is dedicated to the increasingly controversial subject of smoking and spans the length of Parr’s career – with photographs from 1970 to 2019. The exhibition – and new book of the same title – highlights the evolution of smoking culture over the last five decades.
Throughout his career Martin Parr has captured daily life as it really is and as you sift through the archives it is rather difficult to not stumble upon a cigarette, cigar, pipe or – in recent years – a dreaded vape. So, with murmurs of the United Kingdom banning the purchase of tobacco by anyone born after 2009, no time seems more ideal to offer up a typically Parr commentary on society’s ever-changing relationship with smoking.
More information here.
AMY HUI LI: PARADISE LOST
UNIT
Oxford Circus I 11 December to 19 January
Amy Hui Li’s first solo exhibition with Unit is a deeply personal exploration of materiality, fragility and emotion. Balanced between painting and sculpture, paradise lost narrates the process of falling apart and coming back together again.
Immediately evocative of John Milton’s epic poem, the exhibition’s title reconsiders ideas of sin and grace in a contemporary context. In this sense, Li looks also to the song of the same name – ‘paradise lost/ 失乐园’ written by the Cantonese lyricist Wyman Wong and performed by the Hong Kong based band, Grasshopper – which encapsulates the dichotomy of everyday existence in a world that is cruel and strange, yet also exciting and wondrous. Each painting delves into Li’s personal experiences of struggle and reparation and, in doing so, exposes her inner self and a version of her own ‘paradise lost.’
Find more information here.
KYLER GARRISON: HOLD MY HAND WHILE I GOOGLE SYMPTOMS
CARL KOSTYÁL
Piccadilly Circus I 12 December to 17 January
The act of googling symptoms is a reaction of an anxious impulse, grasping for a sense of control. This act is violent, pure, and inherently self sabotaging, offering no real solutions except for the hope of peace of mind and comfort, but it almost always makes things more worrisome. The intention of these paintings thus far has been to highlight this poignant process and never-ending cycle of the search for comfort, stability, and new experiences in a worrisome and ever-changing world.
This body of work is meant to exist in the liminal space of anxiety and isolation. The compositions are primarily still-life based, with two defining compositions presented in a delicate arrangement of deeply personal items, curated within each painting to display a moment in time – both physically and as an emotional placeholder. The works thus far mostly depict dreary bedroom still life settings, that are meant to evoke a sense of cold isolation from the outside world. Some images are digitally manipulated and constructed in Photoshop, and others are painted directly from the photo, the way it appears in Garrison's camera roll.
