Hasta La Ideas

Coming to London for our Dezeen Day conference and the Dezeen Awards party on 30 October? To help you make the most of your trip, here’s a guide to the best shows in town.

Dezeen Day takes place at BFI Southbank in central London, part of the Southbank arts complex. Our partner hotel, The Hoxton Hotel in Southwark, is a few minutes’ stroll from the conference venue, with world-class arts venues including the Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern a short walk away.

The Hayward plays host to a major Bridget Riley exhibition while the Blavatnik Building (pictured above), Herzog & de Meuron’s extension to Tate Modern, is home to the wildly popular Olafur Eliasson: In real life show.

Dezeen Day delegates and Dezeen Awards party attendees can get a 10 per cent discount at The Hoxton Hotel in Southwark. Check your ticket confirmation email for details.

The Dezeen Awards party is sold out. A few tickets remain for Dezeen Day, which will set the global agenda for architecture and design. Buy tickets now.

Read on for our guide to the best exhibitions in London:

Olafur Eliasson: In real life
Until 5 January 2020
Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Art, design and architecture: in what is perhaps the city’s most Instagrammed exhibition of the year, Olafur Eliasson presents a series of interactive installations including a 39-metre-long, fog-filled corridor, a multi-coloured shadow play and an indoor rainbow.

Elsewhere, the exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s forays into design and architecture, from a castle-like office he erected in a Danish fjord, to his Little Sun project which provides DIY solar-powered lamps to communities off the electricity grid.

Bridget Riley
23 October 2019 – 26 January 2020
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London SE1 8XX

Art: British painter Bridget Riley is among the most well-known faces of Op Art – a style that uses geometric shapes to play with our perception and create optical illusions.

In the largest exhibition of her work to date, the Hayward Gallery is showcasing everything from the early, monochrome pieces to the seminal colour canvases and her only three-dimensional work, the walk-in installation Continuum.

Anthony Gormley
Until 3 December
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London W1J 0BD

Art: in what the Royal Academy of Arts is calling the most significant display of his work in the country for over a decade, Antony Gormley is taking over the RA’s main gallery with pieces spanning the past 45 years of his career.

Here, rarely seen early works by the preeminent British sculptor sit alongside new installations created specifically for the space, including the 24 cast-iron figures of Lost Horizon I, which are dotted around one room, from the floor to the walls and ceiling.

Mary Quant
Until 16 February 2020
Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

Fashion design: last year, the V&A asked the public to dig through their wardrobes in search of rare items by swinging sixties designer Mary Quant.

Of the more than one thousand responses, archive items from 30 different women are featured in this self-titled exhibition, alongside some of Quant’s generation-defining creations, including brightly coloured tights, hot pants and, of course, the mini skirt.

Beazley Designs of the Year
Until 9 February 2020
Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG

Design: the Design Museum’s annual round-up of the best projects of the year includes a pocket-sized home HIV test kit, and the world’s first genderless voice alongside 76 other nominees.

The exhibition does not, as intended, feature posters and flags created by Extinction Rebellion, as the group publicly withdrew its designs from the show back in June in protest against Beazley, an insurance company and the project’s sponsor.

Other Spaces by United Visual Artists
Until 8 December
The Store X, 180 The Strand, London WC2R 1EA

Art and design: three installations by the United Visual Artists envelop visitors in a world of light and sound, where lasers create and unmake the surrounding space, and sound recordings of animals in their natural habitat are illustrated through evocative spectrograms.

The multidisciplinary collective, which consists of a range of designers alongside an architect and creative technologist, has previously flexed its creative muscles to create stage sets for Jay Z as well as for Burberry’s autumn/winter 2018 fashion show.

What is radical today? 40 positions on architecture
Until 7 November
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London W1J 0BD

Architecture: The Royal Academy of Arts has invited 40 architects and collectives – from Denise Scott Brown, to Archigram and Dezeen columnist Aaron Betsky – to answer the titular question of this exhibition with an A3 image and a 100-word text.

The resulting exhibition explores how architecture can and should change in response to the current period of environmental, political and social upheaval.

Damien Hirst: Mandalas
Until 2 November
White Cube Mason’s Yard, 25-26 Masons Yard, London SW1Y 6BU

Art: Damien Hirst returns to one of his most well-known motifs – the butterfly – in his latest show at the White Cube gallery.

Following on from previous works, which used their wings to recreate stained-glass church windows, this series sees them arranged in hypnotic, concentric circles to form morbid mandalas.

Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography
Until 9 February 2020
The Photographer’s Gallery, 16-18 Ramilies Street, London W1F 7LW

Photography: Martin Parr, Man Ray and Wolfgang Tillmans are among a cast of artists featured in an exhibition about food photography, tracing its history from the origins in traditional still lifes all the way to today’s Instagram-spawned ubiquity.

The exhibition will explore how, through the lens of different disciplines from fashion to art and photojournalism, food can be used to convey a vast range of emotions and themes.

Nam June Paik
Until 9 February 2020
Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Art and film: the revolution will be televised in this retrospective of work from Nam June Paik, often referred to as the “father of video art”.

Among the more than 200 works on show are TV Garden 1974/2002, a jungle of plants sprouting dozens of television sets, and the Sistine Chapel installation – which has been recreated for the first time since it was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Tim Walker: Wonderful Things
Until 8 March 2020
Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL

Photography and fashion: the largest exhibition ever to be devoted to British photographer Tim Walker includes ten new commissions, which were created specifically for the Victoria and Albert Museum and inspired by pieces from its permanent collection.

Alongside this, a selection of more than 100 photographs gives an overview of his expansive body of work, including portraits of Kate Moss, Björk and David Hockney.

Moving to Mars
Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London
Until 23 February 2020

Design: everything about humanity’s move to Mars – from the seven-month journey there, to what we’ll eat when we get there – is considered in this exhibition, which features original artefacts from NASA and the European Space Station alongside newly commissioned designs.

Highlights include clothes made of repurposed solar blankets and parachutes, a zero-gravity spacecraft table and a speculative installation imagining the planet inhabited by plants instead of humans, courtesy of Dezeen Day speaker Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.

Mary Sibande: I Came Apart at the Seams
Until 5 January 2020
Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA

Art and photography: through her first solo exhibition in the UK, artist Mary Siabande pays homage to the generations of domestic workers within her family, while challenging reductive portrayals of black women in her native South Africa.

Life-sized sculptures, modelled on the artist herself, sit next to photographs of Sibande’s alter-ego Sophie, who is transformed into various roles which transcend boundaries of class, race and gender.

Hand Held to Super Scale: Building with Ceramics
Until 31 January 2020
The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT

Architecture and design: Whether used to create earthen tableware or an entire tiled house-front, whether hand- or robot-made – this exhibition explores the versatility of ceramic as a material and its resurgence in contemporary architecture.

Among the projects featured is Assemble’s ceramic studio Granby Workshop, alongside high profile collaborations between architecture studio FAT and Grayson Perry, as well as between artist Richard Deacon and Eric Parry Architects.

BAFTA: Behind the Screens
BAFTA Piccadilly, 194 Piccadilly, London W1J 9EX

Film, costume and sound design: on 17 September, BAFTA opened its doors to the public for the first time with a new permanent exhibition exploring the craft behind some of Britain’s most acclaimed films and TV shows.

The ever-expanding collection covers everything from the costumes of multi award-winning BBC series Killing Eve, to the sound design of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and the intricate hair and make-up artistry behind The Favourite.

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