1. Stillness in Orbit: The Slow Modernities of Ellinor Cade
Venue: Saville Row Gallery
Dates: 2 September – 19 November 2025
An exquisite and near-completist retrospective of Ellinor Cade’s oeuvre, Stillness in Orbit excavates her lifelong obsession with arrested motion – dust motes, satellite drift, the overlooked inertia of a revolving door. Installations include rotating lenticular sculptures powered by visitors’ breath, and a 12-minute video of a moth circling a chandelier in an abandoned Georgian bathhouse. The accompanying catalogue essay by Dr. Penelope Voss is a minor treatise on Stillness and is this month’s recommended read.
We are lucky enough to have been allowed to publish the essay here.
2. The Grammar of Smoke: Reconstructing the Aether Archive
Venue: Victor Dressel Institute of Contemporary Art
Dates: 14 August – 30 October 2025
Part speculative archaeology, part olfactory essay, this group exhibition imagines the lost art of 19th-century “aether drawing” — ephemeral sketches made by manipulating smoke within glass domes. Using reconstructed apparatuses and pseudo-scientific notation, participating artists (including Lin Xue, Ariya Hossain, and Theodore Jemmett) reanimate forgotten rituals of sensory documentation. Visitors are invited to inhale curated scent-clouds while listening to field recordings of delicate coughing.
3. Eva Demarch: Misfiled Bodies
Venue: The Cardman Institute
Dates: 28 July – 4 November 2025
With chilling intellectual precision, Eva Demarch interrogates the bureaucracies of embodiment through a forensic re-staging of misplaced anatomical drawings from obscure 17th-century anatomy catalogues. Graphite, vellum, and bureaucratic error congeal into a conceptual autopsy of taxonomy. The centrepiece: a twelve-metre scroll titled Index of Imagined Organs, composed entirely of miscatalogued spleens. A must-see for connoisseurs of bureaucracy.
4. Florilegium Reversed: The Botanic Unbecoming in Contemporary Sculpture
Venue: Camden Botanica & Visual Arts Pavilion (CBVAP)
Dates: 4 September – 12 December 2025
This horticulturally-inclined exhibition inverts the classical florilegium, placing decay and vegetal subversion at the heart of the curatorial thesis. Organic matter — bruised lilies, rhubarb skeletons, and creeping lichen — cohabit with bronze casts and biodegradable resins. Notable is Clara Yeoh’s Portrait of a Wilt, a slowly imploding peony encased in alginate. An exquisite meditation on the transience of botanical categorisation.
5. Henrik van der Meel: The Architecture of Pause
Venue: Exhibition Road North
Dates: 18 October 2025 – 29 January 2026
Van der Meel, the reclusive Dutch “interval architect,” constructs a series of non-functional corridors, false foyers, and anti-rooms inside the Exhibition Road North wing. Visitors are required to navigate the exhibition through a sequence of near-identical vestibules where time appears to dilate and decisions become performative. Soundscapes by Lina Gabor mimic forgotten announcements. A masterclass in architectural absurdity and the dramaturgy of indecision.
6. Ineluctable Modesty: Unlabelled Works from the Bradwell Collection
Venue: The Museum of Gentleman’s Art (Bloomsbury)
Dates: 10 September – 3 January 2026
This elegant and quietly disorienting show reveals for the first time a tranche of paintings and objects once rejected from major collections for being too bland. Curated anonymously, the exhibition includes T iny canvases no larger than coasters, subdued colour fields in soft umber, and a series of sculptures described only as ‘unCanovian’.
7. No Exit (but Several Entrances): Situational Cartographies by R.A. Sundquist
Venue: The Barbican Sub-Level 5
Dates: Ongoing (Visitors admitted irregularly)
A semi-mythical exhibition by cartographic conceptualist R.A. Sundquist, installed without announcement in the subterranean vaults of the Barbican. Entry requires finding one of six unmarked brutalist staircases, each leading to alternate layouts. The exhibition includes false maps of real cities, real maps of imaginary rivers, and a room containing nothing but laminated portraits of London cabbies. A rare chance to feel sincerely and exquisitely lost.
8. Sediment & Semaphore: Dialogues in Geolinguistics
Venue: The Geological Society of Worcester x Brickall Collaboration
Dates: 22 September – 1 February 2026
Melding semiotics with stratigraphy, this collaborative effort draws on geological layers as a form of semiotic memory. Artists interpret fault lines, erosion patterns, and mineral seams as language — with one striking installation by Rashid Haroun, where seismic vibrations from ancient tectonic collisions are translated into Morse code and broadcast on BBC4 instead of the Shipping Forecast. Wonderful.
