Rewrite
From major exhibitions on Yayoi Kusama and Ryuichi Sakamoto to exciting shows by ascendent new talents, here’s our roundup of the best art, film, theatre and food to usher in autumn
A furry yellow bumblebee, with sheer black wings, rests on a pair of perfectly painted red lips; the famed American beauty Jean Patchett, her face obscured by the wide brim of a black hat and net veil, becomes a living sculpture in an exquisite monochrome shot that reveals every fold, wrinkle and texture of her ensemble. These are, of course, the works of Irving Penn, whose exacting eye for silhouette, volume and texture produced some of fashion’s most enduring imagery. Both will soon go on display at Paris’s MEP in a show that revisits six decades of the American image-maker’s sartorial studies – from his Parisian haute couture pictures and his celebrated work for US Vogue to collaborations with Yves Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake et al. Drawn principally from the MEP and Nicola Erni collections, Penn & Fashion will offer a rare chance to appraise the full sweep of Penn’s fashion output, still breathtaking in its sharp modernity.
Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam: 11 September, 2026 – 17 January, 2027
Yayoi Kusama died last month at the age of 97. It feels all the more meaningful, then, that the inimitable Japanese artist should be the focus of the Stedelijk’s autumn programme, with a landmark retrospective opening next week. Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama studied art in Japan before settling in New York in the 1950s, where she soon became a force among the city’s avant-garde. Through relentless repetition – endless fields of polka dots, recurring motifs and kaleidoscopic reflections – Kusama gave form to an alternative way of seeing, dissolving the boundaries between the self and the infinite. Spanning more than seven decades, the show charts her remarkable evolution through painting, sculpture, performance, fashion and immersive installations, bringing together rarely seen historic works alongside newly conceived pieces. A timely celebration of an artist – and imagination – quite unlike any other.
Can art change how we approach crisis? This autumn, Cornwall’s Eden Project tackles the question with Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet, an ambitious new exhibition bringing together more than 35 artists, photographers and filmmakers from across the globe. Sebastião Salgado, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Mosse and Cristina Mittermeier are among those represented, with works ranging from sculptures incorporating prehistoric artefacts and fossils to images of communities confronting the climate crisis in Mongolia, Malaysia, Sudan and beyond. Divided into four themes – extinction, climate, community and, ultimately, renewal – the show looks squarely at what we stand to lose, while making a persuasive case for creativity as a lens through which to imagine the future.
Krzysztof Grzybacz: Haruspex at Pace London: 3 September – 3 October, 2026
At Pace Gallery, Kraków-based artist Krzysztof Grzybacz will soon open his first UK solo show, foregrounding a new series of beguiling paintings that consider the body “as a site where memory, instinct, and lived experience accumulate in layers”. Across some ten new works – including his largest single-surface painting to date – figures sprawl among patterned textiles concealing flowers and other traces of nature, while a vibrant, instinctive palette reflects both the artist’s interest in colour theory and the role of colour as an expression of queer identity. Though Grzybacz resists calling the works self-portraits, autobiographical fragments have a habit of surfacing, adding another layer to his painted musings on past selves.
Keerthana Kunnath: Not What You Saw at Foam, Amsterdam: 18 September – 27 November 2026
Foam in Amsterdam will soon present the first museum exhibition of Indian image-maker Keerthana Kunnath with her accomplished debut series, Not What You Saw – a study of female bodybuilders in Kerala. Kunnath spent time with more than a dozen women, following them from their homes to the competitions they train for, to document not only the physical demands of the sport, but also the emotional and financial pressures it encompasses. Set against Kerala’s verdant landscapes and suffused with the warm glow of southern Indian sunsets, her richly coloured images reveal tenderness alongside physical strength. Both tribute and provocation, the series celebrates women pushing against convention while posing a challenge to preconceptions of gender, beauty and the form female strength should take.
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony at the New Museum, New York: 24 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
Few artists have captured the contradictions of contemporary Black American life with the force of Arthur Jafa, whose work confronts institutional violence head on while tracing the indelible imprint of Black culture on the American imaginary. This autumn, the newly expanded New Museum will devote two floors to I Am Tony, the first US museum survey to encompass the full breadth of the Mississippi-born artist and filmmaker’s near four-decade career. Seminal works including Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and Jafa’s Golden Lion-winning film The White Album (2019) will appear alongside new pieces, recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, sculpture and photography. Together, track the development of Jafa’s distinct “filmic language whose syncopations and textures match the aspirations of Black popular music”.
John Baldessari: Sculptures at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles: 11 September – 24 October, 2026
From coloured dots obscuring faces to words and letters spliced into images, John Baldessari’s visual experiments with language, photography and painting are instantly recognisable. Lesser known, however, is his three-dimensional work, which ranged from patterned wallpapers and excursions into bas-relief to playful sculptures – among them the giant ear and old-fashioned hearing trumpet soon to be installed at Sprüth Magers’ Los Angeles gallery. Dedicated uniquely to the artist’s sculptural practice, the exhibition will highlight how Baldessari carried his characteristic wit beyond the picture plane, toying with proportion, perspective and the physical space surrounding his art.
Deana Lawson, Gagosian, New York: 10 September – 24 October, 2026
Beauty and surveillance make unlikely bedfellows, but Deana Lawson brings the two into uneasy proximity in Edge Control, a photographic series soon to be shown as part of her first solo exhibition at Gagosian. Taking its title from the styling gel used to smooth baby hairs – and, pointedly, the systems of control operating within a surveilled frame – the series recontextualises blurred security stills from beauty supply stores across the US. Their “deep-horizon blues and greens”, Lawson says, opened up an “alien view” of the wider supply chain culminating in the stores she herself frequents. Throughout, a tension emerges between controlling one’s own appearance and having one’s image captured and scrutinised by others. Alongside large-scale portraits and new holograms inspired partly by Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the works feed into Lawson’s wider meditation on personhood, image-making and who gets to look at whom.
Remedios Varo at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk: 18 September, 2026 – 10 January, 2027
The first major museum exhibition devoted to Remedios Varo ever to be held in Europe opens this month at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum. There, audiences will be plunged into the extraordinary visual world of the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist and introduced to the wildly diverse influences that shaped it – from Renaissance painting and Surrealism to mysticism, the occult and modern science. “Varo’s paintings transport us to another time. But we don’t really know which time it is – the Middle Ages, Renaissance or the future?” says Mexican art historian and exhibition collaborator Tere Arcq. Across dreamlike scenes where magic, machinery and nature intermingle, Varo forged a Surrealist language all her own – one rooted, the show emphasises, in female experience and empowerment.
Amar Kanwar at the Serpentine North, London: 3 September, 2026 – 31 January, 2027
Serpentine North has turned the spotlight on Amar Kanwar, the esteemed New Delhi-based artist and filmmaker whose lyrical, politically charged films tackle violence, displacement and the unfinished business of history. Transforming the gallery’s darkened rooms into an immersive visual and sonic environment, this major new solo exhibition brings together three works that blur the boundaries between documentary, travelogue and visual essay: the feature-length Such a Morning (2017), and multi-screen installations The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023) and The Charcoal Man (2026). Through individual stories, Kanwar encourages us to consider how the upheavals of the past continue to shape the present.
Rachel Seidu. Love Is the Work at Between Bridges, Berlin: 10 September – October 25, 2026
Berlin Art Week returns next week, bringing with it a whole host of new exhibitions across the German capital. Alongside the bigger shows (see below), it’s also a chance to discover some lesser-known names. Case in point: Love Is the Work, the first extensive solo presentation in Germany by Nigerian artist Rachel Seidu, at the Wolfgang Tillmans-founded exhibition space Between Bridges. Photographing queer Nigerians in intimate domestic settings, at parties, and out in public, Seidu captures the myriad ways in which queerness finds expression in everyday life – sometimes quietly, sometimes boldly. The resulting images are tender, assured and quietly subversive.
While in Berlin, don’t miss Hamburger Bahnhof’s forthcoming exhibition devoted to Ryuichi Sakamoto, the radical Japanese composer and artist who died in 2023. Within the former railway station, five large-scale installations will illuminate the increasingly spatial direction of Sakamoto’s artistic practice from the 2000s onwards. Notable among the works set to go on display are Is Your Time (2017), in which a piano damaged by Japan’s 2011 tsunami is made to sound in response to seismic data from earthquakes around the world, and immersive installations developed from the composer’s acclaimed 2017 album Async in collaboration with artist Shiro Takatani and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. All in all, the show promises an absorbing look at the restless experimentation that defined the later decades of Sakamoto’s career.
September’s theatre calendar is brimming with big-name returns and hotly anticipated new productions. First up is Man to Man at the Royal Court, which sees Tilda Swinton return to the stage for the first time in over 30 years, reprising the role she originated in Manfred Karge’s play in 1988. Directed by Stephen Unwin, it follows a woman in 1930s Germany who assumes her dead husband’s identity in order to survive. At the Almeida, Josh O’Connor stars in Sam Yates’ revival of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, playing a gifted violinist in Depression-era New York who abandons music for the brutal world of professional boxing. Meanwhile, James Graham’s new play The Standard of Living arrives at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 21 September, starring Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes, iconoclastic economist and Bloomsbury Group member, alongside Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova as his wife, ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
Dance aficionados, meanwhile, are in for a treat. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to Sadler’s Wells from 15–19 September with two programmes spanning the company’s past and present: Legacy revisits cornerstones of the Ailey repertory, including Cry and Revelations, while New Works will showcase pieces by four leading contemporary choreographers, including three UK premieres. From 24 September, the English National Ballet takes over the same stage with Rhythm Riot, a visually arresting triple bill bringing together George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements and world premieres by Jae Man Joo and Micaela Taylor, with references spanning Issey Miyake, William Blake and Golden Age tap-dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers. Opera fans: be sure to catch Kasper Holten’s spectacular production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, returning to the Royal Opera House from 10 September–15 October with acclaimed bass-baritone Gordon Bintner as the notorious libertine whose trail of deception and desire finally catches up with him.
Among this month’s must-see films is Barrio Triste, the feature debut from Colombian-American filmmaker and longtime Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz, produced by Harmony Korine and featuring the first original score by Arca. Set in 1980s Medellín, it follows a group of disaffected teenagers who steal a television reporter’s camera to document their lives. It’s all fun and games until their footage begins to take a strange and otherworldly turn. American director Lance Hammer returns with Queen at Sea, a poignant family drama starring Juliette Binoche as a woman who, alongside her stepfather (Tom Courtenay), must grapple with painful questions around care and autonomy as her mother’s dementia advances.
S.O.U.L. Fest x ABFF London returns to BFI Southbank from 11–13 September, celebrating the best of Black British cinema with three days of features, shorts and special events. Highlights include a screening of Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story – about the pioneering photographer and activist who helped popularise the film’s titular movement – and an exclusive first look at American director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s forthcoming fantasy epic Children of Blood and Bone. Later in the month, Kino Bloc runs from 16–30 September at the Barbican, putting the spotlight on contemporary and historical cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Balkans. Don’t miss the Q&A with Kazakh filmmaker Zhannat Alshanova following a screening of her coming-of-age drama Becoming, or the season’s closing programme of short films from across the Balkans exploring everything from sexuality and climate change to recent history.
Documentary fans should seek out Boorman and the Devil, American filmmaker David Kittredge’s fascinating reappraisal of John Boorman’s notorious 1977 sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic, which offers a deep dive into the film’s ambitious production, disastrous reception and near-career-ending fallout through interviews with Boorman, Linda Blair and others. British filmmaker Garth Jennings turns his attention to one of the north’s most beloved exports in Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, combining footage from the band’s 2025 tour with four decades of unseen archive to trace their unlikely journey from Sheffield outsiders to Britpop legends. Last but not least, British director Ed Sayers’ Super Nature is a globe-spanning love letter to the natural world, pieced together entirely from Super 8 footage shot by 40 filmmakers across 25 countries.
There’s plenty to whet the appetite in London this September. Ramen fans, take note. Opening near Notting Hill Gate on 7 September, Nakimushi is a new Japanese townhouse from the team behind Dorian, led by chefs Yuji Shimokawa Kelly and Robin Kosuge, who are joining forces to give their individual (but equally popular) pop-up concepts, Urchin and Robin’s Ramen, a permanent home under one roof. Downstairs, a lively Tokyo-style ramen bar will serve bowls including lobster ramen with seafood paitan and charshu pork belly ramen with Basque chicken broth, while upstairs, expect Japanese sharing plates from red prawn and courgette gyoza to grilled pork loin with red almond miso.
Set inside a former bank with a triple-height ceiling, Notting Hill’s all-day brasserie Kinz, is an airy gem offering comforting Lebanese recipes passed down through the generations. Plates are generous and made for sharing: mezze (smoky chargrilled aubergine purée with tahini, falafel sliders) and larger signature dishes like vine leaves and baby courgettes stuffed with fragrant rice and spiced lamb, while the drinks list features delicious, almost entirely Lebanese wines from independent producers – make sure to check out the bottles, which are housed in the original bank vault.
Offering a taste of Tuscany in the heart of Soho, Evelyn’s Table will host the third instalment of its wine dinner series on 15 September, this time joining forces with revered estate Avignonesi. Across the Michelin-starred restaurant’s intimate 12-seat counter, head chef Seamus Sam will whip up a five-course, early-autumn tasting menu showcasing his refined, French-influenced cooking and the best of British produce, paired with a selection of the producer’s wines. While the exact dishes are yet to be revealed, Sam’s past array of seasonal dishes gives a taste of what’s to come, with recent offerings ranging from Cornish red mullet with rhubarb and blood-orange nam jim to guinea fowl with fermented spelt, carrots and chestnut.
Fine dining meets Korean street food at Papa Dak in Flat Iron Square – a new fried chicken spot from Woongchul Park, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Sollip in London Bridge. Inspired by Park’s Korean heritage and his own penchant for the dish, the menu centres on crispy, double-fried chicken served two ways: Korean Red, coated in a sticky, sweet and spicy yangnyeom-style glaze, and Guinness Black, doused in a deep, savoury Guinness sauce. Elsewhere, tuck into So-Tok So-Tok skewers of smoked sausage and Korean rice cakes, alongside punchy sides like chilli and sesame slaw and pickled kohlrabi with garlic and ginger. Tasty stuff.
For comforting classics in suitably cosy surrounds, head to Marrion’s, a new neighbourhood bar opening on Hackney’s Morning Lane on 10 September. The first solo venture from Elliott Kaye – formerly of Lyle’s, The French House and Leroy – Marrion’s is conceived as an unfussy local haunt, open Thursday to Saturday evenings for bar-top drinks and dinner, and on Sundays for brunch. For the former, guests can sample such delights as devilled crab rarebit, pork schnitzel Holstein with capers, anchovies and a fried egg, moules frites or a classic cheeseburger, while Sundays bring smoked ham with sage-fried eggs, lox bagels and baked eggs with vodka sauce.
A reunion or two is in store for Ben Murphy, founder of 74 Charlotte Street, who this month launches Ben & Friends – a new series of one-night-only dinners which will see the chef joined by some of the culinary talents who’ve shaped his career and cooking. First up, on 15 September, is legendary French chef Pierre Koffmann, Murphy’s former mentor, who will reunite with his protégé for a special collaborative menu. Koffmann classics abound including lobster ravioli with bouillabaisse and his iconic pig’s trotter, rounded off by a suitably decadent pistachio soufflé and petit fours including tarte au citron and madeleines. Tous à table!
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From major exhibitions on Yayoi Kusama and Ryuichi Sakamoto to exciting shows by ascendent new talents, here’s our roundup of the best art, film, theatre and food to usher in autumn
A furry yellow bumblebee, with sheer black wings, rests on a pair of perfectly painted red lips; the famed American beauty Jean Patchett, her face obscured by the wide brim of a black hat and net veil, becomes a living sculpture in an exquisite monochrome shot that reveals every fold, wrinkle and texture of her ensemble. These are, of course, the works of Irving Penn, whose exacting eye for silhouette, volume and texture produced some of fashion’s most enduring imagery. Both will soon go on display at Paris’s MEP in a show that revisits six decades of the American image-maker’s sartorial studies – from his Parisian haute couture pictures and his celebrated work for US Vogue to collaborations with Yves Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake et al. Drawn principally from the MEP and Nicola Erni collections, Penn & Fashion will offer a rare chance to appraise the full sweep of Penn’s fashion output, still breathtaking in its sharp modernity.
Yayoi Kusama at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam: 11 September, 2026 – 17 January, 2027
Yayoi Kusama died last month at the age of 97. It feels all the more meaningful, then, that the inimitable Japanese artist should be the focus of the Stedelijk’s autumn programme, with a landmark retrospective opening next week. Born in Matsumoto in 1929, Kusama studied art in Japan before settling in New York in the 1950s, where she soon became a force among the city’s avant-garde. Through relentless repetition – endless fields of polka dots, recurring motifs and kaleidoscopic reflections – Kusama gave form to an alternative way of seeing, dissolving the boundaries between the self and the infinite. Spanning more than seven decades, the show charts her remarkable evolution through painting, sculpture, performance, fashion and immersive installations, bringing together rarely seen historic works alongside newly conceived pieces. A timely celebration of an artist – and imagination – quite unlike any other.
Can art change how we approach crisis? This autumn, Cornwall’s Eden Project tackles the question with Extinction: Renewal, Art of a Living Planet, an ambitious new exhibition bringing together more than 35 artists, photographers and filmmakers from across the globe. Sebastião Salgado, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Mosse and Cristina Mittermeier are among those represented, with works ranging from sculptures incorporating prehistoric artefacts and fossils to images of communities confronting the climate crisis in Mongolia, Malaysia, Sudan and beyond. Divided into four themes – extinction, climate, community and, ultimately, renewal – the show looks squarely at what we stand to lose, while making a persuasive case for creativity as a lens through which to imagine the future.
Krzysztof Grzybacz: Haruspex at Pace London: 3 September – 3 October, 2026
At Pace Gallery, Kraków-based artist Krzysztof Grzybacz will soon open his first UK solo show, foregrounding a new series of beguiling paintings that consider the body “as a site where memory, instinct, and lived experience accumulate in layers”. Across some ten new works – including his largest single-surface painting to date – figures sprawl among patterned textiles concealing flowers and other traces of nature, while a vibrant, instinctive palette reflects both the artist’s interest in colour theory and the role of colour as an expression of queer identity. Though Grzybacz resists calling the works self-portraits, autobiographical fragments have a habit of surfacing, adding another layer to his painted musings on past selves.
Keerthana Kunnath: Not What You Saw at Foam, Amsterdam: 18 September – 27 November 2026
Foam in Amsterdam will soon present the first museum exhibition of Indian image-maker Keerthana Kunnath with her accomplished debut series, Not What You Saw – a study of female bodybuilders in Kerala. Kunnath spent time with more than a dozen women, following them from their homes to the competitions they train for, to document not only the physical demands of the sport, but also the emotional and financial pressures it encompasses. Set against Kerala’s verdant landscapes and suffused with the warm glow of southern Indian sunsets, her richly coloured images reveal tenderness alongside physical strength. Both tribute and provocation, the series celebrates women pushing against convention while posing a challenge to preconceptions of gender, beauty and the form female strength should take.
Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony at the New Museum, New York: 24 September 2026 – 31 January 2027
Few artists have captured the contradictions of contemporary Black American life with the force of Arthur Jafa, whose work confronts institutional violence head on while tracing the indelible imprint of Black culture on the American imaginary. This autumn, the newly expanded New Museum will devote two floors to I Am Tony, the first US museum survey to encompass the full breadth of the Mississippi-born artist and filmmaker’s near four-decade career. Seminal works including Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) and Jafa’s Golden Lion-winning film The White Album (2019) will appear alongside new pieces, recent paintings, large-scale video and film installations, sculpture and photography. Together, track the development of Jafa’s distinct “filmic language whose syncopations and textures match the aspirations of Black popular music”.
John Baldessari: Sculptures at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles: 11 September – 24 October, 2026
From coloured dots obscuring faces to words and letters spliced into images, John Baldessari’s visual experiments with language, photography and painting are instantly recognisable. Lesser known, however, is his three-dimensional work, which ranged from patterned wallpapers and excursions into bas-relief to playful sculptures – among them the giant ear and old-fashioned hearing trumpet soon to be installed at Sprüth Magers’ Los Angeles gallery. Dedicated uniquely to the artist’s sculptural practice, the exhibition will highlight how Baldessari carried his characteristic wit beyond the picture plane, toying with proportion, perspective and the physical space surrounding his art.
Deana Lawson, Gagosian, New York: 10 September – 24 October, 2026
Beauty and surveillance make unlikely bedfellows, but Deana Lawson brings the two into uneasy proximity in Edge Control, a photographic series soon to be shown as part of her first solo exhibition at Gagosian. Taking its title from the styling gel used to smooth baby hairs – and, pointedly, the systems of control operating within a surveilled frame – the series recontextualises blurred security stills from beauty supply stores across the US. Their “deep-horizon blues and greens”, Lawson says, opened up an “alien view” of the wider supply chain culminating in the stores she herself frequents. Throughout, a tension emerges between controlling one’s own appearance and having one’s image captured and scrutinised by others. Alongside large-scale portraits and new holograms inspired partly by Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the works feed into Lawson’s wider meditation on personhood, image-making and who gets to look at whom.
Remedios Varo at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk: 18 September, 2026 – 10 January, 2027
The first major museum exhibition devoted to Remedios Varo ever to be held in Europe opens this month at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum. There, audiences will be plunged into the extraordinary visual world of the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist and introduced to the wildly diverse influences that shaped it – from Renaissance painting and Surrealism to mysticism, the occult and modern science. “Varo’s paintings transport us to another time. But we don’t really know which time it is – the Middle Ages, Renaissance or the future?” says Mexican art historian and exhibition collaborator Tere Arcq. Across dreamlike scenes where magic, machinery and nature intermingle, Varo forged a Surrealist language all her own – one rooted, the show emphasises, in female experience and empowerment.
Amar Kanwar at the Serpentine North, London: 3 September, 2026 – 31 January, 2027
Serpentine North has turned the spotlight on Amar Kanwar, the esteemed New Delhi-based artist and filmmaker whose lyrical, politically charged films tackle violence, displacement and the unfinished business of history. Transforming the gallery’s darkened rooms into an immersive visual and sonic environment, this major new solo exhibition brings together three works that blur the boundaries between documentary, travelogue and visual essay: the feature-length Such a Morning (2017), and multi-screen installations The Peacock’s Graveyard (2023) and The Charcoal Man (2026). Through individual stories, Kanwar encourages us to consider how the upheavals of the past continue to shape the present.
Rachel Seidu. Love Is the Work at Between Bridges, Berlin: 10 September – October 25, 2026
Berlin Art Week returns next week, bringing with it a whole host of new exhibitions across the German capital. Alongside the bigger shows (see below), it’s also a chance to discover some lesser-known names. Case in point: Love Is the Work, the first extensive solo presentation in Germany by Nigerian artist Rachel Seidu, at the Wolfgang Tillmans-founded exhibition space Between Bridges. Photographing queer Nigerians in intimate domestic settings, at parties, and out in public, Seidu captures the myriad ways in which queerness finds expression in everyday life – sometimes quietly, sometimes boldly. The resulting images are tender, assured and quietly subversive.
While in Berlin, don’t miss Hamburger Bahnhof’s forthcoming exhibition devoted to Ryuichi Sakamoto, the radical Japanese composer and artist who died in 2023. Within the former railway station, five large-scale installations will illuminate the increasingly spatial direction of Sakamoto’s artistic practice from the 2000s onwards. Notable among the works set to go on display are Is Your Time (2017), in which a piano damaged by Japan’s 2011 tsunami is made to sound in response to seismic data from earthquakes around the world, and immersive installations developed from the composer’s acclaimed 2017 album Async in collaboration with artist Shiro Takatani and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. All in all, the show promises an absorbing look at the restless experimentation that defined the later decades of Sakamoto’s career.
September’s theatre calendar is brimming with big-name returns and hotly anticipated new productions. First up is Man to Man at the Royal Court, which sees Tilda Swinton return to the stage for the first time in over 30 years, reprising the role she originated in Manfred Karge’s play in 1988. Directed by Stephen Unwin, it follows a woman in 1930s Germany who assumes her dead husband’s identity in order to survive. At the Almeida, Josh O’Connor stars in Sam Yates’ revival of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, playing a gifted violinist in Depression-era New York who abandons music for the brutal world of professional boxing. Meanwhile, James Graham’s new play The Standard of Living arrives at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 21 September, starring Rory Kinnear as John Maynard Keynes, iconoclastic economist and Bloomsbury Group member, alongside Royal Ballet principal Natalia Osipova as his wife, ballerina Lydia Lopokova.
Dance aficionados, meanwhile, are in for a treat. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater returns to Sadler’s Wells from 15–19 September with two programmes spanning the company’s past and present: Legacy revisits cornerstones of the Ailey repertory, including Cry and Revelations, while New Works will showcase pieces by four leading contemporary choreographers, including three UK premieres. From 24 September, the English National Ballet takes over the same stage with Rhythm Riot, a visually arresting triple bill bringing together George Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements and world premieres by Jae Man Joo and Micaela Taylor, with references spanning Issey Miyake, William Blake and Golden Age tap-dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers. Opera fans: be sure to catch Kasper Holten’s spectacular production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, returning to the Royal Opera House from 10 September–15 October with acclaimed bass-baritone Gordon Bintner as the notorious libertine whose trail of deception and desire finally catches up with him.
Among this month’s must-see films is Barrio Triste, the feature debut from Colombian-American filmmaker and longtime Bad Bunny collaborator Stillz, produced by Harmony Korine and featuring the first original score by Arca. Set in 1980s Medellín, it follows a group of disaffected teenagers who steal a television reporter’s camera to document their lives. It’s all fun and games until their footage begins to take a strange and otherworldly turn. American director Lance Hammer returns with Queen at Sea, a poignant family drama starring Juliette Binoche as a woman who, alongside her stepfather (Tom Courtenay), must grapple with painful questions around care and autonomy as her mother’s dementia advances.
S.O.U.L. Fest x ABFF London returns to BFI Southbank from 11–13 September, celebrating the best of Black British cinema with three days of features, shorts and special events. Highlights include a screening of Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story – about the pioneering photographer and activist who helped popularise the film’s titular movement – and an exclusive first look at American director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s forthcoming fantasy epic Children of Blood and Bone. Later in the month, Kino Bloc runs from 16–30 September at the Barbican, putting the spotlight on contemporary and historical cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Balkans. Don’t miss the Q&A with Kazakh filmmaker Zhannat Alshanova following a screening of her coming-of-age drama Becoming, or the season’s closing programme of short films from across the Balkans exploring everything from sexuality and climate change to recent history.
Documentary fans should seek out Boorman and the Devil, American filmmaker David Kittredge’s fascinating reappraisal of John Boorman’s notorious 1977 sequel Exorcist II: The Heretic, which offers a deep dive into the film’s ambitious production, disastrous reception and near-career-ending fallout through interviews with Boorman, Linda Blair and others. British filmmaker Garth Jennings turns his attention to one of the north’s most beloved exports in Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore?, combining footage from the band’s 2025 tour with four decades of unseen archive to trace their unlikely journey from Sheffield outsiders to Britpop legends. Last but not least, British director Ed Sayers’ Super Nature is a globe-spanning love letter to the natural world, pieced together entirely from Super 8 footage shot by 40 filmmakers across 25 countries.
There’s plenty to whet the appetite in London this September. Ramen fans, take note. Opening near Notting Hill Gate on 7 September, Nakimushi is a new Japanese townhouse from the team behind Dorian, led by chefs Yuji Shimokawa Kelly and Robin Kosuge, who are joining forces to give their individual (but equally popular) pop-up concepts, Urchin and Robin’s Ramen, a permanent home under one roof. Downstairs, a lively Tokyo-style ramen bar will serve bowls including lobster ramen with seafood paitan and charshu pork belly ramen with Basque chicken broth, while upstairs, expect Japanese sharing plates from red prawn and courgette gyoza to grilled pork loin with red almond miso.
Set inside a former bank with a triple-height ceiling, Notting Hill’s all-day brasserie Kinz, is an airy gem offering comforting Lebanese recipes passed down through the generations. Plates are generous and made for sharing: mezze (smoky chargrilled aubergine purée with tahini, falafel sliders) and larger signature dishes like vine leaves and baby courgettes stuffed with fragrant rice and spiced lamb, while the drinks list features delicious, almost entirely Lebanese wines from independent producers – make sure to check out the bottles, which are housed in the original bank vault.
Offering a taste of Tuscany in the heart of Soho, Evelyn’s Table will host the third instalment of its wine dinner series on 15 September, this time joining forces with revered estate Avignonesi. Across the Michelin-starred restaurant’s intimate 12-seat counter, head chef Seamus Sam will whip up a five-course, early-autumn tasting menu showcasing his refined, French-influenced cooking and the best of British produce, paired with a selection of the producer’s wines. While the exact dishes are yet to be revealed, Sam’s past array of seasonal dishes gives a taste of what’s to come, with recent offerings ranging from Cornish red mullet with rhubarb and blood-orange nam jim to guinea fowl with fermented spelt, carrots and chestnut.
Fine dining meets Korean street food at Papa Dak in Flat Iron Square – a new fried chicken spot from Woongchul Park, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Sollip in London Bridge. Inspired by Park’s Korean heritage and his own penchant for the dish, the menu centres on crispy, double-fried chicken served two ways: Korean Red, coated in a sticky, sweet and spicy yangnyeom-style glaze, and Guinness Black, doused in a deep, savoury Guinness sauce. Elsewhere, tuck into So-Tok So-Tok skewers of smoked sausage and Korean rice cakes, alongside punchy sides like chilli and sesame slaw and pickled kohlrabi with garlic and ginger. Tasty stuff.
For comforting classics in suitably cosy surrounds, head to Marrion’s, a new neighbourhood bar opening on Hackney’s Morning Lane on 10 September. The first solo venture from Elliott Kaye – formerly of Lyle’s, The French House and Leroy – Marrion’s is conceived as an unfussy local haunt, open Thursday to Saturday evenings for bar-top drinks and dinner, and on Sundays for brunch. For the former, guests can sample such delights as devilled crab rarebit, pork schnitzel Holstein with capers, anchovies and a fried egg, moules frites or a classic cheeseburger, while Sundays bring smoked ham with sage-fried eggs, lox bagels and baked eggs with vodka sauce.
A reunion or two is in store for Ben Murphy, founder of 74 Charlotte Street, who this month launches Ben & Friends – a new series of one-night-only dinners which will see the chef joined by some of the culinary talents who’ve shaped his career and cooking. First up, on 15 September, is legendary French chef Pierre Koffmann, Murphy’s former mentor, who will reunite with his protégé for a special collaborative menu. Koffmann classics abound including lobster ravioli with bouillabaisse and his iconic pig’s trotter, rounded off by a suitably decadent pistachio soufflé and petit fours including tarte au citron and madeleines. Tous à table!
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