Fault Lines: Imagining Indigenous futures for colonial collections presents a series of curatorial responses to current debates regarding colonialism, collections, and custodianship. By bringing together Indigenous curators and contemporary artists, this exciting new exhibition reflects on museums as sites of both historic fracture and future possibility.

For more than two decades, Offeh (b. 1977, Ghana) has been making playful, provocative performance and video works that explore subjects ranging from pop culture to identity and conformity.


Offeh draws from popular music, film and mainstream cultural trends to interrogate our acceptance of political, class, gender and racial models in society. Recently, his practice has approached themes of happiness, play and Afrofuturism through performance and collective live engagements.

Initially trained in theatre design, Himid is best known for her innovative approaches to painting and social engagement, playing a pivotal role in the British Black Arts movement since the 1980s. Over the last decade, she has earned international recognition for her figurative canvases, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and contemporary daily life.

Here is a Gale Warning will feature works by Pia Arke, Justin Caguiat, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Tomashi Jackson, Tarek Lakhrissi, Anne Tallentire, and Cecilia Vicuña. Together, their works invite us to gather and reflect on resilience and resistance.

Presenting new and recent paintings, this exhibition is Portia Zvavahera’s first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Europe. Drawing on southern African culture, Christian iconography, traditional European painting and African printmaking, this exhibition will show artworks informed by the artist’s own dreams and the spiritual traditions she grew up with as a child.

 

Heaving with foods, textiles and decorative objects, these four enormous and indulgent tablescape scenes are the highlight of Picturing Excess: Jan Davidsz de Heem. Our fascinating new display explores the phenomenally popular ‘sumptuous still lifes’ known in Dutch as ‘pronkstilleven’, painted in the 1600s at the height of Dutch colonial trade.

2024 marks 150 years since the founding of the Cavendish Laboratory of Experimental Physics. No one could have predicted in 1874 that Cambridge physics would give birth to the atomic age: that the electron and neutron would be discovered, and the atom itself split, on Free School Lane.
 

From delicate glass vessels and workbench instruments to one of the first industrial-scale particle accelerators, our new temporary exhibition traces the founding of the Laboratory and its first six decades through its apparatus.

Día de los Muertos, often referred to as the Day of the Dead, has been celebrated for at least 3,000 years. It brings together elements of Aztec and Maya religions as well as Catholicism (brought to Mexico by the Spanish). 

For Mexicans everywhere, the Day of the Dead is a time for remembering relatives, friends and ancestors in a lighter way, with the emphasis on laughter and music, rather than sorrow and fear. The colourful tradition reflects the belief that we are not truly dead until there is no one alive to remember us.

Recent sightings of the Northern Lights in Britain have piqued the public's interest in this wonderfully colourful natural phenomenon. Sophus Tromholt was also captivated by the auroras and hoped to capture them using photography while living in Norway from 1882-83, however the photographic plates were not sensitive enough at the time. Instead, he sketched the auroras on wood and photographed his works to accompany his book, Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis. 

Explore the Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa exhibition out of hours. Music provided by DJ Bosslady. The Garden Kitchen café will be open for special cocktails and food.

You will also be able to do some late night shopping ahead of the festive period in the Kettle’s Yard shop and pick up special Christmas gifts for friends and family.

Subscribe to Exhibitions and displays