The must-see art exhibitions of the summer
Hyphen’s art critic shares highlights from upcoming shows by artists from south-west Asia, north Africa and diaspora communities across the UK
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A host of solo and group exhibitions opening across the UK this summer will engage with narratives of colonialism, war and the art of resistance from south-west Asia, North Africa and diaspora communities. From Ali Cherri’s mud and bronze sculptural works to Wael Shawky’s films, artists employ unique mediums to comment on these histories and their present reverberations.
As part of the Shubbak Festival, showcasing contemporary Arab cultures through the arts, one exhibition will trace the history of the Palestinian political poster as an art form, while an immersive sound installation, Memory of Birds, created by Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury in collaboration with a trauma therapist, invites audiences into hammocks for a sensory experience exploring collective memory, migration and displacement.
Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument
The practice of Paris-based Lebanese artist Ali Cherri — born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) — is rooted in the milieu of Beirut’s postwar art renaissance of the 1990s. His work explores the ways in which political violence is wrought on both bodies and landscapes, through sculpture, film and installation.
How I Am Monument at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead features a series of works that demonstrate Cherri’s interest in materiality and archaeological artefacts. “The modern project of archaeology is that ruins have to be preserved in order to remain ruins. But ruins are a process of decay. Whether it’s archaeological sites or taxidermy or my watercolours, they are a stop on a moment of death in the making,” he told the New York Times.
Among the sculptures is the newly commissioned Sphinx (2024), a winged creature made of mud and bronze, evocative of Egyptian and Assyrian statues. Toppled Monuments 1-6 (2024) are wooden creations encased in vitrines that depict the empty plinths of monuments to controversial figures, referencing the removal and destruction of statues during the post-Soviet era, the Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter movement. A video installation will feature Cherri’s film Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), shot at the Merowe Dam in northern Sudan, the largest hydropower plant in Africa, whose construction resulted in the forced displacement of more than 50,000 people.
How I Am Monument is at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, from 12 April to 12 October 2025.
Art of the Palestinian Poster
Art of the Palestinian Poster begins in the 1960s, tracing the form’s history through to its contemporary resonance and resurgence as works of art that draw attention to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank. The exhibition includes works from groups such as Posters for Gaza, Artists Against Apartheid and Visualizing Palestine, as well as contributions from artists Vera Tamari, Sliman Mansour, Tayseer Barakat, Nabil Anani, Hazem Harb, Khaled El Haber and Haneen Nazzal.
“Like many Palestinians growing up in the region, I experienced Palestinian poster art in my every day — I saw it posted on walls, lampposts, in newspapers and in books — to the extent I almost no longer saw it,” writes Professor Dina Matar, who will be in conversation with curator Malu Halasa and Aline Batarseh from Visualizing Palestine on 18 June at SOAS University of London.
Art of the Palestinian Poster is at P21 Gallery, as part of Shubbak Festival, London from 23 May to 13 June 2025.
Finding My Blue Sky
Finding My Blue Sky, a group show featuring more than 20 artists and 12 new commissions, has been described by curator Dr Omar Kholeif as a “love-letter to London”. It was born out of a series of conversations between Kholeif and artist Lubaina Himid, who recalled accompanying her mother to “independence” ceremonies at the embassies of former African colonies while growing up in 1960s England. The exhibition speaks to the diasporic backgrounds of the artists involved, while engaging audiences to ascribe meaning themselves (the title in Arabic translates as: “What is the world that you dream of?”).
Air Conditioning (2022), a photographic piece by British Lebanese artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, draws on open-source data from the United Nations Digital Library recording Lebanese airspace violations, while the wall sculpture Four Seasons (2011), by Iranian artist and folk art collector Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, uses cut-glass mosaic techniques in the context of geometric abstraction. The Spanish Moroccan painter Anuar Khalifi has contributed a new triptych combining Islamic aesthetic traditions in combination with elements of northern European painting.
Finding My Blue Sky is at the Lisson Gallery, London, from 30 May to 26 July 2025.
Dana Awartani
In her first European solo exhibition, Palestinian Saudi artist Dana Awartani draws on locally sourced materials referencing Islamic and Arab-art making traditions. The ongoing series, Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken heart, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2024, uses naturally dyed silk fabrics from Kerala in southern India as part of commentaries on cultural destruction and sustainability. Herbs and spices with medicinal functions are used to saturate the fabrics, while darns in the material represent locations that have been subjected to colonial violence and acts of terror, as well as the potential for collective healing.
Dana Awartani is at Arnolfini, Bristol from 28 June to 28 September 2025.
Wael Shawky
Wael Shawky was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Egyptian Pavilion during last year’s Venice Biennale. His large-scale film productions, sculptures and drawings will soon occupy all of the contemporary and neoclassical galleries at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh, as part of its 50th anniversary.
The exhibition will feature a past trilogy of films drawing on puppets and marionettes to tell the story of the Crusades — Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show Files (2010), The Path to Cairo (2012) and The Secrets of Karbala (2015). Shawky’s most recent film, Drama 1882, was produced in an Alexandria theatre and includes a libretto as part of a retelling of the nationalist Urabi revolution (1879-82). In another three-part production, Al Araba Al Madfuna — shown at the Bristol Museum last year — Shawky employed child actors to recite the parables of Egyptian writer Mohamed Mustagab in a village near the archaeological site of Abydos.
Wael Shawky is showing at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh from 28 June to 28 September 2025.
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