We are almost at Frieze Week now, this are starting to get busy (at last) and we surely don’t need to repeat the bit about the editorial here again do we do we? Another week, another Five London Art Things thing and on with all this endless art coverage? Years of it. Actually this week we probably do need an editorial, or a repeat, we won’t though, there’s no time, and we did say that last time, on with it…
Five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now (or any moment now). Five art shows to check out in the coming days as we repeat ourselves. We do aim to make this an (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events, five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This Five Things thing is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will…
And we should add, that entry to these recommended exhibitions and events, unless otherwise stated, is free…
The image at the top of the page is of a Phillip Allen painting, the artist currently has a solo show at East London’s The Approach, here’s some words and details before we get on with this week’s five… ORGAN THING: Phillip Allen’s Farm, Olivia Jia’s Faun, both at The Approach, East London, two rather intriguing exhibitions…
1: Mira Schor, WET/London at Mimosa House – Opening on 8th October (6pm until 8pm) and then running from 9th October until 5th December 2026 – “Solo exhibition by renowned feminist painter Mira Schor, her first solo presentation in a UK publicly-funded gallery, including a new site-specific work”.
“Mimosa House is delighted to present a solo exhibition by renowned feminist artist Mira Schor. This will be her first solo presentation in a UK publicly-funded gallery and will include a new site specific work made for Mimosa House.
Mira Schor (b. 1950, New York) is one of the most significant and incisive feminist painters of the past fifty years. Her work emerges from the belief that painting remains a vital intellectual and political tool – a place where language takes material and visual bodily form, and the body becomes a site of inscription, resistance, and desire. At a moment when democratic institutions are under pressure, language is increasingly militarised, and questions of bodily autonomy are once again fiercely contested, Schor’s practice speaks with renewed urgency.
Despite Schor’s significance as an artist, writer and educator, until recently her work has rarely been exhibited outside America. WET/London is framed as both a historical corrective – addressing the lack of exposure to Schor’s work outside the States – and a political intervention, foregrounding feminist bodies of knowledge and visual languages urgently needed today.
WET/London will comprise paintings, drawings and other paper works that span the breadth of Schor’s career from her time as a student at CalArts on the Feminist Art Program in the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition is anchored by a new site-specific painting commissioned with the support of rossogranada through its Artists First programme, for Mimosa House’s six-metre fireplace wall. Responding to the scale and architectural symbolism of the hearth, the work reclaims a traditionally domestic site as a space of feminist inscription and public address. This commission underscores the exhibition’s urgency, asserting painting as an active, contemporary language rather than an historical form”.
Mimosa House is found at 47 Theobalds Rd, London, WC1X 8SP. The space is open Wednesday to Saturday, midday until 6pm. Mira Schor’s solo show Opening on 8th October (6pm until 8pm) and then running from 9th October until 5th December 2026
2: Contact Points at Peckham Oasis Gallery – 9th to 11th October with an opening evening on the 8th – Now this one looks intriguing, especially some of the things Kate Youme with her own contact points and her Really Real Arbitrary Dating interactive art piece. We shall no doubt learn about the other artist at some point over the weekend.
“Contact Points brings together four artists thinking about the different systems we move through every day, and what happens when those systems meet the body. Some of these systems are obvious and others are harder to see. They might be an algorithm deciding what appears on a feed, a dating system sorting people through compatibility, or the bureaucratic structures that determine where someone can move and belong. In each case, there is a moment where a person comes into contact with something that tries to read, organise or make sense of them.
The works in the exhibition approach these encounters from very different places. They deal with intimacy, surveillance, communication, and the traces we leave behind. Some look directly at technology and data, while others are more interested in what these structures feel like when they become part of everyday life”.
Artists involved: I-T-Z-E-L (Claudia Sanchez Hernandez), Joe Twm, Kate Youme and Louise Wan. The show is curated by Annabell Pu
Peckham Oasis Gallery is found at Unit 4/5, Dovedale trading estate, Peckham, London SE15 4QN. The show is open 9th until 11th October, Midday until 6pm and there’s a private view on Thursday 8th October, 6pm until 8pm
3: Pia Camil, Bestia at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market, London EC1 – Opening tonight, 8th October (6pm until 8pm) and running. 9th October until 22nd November 2026 – “Elizabeth Xi Bauer presents Bestia, a solo exhibition of new works by Pia Camil. The show marks both the artist’s debut solo exhibition in London and her first presentation with the gallery. Drawing from personal experience, the exhibition explores the unstable boundaries between looking and being looked at. Continuing Camil’s long-standing interest in dismantling fixed narratives and hierarchies, this upcoming exhibition invites viewers to connect with their own desire as a place for resistance. Throughout Bestia, Camil rejects binary ways of thinking that seek to separate instinct from intellect and the public from the private. Instead, the exhibition embraces complexity, emphasising the coexistence of multiple truths regarding the female experience. By unsettling fixed notions of womanhood and inherited structures, Camil argues for a nuanced understanding of identity and subjectivity, based on the collective experience”.
Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market is found at 20-22 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE. The space is open Wednesday through to Sunday, Midday until 6pm. Bestia runs from 9th October until 22nd November 2026
And maybe on a theme somewhere near? Or maybe nowhere near? Tune in in a couple of days to see ifwe have an answer to those questions
4: Thomas Hjelm, Consumed (Swallow The Sky) at Souvenir438space – Running from 9th until 22nd October 2026 (with an opening on Friday 9th October 6pm until 9pm) – “A solo exhibition by Thomas Hjelm Presented in correlation with Frieze London. Souvenir 438 Space is proud to present Consumed (Swallow The Sky), a solo exhibition by London-based artist Thomas Hjelm in correlation with Frieze London. The exhibition brings together a new body of work that examines surrender in its many forms: to desire, to nature, and to another person. At its centre is the idea that surrender can become a route to freedom – a moment in which the boundary of the self dissolves.
Consumed explores the sensation of being completely enveloped by your surroundings: lost in desire, absorbed by nature, or staring at the sky until the distinction between yourself and your surroundings begins to collapse. Hjelm’s paintings occupy the space between intimacy and vastness, where the self becomes both intensely present and almost absent.
The imagery draws directly from archival call cards, the small advertisements once found in London telephone booths that promised connection, pleasure, and escape in a single glance. Hjelm strips these images of their original context, isolating their emotional charge: figures caught in states of ecstasy, eyes closed, mouths open in surrender. Desire is present, but its object is withheld. The space between anticipation and release becomes central to the exhibition.
That tension is set against recurring motifs of the sky and the sea: vast, borderless, and constant. Where the figures strain towards contact, the sky offers another form of surrender — one without an object of desire, where the self simply dissipates. Across the exhibition, sea and clouds, body and atmosphere begin to merge, until the distinction between figure and environment becomes increasingly unstable.
The show’s emotional register draws on the Romantic sublime and Nietzsche’s reading of intensity and surrender as forms of vitality rather than loss of control. Together, they frame surrender as an active act of release: a willingness to let go of the need to interpret, possess, or control an experience while it is happening. Hjelm builds this language from an archive of call cards, pages from Playgirl magazine, self-portraits, and photographs of the sky. Reworked, layered and abraded, these images become fragments of memory, suspended between recognition and disappearance.
Technically, the exhibition marks a significant shift in Hjelm’s practice. This year, he has moved towards a more flattened surface, moving away from the physical layering, tearing and reconstruction that defined the depth of his earlier work. In Consumed, depth is instead created through the accumulation, repetition and manipulation of imagery. The result is a more distilled technical language, where physical intervention gives way to the gradual erosion and transformation of the image over time”.
Souvenir438space is found at 5 Kingsland Rd, Shoreditch, London, E2 8AA. Running from 9th until 22nd October 2026 (with an opening on Friday 9th October 6pm until 9pm, The space is open Wednesday to Saturday, 11am until 6pm
Karin Sander: Stairway to Heaven, 2026 (video still)5: Karin Sander at Annka Kultys Gallery – 9th Oct until 5th Dec 2026 – “Featuring Karin Sander’s new video work 696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026), the exhibition continues her established conceptual practice of intervening in and transforming environments and structures” – We’ve kind of lost touch with Annka Kultys Gallery since the gallery moved from that industrial space behind the Hackney Road and slightly changed the way things were done, we have enjoyed so many engaging/challenging/rewarding events via Annka Kultys Gallery over the last what is is now? Ten years? It really would not be a London Frieze Week without a challenge and a positive debate Annka Kultys
“Annka Kultys Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by leading German artist Karin Sander. Featuring her new video work 696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026), the exhibition continues Sander’s established conceptual practice of intervening in and transforming environments and structures. It marks the artist’s return to London following her 2016 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and her first solo show with ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY, a leading champion of new-media and digital art.
Karin Sander is an acclaimed conceptual artist who lives and works across Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany. Across a career spanning three decades, her extensive œuvre has encompassed a multitude of media, including sculpture, performance, architecture, photography and video. Her work is conceptual in the way that it often employs existing objects, spaces and environments, which are transformed through minimal intervention to alter perspectives on the familiar and everyday in the institutional environment. Following a major career retrospective at Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland, this exhibition continues Sander’s longstanding engagement with technological practices.
696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026) is a five-minute moving image work that depicts a community of ants moving to-and-fro along the ledge of a railing against a blue sky, filmed by the artist. Compositionally, the picture plane consists of stark verticals and horizontals with the railing occupying the majority of the frame. Against this fixed architectural structure, the eye is drawn to the organic movement of the ants as they scurry backwards and forwards in and out of view, chaotic and organised at one and the same time. The scene shares a striking resemblance to traffic or people moving across elevated highways in dense urban spaces, recreated in miniature form. Unlike city congestion, however, the ants cluster, collide and crawl on top of each other, despite their reputation as a highly organised, purposeful insect society. Perhaps the work may invite contemplation on parallels between animal and human forms of social organisation.
A comical element is introduced with a Schoenbergian atonal keyboard soundtrack consisting of syncopated notes that seem to punctuate the ants’ collisions, in a manner reminiscent of the use of musical accompaniment to amplify moments of disorder in early screen comedy. Parallels can also be drawn to Pierre Huyghe’s gallery intervention Umwelt (2011), which similarly brought ants into the institutional environment, asking audiences to envisage non-human ecosystems. Additionally, Sander often includes a large scale wall-based vinyl bearing the coordinates of the presenting location. At nearly 2 metres wide, it purposefully asserts its presence within the architecture, conceptually reinforcing Sander’s well-known and longstanding practice of site-specific installation.
696 Encounters / 696 Begegnungen (2026) is a work that is both playful and thought-provoking. The minimal interventions of the artist, such as the framing of the video, the backdrop of blue sky with cotton white clouds and the introduction of a soundtrack, turn a common sight into a contemplative artistic encounter. In such a way, the exhibition presented by Annka Kultys is a striking reminder of the artist’s groundbreaking conceptual approach to environment, architecture and digital media”. (By Georgia Gerson)
Annka Kultys Gallery is now found at 2 Shepherdess Walk, London, N1 7LB. The space is open Wednesday to Saturday, Midday until 6pm
Previous Annka Kultys Gallery coverage on these pages (there is a lot of it)
And more recent recomendations…
