The Exhibitions Not to Miss During Frieze London

A show all about complaining, a video work deemed too controversial for Venice and a new William Kentridge film are just some of the highlights of exhibitions in the English capital during Frieze Week. Ocula’s editors round up the must-see shows.

Autumn Knight, I Can’t Complain (until 29 November 2026) at ICA, The Mall SW1 

I love complaining, and now there is a whole show dedicated to it. In I Can’t Complain, New York-based interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight elevates complaining into an art form and mode of structural critique. A large net holds hundreds of helium-filled balloons that strain and sometimes poke out of this canopy, surrounded by an immersive sound installation of recorded conversations and grievances, and accompanied by recent video works. At times funny and intimate, Knight’s performance and film works often focus on group dynamics that reveal structures of power. I Can’t Complain explores how complaining can be a connective thread between minor everyday irritations and systemic degradation and oppression. Knight also asks: Whose complaints are listened to? What political and social values do they refract? To complain is to recall an instructive, political event; never let anyone tell you otherwise.—Lucy Mercer 

Lorna Simpson, Previous and Ongoing (13 October–23 December 2026) at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row W1 

To make her collage works, American artist Lorna Simpson mines old issues of the Black culture magazines Jet and Ebony and the archives of the Library of Congress, Reuters and the Associated Press. She then makes silkscreens of the images they contain, onto which she paints directly, forming often surreal compositions: women with starry skies for skin (Sky Pin-Ups (2021–)); a woman walking along a beach in a bikini with a tiger’s head (Tiger with Star Spots (2025)). In her solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London, Simpson presents a new body of works in which she has developed her interest in the relationship between painting and collage. She often splashes the compositions, made up of fragments of magazine and office documents, with bright blue acrylic paint, drawing on the emotional resonances of the colour and the history of the idea of “blue-black”, a term used in the Black community to describe very dark skin colours. As she has said about her work in the past, “We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves.”—Baya Simons 

Pope L: Five Decades (13 October–14 November 2026) at Modern Art, Bennet Street SW1

In 1978, Pope.L, clad in a two-piece suit, a yellow square affixed to the back of his jacket, crawled down a stretch of Manhattan’s West 42nd Street. The first of more than 30 iterations of his “crawl performances”, Times Square Crawl aka Meditation Square Pieces (1978) marked the beginning of a practice that pushed the limits of discomfort, forcing a confrontation with the overlooked realities of racial and class inequality. As the American artist explained in an interview four decades later, his ambition was to make an impact: “If I crawl long enough I’ll get company, and that’s where we are now.” A new exhibition at Modern Art makes clear the immense impact of Pope.L on the art world. This is the artist’s first solo show in London following his untimely death in 2023. Titled Five Decades, it brings together sculptures, paintings and drawings, with several of the artist’s hallmark performances screened in a separate room. With the full breadth of his practice on display, the viewer will be placed in a state of uncertainty and limbo—a state that, as Pope.L demonstrated time and again, both implicates and transforms.—Maja Renfer 

Yuko Mohri, In Concert (until 24 January 2027) at The Curve, Barbican Centre, Silk Street EC2 

It’s easy to recognise a Yuko Mohri work: fruit, electrical wires, water buckets, speakers. What ideas connect these elements is harder to articulate. Often sprawling across a space, her DIY-aesthetic installations create a choreography of chance, entropy and inevitable decay. With the Barbican Centre scheduled to undergo renovation (closing for a year in 2028), In Concert draws some of the building’s already discarded fixtures into this process. Salvaged streetlamps pulse in response to the changing moisture levels of ripening fruit or the airflow in the gallery, while dripping water triggers movements and sounds among vessels, tubes and instruments. Mohri transforms The Curve into a realm of happenings, uncertainties and encounters, where performativity unfolds through the materials themselves, shifting rhythms as they age and the surrounding conditions change.—Shanyu Zhong 

Salman Toor, Someone Like You (until 10 January 2027) at The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House WC2 

Salman Toor’s best-known paintings are bar scenes, particularly The Bar on East 13th (2019), inspired by Édouard Manet’s 1882 A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In these works, as in Manet’s masterpiece, a sense of melancholic beauty prevails, partly achieved through Toor’s liberal use of green, a colour he has described as “velvety, nocturnal, and comforting”. Behind the central figures, however, all the action is rooted in private conversation. Pairs of rapt faces turn towards each other, creating an atmosphere of sociality that feels almost audible. Toor’s quieter paintings, also on view at The Courtauld Gallery, depict other forms of public intimacy. Fag Puddle with Carriers (2021) depicts three men carrying a dish on which lies a bundle of body parts, saved from looking gruesome by their rubbery quality. Another of the artist’s visual motifs is a round, clownish nose which, when it appears on a half-naked man in Wandering Beggars (2022), gives him a carnivalesque air—until you notice that his socks look flecked with bloodstains, and his companion is missing a shoe. Toor has spoken about the clown nose as representing not comedic value, but vulnerability. Across these works, the funny and the tragic are similarly often difficult to distinguish from one another.—Nell Whittaker 

Cecilia Vicuña, Living Threads (until 14 February 2027) at Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel High Street E1 

A major solo exhibition showcasing more than six decades of work by Chilean multidisciplinary artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña, who has become one of the most revered figures in the art world and beyond. Many works highlight Vicuña’s lifelong devotion to expanding poetry as a medium into material and relational forms: from the spatial poetics of quipu (huge, collectively made hanging sculptures of knotted unspun wool or debris and plant matter) to tiny precarios—ephemeral assemblages of “little bits of garbage” or found objects, which Vicuña considers to be multidimensional poems; to writing as a practice of drawing in AMAzone Palabrarmas (1978) (“word weapons”) and her film asking passers-by in Bogotá What Is Poetry To You? (1980). “Poetics” is now an overused term in art, but Vicuña’s contributions to alternative ways of reading, and her vision of poetry as a permission-giving source of resistance are not to be missed.—Lucy Mercer 

Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy (until 17 January 2027) at Ibraaz, Mortimer Street W1 

Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy (2015–) has had a long journey to London. Since its inception, the ritual performance and installation project has travelled across Johannesburg, Cape Town, São Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich and, most recently, Venice. During the Biennale, the haunting multi-channel video work was on show at the fourth-century Church of Sant’Antonin, and notably not in the South African pavilion, from where it was pulled by the country’s department of sport, arts and culture after concerns were raised about references in the work to Gaza. This defiant incarnation, which Goliath described at the time as a “Black femme chorus”, was realised in partnership with London-based Ibraaz, which now hosts Elegy’s institutional debut in the UK capital. Here Elegy takes place inside a “sonic chamber”, where, across eight funerary monoliths, recorded singing voices and video are used to explore mourning not as closure but as a practice of collective presence.—Philippa Kelly 

Sturtevant, Eat The Outside to Light Up the Inside (15 October–20 December 2026) at Raven Row, Artillery Lane E1 

Raven Row’s retrospective surveys and historical reassessments often promise a fresh encounter with familiar art. The gallery’s forthcoming Sturtevant exhibition poses a challenge curator Antony Hudek has himself articulated. Reviewing the American conceptual artist’s work in 2010, he resisted reducing the artist to being a precursor of appropriation art or a feminist provocateur. His selection in the exhibition pairs her Warhol riffs with rarely seen Krazy Kat drawings from the 1980s, photographic Muybridge studies (a series in which she herself becomes a subject) and Digital Click (2005), which invites visitors to pose on a cut-out moon. A Keith Haring-inspired rug she designed has also been made for the exhibition. These pieces promise humour, performance and visual pleasure; the test is whether their assembly can escape the reductive readings Hudek once criticised.—Zian Chen 

William Kentridge, A Nicely Built City (until 7 November 2026) at Goodman Gallery, Cork Street W1 

A Nicely Built City, the title of William Kentridge’s exhibition at Goodman Gallery, is only half of a West African proverb. The full version gives the artist’s new stop-motion animation film its name: Nicely Built City (Never Resists Destruction) (2026), which premieres as part of the show. Described by Kentridge as a “return to basics”, the exhibition centres on his longstanding practice of charcoal drawing and filmmaking, and features a studio-like display of the drawings that shaped the film. The animated film itself, set in Kentridge’s birthplace of Johannesburg, follows the artist’s recurring fictional protagonist, Soho Eckstein, as he manoeuvres through a series of real-life catastrophes that have plagued the city, from a non-native beetle invasion to a lethal inner-city methane explosion. And yet, out of the ensuing chaos—the city’s ruins based on contemporary images of Johannesburg but also of Gaza, Tehran, Tel Aviv and Caracas—comes life. Kentridge lets his charcoal transform into trees. In the aphorism’s true meaning, A Nicely Built City proposes an optimistic outlook on the destruction besieging the livelihoods of so many around the world. From Kentridge’s perspective, destruction is cyclical, and hope grows from within its rubble.—Maja Renfer 

Sung Tieu, How is your day? (until 14 November 2026) at Emalin, Helmet Row EC1 

A view from within, looking out. Moving on from the grand façade of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Sung Tieu recreates her mosaic version of post-war social housing in a gallery space. She takes us inside the Gehrenseestraße housing complex in Berlin, where she spent part of her childhood—specifically, into the ruins of its shower room. Recreated across four large-scale mosaics, the scene offers little sense of private intimacy. This was a space shared with other migrants 30 years ago; its reappearance within the white cube makes the return feel ambivalent. In the adjacent room, 14 CRT monitors present a first-person account of the artist’s day, moving from one hour to the next, with her hands often taking the leading role, from preparing food to scrolling on her phone. How is your day? The casual question, the exhibition’s title, gathers political weight as Tieu maps how we live and position our bodies, in the spaces we share and our daily routines.—Shanyu Zhong 

Main image: Salman Toor, Three Friends in a Cab (2021). © Salman Toor. Courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Farzad Owrang.