Fall Has Fallen: Here Are the Best Things to Do This September

Exhibitions

Close Enough: New Perspectives from 12 Women Photographers of Magnum at The ICP, New York: September 30, 2022 – January 9, 2023
Later this month, 12 contemporary women image-makers, all members of esteemed photography collective Magnum Photos, will form the focus of a new exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. “Each of the photographers [will] narrate their creative journey, providing vantage points into the extraordinary relationships they create within global situations, communities and individual subjects,” explains the show's accompanying text of what we can expect. Among the photographers showing are Sabiha Çimen, Bieke Depoorter, Susan Meiselas, and Alessandra Sanguinetti, who will present her brilliant long-term collaboration with Argentine cousins Guille and Belinda, documenting their coming of age.

London Design Festival, London: September 17-25, 2022
Don’t miss London Design Festival, which this year celebrates its 20th anniversary. An ode to design in all its many forms, the event’s highlights include Into Sight, a vast installation by Sony Design at Cromwell Place that “plays on sensorial effects that transform simple boundary surfaces into an infinite vista through shifting light, colour and sound”; The Lebanese House: Saving a Home, Saving a City at the V&A, an installation exploring  “the reconstruction of Beirut after the 2020 explosion”, and Pearl, a dazzling exhibition from five Central Saint Martins’ BA Jewellery Design graduates who share a passion for pearls.

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics at the Barbican Centre: September 8, 2022 – January 8, 2023
Carolee Schneemann made work that addressed “the precarious lived experience of humans and animals,” explains the press release for the Barbican’s forthcoming retrospective of the late American artist and feminist. Packed with over 200 objects and archive materials, the show marks the first major survey of Schneemann’s radical oeuvre, which spanned painting, sculptural assemblages and kinetic works, groundbreaking performance pieces centred around her own body, as well as films and installations. Its aim? “To position Schneemann as one of the most relevant, provocative and inspiring artists [of her time]”.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear at MoMA, New York: September 9, 2022 – January 1, 2023
Another must-see retrospective is soon set to open at MoMA in New York, foregrounding the remarkable career of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. For Tillmans, no subject is out of bounds, his images traversing everything from intimate portraits and windowsill still lifes to pulsating nightlife scenes and experimental camera-less photographs. “The viewer ... should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives,” Tillmans once said. And the MoMA show will invite viewers to do just that.

Very Private? at Charleston, East Sussex: September 17, 2022 – March 12, 2023
At Charleston, the former Bloomsbury Group bolthole in East Sussex, a forthcoming display will spotlight a wonderful series of recently unearthed, queer erotic paintings by Bloomsbury artist and designer Duncan Grant. These will feature alongside responses by six contemporary artists, including Somaya Critchlow, Tim Walker and Ajamu X, that seek to “examine the struggle between private and public, sexual liberation, prejudice and love”.

Garrett Bradley: Safe at Lisson Gallery, London: September 23 – October 29, 2022
Acclaimed New Orleans-based artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley – the first Black woman to win the directing award at Sundance with her nonfiction feature Time – will enjoy her first UK solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London later this month. A continuation of her investigation into mother-daughter relationships, as well as themes of “race, class, social justice and cultural history in the US”, her latest body of work fuses newly shot footage and archival material to powerful effect. 

Foam Talent 2022 at Foam, Amsterdam: From September 16, 2022
The 2022 Foam Talent exhibition will soon open at the museum’s Amsterdam HQ, platforming the work of 20 rising photography stars selected via an open-call process. Each of the participants looks “closely at both the world around us, and the one within – without shying away from discomfort or pain”, their work tackling a wide array of topics, from climate change and political conflict to discrimination and displacement.

Frida Kahlo, Beyond Appearances at the Palais Galliera, Paris: September 15, 2022 – March 5, 2023
While there have been numerous exhibitions dedicated to the inimitable Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in recent years, an upcoming show at Paris’s Palais Gallery promises to push “beyond” the more traditional examinations of Kahlo’s life and work. Instead, it will take an intimate look at who she was privately, as well as how she constructed her outward-facing identity through dress, using more than 200 objects from Kahlo’s former home, the Casa Azul, to do so. A capsule exhibition considering the painter’s influence on contemporary fashion designers, including Alexander McQueen, Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior and Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, will run concurrently until the end of December.

Hallyu! The Korean Wave at the V&A, London: September 24, 2022 – June 25, 2023
From the K-pop explosion to the captivating films of Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook, from the pioneering work of artists like Lee Bul and Haegue Yang to the supreme success of Squid Game, there’s no doubt that South Korea is one of the world’s leading cultural hotspots. Later this month, an exhibition at the V&A promises to explore “the makings of the Korean Wave and its global impact on the creative industries of cinema, drama, music, fandom, beauty and fashion” – and we can’t wait.

Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising at LACMA, Los Angeles: September 4 – December 18, 2022
In LA, LACMA’s newest exhibition will focus on the powerful visual vernacular of advertising and the artists who have co-opted it, first to interrogate “the increased commodification of daily life” and later “to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer”. Expect to see works from Jo Ann Callis, Roe Ethridge, Barbara Kruger, Hank Willis Thomas and many more that will compel and challenge in equal measure.

Eva Hesse: Forms & Figures at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich: September 16 –  November 19, 2022
In Zurich, Forms & Figures will shine new light on the pioneering German-born artist Eva Hesse, zooming in on two distinct bodies of work made at the beginning and end of the 1960s, the decade she established herself as an icon of American art. The first is her evocative Spectre series, a number of gestural figurative paintings made in 1960, the second a group of small, experimental sculptures that she made in 1969, a year before her premature death aged just 34.

In A Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of Joy at The Contemporary Austin, Texas: September 17, 2022 – February 12, 2023
Taking its title from one of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, this group exhibition at the Contemporary Austin in Texas will bring together the work of eight female artists to consider: “Who, under what conditions, must struggle to survive? What does survival look like for individuals and communities? And, how might the tools of our imaginations help us to find joy and collectively reshape the conditions of our society?” Featuring artworks by Juliana Huxtable, Tala Madani, Danielle Mckinney and Wendy Red Star, among others, the show simultaneously highlights societal inequities and “envisions pathways toward a new and better future”.

Performances & Events

If you’re looking for excellent live entertainment this month, then you’re in luck. At the Southbank Centre, Unlimited festival returns from September 7-10, with a sublime array of dance, performance, comedy, music and visual art by disabled artists and companies. Highlights include Jess Thom’s Touretteshero’s Masked Ball, which “embraces facemasks artistically and practically to protect the most vulnerable attending”, and an interactive online narrative by the artist Christopher Samuel, which “tells of growing up in the UK in the 1980s as a disabled, Black child from a working-class background”.

At the Royal Court, the journalist Jonathan Freedland has pieced together fragments of verbatim interviews to conjure up Jews. In Their Own Words, a blistering new play that exposes “the roots and damning legacy of antisemitism in Britain – found in the places where you’d least expect it”. While at The Young Vic, Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of Édouard Louis’ novel Who Killed My Father opens September 7 – the searing story of a gay man who returns to the small, conservative French town he grew up in to visit his dying father.

For those in search of musical nourishment, don’t miss Christine and the Queens Presents Redcar, which sees the fabulous French pop sensation return under a new name to deliver what’s sure to be an unmissable theatrical presentation, composed “in the spirit of the great rock opera”. Classic opera-lovers, meanwhile, be sure to see Malin Byström reprising her titular role in Salome, David McVicar’s visceral staging of Richard Strauss’s masterpiece at London’s Royal Opera House.

This year, Naked City festival returns to Beckenham Place Park on September 10, with discounted tickets for AnOther readers. With a backyard vibe and a bracing line-up – bringing together a broad spectrum of music lovers to celebrate how London makes us feel – guests will include Kojey Radical, Joy Orbison, Donna Leake and more.

Last but not least, for some gut-wrenching but extremely good comedy, head to Soho Theatre where Rich Hardisty, fresh from his run at Edinburgh Fringe, will perform his one-man show Silly Boy from September 29 to October 1. Offering a lightning-bolt dash through Hardisty’s life story, replete with tales of mental illness, drug addiction and missing fathers, it is an hour of candour, humour and brilliant inventiveness you won’t forget.

Film

Film enthusiasts, September’s new offerings won’t disappoint. First up, there’s Dry Ground Burning from Brazilian filmmakers Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós. An extraordinary docufiction feature, it centres on an all-female gang living in the Sol Nascente favela outside of Brasília, who hijack a pipeline to sell oil to their community. In Tom George’s mystery caper See How They Run, a murder in 1950s London halts plans to turn a hit West-End play into a Hollywood movie. While British director Peter Strickland returns with his latest feature Flux Gourmet, a typically madcap and mesmerising watch about a sonic collective’s residency at “an institute for culinary and alimentary performance”.

French auteur Claire Denis and South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo are also back on the big screen this month, the former with Both Sides Of The Blade, a slow-burning yet hard-hitting drama about infidelity and the spectrum of emotions it triggers. The latter with In Front Of Your Face, the quietly compelling story of a former actress who returns to Seoul harbouring a secret, after years spent abroad, and moves in with her sister. Finally, Funny Pages is a must-see coming-of-age story from ascendant director Owen Kline, following a teenage cartoonist as he drops out of college and befriends a former comic artist. Dark humour ensues.

For this month’s best documentaries meanwhile, there’s Alex Pritz’s The Territory, which offers on-the-ground insight into the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people’s ongoing battle to protect the Brazilian Amazon from deforestation. Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream is a psychedelic homage to the life and legacy of David Bowie, billed as “an audio-visual space odyssey” and featuring never-before-seen concert footage. And the Sundance-winning Midwives by Snow Hnin El Hlaing, homes in on a Buddhist midwife and her Muslim apprentice in Myanmar, resulting in a powerful tale of  “female self-determination in the face of militaristic oppression” (Dawn Porter).

Food & Drink

Gastronomes have plenty to sink their teeth into as autumn beckons. In Paris, Café Alaïa is the perfect pit stop for fashion week attendees and aesthetically minded diners alike, situated as it is in the chic Alaïa boutique at 5 rue de Marignan and replete with its own terrace. With dishes inspired by Portuguese, Spanish and Italian cuisine, the cafe’s fare pays homage to the delicious dinners famously served by the fêted couturier in his own kitchen at Rue de Moussy.

Meanwhile, acclaimed Scottish chef Kevin Dalgleish, co-founder of the Signature Food Festival, has just opened his first restaurant, Amuse, in Aberdeen. Drawing on Dalgleish’s classical training, the menu showcases “the best local and regional Scottish produce available from land to sea”. (Think: ravioli filled with Scottish west-coast langoustine and scallop, topped by buttered hispi cabbage and shellfish bisque, and rump of Aberdeenshire lamb with glazed spring vegetables and green tomato jam).

September 10 marks the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, bringing with it the opportunity to feast upon mooncakes. For those looking to celebrate, we suggest heading to Bun House in the heart of Chinatown, where you can purchase a box of the meticulously handcrafted sweet pastries “traditionally exchanged between friends and family on the eve of the harvest moon”. Each contains four mooncakes of different flavours including sweet lotus, sweet bean, and silken egg custard – a Bun House special.

Then there’s the new evening restaurant at Messums Wiltshire, a charming gallery and arts centre in the middle of the English countryside. Headed up by Chris Warwick, the restaurant will feature a seasonal, four-course menu “dictated by the fisherman’s catch or the crop reports”. Examples include clay-baked Crapaudine beetroot with Cornish crab, lavender honey emulsion and toasted rye crumbs, and globe artichoke with Cheshire tomato marmalade, buckler sorrel and lemon salt.

Jason Atherton and Paul Hood of Social Eating House have just introduced a brand new sharing-style menu to die for at the popular Soho restaurant. Continuing their championing of modern British plates with a focus on seasonality, produce and technique, highlights include crispy Cumbrian saddleback pork shoulder with green chilli and aged parmesan, and barbecued Romano courgette and Japanese aubergine, with Westcombe ricotta, honey and meadowsweet.

Also in Soho, Queen’s Park neighbourhood favourite Milk Beach will soon open a second space in the picturesque Ilona Rose House building later this month. Expect the same Australian coastal aesthetic and delicious signature dishes, as well as some tantalising new additions (whole deep-fried seabass with nam jim jaew, for instance, or grilled oyster mushrooms with fermented mushroom glaze and macadamia hummus). Plus, a new cocktail menu and an expanded wine list centred around independent low-intervention producers. Bottom’s up!