From festive feating options to an exhibition on American avant-garde cinema, don’t miss our top recommendations for a magical month ahead
Exhibitions
High Noon at Deichtorhallen Hamburg: 13 December 2024 – 4 May 2025
Made up of works from the FC Collection Gundlach, one of the most important private photography collections in Germany, this upcoming exhibition at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen offers insight into Reagan-era New York and the subcultures that emerged in reaction to its conservative, neoliberal climate. The show spotlights the work of four now-iconic photographers: close friends Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Mark Morrisoe, whose breathtakingly intimate works convey “love, friendship and decay against a backdrop of passion, addiction and Aids”, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, whose staged everyday scenes “create idealised archetypes [and play] with photography’s role as documentary evidence”.
Miriam Cahn: Reading Dust at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam: Until 26 January 2025
If you’re in Amsterdam, be sure to see Reading Dust, the Stedelijk’s survey of the Swiss painter Miriam Cahn whose haunting works, rendered in expressive brushstrokes, explore themes of war, violence, womanhood, and oppression. While the figures Cahn depicts are abstracted, stylised and indistinct, the emotions they convey are real, raw and unflinchingly human. Collectively, they present a searing exploration of the abuse of power – one which transcends time and place, and yet feels entirely timely.
At LACMA later this month, Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics will bring together the work of 60 artists working across painting, sculpture, photography and work on paper in Africa, Europe and the Americas. The show will be divided into four themes – speech and silence, movement and transformation, imagination, and representation – to highlight the conceptual and aesthetic ideas that link the artists’ work, while its catalogue features original works by contemporary poets. The result is an expansive study of almost a quarter of a century of production by Black artists, from Yinka Shonibare and Lorna Simpson to Mark Bradford and Arielle Bobb-Willis.
Movie lovers bound for Amsterdam are in for a treat. Underground, at the Eye Filmmuseum, takes a sweeping look at American avant-garde film in the 1960s, spanning the work of radical auteurs Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, as well as that of visual artists including Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono and Andy Warhol. Defined by a spirit of innovation and experimentation, in purposeful contrast to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the works reflect Mekas’s famous declaration that “we don’t want false, polished, slick films – we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films: we want them the colour of blood.”
 (variation with flash), 2024)
Hank Willis Thomas: Kinship of the Soul at Pace Gallery, London: Until 21 December 2024
Don’t miss the newest exhibition from the US artist Hank Willis Thomas at Pace gallery’s London space, which continues his powerful investigation into “the histories of abstraction through the lenses of colonisation, globalisation, and appropriation, with reference to Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, and Henri Matisse”. While Thomas’s oeuvre spans sculpture, screen printing, photography, video, and installation, the works on view here are activated by the viewer, their appearance changing to reveal latent images when exposed to a camera flash. Captivating to behold, they underscore what the gallery describes as “Thomas’s interest in using wayfinding materials to illuminate often overlooked histories and narratives”.
Francis Bacon: Human Presence at National Portrait Gallery, London: Until 9 January 2025
Francis Bacon was a master of figurative distortion, so much so that the term ‘Baconesque‘ has become a byword for contortion and disfiguration in both life and art. Now, at the National Portrait Gallery, visitors can trace the remarkable history of the painter’s relationship to portraiture, from his early engagement with the genre to his bold subversions of its traditions. Composed of more than 50 works from the 1940s onwards, the show features self-portraits, depictions of Bacon’s friends and contemporaries such as Lucian Freud and Isabel Rawsthorne, and portraits of his lovers including Peter Lacy and George Dyer, offering a comprehensive overview of the artist’s life and artistic evolution.
Memorabile. Ipermoda at MAXXI, Rome: Until 23 March 2025
A new exhibition at MAXXI in Rome seeks to illuminate the state of contemporary fashion from 2015 to the present day, homing in on the ways in which the industry has responded and adapted to recent social, political, economic and cultural shifts. Ranging from haute couture by storied ateliers to pieces by independent designers, the garments on display are arranged into sections that examine fashion’s relationship with time, the management of house archives, the strategic role of creative directors in luxury brands, and the major task of designing sustainably. Expect to see designs by Jonathan Anderson, Miuccia Prada, Viktor & Rolf, Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli, Demna Gvasalia for Balenciaga and many more, presented in dialogue to prompt reflection on the ways in which our sartorial tastes reflect the current moment.
Martin Parr: No Smoking at Rocket Gallery, London: 11 December 2024 to 31 May 2025
“Throughout his career Martin Parr has captured daily life as it really is and as you sift through the archives it is rather difficult to not stumble upon a cigarette, cigar, pipe or – in recent years – a dreaded vape,” says Rocket, the London gallery that has represented Parr for almost 30 years and is soon to host its 13th solo show of the British photographer’s work. This time, the theme is smoking, as snapped by Parr over the last five decades. Photos include an unfathomably tanned hand holding a smouldering cigarette, two grandmothers lighting up outside a church, an array of butts stubbed out in the sand, and other such marvellously Parrian observations of an increasingly discouraged habit.
Dalton Gata: Dressed to Leave This World at Peres Projects, Milan: Until December 20, 2024
In Milan, Peres Project is hosting a new solo show from Dalton Gata in which the Cuban artist “envisions the clothing worn on the final day on earth as a rite of passage into the afterlife”. Gata’s painted protagonists are gorgeously groomed and outfitted, standing proud against brutalist backdrops and oneiric landscapes. The series is a celebration of “the intricate layers of identity, the dazzling intersections of style, and the poetic assertion of self”, the works as alluring as they are defiant.
The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain, London: Until May 5, 2025
Londoners, make sure to see Tate Britain’s new show tracing the development of UK photography across the 1980s. The largest survey on the subject to date, it features work by more than 70 lens-based artists and collectives including Sunil Gupta, Ajamu X, Maud Sulter, Mumtaz Karimjee, Grace Lau and Paul Trevor. Filled with striking documentary photography and fine artworks alike, the exhibition reveals how a new generation of image-makers used photography as a tool for social change, political activism and artistic experimentation during the turbulent Thatcher years, dominated by race uprisings, the miner strikes, section 28, the Aids epidemic and gentrification.
Henni Alftan: Stop Making Sense at Karma Gallery, West 26 St, New York: Until 11 January 2025
If you’re in New York this month, head to Karma’s West 26th space to catch Stop Making Sense, the latest show from Helsinki-born, Paris-based painter Henni Alftan. Alftan is known for her bold yet minimalist works wherein cropped fragments of everyday life – from objects to figures – are rendered mysterious and multi-layered through experiments in colour, texture, scale and perspective. Here, as is so often the case with Alftan’s works, you can interpret the paintings both individually and in relation to one another, whether you’re confronted by two almost-identical depictions of the same cigarette burning down in an ashtray, or the jarring juxtaposition of a pair of bruised knees with what appears to be a fragment of the artist’s own imagined tombstone hanging opposite.
Events & Performances
December is brimming with brilliant new productions and festive events to brighten up the inevitable grey days. First up, a chance to see Sigourney Weaver make her West End debut – in a new Jamie Lloyd production of The Tempest, no less. Weaver will take on the role of Prospero, that master musician, in Shakespeare’s timeless tale of revenge and forgiveness at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from 7 December 2024 to 1 February 2025.
At the Almeida from 10 December 2024 to 1 February 2025, director Rebecca Frecknall will take on another Tennessee Williams classic starring a member of the Normal People cast. This time it’s Daisy Edgar Jones playing Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a wealthy Mississippi family gathering for the birthday of its patriarch. Over at the Donmar, tickets are selling fast for the UK premiere of Dave Malloy’s musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, which scooped no less than 12 Tony Awards on Broadway and will run in London from 9 December 2024 to 9 February 2025. Directed by Tim Sheader, the production is inspired by “a scandalous slice of Tolstoy’s War and Peace” and promises non-stop genre-defying fun.
Opera fans get booking for the Royal Opera House’s acclaimed revival of Tosca, directed by Jonathan Kent. A stirring spin on Puccini’s full-blooded drama, set in 19th-century Rome and filled with “ romance, revolution and intrigue”, performances run until December 13. For a sunshiny take on a Christmas classic meanwhile, check out Carlos Acosta's Nutcracker in Havana, a joyful new work by the revered Cuban choreographer, performed by dancers from his company, Acosta Danza, and set to an exuberant Cuban version of the sublime Tchaikovsky score, arranged by Cuban composer Pepe Gavilondo.
Finally, if you’re looking for more hands-on entertainment, why not partake in a festive workshop at Petersham Nurseries Richmond, where you can perfect your gift-wrapping, tree-decorating and wreath-making skills in dedicated classes scheduled throughout December.
Film
This month’s cinematic highlights include Nightbitch from American director Marielle Heller, a darkly comic musing on motherhood starring Amy Adams as an artist turned stay-at-home-mom whose “maternal instincts begin to manifest in canine form”. Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino is back with Queer, the hotly anticipated screen adaptation of William Burroughs’s 1985 novella of the same name. It stars Daniel Craig as a solitary American expat living in Mexico City who develops an infatuation with an elusive younger man. Zambian-Welsh director Rungano Nyoni also returns with On Becoming A Guinea Fowl in which a young woman stumbles across the dead body of her uncle late one night, prompting the unearthing of deeply buried secrets within her middle-class Zambian family.
Sujo, from Mexican filmmakers Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero, is a tense yet elegiac coming-of-age drama following the young son of a murdered cartel member as he’s raised by his aunts in rural Mexico. The Six Triple Eight sees American director Tyler Perry tell the inspiring true story of World War Two’s only US Women’s Army Corps unit of colour, who were stationed overseas to complete a seemingly impossible mission. Remembering Every Night by Japanese director Yui Kiyohara is a slow-paced, wonderfully poetic movie that follows three women of different generations as they walk the streets of Tama New Town on the outskirts of Tokyo over the course of a single day.
Excellent documentaries abound this month, beginning with Grand Theft Hamlet, a brilliantly accomplished film by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, shot entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto during the Covid-19 lockdown. There, two out of work actors affected by the pandemic decide to audition other players for a production of Hamlet to be performed live in-game, with astonishingly entertaining results. Nocturnes, the award-winning film from Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, plunges us deep into the forests of the Eastern Himalayas by night to reveal the secret existence of the moths that inhabit them. While The Bibi Files, by US filmmaker Alexis Bloom, is an explosive investigation into the corruption charges brought against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu using leaked interrogation footage from his trial.
Food & Drink
There are all sorts of fabulous feasting options to keep you feeling sated and celebratory over the holidays. For an inimitably chic Italian dinner, head to Lina Stores’ newest outpost on Shoreditch High Street, set within a picturesque, Grade-II-listed former bank. Expect tasty antipasti (like sea bream crudo with fennel, lemon, basil and olive oil); delicious pasta dishes (Spaghetti alla Chitarra with Amalfi lemon and pink peppercorns, for instance); sublime secondi such as grilled hispi cabbage with porcini butter, pine nuts, Grana Padano and black truffle; and homemade ice creams or tiramisu for dessert. Then head downstairs to Bar Lina for a swift digestivo in a deep-red, 1970s-style setting.
British-born Filipino chef and entrepreneur Rex De Guzman has just opened Turo Turo, his first permanent standalone restaurant on Tooting Broadway. Foregrounding Filipino street food, the new eatery boasts a “concise yet dynamic menu, designed for mixing and matching.” This ranges from small plates like oxtail Kare Kare croquettes with peanut sauce and Ensaladang Talong, a mouthwatering charred aubergine and tomato salad, to hearty noodle dishes like the beef Pancit Canton. Meanwhile, coconut milk-based “Ginataan” dishes, such as the creamy cauliflower Gata, offer winter comfort in abundance.
For more irresistible fast food offerings, try Long Chim, the newest endeavour from chef David Thompson, bringing the vibrant flavours and boundless energy of Bangkok’s street food scene to Soho. The result of many decades spent “exploring the complex network of alleys and laneways that weave across the city”, Thompson’s tantalising menu is made up of easy-to-share plates like tamarind beef skewers, spicy grilled squid, and aromatic monkfish curry.
At Somerset House until December 31, don’t miss your chance to revel in cheesy goodness courtesy of The Chalet, a temporary restaurant conceived by chef and pop-up restaurateur Jimmy Garcia. Replete with warming British fondue and a tasty assortment of side offerings for dipping, from sourdough bread from BreadBread Bakery in Brixton to baby potatoes, cornichons and more, the pop-up’s premise is fine British fare with an Alpine twist. Other tasty snacks include a delicate plate of gin-cured salmon with pickled beetroot and seeded cracker, and a charcuterie board made up of meats cured by Tempus in Weybridge.
If a spot dedicated to ice cream and well-curated wine sounds like your idea of heaven, then make your way to The Dreamery in Islington, opening December 12. There, the team behind Goodbye Horses will be serving up artisanal ice cream paired with light glou-glou wines from small, independent producers. Initial flavours will include the suitably festive Christmas pudding and gingerbread, as well as mint chocolate chip, croissant and custard – truly dreamy.
Last but not least, for the ultimate festive sandwiches, we recommend taking a tour of The Hoxton’s four London hotels, each of which is offering a different, bespoke sarnie and a vegetarian equivalent. In Shoreditch, sample crispy Korean fried turkey, spiced cranberry sauce, sage-and-onion stuffing and a fried egg, housed in a sesame brioche bun. In Holborn, enjoy a sourdough sub filled with turkey pastrami, maple crispy bacon, spiced cranberry mayo, gherkins, tomato, sage-and-onion stuffing and Reuben sauce. While Southwark’s offerings feature cheese galore, and the Shepherd’s Bush location centres duck (or tofu) served with spinach, spicy peanut sauce, crispy red cabbage and carrot. Wishing you all a happy holiday!
