The Best Shows to See in the UK This July

Francis Alÿs | Barbican Art Gallery, London | 27 June – 1 September

What do you get when you put dozens of children together under the same roof? For one, an astonishingly loud room. Transformed into an audiovisual mega-playground, Barbican Art Gallery roars with the sound of cheering, laughing, sprinting, clapping, singing, dancing, whistling, cooing, swinging and yelling. These noises emanate from oversized projection screens displaying the largest survey to date of Francis Alÿs’s Children’s Games (1999–ongoing), a series of short films documenting how children from across the world navigate their environment through play.  – Nevan Spier

‘Love is Real, and it’s Inside Of My Computer’ | Grand Union, Birmingham | 4 May – 3 August 

‘Love is Real, and it’s Inside Of My Computer’ is an exhibition by the intersectionally disabled collective Babeworld and sound artist utopian_realism that focuses on the social and administrative relationships present in projects commissioned by creative institutions. The show questions the art world’s capacity to support neurodivergent individuals and groups while also highlighting the mental burnout incurred by artists when navigating expectations. 

‘Love is Real …’ picks apart the possibility of self-care in the artists’ day-to-day lives, where games have become work and an elusive fictional project is rapidly metamorphosing into new forms provoked by unrelenting administrative requests. Heavy black curtains line the interior of Grand Union, enhancing the sense that the exhibition is focused on internal world-building. Mounted in the middle of the cloaked wall, violet light spilling out from its edges, a monitor displays words describing utopian_realism’s surrounding soundscape, including ethereal chimes and moments of quiet with ‘slowed down and stretched out whooshes’. In the centre of the gallery sits a large square structure, made from industrial stud-wall timber; inside is a contemporary live-work space with a gaming monitor on which screens the artists’ new film.  – Cathy Wade

Pio Abad | Ashmolean Museum, Oxford | 10 February – 8 September

Pio Abad’s ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness’ is a lyrical meditation on cultural loss and the possibilities of reclaiming mapping for revolutionary retellings of histories of empire. The exhibition’s touchstone is I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), a drawing of the underside of Powhatan’s Mantle (c.1600–38), a deerskin robe dating to early contact between Indigenous peoples and British colonists in North America. In red pencil on paper, Abad has traced the contours and cracks on the mantle’s reverse, mirroring the abstracted map of settlements in beaded shells on its front. A memorial atlas for ‘the many stolen lands that can never be recovered’, as the exhibition text describes, the drawing is also Abad’s acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of struggle. – Crystal Bennes

Michaël Borremans | David Zwirner, London | 6 June – 26 July 

Michäel Borremans came to prominence at the turn of the millennium with a more clearly bifurcated practice than is now evident. One stream was of medium-sized, figurative paintings in oil of quietly disconcerting, unaccountable scenes owing something to surrealist cinema. The other comprised smaller drawings in pencil and watercolour of more panoramic, though equally enigmatic, scenarios, marked by striking disparities in scale between monumental and minuscule figures. While his solo show at David Zwirner, ‘The Monkey’, contains only paintings on canvas, the memory of these early works on paper persists in the form of small painted tableaux featuring miniature landscapes surveyed from on high, as one might pore over an elaborate train set or board game. – Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith

Goshka Macuga | London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE | 9 July – 18 January 2025

Ethereal rock formations sprout from the floor and ceiling in Goshka Macuga’s ‘Born from Stone.’ Glimmering stalagmites and stalactites made from clay and resin, they transform the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE into a surreal cave, inviting us to explore its layers of history.

While Macuga’s installation builds on her longstanding interest in grottoes and caves as subject matter and motif, the location of this exhibition lends the theme a deeper significance. Directly below the show lies the Mithraeum, the relic of an ancient Roman temple dedicated to the god Mithras, which survived heavy bombing during World War 2. Macuga’s serene geological sculptures are contrasted with the visceral imagery of a number of paintings loaned by the Imperial War Museum, which depict scenes of man-made horrors during the war; a London haunted by towering flames and destroyed buildings. – Katie Abbott

^{Main image: Francis Alÿs, Children’s Game #2: Ricochets (detail), Tangier, Morocco, 2007, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega and Julien Devaux, video still. Courtesy: the artist}