The Seven Best Shows to See This Autumn

Rose B. Simpson

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, US

11 August 2022 – 29 January 2023

A darkened atmosphere pervades Rose B. Simpson’s solo exhibition ‘Legacies’ at ICA/Boston, like a cloudy sky calling for rain. Figurative clay sculptures appear on raised platforms in the open gallery. Their resemblances disclose familial relations amongst those in the room and, as the title of the exhibition suggests, to relatives beyond. Simpson herself comes from a long line of accomplished ceramicists from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico, including her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, her late grandmother, Rina Swentzell and her late great-grandmother, Rose Naranjo. – Caitlin Chaisson

Chris Killip 

The Photographers’ Gallery, London 

7 October 2022 – 19 February 2023 

On a trip to New York in 1969, Chris Killip had an epiphany. Seeing the work of Walker Evans, August Sander and Paul Strand for the first time in the Museum of Modern Art, he realized that photography could be made for its own sake. By the early 1970s, the self-taught photographer had abandoned his career in advertising and moved back to his native Isle of Man to document the slow erosion of the island’s traditional way of life. – Julie Hrischeva

Anri Sala

Pinault Collection – Bourse de Commerce, Paris, France 

14 October 2022 – 16 January 2023

Anri Sala’s large video projection Time No Longer (2021) wraps around one-half of the interior of the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda. A turntable plays a recording of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (1940–41) as the camera rotates and appears to spin. At one point, it becomes apparent that the turntable is, in fact, revolving inside a space shuttle. Then, it seems to float away, like an object lost in the stratosphere. In the basement of the Bourse are two further films by Sala, Nocturnes (1999) and 1396 Days without Red (2011), both of which address the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s – works that speak eloquently to our current moment of crisis. – Aaron Peck 

William Kentridge

Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK 

24 September – 11 December 

It is simultaneously simple and impossible to keep up with William Kentridge. Like the alter egos who wander through his works, he is always the same yet always moving. His characteristic gesture appears in the animated pages of De Como Não Fui Ministro d’Estado (How I Did Not Become a Monster, 2012): dressed in his regulation white shirt and dark trousers, antiquated pince-nez trailing its black cord, he paces, muses and turns, over and again, the lines of his body shifting restlessly in the trademark shimmer of his animation style. – Tim Smith-Laing

‘As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic’

Art Museum at the University of Toronto

7 September – 19 November

Featuring more than 70 artists, this jam-packed exhibition – accompanied by a catalogue published by Aperture – presents an encyclopaedic selection of Dr. Kenneth Montague’s Wedge Collection, devoted entirely to Black photography. Works by historical and contemporary photographers from across the African diaspora – including James Barnor, Barkley L. Hendricks, Michèle Pearson Clarke and Ming Smith – play well with the museum’s exhibition spaces: rooms that look like they would house a historical collection adjoin others with the white-cube aesthetics of a contemporary gallery. Here, old meets new, in images that range from mid-20th-century New York to London’s Swinging Sixties and beyond. – Charlene K. Lau

^{Main image: Chris Killip, Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975. Courtesy: © Chris Killip Photography Trust and The Martin Parr Foundation}