Press room

Barbican 2027 Visual Arts Programme:

• EXHIBITION Dayanita Singh
  The Curve
  10 March – 23 May 2027 
   
• EXHIBITION Characters of Fashion
  Barbican Art Gallery 
  15 April – 29 August 2027
   
• PUBLIC COMMISSION Ximena Garrido-Lecca
  Sculpture Court
  6 May – 1 August 2027 
   
• EXHIBITION Magdalene Odundo 
  Barbican Lakeside Gallery 
  2 September 2027 – 9 January 2028
   
• PUBLIC COMMISSION Rosa Barba
  Barbican Foyer
  23 September 2027 – 30 January 2028
   
• EXHIBITION Alice Adams 
  Barbican Art Gallery 
  7 October 2027 – 6 February 2028

In 2027, the Barbican’s visual arts programme continues to span the breadth of the building with a leading international line-up of artists, showcasing exceptional talent across disciplines.

In the Art Gallery fashion returns with Characters of Fashion. Charting the fascinating relationship with literature, this major exhibition explores fashion from an interdisciplinary perspective, showcasing a wide array of authors and designers.

Alice Adams, Magdalene Odundo, Ximena Garrido-Lecca and Rosa Barba bring varied media and process-oriented practices to our Art Gallery, Lakeside Gallery, Sculpture Court and Foyer Lightwell, pushing the boundaries of sculptural form. Elsewhere, The Curve welcomes Dayanita Singh, whose work explores the cross-disciplinary exchange between music and photography.

Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, said: “We are delighted to share our full visual arts programme for 2027 which continues to extend beyond our Art Gallery and The Curve, to activate further spaces within the Centre – from our scenic Lakeside Gallery to the Sculpture Court and the Barbican’s own foyers – bringing our largest arts offering to date.

Across a range of highly individual artistic practices, connections between disciplines will be drawn out, alongside extraordinary and innovative experiments with materials and form, resulting in work that is truly distinctive in its artistry and feeling.

Collectively, we hope these works will encourage close looking and perhaps, through embodied meaningful encounters, help us make better sense of our digitally accelerating world.”

Please see full details of newly announced exhibitions below.

Barbican Members can access all our exhibitions for free, Members Plus can bring a friend. Membership includes priority booking and discounted tickets across our programme. Plus, special offers in our shop, cafés and restaurants. Membership starts from just £59 a month. T&Cs apply.

16–29 year-olds can join Young Barbican for free. Young Barbican gives exclusive access, discounted tickets, offers in our Shop, bars and restaurants, plus curated recommendations. Sign up for free.


2027 EXHIBITION PROGRAMME 

Dayanita Singh
Exhibition: The Curve
10 March – 23 May 2027 

The Barbican’s 2027 visual arts programme opens in March with Dayanita Singh (b. 1961, New Delhi), who will transform The Curve into a shifting landscape of images, reflecting the impact of Indian classical music on her five-decade long practice.

The exhibition will feature several of the artist’s portable museums—modular display structures made of teak—including Ustad Museum (2025), Museum of Tanpura (2021) and Musicians’ Bus (2021), shown alongside new work. Through these structures, described by Singh as ‘mobile, organic and changing’, a selection of photographs from her archive will fill the Barbican’s 90-metre-long gallery.

At the heart of the exhibition is the artist’s relationship with tabla maestro Zakir Hussain whom she photographed for over four decades until his death in 2024. Her practice has been deeply impacted by a period of five winters between 1981-86 where, as a student, she accompanied Hussain and a group of fellow musicians on their tour bus travelling across India.

The strong and intimate connection between music and the visual arts will be highlighted by a newly commissioned soundscape produced by the artist and her collaborator MT Aditya Srinivasan as well as through a series of activations by musicians that will take place within The Curve.

Supported by Phillip Keir and the Barbican Commissioning Council.

Characters of Fashion 
Exhibition: Barbican Art Gallery 
15 April – 29 August 2027

Following last year's landmark exhibition Dirty Looks, fashion programming returns to the Barbican in spring 2027 with Characters of Fashion, a major exhibition exploring the poetic and prolific dialogue between fashion and literature. Through the lens of clothing, previously unexplored facets about the intimate lives of authors and their characters come to life.

Showcasing a wide array of literary voices from Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Jean Rhys, the exhibition will explore how acclaimed authors have used clothing as a way of exploring interior worlds and developing characters, and as a tool for self-fashioning their own image. Through fashion, these authors express elements of joy, non-conformity, self-awareness, mythmaking, performativity and transformation. Alongside rarely seen garments and accessories, illuminated by intimate correspondence, diaries, manuscripts and photography, the exhibition will also feature several contemporary fashion collections inspired by literary characters, including designs by ChristianDior, House of Aama, Robert Wun, Stephen Jones, Prada and Comme des Garçons, highlighting some of the most enduring ‘characters of fashion’ including Orlando, Frankenstein, Beloved, Alice in Wonderland and Dracula.

Throughout the show, installations by contemporary designers including Duro Olowu and Simone Rocha, and authors Ottessa Moshfegh and Arundhati Roy, will immerse visitors in 'rooms of one's own'. The final section of the exhibition will house a reading room, curated by writer and curator Lou Stoppard. 

Including works and garments from: Kathy Acker, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, Barbara Cartland, Eileen Chang, Colette, Joan Didion, George Eliot, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, George Sand, Mary Shelley, Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Yourcenar.

Fashion by: Aganovich, Veronique Branquinho, Comme des Garçons, Thom Browne, S.S. Daley, Dilara Findikoglu, Christian Dior, Dries Van Noten, Erdem, House of Aama, Stephen Jones, Christian Lacroix, Alexander McQueen, Sebastien Meunier, Louis Gabriel Nouchi, Duro Olowu, Prada, Simone Rocha, Yves Saint Laurent, John Alexander Skelton, Valentino, Vaquera, Viktor & Rolf, Wales Bonner, Robert Wun.

Accompanying Characters of Fashion will be a new catalogue published in collaboration with SPBH Editions / MACK with new artwork by Katerina Jebb. 

Ximena Garrido-Lecca
Public Commission: Sculpture Court
6 May – 1 August 2027

A major new public commission by Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca (b. 1980, Lima) will take over the Sculpture Court in Spring 2027. As the artist’s first institutional solo presentation in the UK, the installation will combine the plant as botanical organism and industrial processing system in a sculptural infrastructure exploring the colonial legacies and contemporary impact of extraction. Set against the iconic Brutalist architecture of the Barbican, the commission will draw inspiration from ancient practices of permaculture to imagine alternative futures.

Grounded in rigorous research, Garrido-Lecca's multidisciplinary practice often features large-scale installations composed of materials including seeds, plants, minerals and metals. Her work is informed by artisanal craft traditions, ancestral agricultural rituals, industrial technologies and diverse language systems to question inherited histories and hierarchies of knowledge. 

We would like to thank our Commissioning Partner, the Bukhman Foundation, for their leading support.

Major support from the Cheng-Lan Foundation, and additional support from the Erica Roberts Art Foundation and Barbican Commissioning Council.

Magdalene Odundo 
Exhibition: Barbican Lakeside Gallery 
2 September 2027 – 9 January 2028 

Launching the autumn programme, the Barbican will stage an exhibition of artist Magdalene Odundo (b. 1950, Nairobi, Kenya). This will be Odundo’s first solo institutional presentation in London in over 30 years. 

Situated in the Barbican’s new Lakeside Gallery, home last year to the critically acclaimed Encounters: Giacometti series, the exhibition will present Odundo’s poetic exploration of the ceramic vessel as an elemental form that resonates across time, geographies, and cultures. Taking gestures from everyday life as dynamic cues, Odundo’s vessels have a bodily presence, their forms evoking swelling bellies, swaying torsos and gaping mouths. Considering the human body as a vessel itself, Odundo sees her own body as a channel for transforming her thoughts into clay. 

Odundo views vessels, which are among the first tools created by humans, as intrinsically transcultural objects. Her works invoke conceptually and materially layered histories and her decades-long research has led her to draw rich inspiration from diverse sources – ranging from ancient Egyptian, Japanese and Aztec sculpture to Kenyan and Nigerian burial rites to Elizabethan fashion and European modernism. Created from the life-giving material of the earth, her clay forms are reminders of a shared humanity and vitality.

Rosa Barba 
Public Commission: Barbican Foyer
23 September 2027 – 30 January 2028 

In the second of two public commissions for 2027, the Barbican will present a major new work by artist Rosa Barba (b. 1972, Agrigento, Sicily). Situated at the heart of the Centre’s public spaces, the ambitious project responds to the Foyer Lightwell and its dramatic verticality, through an expansive installation, bringing together cinematic and kinetic sculptural works. In dialogue with the intricately choreographed structure, a newly commissioned 35 mm film will be projected onto the Barbican’s iconic architecture. Here, cinema becomes an instrument for interrogating the qualities of space, creating a performative setting where fact and fiction can be intertwined.

In her site-specific installations, Barba uses cinematic technologies to interrogate traditional viewing practices in film, through a distinctly sculptural approach. Her enigmatic work draws on the materiality and apparatus of cinema – looped strips of celluloid, projectors, and screens – to invite speculation on the relationship between image and perception, memory and time. She often takes landscapes as her starting point, understanding them as repositories of political, technological, and historical inscriptions.

At the Barbican, the suspended installation and its companion film will be visible from multiple vantage points across the Centre, creating for visitors a dynamic, multilayered encounter with continually shifting perspectives. Through the carefully orchestrated interplay of light and sound, Barba’s commission will extend the Barbican’s architecture into a cinematic landscape of its own.

Supported by Phillip Keir and the Barbican Commissioning Council.

Alice Adams 
Exhibition: Barbican Art Gallery 
7 October 2027 – 6 February 2028 

Concluding the 2027 visual arts programme, the Barbican will present the first ever institutional survey devoted to the groundbreaking artist, Alice Adams (b. 1930, New York, USA). This retrospective will introduce audiences to the full breadth of her remarkable career, from her experimental tapestries of the 1950s and architectural sculpture of the 1970s to the work she continues to make today, at the age of 95.

Adam’s oeuvre, notable for its significant shifts in process and materials over time, demonstrates a ceaseless curiosity about the underlying structure of things, whether the interlocking weave of a textile or the evolving urban fabric of downtown New York. Her practice is marked by an honesty of approach—a laying bare—apparent in the loose threads that punctuate her tapestries and the straightforward wood-and-nail construction of her sculptures. It serves as a testament, in our increasingly automated and frictionless world, to the challenge and satisfaction of slow, deliberate making.

Realised through unprecedented access to the artist’s personal archive, this exhibition will trace seven decades of Adams’s experimentation across mediums, contextualising her practice within the history of American art. Through sculpture, textiles, photographs, drawings, prints, and film, visitors will encounter an artist relentlessly at work and ever responsive to her surroundings, within the immediacy of her studio and the dynamism of the wider city.

Supported by Lonti Ebers.

Upcoming Autumn/Winter 2026 exhibitions:

Repercussions: A takeover by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Earshot 
Barbican Centre 
Wed 23 Sep 2026 — Sat 26 Sep 2026 
Press preview: Please get in touch for details  

Yuko Mohri: In Concert  
The Curve 
Thu 1 Oct 2026 — Sun 24 Jan 2027
Press preview: Wed 30 Sep, 10am – 1pm, RSVP here 

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing 
Barbican Art Gallery 
Thu 8 Oct 2026 — Sun 28 Feb 2027
Press Preview: Wed 7 Oct, 10am – 1pm, RSVP here