London Art Guide June 2026 – quick links
1996: 30 Years On
This brilliant exhibition is dedicated to the best of Britpop and ‘the wildest year of Britain’s wildest decade’. In 1996, the Spice Girls released Wannabe and scored three number one hits; Trainspotting hit the cinemas; Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were the hottest Young British Artists; and England made it to the semifinals of the Euros.
This your chance to relive the year in all its iconic glory: music, fashion, football, and the faces that made Cool Britannia really cool. 1996: 30 Years On is curated with a keen eye by Dominic Mohan, formerly the entertainment editor at The Sun. The highlight for this Spice World fan was seeing Geri Halliwell’s famous Union Jack boots.
1996: 30 Years On is at Barbican Music Library until 19 September. It is a free exhibition.
In Transit
In Transit: Greek Artists Abroad is a group sculpture exhibition shaped by the lived reality of standing between places and identities. Bringing together nine Greek artists who have worked abroad, the exhibition considers the state of being in-between, touching on themes of memory, displacement, humour and adaptation to reveal how movement reshapes who we are and how we belong.
Each work emerges from the friction of distance: between homeland and host country, memory and present time, certainty and reinvention. Sculpture becomes a language for what cannot be easily spoken: the weight of absence, the elasticity of identity, and the quiet negotiations required to belong somewhere new without losing where you began.
In Transit: Greek Artists Abroad is at The Hellenic Centre, Marylebone from 5 to 26 June. Free.
Women’s Prize LIVE 2026
Spend the day with like-minded bibliophiles in Bedford Square Gardens for Women’s Prize LIVE 2026. A celebration of women’s writing, this is a day to inspire both readers and writers. There are lively in-conversation events with authors throughout the day as well as inspiring workshops with authors and industry insiders. As evening falls, you can hear exclusive readings of the books on the 2026 shortlists for the Women’s Prizes for Fiction and Non-Fiction.
Speakers include Candice Carty-Williams, Vick Hope, Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Julia Gillard. The ticket price includes a take-home goodie bag full of bookish treats.
Women’s Prize LIVE 2026 is at Bedford Square Gardens in Bloomsbury on 10 June.
Flamenco Festival
The vibrancy, heat and passion of Spain ignites London this month in the 21st annual Flamenco Festival. Held at venues across the city, including Sadler’s Wells in Islington and Stratford, there are distinctive productions by renowned flamenco dancers, choreographers and musicians, including five UK premieres. For Flamenco enthusiasts and newcomers alike, this is world-class dance with powerful music and hypnotic choreography.
The festival includes a special one-night-only performance at the National Gallery on 15 June with viola player Fahmi Alqhaiand acclaimed dancer Patricia Guerrero of Ballet Flamenco de Andalucía. The performance will be in dialogue with the paintings in the Gallery’s Zurbarán exhibition, on now in the Sainsbury Wing.
The Flamenco Festival runs from 16 to 29 June at Sadler’s Wells and other venues.
Kyotographie at Japan House
Kawada Kikuji and Iwane Ai are two of Japan’s most exciting contemporary photographers. The images in this exhibition explore moments the photographers consider significant, as seen through an expressionistic lens.
Kikuji a previous winner of the Photographic Society of Japan’s lifetime achievement award, shows work from the 1950s and from his iconic 1965 series and photobook Chizu (The Map). Ai’s A New River shows pictures from the Tohoku region of Japan featuring cherry blossoms at night and figures from folk traditions alongside works from her Kipuka series about Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii.
Kyotographie opens 3 June at Japan House, Kensington. It is a free exhibition.
Whodunnit [Unrehearsed] 4
Whodunnit [unrehearsed] 4 is Park Theatre’s hugely popular comedy fundraising spectacular. Set in the lawless Wild West town of Graveside, the show transforms the theatre into a fully immersive world. The exterior has been turned into a Wild West streetscape and the studio space is now The Last Chance Saloon. At each performance, a different celebrity plays the central role of the Sheriff, completely unrehearsed. Armed only with an earpiece feeding them lines moments before they speak, the Sheriff must attempt to solve the murder, survive the mayhem and keep the show on track, while events spiral in gloriously unpredictable ways.
This year’s celebrity Sheriffs include Benedict Cumberbatch, Simon Pegg, Gillian Anderson, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent, Sandi Toksvig, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Hugh Bonneville, and many more. This is seriously good fun and a vital fundraiser for Park Theatre which receives no regular public subsidy.
Whodunnit [unrehearsed] 4 is at Park Theatre, Finsbury Park until 27 June.
The Sun and the Moon
The Sun and the Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial is a wondrous new exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery that explores how the sun and the moon have inspired creativity, curiosity and belief across cultures and throughout history.
The exhibition brings together works by established and emerging artists and is structured as a journey through a 24-hour cycle from dawn to the dark of night. Highlights include Helios, a large-scale sculpture of the sun by Luke Jerram, and teamLab’s immersive Massless Suns and Dark Suns. Be sure to see one of my favourites, the magical Twilight Dreams by the legendary British illustrator Arthur Rackham.
There is a special weekend of performances, guided workshops and creative activations across 19 to 21 June to celebrate the summer solstice.
The Sun and the Moon: Art inspired by the Celestial opens at Saatchi Gallery, Sloane Square on 5 June.
Belfast Photo Festival
Head to Belfast for the 2026 Photo Festival. This year’s event is themed around ‘Horizons’ and considers photography at a critical threshold in an age of AI-generated imagery, automation and algorithmic seeing. This is a period of transformation for photography, which is seeing its claims to truth, trust, authorship and materiality increasingly debated. The festival is responding to these questions with exhibitions and installations that explore the horizon as both visual subject and metaphor: a space of possibility and uncertainty, and an opportunity to consider what lies beyond our current technological, environmental, social, economic and geopolitical boundaries.
An exciting participatory installation called Camera Obsolete? invites audiences to destroy, dismantle, recast or resist the transformation of obsolete cameras into new sculptural forms. You can wield a hammer in a rage room, take apart equipment in accessible disassembly areas, or choose resistance over destruction by adopting an old camera and returning it to use, asserting the continuing value of photography as a physical medium. Part spectacle, part critique, the project confronts photography’s unstable future by asking what is being lost, remade or abandoned.
The Belfast Photo Festival runs at venues across Belfast from 4 to 30 June.
Famous faces on London stages
There’s always an opportunity to see a famous face from film and television live on stage in London. This month, Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner star in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at Southbank’s Lyttelton Theatre; Rosamund Pike shines in Inter Alia at Wyndham’s Theatre; Jinkx Monsoon is amazing as Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow at Soho Theatre; Catherine Tate is Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh Mary! at The Trafalgar Theatre; Felicity Kendall stars in High Society at the Barbican, along with Freddie Fox; Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison do Grace Pervades at Theatre Royal Haymarket; Dame Maureen Lipman stars in the title role of Allegra, on national tour throughout June; Adrian Lester is Cyrano de Bergerac at Noël Coward Theatre; Golden Globe winner Sandra Oh makes her West End debut in The Misanthrope at the National Theatre; Stephen Mangan and Sarah Hadland star in the hit comedy The Truth at Apollo Theatre; and Robert Lindsay and Jemma Redgrave open in the world premiere of Springwood at Hampstead.
