Wondering what to do this weekend? You’ve come to the right place. Welcome to The Independent’s Arts Agenda, our guide to the very best culture to catch up with across your Saturday and Sunday.
Carefully curated by our critics and editors, this round-up features hot tips across the worlds of art, film, TV, theatre, dance, comedy, opera, books and music. Whether you’re after a must-see new production or an under-the-radar gem you might have overlooked, we’ve got you covered.
This week, TV editor Ellie Harrison gives the thumbs-up to Jason Segel and Harrison Ford’s new psychotherapy sitcom Shrinking, while arts editor Jessie Thompson says she’s discovered the joys of reading Barbara Trapido. Film editor Adam White recommends a deeply moving documentary about Nan Goldin, while our chief art critic Mark Hudson highlights the latest first-rate show from Mohammed Sami. Our music editor Roisin O’Connor, meanwhile, has good things to say about Florence and the Machine’s London O2 gig.
Africa Fashion
An exuberant collision of tradition and innovation in Britain’s biggest African fashion showcase to date, with 250 exhibits highlighting interactions with music and the visual arts. From mid-20th-century pioneers to radical designers of today, this groundbreaking show sees the long-marginalised continent’s creativity exploding on all fronts. V&A, until April 16
Alberta Whittle: Dipping Below a Waxing Moon, the Dance Claims Us for Release
Barbados-born, Glasgow-based Whittle delights in dishing painful home truths. Her hard-hitting film for the Scottish pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale saw an African praise singer declaiming the genealogies of Black men killed in British police custody. This show, meanwhile, delves into the slave-trading heritage of Bath’s beautiful Holburne Museum. Holburne Museum, Bath, until May 7
Mohammed Sami: The Point O
From asylum-seeking refugee to art-world star. This is the biggest show to date for the 38-year-old Baghdad-born artist, who was a revelation in Mixing It Up, the Hayward’s mammoth 2021 British painting survey. Sami’s eerily quiet, exquisitely rendered images of abandoned installations and deserted cities are suffused with the agony of displacement and loss. Camden Art Centre, until May 28
Mark Hudson, chief art critic
The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care, by Rina Raphael
January is usually a mad fever-dream of desperate aspirations to change one’s entire physical being, but this year feels a bit different. Most of the people I’ve spoken to aren’t setting themselves intimidating health or fitness goals – maybe that’s because we’re all finally over the thrall of the bloodsucking wellness trend. Rina Raphael’s new book takes a deep dive into an industry that might actually be making us quite unwell.
Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido
Barbara Trapido’s hysterical coming-of-age novel was republished last year to mark its 40th anniversary. I’m recommending it simply because I stumbled upon it the other day, tweeted about how much I adored it, and was immediately inundated with messages from superfans. The fact I didn’t know about it honestly feels like some kind of egregious faux pas, so I wanted to share the love – and recruit a few other new Trapido groupies.
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, by Victoria MacKenzie
Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine
The inspiration for Victoria MacKenzie’s debut novel is fascinating: set in the 14th century, it’s about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe – the first known female authors of books in English. It tells the little-known story of how women’s writing began, and is definitely one of the debuts to keep an eye on this year.
Jessie Thompson, arts editor
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
The work of pioneering photographer Nan Goldin is rooted in its intimacy – the queer joy, the hushed longing, the private pain. This powerful, rousing documentary unpacks her journey from conservative Sixties suburbia to the LGBT+ liberation of Seventies New York. Alongside this, director Laura Poitras follows Goldin in the present day as she wages war against the billionaire Sackler dynasty. The family’s sponsorship of art galleries and museums long served as a pretty smokescreen to conceal darker interests: they financed and profited from the production and marketing of OxyContin, considered the root cause of America’s opioid crisis. In cinemas from Friday 27 Jan
Nan Goldin attending a protest against Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, as seen in ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’
‘Sound of the Underground’ is being staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London
