What's on at Tate Modern in 2025
- maxwell museums
- Nov 20, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 29, 2024
It's the most visited contemporary art gallery in the world, with over 4.7 million people walking through the doors in 2023. That also makes it the fifth most visited art museum — covering any period — on the planet. So it's no wonder you want to find out what Tate Modern's 2025 exhibitions are.
The gallery on the South Bank of the Thames is planning a packed programme of blockbuster shows this year. The subjects are eclectic, meaning it'll be even more of a go-to destination for art lovers in London and beyond.
Here's what's on right now in 2025, and what you've got to look forward to.
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Tate Modern exhibitions open right now
Acclaimed photographer Zanele Muholi gets a major career retrospective — in what is actually a second attempt. The first iteration of this show was massively curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic at the end of 2020.
This second incarnation is even bigger, and includes new works produced in the intervening three years. In total over 260 photographs are on display, representing the full breadth of the artist’s career to date.
Muholi describes themself as a visual activist. From the early 2000s, they have documented and celebrated the lives of South Africa’s Black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities.
A number of Muholi’s key photographic series are the standout highlights of this exhibition. These include the early series Only Half the Picture, and Faces and Phases, where each participant looks directly at the camera, challenging the viewer to hold their gaze.
Now open until 26 January 2025
The Hyundai Commission — Mire Lee: Open Wound
Mire Lee's "gore-fest" art installation features a large-scale sculptural artwork that reimagines the famous Turbine Hall as the inside of a body, transforming it into an eerie and fantastical factory.
It's the Korean artist’s first major presentation of work in the UK, and the installation sees Lee explore the tension between beauty and the grotesque on an a massive scale.
It centres around a seven-metre-long turbine which hangs from one of the building’s original cranes, especially recommissioned for this installation. As the days and weeks pass, this turbine and its constant leaking of fluid produce 'skins' which are then hung around it — like meat cuts in a butchers.
It's the 2024 annual commission in the Turbine Hall. The 2025 iteration will be unveiled in October.
Open now until 16 March 2025
Anthony McCall: Solid Light
Four of the immersive artworks of English-born, US-based artist Anthony McCall come to Tate Modern in a compact but atmospheric exhibition.
Seen as a pioneer of film environments, McCall is most famous for his ‘solid-light’ installations. Here the exhibition lets visitors enter a selection of his most well-known huge artworks, which are mostly created from a thin mist pierced by slowly evolving planes of projected light. As you move through these translucent sculptures of light, you’ll create new shapes and discover your own mesmerising perspectives.
A major highlight is Anthony McCall's first ever 'solid-light’ installation: Line Describing a Cone. Created in 1973, the 30-minute-long work tests the boundaries between cinema and sculpture and takes the form of a projected white dot that slowly grows to fill the dark space with a cone of light. It immerses its audience members in its field.
Now open until 27 Apr 2025
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit
An entire career-spanning exhibition on Mike Kelley shows how American trailblazer Kelley produced provocative art from the 1970s until his death aged 57 in 2012. The art world celebrated him but there’s never been a major exhibition dedicated to him in Britain before this.
This challenging and sometimes uncomfortable retrospective draws on references from popular and underground culture, literature, and philosophy. It brings together Kelley's diverse body of experimental and performance pieces: from sculptures made with plush toys to multi-media installations set to music such as Day Is Done.
A major highlight is the Kandors series 1999–2011. These illuminated models of Superman's mythical lost home, each preserved in a glass bell jar, form a ghostly cityscape that hints at the psychological depths of this iconic American superhero.
Now open until 09 March 2025
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet
One of the "most ambitious exhibitions" ever held by Tate Modern, this show celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art.
With a focus on art produced between the 1950s and 1980s — from the birth of op art to the dawn of the internet age — Electric Dreams brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation to experiment with machine-made art and early home computing systems.
Featuring over 150 works — many of which are shown in the UK for the first time — this vast exhibition offers a feast for the eyes and ears, and pairs huge gallery installations with delicate and fascinating pieces.
Now open until 01 June 2025
Tate Modern's upcoming exhibitions in 2025
Leigh Bowery!
This "eclectic and immersive" Leigh Bowery exhibition will show how the boundary-pushing artist, performer, model, designer, TV personality, club promoter and musician left a sensational legacy from his short life.
Born in Australia but based in London for much of his adult life, Bowery’s career would see him take on many different roles, all the while refusing to be limited by convention.
This retrospective will span his emergence in the British capital’s club scene in the 1980s through to his outrageous performances in galleries, theatres and even in the street. It will show how he celebrated the body as a shape-shifting tool with the power to challenge norms of aesthetics, sexuality and gender.
Opens on 27 February and runs until 31 August 2025
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Best known for his large-scale installations, the Korean-born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh is getting a career-spanning retrospective. This will be a crowd-pleasing show with a number of “immersive” works that will explore the notion of the 'home' as well as themes of belonging, individuality, connection and disconnection.
Tate is billing the exhibition as "the first major solo showing of his work in London for a generation." It will certainly also be one of the most instagrammable of London’s exhibitions next summer based on the nature of the artist's eye-catching artistic practice.
Highlights will include brand new installations which have been created especially for this display.
Opens on 01 May and runs until 26 October 2025
Emily Kam Kngwarray
This huge retrospective of the work of the renowned Australian artist was described as "stunning" when it opened at the National Gallery of Australia at the end of 2023. The gallery in Melbourne has now partnered with Tate to bring it to London in what will be the first large-scale presentation of Kngwarray’s work ever held in Europe.
Kngwarray only began creating art in her late 70s, when she suddenly started painting extensively. This was in the 1970s, but by the 1980s, she transitioned to the more commercial medium of acrylic on canvas. This put a rocket under her fame and her output's desirability for collectors.
Visitors to this exhibition will get to experience her lived experience and spiritual engagement with her homelands, through rich textiles, paintings, film and audio elements that embody Kngwarray’s ancestral heritage.
Opens 10 July 2025 and runs until 11 January 2026
Picasso: The Three Dancers
Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece The Three Dancers is considered one of the most significant paintings in modern art. Now a century after it was created, it will be the focus of its very own exhibition.
Blending personal tragedy, emotional intensity, and groundbreaking artistic innovation, it was a turning point in Picasso’s career. The painting marked a radical break away from his serene, classical phase, and the beginning of a new period of emotional violence and expressionist distortion.
It’s been in Tate’s collection since 1965 and this unique and focussed Three Dancers exhibition will tell the story of its history through a selection of other key works from across Picasso’s career.
Opens 17 September 2025 and runs until Spring 2026
Nigerian Modernism
Visitors are invited to explore the artists who revolutionised modern art in Nigeria in the mid-20th century in this exhibition set against the backdrop of cultural and artistic rebellion.
The show will look at the work of Nigerian artists working before and after the country's national independence from British colonial rule in 1960, and who combined African and European traditions to create new, multidisciplinary forms across painting, sculpture, textile, literature and poetry.
While modernism is often associated as an art movement in Europe, this show will highlight its often-overlooked international roots. Over 50 artists will be featured, including Uzo Egonu, El Anatsui, Ladi Kwali and Ben Enwonwu MBE.
Opens on 08 October 2025 and runs until 11 May 2026
Light and Magic: The birth of art photography
Tate Modern's final exhibition of 2025 will be a major photography show covering the international movement which first transformed the camera into an artistic tool.
Through 50 photographers — from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town, and Brazil to Singapore — this show will survey Pictorialism's evolution across the world. On display will be the beautiful and atmospheric images created between the 1880s and 1960s, when these artists began to embrace experimental new techniques and which led to photography's transition into an art form in its own right.
Featuring never-before seen works from around the world alongside pieces from Tate’s collection, Light and Magic will highlight the vast and varied artistic possibilities of photography as a medium.
Opens on 04 December 2025 and runs until 25 May 2026
