It’s that time of year again, when the global art world descends in full force on London for a week of visual madness (fuelled almost entirely by sponsored white wine). It’s the season for another edition of Frieze. While the art brats are ready to let loose, the tote bag-sporting art crawlers are prematurely beset with art fatigue as we prepare press releases, share itineraries of off-Frieze parties, and prepare to elbow our way into the crowded marquees of Regents Park. After all, Frieze is not just about the art – it’s about the spectacle. Keeping up with it all – a week of jam-packed events, exhibitions and parties – usually sends the art fanatics a bit delulu.

But for anyone not intending to brave Regent’s Park, we’ve gathered a list of other art shows and events taking place in London this weekend...

The Australian designer and performer Leigh Bowery opened Taboo in 1985, a now legendary but defunct nightclub that once resided in Leicester Square (before it lost its cool to tourism). Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London exhibition at the Fashion + Textiles Museum is dedicated to the vibrant history of the club and its regulars – the likes of Pam Hoog, George Michael, Boy George and fashion designer John Crancher amongst others. Known as the “place to be”, the club represented sheer hedonism and the decade’s most avant-garde fashion and art.

The club also became reputationally known as a place for sexual experimentation. Its uninhibited atmosphere stood as a precursor to today’s sex positivity movement – its members defied sexual taboos and embraced gender and sexual fluidity. Bowery was known to shock audiences with his wild and debauched stage acts. Like other LGBTQ+ venues, the freewheeling spirit of the nightclub would tragically come to an abrupt halt with the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. Curated by Martin Green of DuoVision Arts and fashion curator NJ Stevenson, the show displays original garments and accessories from Leigh Bowery and 30 other designers, bringing the heady atmosphere of London’s 80s club scene to life.

Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s is running until March 9, 2025, at the Fashion + Textile Museum. Tickets are avilable here. 

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is back for its 12th edition, returning to its usual flagship venue of Somerset House. Founded in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, it is the first and only international art fair dedicated to contemporary African art that also travels to New York and Marrakech, this year more than 60 galleries have been selected to show new work, including the likes of AFRIKARIS, Ed Cross, October Gallery and Unit. Key artists exhibiting this year are works by Nigerian painter Damilola Onosowobo, the Ghanaian-American artist Rita Mawuena Benissan, and UK-based Nigerian photographer Dola Posh.

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is running at Somerset House from October 10 – 13, 2025. Tickets are available here. 

Emo never dies, it just lays dormant waiting to find a new host. Brought to you by the Museum of Youth Culture, I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective is a treasure trove of ephemera from this melancholic Y2K subculture. Straddling the Atlantic as well as cyberspace and IRL, the exhibition pulls together personal photographs from early digital and noughties phone cameras and unearths imagery from old hard drives, Tumblr and Photobucket accounts in the UK and the US. Focusing on the first self-styled generation of emo kids in 2004-2009, the show creates a precious and nostalgic archive of this moment in time and enshrines that distinct emo style and spirit. 

I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective runs until January 25, 2025 in the Barbican Music Library.

Minor Attractions at The Mandrake Hotel forms part of a week-long art fair at the Fitzrovia-based boutique hotel. Now in its second edition, the commercial art event centres on emerging contemporary art and presents itself as a much-needed alternative to Frieze (“providing an energy that is waning at Frieze” said the organisers to The Art Newspaper).

Participants include the likes of Alice Amati, ARCADE, Cob, Kate MacGarry, TJ Boulting and Pi Artworks amongst many other small, emerging galleries. Positioning itself as a ‘non art fair’, Minor Attractions attempts to bring together more radical, risk-taking galleries in London and abroad.

Minor Attractions is running at The Mandrake Hotel from October 8-13. RSVP here for your free pass.

Taking the egg as its starting point, the TJ Boulting show An Oeuf is un Oeuf traces the visual history and symbolism of the egg – across myriad art forms, referencing its presence in mythological times to contemporary artistic expression. In homage and response to Sarah Lucas’ repeated use of the egg as a material and motif in her art, the show presents her iconic performance “1000 Eggs: For Women”, in which women, those identifying as women, and men dressed as women, will throw 1000 eggs against the gallery wall – creating a sticky, colossal abstract painting.

Beyond performance-based work by Lucas, the show also features artists Rachel Howard, Francesca Woodman, Boo Saville, Coco Capitan, Maisie Cousins, Polly Morgan and Katy Stubbs amongst many others.

The group show will run at TJ Boulting from October 10 until November 16, following the creation of Sarah Lucas’ participatory action painting. If you want to get involved in that (or just fancy lobbing an egg at a wall) you can register to take part here.

As one of the most prominent painters working in the UK today, George Rouy’s debut show at Hauser & Wirth comes as no surprise (he is the youngest artist on its roster). The Bleed, Part I, features his latest body of work that continues his signature abstraction of the human figure, which takes on a Baconian sense of anguish and emotional turmoil. Psychologically charged, the title of this body of the work, is an expression used by the artist to express the relationship between figure and void – and how those two realms coalesce on the surface of his paintings.

George Rouy’s The Bleed, Part I is running at Hauser & Wirth London until December 21, 2025.

Is the soil right? is the debut solo show by Olu Ogunnaike at Rose Easton Gallery, assembling the artist’s large-scale monochromatic charcoal silkscreens that conflate photographic and painterly qualities. The London-based artist graduated from the Royal Academy in 2021, and has since developed a practice that draws from the material histories of objects and environments – the simplicity of closely observing the object world and how it informs the history of human life.

The show speaks to a sense of otherness, tapping into the cultural atmosphere of an increasingly far-right UK as it continues to grapple with its colonial history and new hostile attitudes towards immigration. Work titles such as “Staying Put”, “Here But Not”, and “Close Enough?” elude to a sense of growing alienation. speaking to Elephant Magazine, the artist elaborated: “I really like this idea of material life as a reflection of these legacies of human travel, slavery, migration and labour.”

Is the soil right? by Olu Ogunnaike is running at Rose Easton Gallery until October 26.

An exhibition dedicated to the history of the Black LGBTQ+ community in Britain is the centre focus at Somerset House this October, curated by the artist, filmmaker Topher Campbell, the co-founder of the Black Queer arts charity rukus! federation. Diving into the rukus! Archive (which is housed in the London Metropolitan Archives), the show explores decades of activism, revealing the ongoing political and artistic interventions of the organisation. As loud and proud as the exhibition title suggests, the show is in homage to Black, lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans history, displaying an archive that dates back to the 1970s and bears witness to the resistance, rebellion, creativity, friendship and joy of the Black LGBTQIA+ community. Alongside historical documentation, the show is accompanied by contemporary artworks and brand-new commissions.

Making a Rukus is running at Somerset House from October 11, 2024 – January 19, 2025 on a pay what you can basis. Book your tickets here now. 

My Weaponised Body is the latest solo exhibition by Wynnie Mynerva that draws upon personal experience of the theme of being chronically ill. Transforming the gallery space into an immersive environment, the Peruvian artist presents a new body of work that encompasses installation, sculpture and painting, all of which grapple with the complexities of the HIV virus and the dominant narratives surrounding the illness. To be HIV positive is to be sick with meanings, infected by the assumptions society projects onto my body” she writes. Exposing the structures of power surrounding such social assumptions, Mynerva crafts a poetic space where the personal and political come into dialogue.

My Weaponised Body by Wynnie Mynerva runs at Gathering London until November 9.

Olivia Erlanger’s latest exhibition, Fan Fiction at Soft Opening, continues her artistic investigation into the domestic appliances we use and live with on a daily basis. It has the unsettling undertones of a home invasion. While ceiling fans adorned with butterfly wings appear, at first glance, decorative and beautiful, the adornment of this mundane object with the insects’ severed wings also evokes a host of threatening associations – not only the “ceiling fan death” trope of horror films but the encroachment into the domestic space of the natural world with its hierarchy of predators and prey.

Her short film Appliance (2024), Erlanger depicts irregular appliances that seem to disturb the film’s protagonist, continually diminishing her comfort. As each object rejects its prescribed purpose, her sense of reality is undermined and the home takes on an uncanny, alarming aspect. 

Olivia Erlanger’s Fan Fiction run at Soft Opening until November 23, 2025.