The best art and photography shows to see in March 2026

From latex gloves and presidential peepholes to cash-and-carry warehouses after dark, this month’s exhibitions circle power, visibility, and who gets to claim space. Across London, Margate, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and New York, artists turn intimacy into theatre, heritage into set, and the body into battleground and archive. Authority is miniaturised, memes immortalised, and migration is traced through gesture and memory. What binds this list isn’t a single theme but a shared insistence that looking is never neutral, and that freedom – whether personal, political or planetary – is always under negotiation. Until next month!

Síomha Harrington’s UK solo debut stages intimacy as something rehearsed, negotiated, and a little bit dangerous. Across 12 small-scale paintings and one commanding central canvas, latex gloves, ribbons, and choreographed gestures form a tight visual language of desire and control. Bodies hover between agency and submission, performer and prop, drawing the viewer into the mechanics of looking. Co-curated with Maudji Mendel, the work is shown in dialogue with Valentine Dobrée’s Black Gloves (1930).

A Spy in the House of Love runs 20 March – 25 April 2026 at ALICE BLACK, London, UK

A Pakistani family-owned cash and carry warehouse becomes an after-hours stage in Alina Akbar’s Queen of the Night. Set inside Haji Cash & Carry (which was established in 1955), this multi-artform exhibition moves across photography, sculpture, sound, and film, drawing from late-night car conversations between young Muslim women. At its centre is a Nissan Micra, recast as both sculptural object and private third space, where voices speak on freedom, surveillance, jinn folklore, and inherited anxiety. Devotional symbols and youth ephemera are enlarged, twisted, and played with, exposing the tightrope between ritual and rebellion. Tender, funny, and defiant, the show asks who heritage belongs to – and who gets to rewrite it.

Queen of the Night runs 26–29 March 2026 at Haji Cash & Carry, Rochdale, UK

Benjamin Slinger turns a former bike shop on an ex-council estate into a scaled replica of the Oval Office. Except that no one can enter it. The space is sealed off behind a fabricated presidential door, viewable only through a brass door peephole. Mouldings, carpet, gloss paint, and gilt frames compress decades of presidential interiors into a single composite set. Here, authority is lacking, theatrical, and slightly off – which sounds like business as usual…

Jib Door runs 13 February – 13 March 2026 at Best Wishes, @ Next Door, London, UK

Opening in Riverside – an area currently under intensified ICE policing – Devyn Galindo’s Smoking Mirror meets the present moment head-on. Through a decolonial lens, the two-spirit Mēxika-Indigenous artist traces their paternal family’s migration routes from the pueblos of West Texas and New Mexico to California’s strawberry fields and barrios. Sacred ruins and cosmologies sit alongside razor wire, labour histories, and the ongoing violence of the US-Mexico border. The myth of the “American Cowboy” unravels under pressure as personal archive folds into collective resistance, positioning the US-Mexico border as both a wound and a site of survival.

Smoking Mirror opens 26 March 2026 at Norco College Gallery, Riverside, California, USA

Guest-curated by Wondering People, Tracing Movement borrows Patti Smith’s line, “The first sensation I remember is movement”, and gathers works by Andrew Pierce Scott, Nathalia Triantyfili, William van Hoorn, Jiahe Zhang, and Elena Zagari to think through migration, bodily gesture, collective movement, and environmental wear. Movement here is physical, political, and intimate, and the works are in-process and lived-in as opposed to anything declarative or fixed – tracing how shifts in space and community happen, often quietly, over time.

Tracing Movement runs 4 March – 18 April 2026 at Soho Revue, London, UK

Christine Tien Wang and Rachel Youn put self-care and meme culture into an endless loop. Wang paints the internet’s detritus – from thirst traps to viral villains – with Old Master precision, immortalising content that is meant to be discarded or disappear. Youn, meanwhile, rigs massage guns, baby rockers, and car-wash bristles into twitching, overworked sculptures that keep performing long after their purpose has ended. Together, they turn dopamine machines inside out. It’s a show about late capitalism’s promise of comfort that never quite lands – funny, bleak, and painfully accurate. 

Factory Doomscroll runs 21 February – 4 April 2026 at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA

Set in Forma’s 24/7 window gallery in Bermondsey Square, Between Here and Elsewhere centres the film Open Country (2025) which follows a Somali mother and daughter travelling from London into the Kent countryside. As the daughter records a cassette for her grandmother in Somalia, belonging becomes something both claimed and questioned. New photographic works line the gallery’s glass window, figures caught mid-reflection, just as visible as they are unreachable. A quiet, necessary study of migration and the tension between being here while longing for elsewhere.

Between Here and Elsewhere runs 26 February – 7 June 2026 at Forma, Bermondsey Square, London, UK

What started as a self-imposed challenge of how many portraits he could make in a day became 90 faces photographed over three days. Now, it’s the first chapter in a lifelong project. Street-cast in London with Coco Wu, these headshot portraits strip everything back. Printed as photopolymer gravures and installed as a dense constellation. Davison plans to repeat the process annually.

Portraits: 14–16 November runs 6 March – 2 April 2026 at Cob Gallery, London, UK

Curated by Bryan Stevenson, this is a focused survey of Gordon Parks spanning 1942–1967. From American Gothic, Washington, D.C. to the 1963 March on Washington and his Segregation in the South series, Parks’ camera operates exactly as he described it: a weapon against racism and poverty. Stevenson’s curation sharpens the present-tense urgency of resistance, erasure, and civil rights under threat. What should be historical artefacts are instead documents of our time.

We Shall Not Be Moved runs 5 March – 11 April 2026 at Alison Jacques, London, UK

Tate Modern stages the largest survey of Tracey Emin’s work to date, spanning four decades of confession, rupture, and return. My Bed, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, early video works, and textiles sit alongside new bronzes and paintings shaped by illness, survival, and what Emin calls her “second life”. 

A Second Life runs 27 February – 31 August 2026 at Tate Modern, London, UK

Born from Perryman’s own top surgery journey, TOPS moves from short film to photography to monograph. The images hold tenderness without softening the stakes. At the centre of TOPS is community. Framed by John Edmonds’ poem ON THE L, scars become an archive, caregiving an act of survival, and trans-masculine vulnerability something fiercely visible. 

TOPS runs 9 March – 17 April 2026 at 10 14 Gallery, London, UK

Shaped by her own pregnancy and time working in a Dutch abortion clinic, Verena Blok turns her lens on reproduction. Full of contradictions: intimacy and autonomy, joy and grief, care and control, the images are shot on analogue 35mm and feature portraits of pregnant women, children, and couples alongside abstractions and diary fragments, bridging the personal to the political. At a moment when reproductive rights are increasingly fragile, Blok chooses to focus on the messy, embodied reality of choice.

Love Shit runs 6 March – 25 May 2026 at Foam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

First profiled in Dazed last year as “a diasporic archive of transness”, Ezekiel’s Somewhere Between a Doll and a Dog now expands into an exhibition in Margate – a town currently represented by Reform UK. Shot over three years across the UK, the Philippines, Europe, and the US, the work moves through raves, prisons, bedrooms, and mythologies, tracing masculinity as something unstable and porous. Refusing Western binaries, Ezekiel builds a trans archive that is planetary, spiritual, and defiantly visible. 

Somewhere Between a Doll and a Dog launches 21 March 2026 at CRATE, Margate, UK

From X-rays to endoscopies, Overexposed asks what it means to live in an age where the body is endlessly imaged, scanned, and rendered transparent. Bringing together historical medical artefacts, film, and installation, the exhibition tracks how technologies designed to diagnose and surveil have reshaped ideas of privacy, vulnerability, and control. Works by figures including Barbara Hammer and Ana Mendieta sit alongside 16 women and gender-expansive artists from 13 countries to reframe visibility as both power and exposure. 

Overexposed runs 14 March 2026 – 3 January 2027 at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, USA

Part of the wider Sustaining the Otherwise programme, Practising Freedom and Refusal shifts restitution beyond the return of objects and into the realm of memory, labour, and knowledge. Featuring AYO, Masimba Hwati, Christian Nyampeta, Adeju Thompson, and Helena Uambembe, the show treats artistic practice as a site where reparation is felt. Sound, textile, film, and sculpture ask what it means to refuse extractive systems, and what freedom looks like when built through intimacy, study, and care. 

Practising Freedom and Refusal runs 27 February – 24 April 2026 at Metro54, Amsterdam, Netherlands

South Korea’s first major institutional exhibition dedicated to queer subjects arrives at Art Sonje Center this spring. Spectrosynthesis Seoul, presented by Sunpride Foundation in collaboration with Art Sonje Center, gathers over 70 LGBTQ+ artists and collectives, centring on the ideas of memory, place, and form across both local and international practices. With “trans” as a core theme, the exhibition foregrounds the lives of queer people marginalised during Korea’s rapid modernisation, tracing how bodies, identities, and communities have been rearticulated across time.

Spectrosynthesis Seoul is running from 20 March 20 until 28 Jun 2026 at Art Sonje Center.