Barbican announces 2027 art programme with fashion, photography and major new commissions
The Barbican will bring fashion, photography, ceramics and experimental sculpture into its distinctive Brutalist spaces in 2027, with six exhibitions and public commissions spanning literature, music, industrial history, and the possibilities of making art by hand.
The programme begins on 10 March with Indian photographer Dayanita Singh at The Curve. Her exhibition will combine photographs with her distinctive wooden ‘portable museums’, modular structures that allow images to be displayed in changing arrangements. The work draws on the influence of Indian classical music on Singh’s practice, including her decades-long relationship with tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, who died in 2024.
From 15 April to 29 August, the Barbican Art Gallery will host Characters of Fashion, exploring the relationship between clothing and literature. Garments, personal correspondence, manuscripts and photography will reveal how writers have used dress to develop fictional characters and shape their own public identities. Designs by houses including Dior, Prada and Comme des Garçons will appear alongside literary figures ranging from Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin and Mary Shelley.
Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca will take over the Sculpture Court from 6 May, with an installation examining the colonial legacies and contemporary consequences of resource extraction. Drawing on plants, minerals, metals and traditional agricultural practices, the commission will consider how inherited knowledge might inform alternative futures.
The autumn programme turns to ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo, whose exhibition opens in the Lakeside Gallery on 2 September. Her sculptural vessels draw on diverse cultural histories and evoke the human body through their curves, proportions and surfaces. It will be her first solo institutional presentation in London in more than 30 years.
Italian artist Rosa Barba will present a new commission in the Barbican Foyer from 23 September, combining kinetic sculpture with a specially commissioned 35mm film. The installation will use the building’s vertical spaces to explore how cinema shapes perceptions of time, memory and place.
The programme concludes with Alice Adams, whose retrospective opens in the Art Gallery on 7 October. Spanning seven decades, it will bring together textiles, sculpture, drawings, photographs and film, tracing an artistic career shaped by experimentation with materials and the structures of urban life.
Together, the six presentations extend the Barbican’s visual arts programme beyond its galleries, bringing international artists into the building’s public spaces and creating new connections between art, architecture and everyday experience.
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