Start 2020 off right with these events and exhibitions

Welcome to 2020! And a happy new year from all of us here at It’s Nice That. Having stuffed ourselves to the brim with mince pies and lamented with estranged uncles over one too many sherries, we’re officially back in the studio and ready to see what the creative world has in store for us.

A new year is always exciting as the major galleries announce their upcoming blockbuster shows, so to wet your whistle, we’ve pulled together some of the most exciting events and exhibitions happening around the world this January. Particular highlights include a show looking at the impact of technology on fashion, and an exploration into the future of mushrooms. Enjoy!

Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years
The Holburne Museum, Bath
24 January – 25 May 2020

Featuring 70 items crowd-sourced from around the UK after an appeal to the public, this show reveals much about the inimitable Perry’s formative years in the art world. It includes pots, plates and sculptures made between 1982 – 1994, works which first made his name, and expose his early dabblings in this media to address radical issues and depict human stories.

Lauren Halsey
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
25 January – 14 March 2020

Feted up-and-coming artist Lauren Halsey is holding a solo show with her gallery David Kordansky in LA, featuring sculptural painting installations penned as a “vivid, mythopoetic hauntscape of South Central LA” – her home, and subject of much of her works. The series continues her creative exploration of monuments, memorials, and public space, particularly her reckonings with gentrification and the threatening economic displacement of black and Latino shops.

Sixteen
17 January – 27 February 2020
Trongate 103, Glasgow

The 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum was the first (and as yet only) time that sixteen-year-olds have voted in the United Kingdom. This inspired a project that has seen artists collaborate with over 170 young people across the country, hoping to give them a chance to voice their seldom heard opinions.

Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi
31 January – 26 April 2020
Somerset House, London

Bringing together the work of over 40 leading artists, designers and musicians, Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi looks at fungi’s colourful cultural legacy, as well as the promise it offers to reimagine our relationship with the planet.

Denis Dailleux: Ghana
18 January – 22 February 2020
Galerie Peter Sillem, Frankfurt

Denis Dailleux is a French-born photographer now based in Cairo. Having extensively photographed the city he calls home, Ghana is his first project in sub-Saharan Africa. Taken over multiple visits, this selection of beautiful portraits captures a variety of people across the country, from urban fishermen in Accra to those in a remote village at the foot of Lake Volta.

Making Fashion Sense
16 January – 8 March 2020
House of Electronic Arts, Basel

The exhibition Making Fashion Sense highlights the impact of technology on fashion, and the resulting transformation. In recent years, robot arms and mixed reality, holograms and drones have all paraded down international catwalks. This exhibition, therefore, looks at the impact of technology upon outcomes and the creative processes in the fashion industry, as well as on artistic paths leading towards increasing sustainability: “Fashion which makes sense.”

Ann Veronica Janssens: Hot Pink Turquoise
23 January – 17 May 2020
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

If you still hold fond memories of when everyone’s Tinder picture was them enshrouded in a pink, blue or yellow cloud courtesy of The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition yellowbluepink, then you’re in for a treat. The artist responsible for that incredibly popular London exhibition will be taking over Louisiana Gallery in Denmark from the end of January – the first time her work is being shown in the country. As an artist, Ann Veronica Janssens works almost scientifically to push the boundaries of the known. Whether solid, liquid or gaseous Veronica Janssens uses light in all its forms “to show the manifestations of reality in a different way.”

Dana Lixenberg: Imperial Courts
18 January – 10 May 2020
Stedelijk, Amsterdam

Imperial Courts is a 69-minute three-channel video installation by the Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg. The work is the last link in the larger project of the same name in which Lixenberg recorded life in Imperial Courts, a South Central Los Angeles neighbourhood, between 1993 and 2015, through photography, a web documentary and audio recordings. The video invites the viewer into the residents’ everyday lives through interconnected scenes that gradually unfold on the three screens.

Hot Moment
12 January – 14 March 2020
Auto Italia, London

During the 1980s and 90s, Tessa Boffin, Ingrid Pollard, Jill Posener photographed the lives of lesbians living in London. Hot Moment presents their work as three photographers for whom lesbian identity was never a straightforward concept, easily captured on camera. Instead, it signals “a style, a politics, and an attitude of production.” This group show demonstrates how wide-spanning each photographer’s practice was, including responses to mainstream homophobia and heterosexism, and the public spaces occupied by queer women, particularly at night.

Imran Perretta
17 January – 15 March 2020
Chisenhale Gallery, London

Later this month, Chisenhale Gallery will play host to the destructors by Imran Perretta, a film shot on location in Tower Hamlets, east London. It reflects on Perretta’s experience as a young man of Bangladeshi heritage, and reconsiders the figure of alienated male youth to explore the complexities of “coming of age” for young Muslim men living in the UK.