Exhibitions, screenings and site-specific works across London this June move through archives, testimony and political memory — from Pan-African histories at the Barbican to Ukrainian war stories at Raindance, community-led work in East London and a crypt-based exhibition marking Alexei Navalny’s legacy.
Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa
Barbican Centre
11 June – 6 September 2026
A large-scale exhibition tracing Pan-African cultural and political movements through more than 300 works spanning art, photography, film, design and print culture. The show brings together material from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the Americas.
Posters, magazines, archival film and documentary material sit alongside works by artists including Chris Ofili, Simone Leigh and Kerry James Marshall. The exhibition moves between cultural production and political history, showing how ideas of liberation, identity and solidarity circulate through image, text and publication.
Refugee Week London (selected screenings & events)
Across London (Southbank Centre, Tate Modern, community venues)
16–22 June 2026
A citywide programme of screenings, talks and public events centred on migration, asylum and sanctuary.
At Southbank Centre, documentary screenings and spoken-word responses examine asylum systems and border politics. At Tate Modern, events bring visual storytelling together with testimony from displaced communities, often combining film with live discussion or performance. Across smaller venues, community-led screenings and workshops foreground personal narrative and shared experience.
Rather than a single hub, Refugee Week operates as a network of events shaped directly by refugee and migrant communities.
Website: https://refugeeweek.org/
CAMDENWALLA
Camden People’s Theatre
17 June – 4 July 2026
Set in 1994 inside the Camden Monitoring Project, CAMDENWALLA reconstructs a night of community organising against racist violence in North London. Volunteers document attacks, answer emergency calls and arrange safe transport home for Bengali workers.
Written by Jonny Khan, the play follows Muhammad, a first-generation Bangladeshi volunteer, and Alima, a British-Bangladeshi teenager drawn into inherited histories of resistance and care. Built from archival testimony and interviews with Camden’s Drummond Street community, it traces how protection and activism were built from the ground up.
In Memory of Alexei Navalny
The Crypt Gallery, Euston
4–11 June 2026
A group exhibition staged in the underground Crypt beneath St Pancras Church, marking Alexei Navalny’s political legacy. Twelve artists respond to imprisonment, surveillance and resistance through installation, photography and documentary-based work.
The subterranean setting shapes the experience. Enclosed stone chambers intensify the sense of pressure and containment, echoing the conditions of political imprisonment. Works sit in dialogue rather than sequence, forming multiple responses to dissent and state power.
Website: http://cryptgallery.org/event/in-memory-of-alexei-navalny/
Raindance Film Festival: Ukrainian War Stories
Various venues, London
17–26 June 2026
This year’s Raindance programme includes a small but pointed group of Ukrainian films shaped directly by the ongoing war. In On a Stringer, a Ukrainian serviceman returns to the banks of the Dnipro River, using a quiet day of fishing to process the psychological strain of war. The short, directed by Sashko Roshchyn, keeps its focus intimate, tracing how conflict reshapes interior life rather than spectacle.
The documentary Rescue follows volunteers evacuating animals from combat zones across Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Filmed on the ground, it tracks a network of rescuers working across active war zones, where survival extends beyond human life.
Our Colors Never Fade, directed by Jim McSherry, shifts the focus to LGBTQ+ Ukrainian service members. Built from frontline footage and personal testimony, the film documents individuals fighting both external aggression and internal discrimination.
Website: https://raindance.org/
