'Beyond Bedlam’ by Richard Dadd at Royal Academy of Arts, London. 25 July - 25 October 2026 (only 10 days left) What I find interesting about this exhibition is how Dadd uses imagination, folklore and fantastical imagery to construct worlds that feel both familiar and completely unfamiliar. His paintings draw on ideas of myth and legend, but rather than simply illustrating existing stories, he creates intricate worlds of his own. I think it’s interesting to consider how these imagined worlds reflect the stories, beliefs and anxieties we inherit and how art can transform them into something entirely new.

What I find interesting about this book is how it approaches mythology as more than a collection of stories we inherit. Myths give shape to things we struggle to explain, from our place in the world to our relationship with death, nature and one another. I think what makes them so compelling is that, even as cultures change, we keep returning to these stories, reinterpreting them and finding new meanings in them. In that sense, mythology is never really fixed; it’s something we continue to build.

Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads at Whitechapel Gallery brings together six decades of the Chilean artist’s practice, exploring the intersections of ancestral knowledge, ecological consciousness, memory and political resistance. Through painting, textiles, poetry, film and installation, Vicuña draws on Andean traditions and Indigenous systems of communication to challenge conventional understandings of language, history and cultural preservation. Central to the exhibition are her quipus, inspired by an ancient Andean system of knotted cords, and her precarios, fragile assemblages of found materials that reflect on impermanence and the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Rooted in her experience of exile following Chile’s 1973 military coup, Vicuña’s work considers artistic creation as an act of remembrance, resistance and reconnection with ancestral ways of knowing. Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads 7 October 2026 – 14 February 2027 Whitechapel Gallery, London https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/cecilia-vicuna/

The exhibition draws directly on mythology, classical antiquity, symbolism and material culture, with works inspired by figures such as Demeter and Medusa. Joy BC treats these inherited stories as something that can be transformed and given new meaning through contemporary objects and personal experience. The exhibition runs from 29 September to 10 November 2026.

On how do images acquire power, meaning and emotional force. Freedberg looks at how people across different cultures and periods have responded to images, through belief, ritual, memory, fear, desire and devotion. I think it connects particularly well to the theme’s interest in how images and symbols circulate, carry inherited meanings, and are reactivated in different cultural contexts.