Exhibitions to feed our minds and nourish our souls in 2026
Get out the house and see real things.
In our current times, the content epoch, let’s call it, a new year means one thing – December’s best-of-the-year lists are now irrelevant, and January’s best-of-what’s-yet-to-come lists are of critical importance. So, with this in mind, and a sense of foreboding dread as to what evil invention the billionaires will necessitate our usage of seemingly in the name of convenience but actually to force us to burrow deeper inside our screens and become lifeless simulacrums of our former selves, we put together the following list of culturally nourishing exhibitions that open this year.
Sorry for crashing out just then. But, 2025 was a year of digital slop, enshittification and diabolical levels of screen time, and there’s no reason to believe 2026 won’t be worse. The streaming platform that gave us Emily in Paris is buying the channel that made The Sopranos. Disney is licensing its characters to OpenAI. Deezer reports that 28-34% of tracks uploaded daily to its service are fully AI-generated. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are hosting(?) or just paying for(?) the Met Gala (we imagine them presiding over it like Roman proconsuls on the balcony of a coliseum).
Anyway. We must not let this deter, overwhelm or inhibit us – instead, we shall challenge ourselves, learn more, spend less time inside, and see art!! Great art!!!
Antwerp Six
MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerp), Antwerp, Belgium
March 2026 – January 2027
Let’s start with the biggy. It’s hard to think of a more important fashion show than this. The first-ever museum survey of all six designers, MoMu will explore their collective impact on fashion education, authorship, and the international repositioning of Belgian fashion. Naturally, we at 1 Granary, like most people in fashion, revere the Antwerp Six, particularly the late Marina Yee, whom we spoke to last year. More info here
Embroidering Palestina
MoMu (Fashion Museum Antwerp), Antwerp, Belgium
December 2025 – June 2026
Well, since you’re already planning a trip to Antwerp, this exhibition will run in tandem with Antwerp Six for a couple of months. The show unpicks embroidery as a form of cultural memory, resistance, and political expression within Palestinian visual and material culture. It features contemporary designers we’re big fans of, too, like Ayham Hassan, who we spoke to in 2022, GmbH, and Zeid Hijazi, who we spoke to in 2020. More info here
Vivienne Westwood: Rebel - Storyteller - Visionary
The Bowes Museum, Durham, UK
March – September 2026
For anyone uneasy with the current management of Vivienne Westwood’s namesake brand (her niece exited and disavowed the current CEO not long ago), you’ll be happy to know this show has no affiliation with the brand itself. Instead, it seems to be a display of one private collector – a teacher from Cumbria called Peter Smithson, who started buying pieces in the 1980s and slowly amassed an exhibition-worthy selection. More info here