Armed with a £54 inflatable dinghy and two well-worn paddles, Annabel Downes braves London’s waters to tour the best galleries ahead of the weekend.
Some Amazon purchases you regret: the wearable neck fan got irritating; the self-twirling spaghetti fork was only funny the first time; and the life-size James Blunt cardboard cutout started scaring the neighbours. But now and then, one earns its keep—and last year, it was the £54.58 inflatable dinghy I now use to cruise down Regent’s Canal. Not until that late-night purchase did I truly appreciate the beauty of one of London’s most celebrated waterways.
Bucolic banks draped in willow trees and riverside drinkers. Lonely carp surfacing through a green carpet of algae. Eurasian coots making nests for their young with twigs and discarded yoghurt pots. And then, drifting past it all, you begin to notice something else: galleries. Lots of them. Victoria Miro tucked into Wenlock Basin in Angel; Alma Pearl along the main stretch in Haggerston; and of course, Chisenhale Gallery standing tall on a narrow cut on the south edge of Victoria Park. Eventually, the canal gives way to the Thames—wider, faster, and lined with London’s riverfront institutions: Hayward Gallery, Somerset House, and the two Tates. So, as galleries open their doors for the 2025 edition of London Gallery Weekend (6-8 June), Annabel Downes takes to the high seas, mapping London’s best waterside exhibitions for the weekend and the summer ahead.
EMBARKING: VICTORIA MIRO & WENLOCK BASIN
Wenlock Basin—the stretch of water just behind Victoria Miro—offers the perfect platform to inflate and launch your boat. This quiet backwater is also the ideal spot to familiarise yourself with the canal’s code of conduct: a friendly wave or air-handshake goes a long way when passing fellow boats (on their starboard side, I must add). Before inflating the dinghy, I suggest ticking off Victoria Miro. Details of the exhibition are scarce at the time of writing, but the commemorative exhibition, Victoria Miro: 40 Years, sets to honour the artists who have shaped the gallery since its founding in 1985, from the early collaborators like Ian Hamiton Finlay and Stephen Willats to recent additions Doron Langberg and the late Paula Rego.
ALMA PEARL & SEVENTEEN
This first leg to galleries Alma Pearl and Seventeen is a fantastic stretch of Regent’s Canal; one to be enjoyed even more so in the early morning, so as to avoid the traffic of Regents Canoe Club. With no locks to navigate, you can use this straight stretch of water to get acquainted with your oars, while being gawked at by a queue of hungry hopefuls vying for a table at Towpath, the popular canal-side café.
Approaching Alma Pearl, I suggest bay parking in Kingsland Basin just beyond, a manoeuvre that will ensure you don’t get caught up in the velodrome that is Regent’s Canal Towpath. Alma Pearl occupies the former WORKPLACE space, and this June sees the return of Moscow-born, London-based artist Margarita Gluzberg for her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Implicate Factory Outlet (30 May–5 July 2025). Her drawings are quite magical—abstract, suspended lava lamp-like globs, each crafted using a full set of Soviet-era colouring pencils from defunct factories. As you take in the visuals, a sound installation envelops the space: a haunting composition built from Gluzberg’s collection of antique gramophone records of birdsong. The oldest in the archive dates back to 1910, capturing nightingales from Carl Reich’s famed aviary.
Over at Seventeen, Erin O’Keefe turns familiar spaces inside out for her latest exhibition A Whole Thing (6 June–19 July 2025). Drawing on her background as an architect and former professor, she builds painted wooden objects in her studio, then photographs them to create images that look like abstract paintings—but something’s always off. Like Escher’s irrational staircases, shadows misbehave, a circle tilts the wrong way, depth collapses.
SHARKS!
A few strokes from Haggerston Bridge stands an installation which has had to fight for its survival. For the past five years, Hackney Council has argued that SHARKS!!!—a group of five life-sized fibreglass predators, and Jaimie Shorten’s winning entry for the 2020 Antepavilion competition—posed a danger to the community. The ensuing bureaucratic saga echoes the tale of the Headington Shark: an eight-metre-long sculpture embedded nose-first into the roof of a suburban Oxford home, commissioned by radio presenter Bill Heine and cited as an influence by Shorten. That sculpture is now a heritage site, so we’ll see how this one fares.
THREE BIRDS: LUNCH, THE APPROACH & AUTO ITALIA
You’ll now be well into the rhythms of rowing life, flying towards Bethnal Green’s offerings. However, concerned you’re thinking about lunch, I thought best to lay out the options now. If you, like myself—a woman of delicate build and restrained appetite—prefer to consume a coronation chicken focaccia sandwich washed down with a slab of Guinness cake on the move, then drop by Kitchen 94 at Regent Studios, just off Broadway Market. Alternatively, if you can wait the extra mile, a lunch at The Approach Tavern, the pub beneath our upcoming gallery stop The Approach, is a viable stationary option.
While a simple cleat hitch may do when mooring a boat outside the M25, we were warned by seasoned urban mariners that a raft of this calibre left unattended on Pound Path risks being reclaimed. Erring on the side of caution, we disembarked by Victoria Park’s Bonner Gate and walked the fully inflated dinghy to our next stop Auto Italia, nearly knocking out visiting gallerist Sadie Coles as she left to get into an Uber.
There, the Berlin-based Iranian artist Nazanin Noori has transformed the non-profit gallery into a visceral mediation on protest and political distance. THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST (10 April–22 June 2025) responds to the 2022 death of Jina Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being arrested for allegedly violating the country’s mandatory hijab laws—and to the nationwide uprisings her death ignited across the Islamic Republic. As the title suggests, Noori reflects on her experience of witnessing political events from afar, and how, as an Iranian woman living outside Iran, she is expected to become the spokesperson of a group you see from afar and are connected to, but in a distant way. From a stark reimagining of the Hezbollah flag at the gallery’s entrance to a circle of white plastic chairs bathed in red light and engulfed in a wall of sound, the exhibition is immersive, confrontational, and lingers long after we deflated the boat in our final stop in Millbank.
Down the road at The Approach—a first-floor gallery above The Approach Tavern—is a solo show of the epic sculptures of Anderson Borba. Widely exhibited through the acclaimed gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, Secret Ceremony is the Brazilian artist’s debut at the East London gallery. Whether freestanding totems or hanging wall reliefs, each of Borba’s works undergoes a rigorous process: carved, burned, painted with oils and varnishes, and embedded with digitally manipulated images pressed into the wood’s surface. The result is a series of raw, cracked, and viscerally seductive body-like forms—a collision of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary expression.
SLIGHT DETOUR: CHISENHALE GALLERY
While we’re ultimately bound for Limehouse Waterside & Marina, a quick tack east along the south edge of Victoria Park to Chisenhale Gallery is essential. Here, the British artist-filmmaker Dan Guthrie presents Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure (6 June–17 August 2025), his first institutional exhibition in London. The show—arriving from Spike Island in Bristol to much acclaim—centres on a major new commission that continues Guthrie’s ongoing engagement with the Blackboy Clock, a timepiece of contested heritage in his hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire.
THE THAMES STRETCH
In preparation for this excursion, I found myself Googling the legality of launching an 8-foot inflatable dinghy onto the Thames. The top Reddit post from one user, R-Mutt1, confirmed my anxieties: “I was brought up being told that the undercurrent would immediately suck me under…many suggested that I’d die from an infection, citing the Great Sink of 1858.” But Bamber Gascoigne swam in the Thames daily, Worth_Sink_1293 writes; they had once spotted the University Challenge quiz master emerging from the Richmond stretch in trunks and flip flops.
Fearing that capsizing in the capital’s murky waters could turn us into insufferable brainiacs, we opted to park up at Limehouse, deflate the boat, and make our way to Canary Wharf Pier for the final leg of our journey: westbound on the Thames via UberBoat. This comfortable alternative goes every 20 minutes, and will set you back £9.50. However, with the wind in your hair, and a 75 centilitre bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (full menu here) in your veins, zooming under Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London and HMS Belfast could just be the best viewing experience of the weekend.
SOUTHSIDE: TATE MODERN & HAYWARD GALLERY
Pulling into Bankside, we disembarked—deflated raft in tow—for Tate Modern and its two blockbuster exhibitions. First up, Leigh Bowery!, a riotous, unfiltered celebration of one of the most outrageous figures in 20th-century art and nightlife. This sprawling retrospective captures Bowery’s shapeshifting genius: from sequined gimp masks and prosthetic-laden bodysuits to his collaborations with Lucian Freud and Michael Clark. Next is a major survey of Korean-born, London-artist Do Ho Suh: a three-decade-long exploration into the enigma of home and how we inhabit the world around us, spanning Seoul, New York, and London—the three cities the artist has called home (1 May–19 October 2025). As ever with Suh, it’s the detail which is extraordinary. Among the sculptures, videos, and drawings, one work distills it best: Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024)—a spectral rendering of Suh’s London home, recreated entirely in his signature translucent fabric. Every doorknob, light switch, fire extinguisher, and wall-mounted mundanity is recreated with uncanny precision—you can even read the instructions on the fuse box, painstakingly sewn into the fabric letter-by-letter. And as you leave—because you likely missed it on entry—pause at the wallpaper. What first appears as a foggy wash of greys gradually resolves on closer inspection into a mosaic of tens of thousands of pea-sized yearbook portraits, an early work from 2000, reflecting on individual and collective identity.
The 15-minute walk along the Southbank to the Hayward Gallery can be broken up with a rooftop drink at Forza Wine atop the National Theatre. The Wahaca Colada or Marmalade Mezcalita at London’s favourite Mexican establishment WAHACA next door is a perfectly respectable alternative. Now, it appears that the curators of Yoshitomo Nara’s retrospective at Hayward Gallery hadn’t quite marked the dates of London Gallery Weekend in their calendars. But if you’re following this guide anytime between 10 June and 31 August, then I suggest heading to the largest European retrospective of one of Japan’s most celebrated artists. The 150-work exhibition of drawings, sculptures, and installations has already wowed audiences at Guggenheim Bilbao, and Museum Frieder Burder, Baden-Baden.
NORTHSIDE: TATE BRITAIN & SOMERSET HOUSE
Our final stop: Tate Britain, reached by a 10-minute ferry from Embankment to Millbank Pier. There, Ed Atkins’ mid-career retrospective (2 April–25 August 2025) offers a glitchy, gripping, and gorgeously unsettling plunge into the digital psyche. Over the past 15 years, Atkins has made a name for himself by pairing cutting-edge CGI with raw, confessional text and sound—and this show is his most ambitious yet. You’ll meet avatars with too-human eyes, witness loops of digital grief, and hear the echo of real emotions rendered in synthetic flesh. Standouts include Pianowork 2 (2023), where a digitised Atkins performs a minimalist piano piece, deadpan yet achingly sincere; Hisser (2015), a claustrophobic fever dream of domestic despair; and the devastating Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), where actor Toby Jones reads from the artist’s late father’s cancer diary.
To close the day and take to Strava to gawk at the 19,652 metres (bloody hell, it’s a half marathon!) you’ve clocked since Victoria Miro this morning, head to Setlist, Somerset House’s new riverside bar slash restaurant, where you get semi-uninterrupted views of the day’s efforts in real time.
Written by Annabel Downes
Photography by Saffron Liberty
