the best shows for photography fans

Nan Goldin

Gagosian Open, 83 Charing Cross Road, WC2H 0AA, 30 May-23 June

& Gagosian Shop, 28–29 Burlington Arcade, W1J 0QJ, until 22 June

Fifteen years ago, Nan Goldin was so financially stretched that she was forced to sell off precious items in her personal collection of artworks and curiosities at auction. Now, she tops ArtReview’s Power 100 and she’s represented by Gagosian. The mega-gallery has two concurrent exhibitions during London Gallery Weekend that revisit the photographer’s formative moments. Sisters, Saints, Sibyls reprises her three-channel video installation making parallels between martyrdom, rebellion and her sister’s suicide—a defining moment in Goldin’s life that ultimately led her to run away from home and eventually become an artist. (The venue is a former Welsh chapel turned legendary 1980s nightclub, the Limelight, on Charing Cross Road, which seems particularly apt.)

And some of her earliest works are presented at Gagosian’s Shop space in Burlington Arcade—black-and-white photographs from the mid-1970s of her chosen family, Boston’s transgender community, captured at home and at drag club, The Other Side. Downstairs, she has curated a reading room of books by artists and writers she admires, as well as publications about her own work.

Dayanita Singh

Frith Street Gallery, 17-18 Golden Square, W1F 9JJ, until 29 June

For the Delhi-based artist Dayanita Singh, as for many of her photographic contemporaries, the book doesn’t just take precedence, it is her primary medium. Her preoccupation with the archive as a repository for endless play and interpretation informs her experiments with bookmaking and—increasingly—installation, leading her to create “mobile museums” that can be reconfigured in response to a particular space or, indeed, within a reader’s hands.

Now, for the first time, she has made a sculptural work that contains no photographs at all. Abstract it may be, but it remains in keeping with the rest of her work, clearly referencing book shelves, and continuing her fascination with architectural forms. Elsewhere, she presents a new series of wall-based “constructed contact sheets”, drawing on photographic subjects that range from the Ellora Caves to Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel and references to her own installations in museum spaces.

Annette Kelm

Herald St, 43 Museum Street, WC1A 1LY, 31 May-14 July

Domino is the third exhibition devoted to Annette Kelm at Herland St, which presents a new series of constructed still-life photographs, made while the Berlin-based artist was in Ireland. Here she presents playful and surprising contexts for everyday objects, continuing to borrow from the visual language of commercial photography to create deliberately obscure fictional narratives.

In his text accompanying her 2016 show at the gallery, Jonathan Watts described her photographs as containing “autonomous worlds, lyrical correspondences of texture, pattern, density, weight, light and colour”. And in this latest work, Kelm seems to have taken this idea and run with it: a horse figurine trots across a neon-coloured plinth that echos the fast food motif of the pop backdrop; a blue lampshade sprouts a sprig of pink magnolia, set against a diamond-pattern landscape. The trick is that the objects brought together in the frame appear like they always belonged.

Alina Frieske

Pipeline, 35 Eastcastle St, W1W 8DW, until 2 June

At first glance, Alina Frieske’s works give the appearance of conventional, figurative painting. They are anything but. Her compositions are, in fact, made up images sourced from search engines—a kind of conversation between how humans understand images, and how algorithms interpret them. The young German’s latest series, Nightly Newsfeed, considers “the physicality of touch in relation to digital media and devices”, she tells The Art Newspaper, reflecting on how we have “become accustomed to receiving unsorted visual information“ direct to our fingertips.

It’s an interesting subject for a young gallery whose mission is to provide emerging artists with “the right environment to introduce their work in an authentic way”, a counterpoint to the 15 seconds of fame offered by social media.

Hannah Starkey

Maureen Paley, 60 Three Colts Lane, E2 6GQ, until 14 July

“My work is a way of speaking to women about how you don’t always need to perform for the gaze, that there is more to being female than being seen,” said Hannah Starkey, in conversation with Lauren Elkin at The Hepworth, which staged a major survey exhibition of the Northern Irish photographer in 2022. Now she’s back with her eighth solo show at Maureen Paley, presenting her ever-increasingly collaborative portraits of young women, using reflection and refraction to disrupt what she terms “the consuming eye”.

Other photography shows around London:

Jack Pierson, Lisson Gallery, until 3 August

Aisha Seriki: Ori Inu at Doyle Wham, until 27 July

Ana Viktoria Dzinic: Repetitive, Nicoletti, until 3 June

Lisa Jahovic: The Third Drawer at Flowers, Cork Street, until 22 June

Sharon Walters, HackelBury, until 6 July