Dreaming Cleaning is a poignant documentary series by photographer Almudena Zambrana that moves between softness and strain, reverie and repetition. Drawing from her lived experience as a qualified migrant working as a cleaner in Australia, Zambrana reveals the emotional and psychological weight of repetitive, often unacknowledged labour. Through cyclical, dream-like imagery, the project exposes the fragile gap between education, identity and survival.

Antidote is a framework of five photographic series and an academic essay exploring the rise of contemporary authoritarianism. Drawing on Indigenous worldviews, Marco Vernaschi proposes empathy as a counterforce to polarised ideologies. We speak with Vernaschi about power, psychology, and resistance.

Looking ahead to beauty trends of 2026, the Spring/Summer runways set the tone with bold, expressive looks and futuristic flair. From 80s-inspired blush contour at Aadnevik to sci-fi metallics at Theophilio, designers embraced impact. Vivid blue carnival eyes as seen at Luar, next-level lashes at Thom Brown and graphic statement lips at Roksanda & Westwood signal a fearless new beauty era.

Jamnesia is a meditation on obsession, endurance, and queer presence inside chaos. Colliding roller derby’s radical, bruised community with the unforgiving ritual of wet plate collodion, the project celebrates failure, devotion, and bodies that persist. It is about showing up – again and again – for art, impact, and belonging.

Photographer Alex Bex interrogates the cowboy myth and the codes of traditional masculinity. Immersed in ranching communities, the project reveals vulnerability behind the archetype, questioning how images shape manhood in a society undergoing profound cultural change today, urgently, and without nostalgia.

Archipelago explores the fragile balance between connection and solitude. Through staged scenes featuring friends and family, Yolanda del Amo examines how class, family, and gender shape our identities and relationships. Each photograph becomes an “island”: a quiet, charged space where intimacy and distance coexist, revealing the tensions of living together and apart.

Congolese artist Léonard Pongo’s first solo show in the UK, Apophenia, explores ways of knowing a place as rich and complex as the DRC. He interprets the land as a reactive entity in an attempt to show that a living body of knowledge is a valuable as other more sterile ways of knowing a place. It’s a deeply moving act of decolonisation that functions on an almost sensory level. We spoke to him about his work.

Inspired by Dorothy’s famous words, No Place Like Home reimagines the idea of home as both comfort and illusion. Set within an imaginary doll’s house, the series explores memory, loss, and identity, where the longing to return collides with the inescapable confines of nostalgia, femininity, and the shifting meaning of belonging.

Gumsucker by Rory King mourns the vanishing Australian wilderness and the quiet erosion of spirit that follows. Through haunting, tender images of isolation and resilience, King’s work traces the tension between nature and civilisation, where loss, memory, and belonging intertwine in a poetic reflection on the fading frontier and its lingering ghosts.

In No Woman’s Land, photojournalist Kiana Hayeri and researcher Mélissa Cornet travel through seven Afghan provinces to document women’s lives under Taliban rule. Through intimate portraits, interviews, and collaborative artworks, the book offers a vital record of gender-based persecution — and the extraordinary resistance of those living through it.

London-based Purist Gallery presents Unyọñ Ufọk (Going Home), an intimate photo-and-film exhibition by Nigerian-British artist Emily Nkanga. From 9–11 October 2025, the show navigates grief, memory, and the emotional terrain of “returning home” through visuals rooted in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria.