How Do We Find Love?

– Our autumn 2026 season will explore the profound complexities of human relationships, desire, and intimacy.     The Last Human Kiss 14 November 2026 – 11 April 2027 Tracing the visual history of kissing across 11,000 years, from prehistory to its digital expressions in the 21st century, this exhibition explores the kiss as a language through which desire, power, vulnerability and transcendence have been expressed and contested for millennia. At once scholarly and sensorial, The Last Human Kiss reimagines the kiss as one of humanity’s most enduring gestures: intimate and unruly, sacred and subversive. The exhibition unfolds across five chapters: ‘The First Kiss’ contains some of the earliest known depictions of the kiss; ‘The Divine Kiss’ explores the Renaissance fascination with love’s power to disrupt; in ‘The Social Kiss’ intimacy takes the form of family and kinship; ‘The Romantic Kiss’ explores desire’s euphoric charge, while ‘The Trickster Kiss’ brings us to the present, where kissing takes on mediated, digital, and post-human forms, at once everywhere and strangely absent.

The Last Human Kiss is curated John Kenneth Paranada, Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre.   Ecstasy and the Aftermath 14 November 2026 – 11 April 2027 Love has long been imagined in terms of union and rupture, or transformation and longing – reflected in mythology, alchemy and contemporary rituals. Ecstasy and the Aftermath reconsiders love beyond romantic clichés, exploring it through the lens of kinship and mourning, and as a strategy of survival and act of resistance. The exhibition brings together artists who engage with global histories, queer ecologies, and feminist politics.

Structured as a series of ‘ritual chambers,’ the exhibition explores desire, ecstasy and the traces that remain in love’s aftermath. Timed for the winter season, where natural cycles of loss, fertility and renewal echo love’s own, this exhibition explores love as both a wounding and a world-building force. Ecstasy and the Aftermath is curated by guest curator Huma Kabakci, in collaboration with Vanessa Tothill, Curator of Transhistorical Narratives at the Sainsbury Centre.   Love Stories 19 December 2026 – 30 May 2027 Love Stories will present series of photographs by a select group of photographers who capture the raw reality of everyday intimacy – challenging the idealised notions of love prevalent in popular culture and revealing instead the complex mix of mundane, humorous, painful and joyful emotions at the heart of human relationships.

Playful, honest, poetic or sardonic, these photographic works draw attention to the subtly shifting dynamics involved in loving and being loved, whether romantic, familial or platonic. Curated by Tafadzwa Makwabarara, Curator of Cultural Empowerment.     Image: Goldweight representing human couple, c.1700 – 1899, brass, Africa, Ghana. Donated by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, 1973 ..