More Than Art on Walls: How Exhibitions Are Becoming Wider Cultural Experiences

An exhibition was once understood primarily as a collection of artworks brought together in a room.

The visitor entered, looked, read the accompanying text and left.

That format remains important, but across London, a broader model is becoming increasingly visible. Exhibitions are being expanded through food, music, performance, film, fashion, technology and live programming. Rather than treating the exhibition as a complete and self-contained object, galleries and museums are using it as the centre of a much wider cultural experience.

Tate Modern’s current Frida Kahlo programme offers a timely example.

Frida Kahlo Through Art, Food and Mexican Culture

Frida: The Making of an Icon opened at Tate Modern in June 2026. Through more than 130 works, the exhibition examines not only Kahlo’s artistic practice but also her development into one of the most recognisable cultural figures of the modern era.

Alongside the exhibition, Tate has partnered with Santiago Lastra, the chef behind the Michelin-starred London restaurant KOL, to create a Mexican menu inspired by Kahlo’s life, work and cultural background.

The collaboration includes a five-course dining experience, after-hours access and wider programming that brings together Mexican art, food and hospitality.

 

Chef Santiago Lastra’s collaboration with Tate Modern connects Frida Kahlo’s art and cultural legacy with Mexican food, hospitality and sensory experience. Image courtesy of Tate.

 

This matters because the food is not simply an unrelated amenity positioned beside the exhibition. It extends the cultural world around Kahlo and gives visitors another sensory and social way to engage with it.

A person may initially be drawn by the artist. Another may be interested in Mexican cooking. Someone else may be looking for a memorable evening in London. All three can enter the same programme through different doors.

The Exhibition as a Cultural Platform

This approach is becoming more common across London.

At the Serpentine, Peter Doig’s House of Music brought painting together with film, sound and a specially installed sound system. A live programme regularly activated the gallery, turning it into a place of collective listening and creative exchange.

Peter Doig’s House of Music at The Serpentine.

 

The Barbican’s Project a Black Planet goes further still. A major exhibition is positioned at the centre of a season of more than 50 events, including film screenings, concerts, performances, workshops, talks and listening sessions.

At V&A East, The Music is Black: A British Story uses more than 120 songs to guide visitors through 125 years of Black British music-making. Sound is not an optional addition. It is one of the exhibition’s principal storytelling tools.

These examples reflect an important shift. The exhibition is no longer always the entire proposition. It can be the starting point from which many connected cultural experiences develop.

Why This Matters for Audiences

The art world still has an accessibility problem.

This is not solely about ticket prices, geography or physical access, although all of those remain important. It is also about social and emotional access.

Many people enter galleries feeling that there are rules they have not been taught. They may not know how long to look at something, what questions they are allowed to ask or whether their response to the work is sufficiently informed.

Some worry that they do not understand contemporary art. Others feel that galleries were not designed with them in mind.

A traditional white-walled exhibition can unintentionally intensify that uncertainty. The silence that one visitor finds contemplative may feel intimidating to another.

 

Guests gather around the gallery bar during a D’Stassi Art event. Hospitality and informal conversation can help remove the social barriers that often surround contemporary art.

 

Additional cultural elements can help lower that barrier.

Food creates familiarity and conversation. Music changes the atmosphere of a room. Film provides context. Performance creates a shared moment. Product and design allow someone to encounter an artist through an object they understand instinctively. Talks and live creation make the artistic process more visible.

Crucially, these elements do not have to simplify or dilute the art.

When thoughtfully selected, they can deepen it.

D’Stassi Art and the Multidisciplinary Exhibition

At D’Stassi Art, we have long believed that an exhibition should feel alive.

Our aim has never been to reproduce the most formal version of the traditional gallery experience. We want people to encounter significant artworks, but we also want them to feel able to speak, ask questions, meet others and become part of the occasion.

A packed opening night at D’Stassi Art. The gallery is treated as a place for art, conversation, discovery and cultural exchange rather than a silent viewing room.

This philosophy has taken different forms across our programme.

Entering Malik Roberts’ World

For Malik Roberts’ 2024 UK debut, The Double Up, the gallery was transformed into a physical extension of the artist’s work.

More than 25 paintings were presented against deep red walls. A hallway was covered in Roberts’ drawings, while a Porsche positioned outside the gallery carried the atmosphere of the exhibition into the street.

 Porsche 911 extends the artist’s visual language beyond the gallery walls. Art can move into the street, onto functional objects and into the wider visual culture surrounding an exhibition.

These decisions were not decorative additions.

Roberts’ work explores identity, fragmentation, visibility and the ways in which people construct different versions of themselves. By transforming the visitor’s surroundings, the exhibition allowed those ideas to exist beyond the boundaries of individual canvases.

Visitors did not simply view the work. They entered a world created around it.

Art Beyond the Canvas

A multidisciplinary exhibition does not always require digital technology, live performance or large-scale projection. Sometimes it begins by allowing an artist’s visual language to inhabit an unexpected object.

For Didier Chamizo’s exhibition at D’Stassi Art, the gallery presented a hand-painted, custom-built Harley-Davidson motorcycle alongside the artist’s paintings.

Didier Chamizo’s exhibition included a hand-painted, custom-built Harley-Davidson motorcycle, extending the artist’s visual language beyond the canvas and into a functional sculptural object.

The motorcycle operated somewhere between artwork, sculpture, engineering and custom culture. Its presence changed the physical rhythm of the exhibition, giving visitors an object to move around and experience from multiple viewpoints.

It also demonstrated that painting does not have to remain confined to canvas. An artist’s language can travel across surfaces, materials and cultural forms while retaining its identity.

The motorcycle was not simply an object placed in the gallery for spectacle. It became part of the exhibition’s central proposition, allowing Chamizo’s work to be encountered through both traditional painting and a completely different physical form.

Watching Art Being Made

Empty Consumption, curated by Outside the Zone in December 2024, brought together artists exploring consumer culture, digital saturation and contemporary identity.

The programme included live creation and an artist residency within the gallery. Visitors could therefore encounter completed works while also seeing new ones develop.

This changed the relationship between artist, artwork and audience.

The studio process, normally hidden from the collector or visitor, became part of the exhibition itself. Art was no longer presented only as a finished commodity. It could also be experienced as an uncertain, physical and evolving act.

Art, Fashion, Music and Product

Trevor Andrew’s Bang Bang was another naturally multidisciplinary project.

Andrew’s practice grew from the interconnected worlds of professional snowboarding, skate culture, music, fashion and visual art. Presenting his work as though it existed within only one of those categories would have misunderstood the artist.

The exhibition therefore expanded beyond painting through filmed content, fashion, music, graphic design, limited releases and a specially developed dining experience.

 

Trevor Andrew at D’Stassi Art, surrounded by artwork, fashion and guests. His practice moves fluidly between painting, music, skate culture, clothing and product.

 

These elements were not separate from the exhibition’s identity. They reflected the wider cultural world from which Andrew’s practice emerged.

The programme also created different levels of access. A visitor might first connect through an original painting, a piece of clothing, a print, a film or the energy of the opening night. Each offered a different route towards the same artist.

Our earlier work with Lakwena and Fiorucci similarly crossed the boundaries between art, fashion, publishing and product. The collaboration included accessible editions and a limited art book, allowing the creative identity of the project to live in several forms.

Hospitality as an Invitation

Food may appear to be one of the simplest additions to an art programme, but it can also be one of the most powerful.

When D’Stassi Art opened the gallery for a supper club, guests were not asked to arrive already identifying themselves as collectors, experts or members of the art world.

They were invited to share a meal.

 

A supper club inside D’Stassi Art brings food, conversation, printed material and contemporary art around the same table.

 

The art remained present throughout the evening, but the social expectations surrounding it changed. Conversation developed naturally. Guests spent time in the space without feeling that they were being tested on what they knew.

Some people will enter a gallery because of an artist’s name. Others may first enter because of a dinner, a performance, a record launch or a conversation with friends.

Both routes are valid.

What matters is the connection that follows.

Multidisciplinary Does Not Mean Immersive for Its Own Sake

There is a risk in this movement.

As “immersive” becomes a marketing term, galleries can be tempted to add spectacle without purpose. Technology, projection, music and hospitality can attract attention, but they do not automatically create meaning.

A successful multidisciplinary exhibition must begin with the artist and the ideas within the work.

The central question should not be: what else can we add?

It should be: what would help this audience enter more deeply into the artist’s world?

For Frida Kahlo, food can create a meaningful connection to Mexican culture, memory and identity.

For Peter Doig, music and communal listening emerge naturally from his practice.

For Malik Roberts, an altered physical environment extended the psychology of his paintings.

For Lady Pink, documentary storytelling provided historical and social context.

The strongest additional element is not necessarily the largest or most expensive. It is the one that feels inseparable from the story being told.

Creating More Ways to Belong

The continued development of multidisciplinary exhibitions is ultimately about more than entertainment.

It is about belonging.

The art world often asks audiences to adapt themselves to its established structures. A more open model asks how those structures might adapt to the audience.

That does not mean removing scholarship, curatorial rigour or serious engagement. It means recognising that people learn, connect and remember in different ways.

One person responds to colour. Another to music. Another to an artist speaking. Another to a shared meal. Another to an object they can hold or a story they recognise from their own life.

A gallery that offers several meaningful routes into an exhibition is not weakening its message.

It is giving that message more opportunities to be received.

The future of the exhibition will still include extraordinary artworks displayed in quiet rooms. There will always be value in standing alone before a painting.

But it will also include dinners, performances, films, live creation, sound, fashion, conversation and collaboration.

The artwork remains the centre.

The culture built around it helps more people find their way there.

 

The D'Stassi Team