What's coming up in DCA Galleries
We're delighted to announce details of our 2026/27 Exhibitions programme.
We will be bringing the best international and national contemporary art to Dundee, championing artists at all stages of their career. Major installations in video work, painting, installation and sculpture, alongside works created onsite in DCA Print Studio, will all feature in a rich programme tackling themes including climate change, racial injustice, sexuality and memory.
Published
We’re delighted to present a year of ambitious and inspiring exhibitions by Scottish, British and international artists in our beautiful gallery spaces. Connecting in with the city’s past, Scotland’s histories, our love of cinema and print, and the joy of physicality and intimacy, we are so looking forward to sharing these shows with our audiencesBeth Bate, Director of DCA
We Contain Multitudes
Sat 7 February – Sun 26 April 2026
A major group show featuring work by Andrew Gannon, Daisy Lafarge, Jo Longhurst and the Turner Prize 2025 nominated Nnena Kalu will fill both galleries. Across textiles, photography, sculpture and drawing, the exhibition will explore envelopment, enclosure, support, surrounding, and restriction.
This show is developed as part of We Contain Multitudes, a three-year collaborative project between Collective, DCA and LUX Scotland, funded by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. The project aims to create systemic change in the visual arts sector in Scotland, tackling ableism in the sector and imagining a future in which disabled artists have increased access to opportunities, are visible, and their expertise and experiences are truly valued.
Francis Dosoo: The Lives of Dorothy Gale
Sat 16 May – Sun 2 August 2026
Francis Dosoo will fill DCA’s Gallery 1 with a new installation work which uses the 1978 film The Wiz, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, as a point of departure to explore the way we look at historic moving images. Imagining the film's individual images as points within a constellation of ‘memory-objects', The Lives of Dorothy Gale stretches and erodes their edges, leading the viewer's eye to linger on the vast and silent spaces that lie between them.
Adrián Balseca: In the Forest Ruins
Sat 16 May – Sun 2 August 2026
In Gallery 2, Ecuadorian artist Adrián Balseca will present a major new sculptural installation: In the Forest Ruins.
The exhibition will develop Balseca’s longstanding interest in capitalist extractivism, reflecting on the financialisation of nature and questioning our understanding of the world as living matter. Drawing connections between the Amazon Basin and Dundee, the exhibition will excavate layers of extractive legacies, inhabiting the space through new film works, installations, and sculptures. Balseca will undertake a Print Studio residency, working with experimental materials as active, living collaborators in the production of new work for the exhibition.
France-Lise McGurn
Sat 22 August – Sun 15 November 2026
In late summer 2026, we will present a major new exhibition by Scottish artist France-Lise McGurn. McGurn studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD) and this exhibition will mark the first time her work has been exhibited in Dundee. Working predominantly in painting installation McGurn creates fluid, layered works which express facets of human experience including sexuality, intimacy, loss, ecstasy and memory. McGurn's shorthand calligraphic lines recall various states of living and communion; clubbing, family life, sex, sobriety, abandon, pop culture, cartoons and advertising all creep into the work fleetingly as they do on audiences’ own visual and emotional registers.
Across both galleries at DCA, McGurn’s large scale paintings will spill out from canvases directly onto the walls and floors. Painted and printed furniture, including seating and rugs for visitors to sit and walk on will work to dissolve the preciousness of the fine art context, encouraging a more intimate relationship to the work. New large scale collage works will bring some of the artist’s reference archive into the space as part of the installation, toying with the familiar to evoke and recall our latent and lived individual experiences.
John Akomfrah: Listening All Night To The Rain
Sat 5 December 2026 – Sun 21 March 2027
For winter 2026, we will present John Akomfrah’s profound exhibition Listening All Night To The Rain, which continues the artist and filmmaker’s investigation into themes of memory, migration, racial injustice and climate change. The work debuted at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, before traveling to Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Cardiff in 2025. Akomfrah’s immersive audio-visual works will fill both galleries at DCA, inviting audiences on a journey of sights and sounds that draw out specific moments in time and events in our collective histories. By listening, watching and engaging with the pieces, audiences are encouraged to listen as a form of activism against historic and enduring injustices. The Commission and UK Tour of Listening All Night To The Rain is supported by Art Fund.