The best: Exhibitions around Manchester and the North this winter

The Science and Industry Museum’s latest exhibition invites visitors on an immersive journey into their senses. Operation Ouch! Brains, Bogies and You offers the chance to dive head first into a variety of hands-on experiments that will help shed light on how our bodies work.

Opening on Fri 14 Feb, take a trip through an ear canal covered in gooey wax, squeeze past sticky snot and check in with Dr Chris, Dr X and Dr Ronx from the hit BBC Children’s series Operation Ouch! who appear throughout via video to help visitors understand the science behind the fun.

Manchester Museum’s Wild explores our precarious but optimistic dynamic with the natural world, taking over the Exhibition Hall with a fascinating examination of the ways in which people around the world are rebuilding our connections with a planet in jeopardy.

Featuring an immersive installation, audio, film and interactive elements, as well as an array of natural history collections and artworks, Wild transports visitors across a captivatingly diverse global topography and a wide array of voices, from Aboriginal elders to academic researchers, to champion the innovative methods used to restore biodiversity and shape a sustainable future environment while challenging how we think about and interact with nature.

Also free to enter, Manchester Art Gallery’s spellbinding exhibition Unpicking Couture celebrates groundbreaking moments from the world of fashion. Told through a collection of stunning pieces from across the last century, the collection features unique pieces by Christian Dior, Azzedine Alaïa, Cristobal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Vivienne Westwood, Yohji Yamamoto, Bruce Oldfield and Alexander McQueen, as well as a recently restored 1930s silk velvet jacket by Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli.

Eternal Return marks the first major exhibition of film works by Leeds-born Stuart Croft since his untimely death in 2015.

Visitors are invited to journey through a sequence of immersive spaces, each containing an infinitely looping narrative film with no distinct beginning, middle or end. Four of Croft’s major film works, The Stag Without a Heart, Drive In, Remetior, and Comma 39, will be shown at Leeds Art Gallery, with others screened as part of Leeds International Film Festival’s spotlight on the artist.

The exhibition also includes the world premiere of Remetior, the last film the artist produced with sound design finished posthumously by his friends and collaborators.

Curated to recognise over a century of national public fortitude, this year’s Banner Exhibition delivers another sweeping textile timeline of ground-breaking protests and social unity in the long, tireless struggle for the rights we have today, with twenty-six historic and contemporary banners on display and free to explore.

Featuring art across history marbled with defiance, from trade union placards and Miners’ Strike slogans to more recent campaigns on disability and migrant rights, the exhibition occupies a quarter of the People’s History Museum for almost a full year.

Featuring nine commissioned artworks from Manchester-based artists in celebration of their respective footballing heroes, MARKERS honours the off-pitch impact of pioneering players in an exploration of their unique personal journeys, the skills with which they’ve equipped themselves and their involvement in causes spanning LGBTQ+ rights, immigration, women’s football and ethnic minority representation.

Heroes included in MARKERS includes Eric Cantona, Raheem Sterling, Park Ji-sung, Mary Phillip, David Beckham, Lionel Messi, Pete the Badge, Justin Fashanu and Lucy Clark.

The National Football Museum also provides a Community Creative Hub which encourages visitors to express their love for their favourite footballers with boundless artistic imagination.

Guests are invited to immerse themselves in an exhibition that combines art and science to spotlight one of nature’s most important creatures.

Bees: A Story of Survival explores how over 120 million years, bees have been an integral component in human survival, before examining how changes to the environment and climate mean their existence is under serious threat.

Soundscapes, interactive elements, projection and light all combine to place guests in the heart of the world of these tiny, vital creatures.

Sheffield Stories: Caribbean Footsteps celebrates the endless ways that people of African Caribbean heritage have contributed and shaped Sheffield life.

Shaped by community co-curators, displays share inspiring stories of journeys, culture and heritage, from church, sport and carnival to fighting racism and discrimination. Contributions from later generations reflect on the legacy of those who arrived decades before, while interactive displays explore food, music, games and fashion.

Blackpool’s Showtown has launched its first major exhibition, inviting British photographer, Andy Hollingworth to showcase his collection of photographs dedicated to the people who make us laugh.

Andy has worked with some of the UK’s most famous comedic personalities and I Photograph Comedians includes 50 prints of Andy’s photographs as well as objects of comedy memorabilia from his personal collection.

Andy Hollingworth said: “This retrospective of my work over the last 30 years reflects the changing faces of comedy in the UK and my interaction with them. I’m delighted that it’s being displayed at Showtown in Blackpool – the very heart of British entertainment for the last 100 years!”

Bharti Kher’s Alchemies is described as a celebration of diversity, discovery and personal identity.

A powerful exhibition of sculpture and 2D work by one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, the work hones in on themes of magical transformation and the ancient practice of trying to change ordinary metal to gold — alchemy.

Kher blurs boundaries between animals, humans, nature and objects, resulting in hybrid beings that combine the every day with the imaginary and the extraordinary.

The Hepworth Wakefield explores the theme of still life, with more than 70 works from over 50 artists spread across two galleries, each illustrating the enduring and timeless nature of the still life genre.

Showcasing different epochs in art history, including post-impressionism British modernism, surrealism and contemporary art, Still Lives reflects on the various ways different generations of artists have found, and continue to find, their spark in everyday objects.

A new major exhibition coming to Leigh’s Turnpike Gallery delves into how the arts can aid in recovery. Beyond the Surface features work from the Fallen Angels Dance Theatre, a groundbreaking north west arts organisation that uses dance and movement to support recovery.

Central to the collection is a new digital dance, sound and light installation titled Samadhi. By uniting professional and community dancers, the immersive piece plays out in its own gallery space, and is inspired by the real-life experiences of Fallen Angels’ north west recovery communities, offering a platform for dancers who are themselves in recovery.

The Whitworth hosts the first major survey exhibition by British artist Barbara Walker, chartering her compelling figurative practice from the 1990s to today.

Being Here presents over 70 extraordinary artworks, including rarely-seen paintings, her Turner Prize-nominated drawing series Burden of Proof (2022-23), and a newly commissioned printed wallpaper Soft Power (2024).

The exhibition comprises works from across the six major series Walker has made to date; Private Face (1998-2005), Louder Than Words (2006-09), Show and Tell (2008-15), Shock and Awe (2015-20), Vanishing Point (2018-ongoing) and Burden of Proof (2022-23), alongside a new wallpaper, inspired by the Whitworth’s collection, that continues her representation of the Windrush generation.

Award-winning and internationally renowned Greek/British artist Mikhail Karikis addresses the urgency of climate change in HOME’s latest solo exhibition.

Taking the form of an immersive sound and multi-screen installation, Songs for the Storm to Come embraces science and personal perspectives, using listening and sound-making as a means to cultivate climate care.

While casting an eye across worldwide issues, the exhibition simultaneously puts Manchester at its heart. Continuing his practice of collaborating with local communities, Karikis has worked with Manchester-based SHE cooperative choir for women and non-binary people, as well as sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Conversations collates work by 40 leading Black women and non-binary artists who are recognised for their role in transforming contemporary British art today.

The collection asks poignant questions about the present, while also offering a moment of celebration and joy centred around artists working in the UK.

Conversations spans paintings, sculpture and video from the last ten years, with many works selected for display by the artists themselves.

Described as ‘a momentous mix of music, cinematic imagery, songs and stories for the end of the world’ Laurie Anderson brings her most ambitious work to date to Manchester’s Aviva Studios.

The ambitious new stage show explores themes of fear, disaster, preservation, invention, love and escape.  Set in a dream-like moment where the data cloud breaks, ARK offers a pause where digital representation and reality are separated. Within this brief window, Anderson asks whether we running out of time? Or is it already too late?