The best: Exhibitions to see in Manchester

The Science and Industry Museum’s latest exhibition invites visitors on an immersive journey through their senses. Operation Ouch! Brains, Bogies and You invites you to dive headfirst into a variety of hands-on experiments that will help shed light on the mysterious ways in which our bodies work.

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 invites visitors to enter a fantastical world inhabited by a huge, snoozing cosmic cat. The Cat That Slept for a Thousand Years, a collaboration with creative robotics studio Air Giants, represents a bold step in the Museum’s approach to temporary exhibitions.

Blending artistic imagination and family fun, it’s a world-first experience that the museum says is unlike anything it has shown before. The free exhibition invites visitors into a world inhabited by a
giant, inflatable, robotic cat. As the cat peacefully naps, soft lights shimmer across its body, and it moves in response to the activity around it. Visitors of all ages are invited to get up close to the cat, get to know it better, give it a stoke or just peacefully sit and watch.

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 creations from the history’s most influential designers and fashion houses, including Christian Dior, Azzedine Alaïa, Cristobal Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin, Vivienne Westwood, Yohji Yamamoto, Bruce Oldfield and Alexander McQueen.

A first-time collaboration between four female artists explores fragility, place and change at Salford Museum and Art Gallery.

Naomi Kendrick works mainly in drawing, examining fragility and strength, parental ageing and mortality. Lizzie King looks at the floor of the East Wing as a living, breathing thing in an immersive soundscape. Maggie Thompson and Susan Wright are printmakers examining how places change over time and how time is fragile — Maggie through archive photographs of Greengate and Sue directly from its floors, studying how these are shaped over time.

Lowry 360 offers the chance to immerse themselves in the sights and sounds of LS Lowry’s iconic work, Going to the Match.

Created in collaboration with Barcelona’s renowned Immersive studio, Layers of Reality, visitors will be surrounded by a creative exploration, in super-high resolution, of a painting that ‘celebrates the excitement, anticipation, and ritual of going to a football match on a Saturday afternoon’.

Football City, Art United. is an ambitious group exhibition at Aviva Studios which pairs 11 artists and footballs to create new work as part of this year’s Manchester International Festival.

The project is a collaboration between World Cup and Champions’ League winner Juan Mata, renowned curator and Serpentine Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist and writer Josh Willdigg. From interactive play arenas and sound installations to animation and sculpture, Football City, Art United expands the worlds of art and football and the cultural contributions both make to our daily lives.

Coming in October 2025, The National Football Museum’s Black in the Game will provide a platform to share and celebrate football stories and landmark moments involving players with African and Caribbean heritage, including historic trailblazers and contemporary players in today’s game.

The exhibition is co-curated by a representative panel of footballers and academic leaders. A current preview of the exhibition is open in the museum’s Pitch Gallery, titled The Warm Up, it introduces the panel, including players like Kerry Davis, Bruce Dyer, Mary Phillip, Brian Deane and Nikita Parris, as well as respected figures within football, such as Leon Mann and Sagal Abdullahi.

Created in collaboration with AWOL Studios, Connecting Spaces is all about celebrating Manchester’s creative spaces and viewing them as much more than just buildings, instead, as vital communities. Each selected work was chosen as it demonstrated the importance of location, local relationships and the environment in response to the theme: CONNECTING SPACES.

Stories — Brought to Life is a collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery, bringing some of the institution’s most beloved paintings to MediaCity to be displayed in an immersive exhibition space.

The collection will explore the fascinating lives of people featured in the Gallery’s Collection whose stories have shaped the UK’s history and culture, from the Tudor period to the present day, from cultural icons to boundary-pushing activists both past and present.

Included in the display are the likes of Grayson Perry, Malala Yousafzai, Nelson Mandela, Emmeline Pankhurst, Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare and more.

Billed as the ultimate gaming experience, Power Up at the Science and Industry Museum invites guests to immerse themselves in the best video games from the last five decades. With more than 150 consoles to try from across the generations, there’s something for everyone, from Sonic to Street Fighter and Mario to Minecraft, plus a selection of games created in Manchester.

The Songs The Morning Sang is a joint venture from Poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan and photographer Andrew Brooks following a year-long creative correspondence, inspired by the daily whimsical tweets made by Ian on his pre-dawn morning strolls, which became a ritual during the first COVID lockdown.

Inspired by this, Brooks set out on his own series of early-morning walks. Leaving his home at 5am each day with his camera, the photographer took hundreds of pictures all within two miles of his front door.

After each walk, Brooks then shared his pictures with McMillan, who responded to the images of his choice, building a narrative into each with an unexpected micro story.

The Beginning of Knowledge, the first international solo exhibition of works by Santiago Yahuarcani – artist, Indigenous activist and leader of the Aimeni (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto people will be presented by the Whitworth as part of MIF25.

Working from a remote Amazonia town in northern Peru, Santiago Yahuarcani creates large-scale, narrative-rich paintings exploring the relationship between the Uitoto people and the natural world. Using natural pigments and materials, Yahuarcani’s work exists outside of Western art history – instead harnessing the memories, history and wisdom of his ancestors, the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the sounds of the jungle, and Uitoto myths that explain the multiple configurations of the universe.

Originally launched to mark the reopening of the Pankhurst Centre, the Grade II* listed former home of Emmeline Pankhurst, At Home with the Pankhurst Family delves into the lives, legacies and the stories that led each to become fierce campaigners for women’s rights. The exhibition looks at both influences from within the family and the wider city which they called home.

Part of this year’s Manchester International Festival, An Inheritance brings together a sprawling collection of knowledge, advice, jokes, memories and objects curated by over 500 primary school children from across every borough of Greater Manchester.

Working with artists Andy Field, Beckie Darlington and Rosabel Tan, this collective of young people have been thinking about Manchester 100 years from now, and what they can leave behind for its children. To make sure the inheritance is ‘passed down’, key representatives from the city will attend a special ceremony during which they’ll sign an oath written by the children promising to safeguard

The People’s History Museum documents and celebrates the revolutionaries, reformers, workers and voters who have shaped Manchester and beyond. Gallery One hones in on the period between Peterloo and post-war, while Gallery Two shares stories from post-war to the present day.

ANEW Way to Peel an Orange is an ambitious collection of work that is the culmination of a collaborative project between celebrated designer Joe Hartley and the ANEW recovery community. Housed at Castlefield Gallery following Hartley’s five-month residency with ANEW in Tameside, the project has been an evolving journey of creating and reflecting through ceramics and furniture making, photographic experimentation, as well as outdoor and growing activities that include equine-assisted therapy and even the hatching of RECOVERIST chickens as a nurturing metaphor for new life beginnings.