Today marks the second day since the opening of Godfried Donkor’s ‘Mythologies, Proverbs and Fablesm at Gallery 1957 in London. Through painting, embroidery and installation, Donkor explores how images, symbols and histories travel across cultures and generations, bringing together African and European histories, proverbs and fables. The exhibition considers how inherited narratives are carried forward, transformed and given new meanings as they encounter different places and contexts. I think it connects particularly well with the theme Building Mythologies through its exploration of inherited memory, folklore, symbolism and cultural translation. Donkor’s work shows mythology as a living practice not just something inherited from the past, but something that can be reactivated and transformed in the present. Godfried Donkor: Mythologies, Proverbs and Fables. 30 September - 28 November 2026. Gallery 1957 1 Hyde Park Gate, London. SW7 5EW.

In Forms of Enchantment, Marina Warner explores how myths, fairy tales, symbols and stories appear within the work of artists from the sixteenth century to today. Drawing on mythology and anthropology, she looks at how artists transform inherited stories and images, giving them new meanings in different cultural and contemporary contexts. What I like about this book is how it makes mythology feel less like something fixed in the past, and more like something artists can continually reinterpret and give new meaning to. Warner, Marina, Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018).

In ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’, Anna Tsing follows the matsutake mushroom across forests, markets and communities to explore how life persists in landscapes shaped by capitalism, environmental destruction and uncertainty. Rather than focusing on systems of control or progress, Tsing looks at collaboration and survival, showing how worlds are made through encounters between humans and other species. Really interesting book that asks us to reconsider what we mean by progress, nature and survival, suggesting that valuable forms of life can emerge not through mastery or stability, but through fragile relationships between very different beings. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

How are mythologies constructed? “Myth is a system of communication, that it is a message.” — Roland Barthes, Mythologies In Mythologies, Roland Barthes examines how everyday objects, images, cultural practices and popular media become carriers of meaning. Through a series of short essays, he explores how society transforms cultural ideas and values into narratives that come to feel natural or universal, revealing myth not simply as an inherited story, but as something continuously produced through the signs and symbols that surround us. Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972)

Rae-Yen Song’s immersive exhibition at FACT Liverpool draws on family mythology, ancestral histories, ecology and Daoist ways of thinking to construct a world suspended between the deep sea and the cosmos. Taking its title from a lost ancestor remembered through family stories and myths, the exhibition brings together sculpture, textiles, sound, moving image and living organisms, weaving memory and imagination into a personal mythology in which ancestry is understood as something living and continually evolving. Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• 18 September 2026 – 14 February 2027 FACT Liverpool https://www.fact.co.uk/event/rae-yen-song