The UK continues to invest in David Bowie's cultural legacy. More than ten years after the “David Bowie Is” exhibition, which opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013 before embarking on a five-year international tour, London is preparing to welcome a new immersive project: “David Bowie: You're Not Alone”.
The exhibition will open on 22 April 2026 at the Lightroom, an exhibition space located a few minutes from King's Cross, and is presented as a 360-degree experience built from rare and unpublished materials from the David Bowie Archive in New York. Thousands of hours of footage were examined to select historical performances, interviews and documents never exhibited before, with the declared aim of providing a direct portrait of the artist.
The path is divided into thematic chapters presented in a continuous loop. The intention is to strip Bowie of his most famous masks – from Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane, from Halloween Jack to the Thin White Duke – to focus on the human dimension behind the scenic constructions. Moments announced include a 1975 transatlantic television interview with Russell Harty, described as one of the most surreal episodes of his media career, and the scenic reconstruction of the “Diamond Dogs” tour set, which takes shape as if emerging from the dust.
The exhibition arrives at a time of renewed institutional interest: the Victoria and Albert Museum recently inaugurated the David Bowie Centre, a permanent space that displays a selection of the approximately 90,000 objects that have become part of the museum's collections and now preserved in the new center in East London. The opening of “David Bowie: You're Not Alone” also coincides with the tenth anniversary of the artist's death on January 10, 2016 at the age of 69.
The project is produced by Lightroom and designed by studio 59, with writing and direction by Mark Grimmer – former creative director of “David Bowie Is” – together with Tom Wexler. The installation includes monumental projections on walls almost twelve meters high and on the floor, integrating live performances, interviews, film excerpts, drawings and archive materials in a multisensory experience lasting approximately one hour.
Grimmer explained that the curatorial intent is to focus on the insistence with which Bowie, throughout his career, refused to be reduced to an icon or character. The exhibition therefore aims to enhance him as an interpreter and promoter of human creativity, focusing on a recurring idea in his artistic career: art, in all its forms, as a tool for understanding what it means to be alive.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
