Sarah Mayhew Craddock sees what our galleries are doing in 2016

Oxford will be awash with some of the most exciting exhibitions that the city has ever seen in 2016.

Perhaps the most exciting will be Modern Art Oxford’s retrospective of exhibitions spanning the last 50 years since the gallery’s inception. The gallery’s year-long series of interlinking shows, performances and events has been named Kaleidoscope. The line-up includes such celebrated names such as Douglas Gordon, Guan Xiao, Hans Haacke, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, and Gustav Metzger.

Iconic works returning to the gallery from across the globe, will be presented as part of a dynamic programme of new commissions, performances and events by a new generation of artists in an exhibition that will lay bare the exhibition-making process.

Kaleidoscope will take the form of a rolling year of artistic happenings, all of which revolve, in one form or another, around the concept of time.

Further along Pembroke Street, The Story Museum is also having a year-long celebration, in the shape of a safari through stories. The Animal show is a celebration of animals in traditional tales, books and films centred around an immersive exhibition.

Drawing from stories such as Aesop’s Fables to The Wind in the Willows and War Horse, with contributions from an array of writers and artists, including Michael Morpurgo, and Oxford’s Philip Pullman, the exhibition has been designed to encourage visitors to explore their wild side and ponder the teachings of animal stories.that have been capturing imaginations for as long as anyone can remember. Kim Pickin, curator and co-director says: “‘Animal’ is a safari that guarantees some unforgettable encounters with fictional animals – both fierce and friendly. Visitors will have to use all their senses to experience their stories and learn how these animals are faring in the real world.”

Raw, perturbing, waxy – the highly recognisable, largely figurative, oeuvre of the celebrated sculptural ceramicist Mo Jupp will be on display at Oxford Ceramics Gallery from February 6 to March 5. Another leading ceramic artist, Kate Malone, will also exhibit new work inspired by the gardens, collections and archive at Waddesdon Manor, from June to October.

Two Days At Oxford, an exhibition by John Goto at Arts at the Old Fire Station from January 15 to February 17, is another must-see that will throw new light on historic happenings of local and national significance. Through his work, Goto re-examines the time John Betjeman and artist László Moholy-Nagy spent in Oxford in 1936 – a time of great social change – when Moholy made photographs to illustrate Betjeman’s book, An Oxford University Chest.

Similarly politicised, the Peter Rhoades: Gaza exhibition at The North Wall from April 5 to 23, is a hard-hitting exhibition of drawings made in response to press imagery taken from the Israeli assault on Gaza from 2008-9. Rhoades, a tutor in Fine Art at Christ Church, Oxford, employs brutal mark-making and a monochromatic palette in this thought-provoking series intended as a testament to the ongoing deprivations and suffering of the Palestinian people.

Highlights in the Ashmolean’s calendar include an exhibition by Ruskin School of Art lecturer and winner of the 2013 Contemporary Art Society Award, Elizabeth Price from February to April. Responding to the collections and the photographic and graphic archives of the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums, Price, has created a 15-minute, two-screen digital video commission, featuring a chorus of museum administrators.

Opening at the Ashmolean on the same day, and continuing until May, will be an exhibition of works from a private collection by Pop Art star Andy Warhol.

Following that from June to September is an extraordinary exhibition that will reveal the fascinating story of Sicily through discoveries made by underwater archaeologists. The exhibition, entitled Storms, War and Shipwrecks – Treasures from the Sicilian Seas, will illuminate the movement of peoples, goods and ideas via a display of over 200 unusual objects from the bottom of the sea. In short, 2016 promises to be a year of fascinating, challenging, ground-breaking art.