David Bowie On Tour Exhibition Opens at V&A Dundee, Bringing the Archive to Scotland

The David Bowie On Tour exhibition opens today, Wednesday 4 November, at V&A Dundee — and the strangest thing in it might be a set of keys. They opened Bowie’s apartment at Hauptstraße 155 in Berlin. Beside them sit a stopwatch he used when songwriting, a 1988 British passport, to-do lists, and the alto saxophone his father bought him in 1961, his first instrument (V&A). More than 100 objects from Bowie’s personal archive are on display in Scotland for the first time, in the opening venue of a national tour (Arts & Collections).

The archive behind the show is enormous. The V&A acquired it in 2024, and it holds more than 90,000 objects documenting Bowie’s life and career (Dundee Culture). This is the first time highlights from it have been shared on this scale outside London, the V&A says, and the Dundee run lasts until 15 February 2027 before the tour moves on to Blackpool, County Durham, Hull and Bristol between 2027 and 2028 (V&A).

What the David Bowie On Tour exhibition puts in the cases

Four sections organise the life. “Bowie Through a Lens” follows photography’s role in building his image, with work by Masayoshi Sukita, Terry O’Neill, Mick Rock and Brian Ward. “All The Somebody People” covers the stage and the studio across four eras, from Ziggy Stardust through the Berlin years and Let’s Dance to Blackstar. “Hooked to the Silver Screen” handles film and video. The last section, “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” is the personal one — the possessions Bowie chose to keep (V&A).

The headline objects reward the trip. A Ziggy Stardust-era acoustic guitar goes on public display for the first time, alongside the lightning-bolt stage costume from the Ziggy tour. There are handwritten lyrics and notebooks for the final albums, The Next Day and Blackstar, and Bowie’s posthumous Grammy award. Film fans get his annotated script, character notes and costume-fitting Polaroids for Jareth in Labyrinth, the clapperboard from The Man Who Fell to Earth, and the Natasha Korniloff costume for the “Ashes to Ashes” video (Arts & Collections). Quieter items cut deeper: his sketch of the original idea for the Low cover, an advance copy of The Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting for the Man from 1967, and fan-made pins and fanzines kept alongside official merchandise (BritBrief).

Curator Harriet Reed, the V&A’s Curator of Contemporary Performance, describes “an artist in constant motion — a restless, forward-looking mind at work beyond the music and images we know,” pointing to unrealised projects, handwritten notes and unseen sketches among the highlights (V&A). V&A Dundee director Leonie Bell called it a chance to encounter objects that reveal “how David Bowie thought, worked and continually reinvented himself” (Arts & Collections).

The Bowie Caird Hall 1973 Dundee concert, remembered by the people who were there

Dundee is not a random first stop. On 17 May 1973, Bowie played the Caird Hall as Ziggy Stardust, in a red Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit, to a sold-out crowd of 2,500 — Changes, The Jean Genie, Life on Mars? (Arts & Collections). Bell noted he had first performed in the city even earlier, in 1966 (V&A).

The exhibition tells that night partly through the audience. Fans held on to their tickets and Polaroid photographs for more than fifty years, and those keepsakes are in the show. “We were struck by how vividly they still live in the hearts and memories of local fans,” said V&A Dundee curator Svetlana Panova (Dundee Culture). Visitors can add their own thoughts on what Bowie means to them inside the exhibition, and venues across the city are running a Bowie Town programme of themed events alongside it (BritBrief).

The timing is deliberate. The show forms part of Bowie80, the celebrations marking what would have been Bowie’s 80th birthday on 8 January 2027 (Dundee Culture). Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney welcomed the opening as “a fantastic celebration of David Bowie’s legacy,” and as recognition of V&A Dundee’s standing as a cultural institution (BritBrief).

Practicalities for the V&A Dundee Bowie tickets and dates: the museum is open 10am to 5pm, seven days a week, adult tickets are £10 with an optional £1 donation, and members and visitors aged 18 and under go free, with advance booking essential (Dundee Culture).

Analysis: archive exhibitions can feel like reliquaries — famous objects behind glass, reverence supplied by the visitor. This one has a better idea. By mixing the lightning bolt with the stopwatch, the Berlin keys with a fan’s homemade pin, it argues that Bowie’s real medium was not any single art form. It was the process: sketch, costume, persona, discard, repeat, across 28 studio albums between 1967 and 2016 (Arts & Collections). Dundee, where teenagers kept their ticket stubs for half a century on the chance the story would come back, turns out to be the right place to make that argument first.

Photo: Lucas Kendall, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/info/david-bowie-on-tour-to-open-at-v-a-dundee
2. https://www.artsandcollections.com/david-bowie-at-the-va-dundee/
3. https://www.dundeeculture.com/post/first-look-over-100-rare-david-bowie-objects-unveiled-at-v-a-dundee-ahead-of-landmark-exhibition
4. https://britbrief.co.uk/entertainment/arts/david-bowie-archive-treasures-displayed-in-scotland-for-first-time.html