Free art in London

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space.

Nicola L. is not built for 2024. The Moroccan-born French artist (1932-2018) used her art to push a utopian, subversive agenda that sits pretty awkwardly with progressive modern politics. A film here comes with a warning that it was made back when attitudes towards cultural appropriation were different, the main installation comes with an apology that it’s not wheelchair accessible, and all the radical ideas here have been moved on from.

You know a gallery is absolutely winging it when they say their new show is an attempt ‘to fold or stretch time’ and ‘consider new conceptions of the “historical”’ while also being about climate change, clairvoyance and the ‘plasticity’ of the body. Which is to say that Raven Row is flying by the seat of its incredibly nonsensical pants in this exhibition somehow about all of those topics, curated by Denmark-based theorist and art historian Lars Bang Larsen.

If you like GDPR training, you’re in for a treat at the Serpentine. Tech experimenters Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s series of mediaeval church altars and choral compositions is actually a deep dive into the intricacies and legal frameworks of AI modelling. The quasi-historical approach helps to make you feel safe in the uncomfortable, scary waters of new technology.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has cast you as an extra in a tense, hazy film about alienation, love and murder. She’s built a series of plywood film sets in the Barbican Curve, and filled them with rough, bare paintings, each one detailing a grim, uncomfortable narrative arc.

Skinned alive, humiliated and left to rot. The corpse-like figures in hugely influential South African artist Marlene Dumas’s newest series of paintings have suffered, and their pain is almost tangible.

Tracey Emin continues the slow evisceration of her own body and psyche in her latest show at White Cube. Splayed across the walls is all the blood and torment of a life lived without fear of sadness or pain, but in the full knowledge that it must come. 

It’s amazing how some visions of the future can look so historic. All the spaceships and alien landscapes of 1970s and ’80s sci-fi look like they’re from the 1970s and ’80s. And in Budapest-based artist Botond Keresztesi’s paintings, the future looks a hell of a lot like the ’90s.

There’s a crushing, sombre atmosphere of paranoia an bleakness in young English painter Lewis Hammond’s work. In his biggest UK show, he’s filled the gallery with demons, depression and disgust in a despairing meditation on how modern society chews you up and spits you out.

Look, mate. No, seriously: look. Slow down, open your eyes, calm your mind and just look. That’s what David Hockney wants you to do in this exhibition that pairs a stunning renaissance composition by Piero della Francesca with two works by the Yorkshireman that reference it. He wants you to take the time to consider, think about, absorb and really, genuinely look at the art.