Top 10 art exhibitions in London

Ever wanted to become so entwined with someone that you become one person? Rats know all about that desire. There’s the cryptid myth of the Rat King, a mass of rats whose tails have become knotted together, creating one giant, many-headed, dreaded, inseparable (and dead) mega-rat. Now that’s love, that’s togetherness.

An ancient petrified forest has creaked forebodingly into life at Tate Modern. Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz’s huge, towering forms hover around you as you walk around this show of her work, enormous fabric sculptures that have emerged from some bog, and now hang in the dark, threatening to envelop and smother you. 

Chris Killip might not be as well known as Martin Parr or have the cult kudos of Tony Ray-Jones, but the work he produced in the 1970s and ’80s arguably stands above either of them. Killip was born on the Isle of Man and returned there after quitting commercial photography in the early 1970s to concentrate on the communities he grew up amongst.

Memories are hazy, foggy things. The mind twists its own images and narratives with the passage of time. Iraqi-born artist Mohammed Sami is trying to make sense of that fog in his work. The paintings here are re-worked, rehashed, re-cooked memories of life in war ravaged Iraq, of being co-opted to paint propaganda images, of fleeing, of life in a Swedish refugee camp.

The Barbican Curve is full of ghosts, the spectres of bold, creative, amazing women from pre-revolution Iran, captured on fragile vellum in painstaking detail by Soheila Sokhanvari. These 28 cultural figures worked, created, lived and loved with a freedom that was taken away with the 1979 revolution, and still hasn’t been won back. 

Apologies in advance for the PDA, but when you have feelings this intense, you have to let them out. Any chance of critical objectivity or calm art historicism has evaporated, because I am in love with Paul Cezanne.

In video games, you can be whoever you want to be. By day, you might be Tim from accounts, but once you get home, you’re an ancient assassin, a Norse god, an orc or an elite Marine. You can create an avatar, you can choose a new body, a new nose, a new gender. 

A cheeky smile can get you pretty far in life, and even further in art. Just ask Mona Lisa, her semi-smirk has helped make her the most famous painting ever. That’s because that smile is enigmatic: we don’t know why it’s there or what it represents. English painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye pushes that idea – the enigma of the portrait – to an extreme.

‘Nationalism’ is a right can of worms, and the term ‘nationalist art’ should have all right-thinking people putting on their coats and hurrying to the bus stop. But to not appreciate the yearning for a country, language, people and culture to call your own is to miss a lot of the impact of this strange, intense and magical show.

The V&A’s ambitious new exhibition is a triumphant attempt to complete the near-impossible task of capturing an entire continent through its fashion. Incorporating textiles, design and still and moving images, ‘Africa Fashion’ takes visitors on a compelling journey from the 1960s to the present day in a bid to reshape existing geographies and narratives of style.