Free things to do in London this week

The Barbican’s Curve is a tricky gallery to show art in. So for their latest installation – a series of drawings by Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri – they’ve just not really bothered using it. The actual curve of the Curve, the long arcing outer wall, has been largely ignored except for a thick line of red paint. Ababri’s colourful drawings are instead shown on the much easier to use flat inner walls. There’s a metal curtain at either end of the space, a loud pulsating ambient soundtrack, but otherwise the curve itself is present only in its omission. It’s a disappointing use of the space. And it’s unfair on Ababri, whose art was never going to work in this environment. His simple, diaristic drawings document moments of precarious queer life laced with tons of sensuality, defiance and joy. Nude brown bodies dance and play, rest and embrace. They party in nightclubs, writhe in beds, their limbs tangle, their tongues lick. They aren’t brilliant drawings, but they tell a moving story of sexual expression in the face of sexual repression. The splash of red on the curve’s wall and floor signifies the Arabic letter ‘Zayin’, the first letter of the word ‘zamel’, a homophobic slur in the Maghreb, hissed mockingly at gay men. This is art about how just existing as a queer man can be political, how dancing can be political, how nightclubs can be political, and how art can act as a way of reclaiming all those things.  The ideas are nice enough. But take away the architecture of the Curv

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise. Even in this show of not-great works on canvas from 2001-2013 there’s good within the ugliness. The ‘paintings’ are collaged hodgepodges of nicked imagery. Nude women’s bodies overlap with inflatable toy monkeys, piles of pancakes, horny fertility talismans, sandwiches, feet. God they’re ugly, a total mess.  I mean, obviously this is revoltingly cynical, hyper-capitalist trophy art for gross millionaires. But it’s also really base and vile and erotic and pleasurable and fun and ecstatic. This is just Jeff’s own joy and kinks on display: food and skin, toys and tits. It’s Dionysican, stupid, real and – whisper it – kind of good.

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness. ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew.  There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun, oil staining the tarmac, his kid in blue sunnies hopping on her bike; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. This room is the stage, the set where the community acts out its relationships; a cramped, filthy, beautiful world unto itself. Babies are fed, toddlers are cuddles, fags are smoked, teas are split, clothes are ironed. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling.  It’s also brimming with signifiers of late-1980s English working-class life; the clothing, the hair, the brands. Some of it shocks (the mum f

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980. It’s a nice idea, but the modernist paintings on display here are still the real draw. A deep black Lygia Clark circle, shattered squares by Judith Lauand, juddering reliefs by Lygia Pape, stacks of triangles by Ivan Serpa, tumbling blocks by Helio Oiticica; it’s so joyous, so wild despite its geometric rigidity, so full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past.  Mixed in among all that is a whole heap of flat perspective, faux-naive figuration. Heitor dos Prazeres paints women in striped dresses dancing in the street, Silvia de Leon Chalreo depicts workers toiling in a field, Madalena Santos Reinbolt weaves scenes of countryside festivities. This is all as joyous as the abstraction, but more rooted in the traditions and truth of life in rural Brazil. Full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past. So your job as you walk through the show is to try to follow the tangled threads that connect the ultra-simplistic rural figu

There’s an old Jewish joke about a guy emigrating to America. A friend tells him he’ll never make it in the USA with a Jewish name, so he picks a good gentile moniker. But when he gets to the border, it slips his mind. He says ‘Ach! Shoyn fergesin!’ (Yiddish for ‘I've forgotten!’). The official replies ‘Sean Ferguson, welcome to the United States of America’. As artist and writer Joshua Leon shows in his Chisenhale exhibition, names are malleable things for Jews; signifiers that can be twisted and altered to allow you to better fit in, to integrate, to avoid the crushing pressure of antisemitic discrimination. Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman, Joey Ramone’s was Jeffrey Hyman, Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch, and on and on. Leon’s grandfather was born Kurt Hutter, but in the programmes to accompany his musical performances (shown here behind yellowed glass) over the course of his career in the UK, he became Ken or Curtis, and when he left for Israel, he became David.This nominative malleability is at the heart of Leon’s sparse show. There are two letters silhouetted in the window, an O and an E. Are they the missing pieces of the C, H and N on the front of the gallery? Did the former owner of this old veneer factory, Morris Cohen, delete the vowels? Why? To hide his jewishness? To fit into an unwelcoming society? To fly under the radar as fascism gripped 1940s Europe? What has been erased? What story is going untold?  A speaker plays a single isolated violin from

There’s a warning in Sibylle Ruppert’s art: if the devil doesn't get you, technology will. And if they both miss, it’s your own perverse instincts and desires that’ll consume you.  The German artist (1942-2011) filled her drawings, paintings and collages with writhing bodies and gnashing teeth, evil spirits and throbbing phalluses, glistening leather and technological freaks. The implication is that all of this chaotic sci fi horror porn was a way for Ruppert to deal with the legacy of the war and a litany of personal traumas.  In the first work here, a tiny etching, a cock emerges from some dripping abstract blob-form, only to be licked by a faceless flesh ball. A little drawing nearby shows a body with far too many buttocks, too many vulvas. In a huge charcoal, a bird-beaked demon pinches the penis of a supine hermaphrodite while skulls scream in the background. Pretty standard Saturday night, am I right. All this demonic torture climaxes in a four- panel painting where man is desperately battling beast. Forms writhe, penises mutate into pincers, genitals metamorphose into bug-eyed mecha-gods. The work’s classic renaissance themes are shot through with erotic terror and sci fic techno-dystopianism. All are jaw-droppingly painted.  Leather appears in other works, framing bare boobs and bums as creatures are crushed in vices and workers file past post-human cyborg spectres. All this erotic, traumatic horror is way too over the top, absolutely obscene, disconcertingly vile and

After celebrating its 75th anniversary last year, this multimedia exhibition at the Migration Museum in Lewisham delves into the history of the NHS, and to the thousands of dedicated non-British workers who have contributed to its delivery of healthcare. Through photography, artefacts, and a newly commissioned interactive music video installation, their stories are lovingly told. Around 1 in 6 people within the organisation today are non-British, and many others are descendants of migrant healthcare workers. It’s a wonderful way to gain some insight into how working for such a precious but pressured organisation has impacted their lives.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live.  A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived.  Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him. Film, TV, cartoons and sport were his escape, and his path towards art. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. Two vast orthopaedic boots stand like totems as you walk in, but these aren’t austere miserable corrective devices, they’re psychedelically patterned, ultra-colourful - they’re Wilsher-Mills reclaiming his own history and trauma and turning it into joy. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening A huge body lies on a hospital bed in the middle of the room, its feet massively swollen, its guts exposed. Toy soldiers brandishing viruses lay siege to the patient. Seb Coe, his head transformed into a TV, is the figure’s only distraction. The walls show comic book daleks and spaceships, Wilsher-Mills reimagining his static body as futuristic vehicles or beings with wheels and jets and thrusters. Every inch of the space is covered in pop trivia, or dioramas of happy memories. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical ter

London is crumbling, but not for long. In Matthias Groebel’s printed ‘paintings’ – made in Whitechapel in the mid-2000s – the city is bleak, derelict, graffiti’d. But it’s slowly being torn down and rebuilt, too; its greying brickwork tidied, sanitised, gentrified in a process of ceaseless, careless renewal. Each image comes in double, a stereoscopic vision of mundane street scenes, captured on a camcorder and then printed disjointedly on canvas with a custom painting machine. They’re part-photo, part-painting, caught – like the people in the images – between the broken present and a violent future. A girl in a hijab dances against a backdrop of shuttered windows and tagged walls. The building in the background is Tower House, a vast turn-of-the-century tenement, its windows smashed, its masonry crumbling. Men in skullcaps walk by it as scaffolding envelopes the building, hoardings go up promising loft apartments to rent. The structure, and the city, is being chewed up and reconstituted.  But Groebel’s work doesn’t feel like someone railing against the injustice of gentrification. The paintings are too spectral, pixelated and uncomfortable to say anything quite so binary. Instead, it feels like an almost anthropological observation of humanity. It images the poor people of this poor neighbourhood – symbols of us, the wider population of London – as ticks on the back of this city; ticks about to be treated by the corrosive power of rampant capitalism. It’s psychogeographic, de

Success isn’t always enough. Betty Parsons (1900-1982) was a success and a leader in her field, it just wasn't the right field. Her eponymous New York gallery was one of the most important galleries in the world. She championed Rothko and Pollock, and gave Robert Rauschenberg and Clyfford Still their first solo shows. She mattered, she changed art history. But despite all that, she still said ‘I would give up my gallery in a second if the world would accept me as an artist.’ Boohoo, poor successful, multimillionaire Betty, right? Well, the world just wasn’t a friendly place for female artists. So she made her bold, bright, colourful abstraction largely in private, largely as a hobby, always as an afterthought to her career as a gallerist.  Her big acrylic paintings here are pretty unsuccessful. Rough, messy, throwaway, a bit ugly, a bit formless, a bit unfinished. The medium and size just don’t suit her; it’s like she’s constantly fighting them, and constantly losing. How does this admittedly small sample size of her career compare to the greats of her era? To Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and so on? Not well. Her smaller works, especially the gouaches, are way better; more accomplished, better composed, hectic, joyful. But the paintings on found wood, closer to sculptures than anything else, are great. Colourful, clever, improvised compositions that hint at forms but never go full figurative. You’d happily take a full show of them. But t