Free things to do in London this week

Talk about timing. If Samson Kambalu’s Fourth Plinth sculpture had been unveiled last month, it would have just been your ordinary run-of-the-mill, colonialism-is-bad, the-British-Empire-is-evil bit of public art. But now, what with the death of Her Maj, it looks a hell of a lot like speaking ill of the dead. Elizabeth II was the figurehead of the dying embers of the British Empire. The organisers knew that unveiling this work when it was meant to be unveiled – just a few days before her funeral – would have looked a bit like spitting on her grave, so the unveiling was delayed by a few weeks. But its new significance is inescapable, especially as rumours fly around that the Fourth Plinth might be given over to a permanent sculpture of the queen soon. After Liz’s death, there were also a handful of dissenting voices, people speaking up to say that she ruled over an empire defined by oppression, exploitation and cruelty. When she took over in 1952, a quarter of the world’s population was under British rule, and a lot of people all over the world have a problem with that rule and its legacy: especially as it’s a legacy that Britain has never atoned for.  It’s a very simple sculpture with very simple symbolism. So here we are, faced with the latest Fourth Plinth sculpture, and it’s all about the cruelty of colonialism. Sorry Liz. It’s a restaging of a photograph of pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley taken in 1914, at the opening of Chilembwe’s chu

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of imminent ecological disaster, but there are little things you can do: recycle, avoid single-use plastics, drive an electric car, or make enormous sculptures out of wool. That’ll help. It’s what Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña has done, and she’s suspended two of them from the ceiling of the Turbine Hall. Both are made from long strands of twisted white fabric: wool and rope and string and nets, tied into knots, twined around stones and sticks.  These are modern ‘quipu’, an ancient Andean form of pre-written communication, recording stories by tying knots. In these quiet, subtle, monochrome works, Vicuña is recording the story of the devastation of our planet, the destruction of nature, ecological collapse, all soundtracked by the sound of birdsong and pulses of electronic music. The sculptures are like dead trees in a forest, tombstones for the destruction of indigenous culture. Vicuña is part-activist, part-artist, and has spent her life fighting fascism and injustice and creating a body of indigenous-inspired minimal sculpture in the process. But these two works are totally dwarfed by the space. They’re lost in the Turbine Hall, the place looks empty, unfinished, like they ran out of budget. It’s all so slight that you barely notice it’s there. This could have been an impressive, impactful, emotive installation, but instead it's just a bit forgettable. The message of this installation is important, vital, but these sculptures really

‘Bake Off’, ‘Time Team’, ‘Bargain Hunt’: all harmless, safe, distracting entertainment. But American artist Gretchen Bender saw the malice in all of it, the threat of war, violence, corruption, disease. Yeah, even in ‘Bargain Hunt’.She died in 2004, but not before leaving behind a legacy of radical video art as part of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. This show is a recreation of her ‘TV Text & Image’ series. It features row after row of TVs, each one with a single phrase pasted across its screen: ‘class, race, gender’, ‘people with Aids’, ‘living with the poor’, etc etc etc. It’s such a simple move. By plastering short, mega-loaded phrases across live TVs, she recontextualizes every image being fed to you. It’s not long just ‘Loose Women’, it’s ‘Loose Women’ through the len of ‘body ownership’, ‘Bake Off’ through the prism of ‘lesbian and gay rights’, Bargain Hunt and ‘nuclear warheads’. It’s brutally effective, forcing you to reframe and rethink every image coming through the screen. Upstairs, all the TV pieces are accompanied by ear-piercing hisses of white noise and abstract shapes on blank screen. It’s a visual and sonic assault of images and ideas.  The exhibition is so good because it shows how TV is never just about entertainment. It’s never harmless. It’s capitalism in action; it’s products, narratives, propaganda being sold, and we all just buy in. This is Gretchen Bender forcing you to cash out.

It would be nice if objects could tell you the stories of their own past, but it would be even better if they could sing them. That’s what Oliver Beer’s managed to do: he’s shoved microphones down a ceramic frog’s throat, a wedgewood vase, a glazed gravy jug and an earthenware pot and he’s made them all sing.  Motion sensors trigger speakers attached to each pot, allowing their resonant frequencies to echo out into the space. It’s a signature move by the young British artist, and now he’s doing it in the Mithraeum, an ancient Roman temple in the middle of the City.  It works because vessels aren’t just containers of fluids or flowers, they're containers of ideas and histories. The 28 pots here range in date from the second century AD through to today. There are rough, textured, ancient jugs, neatly glazed modern ceramics, glistening metal buckets. Some are lavishly decorated and extravagant, others are minimal and functional. These vessels once served a purpose, they were water jugs, flower vases, or just displays of aesthetic taste or wealth. They had a reason to exist. As you walk past, each vessel hums at you in soft tones, producing gentle ambient melodies, like someone locked Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno in a pottery shop. The interactive element doesn’t always work, and is fiddly enough to distract you from the ideas. But it still sounds gorgeous. Some pots resonate together in big, sad minor chords, others create warm major intervals, some are harshly dissonant and wobbl

Memories are hazy, foggy things. The mind twists its own images and narratives with the passage of time.Iraq-born artist Mohammed Sami is trying to make sense of that fog in his work. The paintings here are reworked, rehashed, recooked memories of life in war-ravaged Iraq, of being co-opted to paint propaganda images, of fleeing, of life in a Swedish refugee camp. He’s processing – slowly, messily – his own past and trauma.  A view out of a plane window shows only ochre sand: a last glimpse of home, but there’s nothing to see, only vast, dusty, empty nothingness. One painting shows an empty podium, another an empty golden armchair, another an empty room with only a carpet and a portrait of a soldier. Everything is empty, abandoned, derelict. These were podiums that were stood on and chairs that were sat on by powerful men, but now there is nothing. Where once there was strength, violence, control, now there is only a void, a memory of those things. There’s a desperation to Sami’s drive to make sense of his memories  ‘Ten Siblings’ shows ten stacked mattresses, once slept on but not any more. ‘Sandstorm’ shows a living room once lived in, but no longer. The emptiness is relentless. There are rails of unworn black clothes, unoccupied prayer rooms, washing hung up to dry. And not a single human figure anywhere, just these barren instants of personal, political history.  There are spidery shapes in lots of the works, shadows cast by palm trees or telephone wires, like these mem

A micro-history of Britain is unfolding at Raven Row. But this isn’t the history of kings and wars and empires. This is the history of the people, told by the people.  The endless screens of the newly reopened Raven Row are showing videos by the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, a division of Auntie dedicated to allowing everyday folk to make films about the issues that mattered to them. It closed in 2004, but before that it racked up hundreds of films by hundreds of people, giving the good taxpaying citizens of the UK budgets, editorial freedom and a film crew to tell their stories. It’s like American cable-access TV, but in Scunthorpe.  It’s all captured on grim, grainy, grey film; it’s brutally nostalgic, intensely transportive. It starts with the CPU’s earliest work in the 1970s. There’s a play about the struggle for employment benefits, a debate about pelican crossings, a documentary about builders from Skelmersdale helping rebuild an earthquake-ravaged Italian town. There are films by the National Unions of the deaf, the Merseyside Chinese community, the Campaign Against Racism in the Media. There are comedy shows, punk zines, musical performances. It’s staggering, incredible, a beautiful window into the communities of 1970s Britain, their struggles, passions, battles, beliefs. These are the people who cared, and you can tell. Nothing’s changed: these battles are still being fought Upstairs, the focus shifts to community-access cable shows: everyday people allowed to mak

You shouldn’t give kids drugs. But if you do, you should film it. That’s what Haroon Mirza did. He arranged a kids’ mushroom-tea ceremony (not the psychedelic kind, but dizziness-inducing fly agaric), complete with gongs, singing bowls and wafts of smoke. The results are shown here accompanied by self-playing bongos and throbs of synthesiser drones, emitting steady tones at 111khz. The frequency is meant to heal, the mushroom tea is meant to collapse time. The installation builds and builds in intensity, gets louder and louder, the bongos start to play themselves, the drone pulsates, all reaching a fever pitch of sound and light, a hippy drum circle come to life. You don’t see a whole lot of tripping kids, but that’s not the point. It’s about the moment, the transcendence.  Next door you find more deep throbs, a solar panel tied to a rock and some lasers. Upstairs, three ant colonies are powered by more speakers and solar panels, little micro-universes of critters going about their lives in their non-hierarchical societies.  You could see all this as art about alternate ways of living, about psychoactive drugs, ant societies, and healing frequencies in a late capitalist world where those things genuinely feel like an escape. Though obviously Mirza is exploring these systems of belief, I’m not sure the engagement with those ideas is that deep or that serious here. Does Mirza really want us to live like ants? Does he really think frequencies can heal? Or – more likely – is he j

BOB is a complex character. It’s not just some bloke, it’s an AI lifeform, or a series of AI lifeforms, invented by artist Ian Cheng. BOBs have been generative artworks, films, installations, all with minds of their own. BOB even took over the Serpentine in 2018 as a menagerie of AI animals. Cheng’s work is complex, multi-layered, filled with lore. BOB even has its own wiki.  And it appears here in this latest work as a character in an anime about a young girl called Challice, whose scientist father melds her personality with an AI. Where is the line between human consciousness and artificial intelligence? Who is making the decisions? Challice becomes more and more BOB-like, the tech takes over. It’s intense, ultra-smart, hectic. If you go in the mornings, you can pause the film with an app, explore the different elements on screen. In the afternoons, it switches to cinema mode.  Upstairs, a generative video follows the trials and tribulations of Challice’s pet turtle as it tries to navigate her room. It’s real, it’s intelligent; a live simulation of a digital turtle figuring the world out in real time.  But Cheng’s so big on ideas and tech experimentation that the actual aesthetic results feel like an afterthought. If the film was better scripted, more beautifully made, we’d have something genuinely excellent. Instead, the execution just doesn’t match up to the ideas.Which is a shame, because the ideas are awesome. Cheng uses BOB to ask big, sweeping questions about the natu

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire Josef Albers’s obsessive dedication to one thing and one thing alone: colour. Across his long career, the hugely influential German modernist experimented endlessly with colour theory, toying with what worked and what didn’t, what melded and what clashed. A lifetime of tinkering led to a whole body of stunning colour studies, and the handful of works on display here are gorgeous. This is Albers’ ‘Variants/Adobe’ series, a bunch of abstract geometric experiments inspired by his trips to Mexico and the desert plains of the American Southwest. They find him messing with viewers’ perception of colour, over and over. No colour is meant to overlap here, instead, each contrasting shade is created by juxtaposition. Your brain perceives them one way in one context, another way in a different one. The ochre looks darker next to blood red than it does next to bile brown; yellow looks brighter next to green than next to beige, etc etc. Each little canvas here is a world of illusions, where your eyes are forced to compete with your brain to figure it all out. Each work is made of the same geometric elements: wide rectangles in the background, two pillars in front, all in slightly different dimensions. It could be a face with eyes, a cat’s ears, a building with two chimneys. You perceive all of it differently, individually. That’s Albers’s point: what you’re seeing isn’t a universal truth, it’s a personal one. The colours are yours to interpret, they’r

Lee Scratch Perry didn’t just dub music, he dubbed the whole world. The Jamaican sound pioneer took sonic source material and twisted it into untold trippy new shapes. And he did it with his art too. The works in this show are salvaged from his famous Black Ark studio in Jamaica – which he apocryphally burned to the ground in 1979 – and his later Blue Ark in Switzerland. The exhibition is exactly what you’d expect: a hectic tornado of found imagery, scrawled text and painted pictograms, all coalescing into a vibrant portrayal of how Perry’s brain worked.There are canvases across the walls, plastered in pages from science books, nature magazines and Perry’s own gig posters. They’re covered in images of Haile Selassie and Stone Cold Steve Austin, Jesus and a whole bunch of chimpanzees. He’s painted teardrops around them, written ‘supremacy’, ‘birds war’ and – over and over – his own name.  These are stuttering, no-holds-barred collages filled with visual samples from music, culture, religion and the cult of Lee Scratch Perry. There are stones all across the floor, folders filled with articles about how Perry was an afrofuturist visionary. It’s a total mess, a collision of Basquiat, pop and reggae culture that barely marks sense. If it was by anyone else, it would seem contrived, but it’s not, it’s by the brilliant Lee Scratch Perry. This is a portrait of a singular, eccentric genius, and genius is rarely anything but untidy.