Free things to do in London this week

Possibly the world's most popular living artist, Yayoi Kusama is already the hottest art ticket in town with her Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern. While you're waiting for new tickets to be released for that, you can sate your Kusama hunger with this exhibition of new paintings, sculptures and her iconic bronze pumpkins.  At Victoria Miro until July 31. Booking is essential, details here. 

I was never much of a Moomins fan as a kid. To me, they seemed tinged with melancholy. Those marshmallowy trolls were always getting lost in dark, entangled forests or trudging through rainstorms. But they were a true reflection of their creator, Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist who had absolute love and reverence for the natural world, even at its most unruly. Along with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, she spent her summers on a remote island, Klovharun, in the Finnish archipelago, living in a simple cottage with no electricity, creating art side-by-side. A new exhibition about Jansson attempts to draw parallels between this island life in Klovharun and the landscape of the Walthamstow Wetlands. It may seem like a reach, but somehow, it makes sense. A tiny exhibit of photographs of Jansson, taken by her brother, are mounted to the red brick walls of the Wetland’s Victorian engine house, along with some great video footage of Jansson walking through Klovharun mid-storm as her face is repeatedly smacked by the wind and rain. Like that ever-quotable Moomin wisdom, the exhibition pared down, simple, there’s nothing inessential here. It spills out into a family-friendly art trail of Moomin-character cut outs dotted through the Wetlands, but the best part is the one you can’t see: an audio download of Jansson’s lyrical essay, ‘The Island’, read by her niece and set to music by Scottish composer Erland Cooper. When you look out at the bird-swarmed islands on the Wetlands’ reservoir,

Pick up handmade crafts and fresh local produce from King’s Cross’s weekend market. It’s found new digs in swanky Coal Drops Yard while its usual home is used as a car park for key workers. There won’t be any hot food, but you can still pick up provisions and unique pieces from designer-makers, including jewellery from Audra’s Brooches and blooms from English Flowerhouse. So wholesome.   

Has this year turned you into the kind of person who stops in their tracks to say things like ‘ooooh hang on, I think that might be wild garlic’? You’re not the only one. Lockdown transformed so many unsuspecting Londoners into nature-noticers and amatuer gardeners. Whether you killed all the plants you bought in 2020, or want to add to your personal arboretum, have a look at the Chiswick Flower Market where you can buy cati, succulents, cut flowers or bulbs for planting. If it’s pot plants and flowering perennials you’re after, visit Steve Burridge, a market trader whose family has been in the flower-selling biz since 1926.

Happiness isn’t hip. We like tortured artists, not happy ones. Think of the countless millions of sad songs about loneliness, heartbreak and misery. Then think of the happy ones. It’s ‘Walking on Sunshine’ and that’s it. Well, the Wellcome Collection doesn’t care, it absolutely loves Katrina and the Waves, and its new shows are all about happiness. ‘Tranquility’ comes first and you’re immediately confronted by Jasleen Kaur’s yoga-critical installation made of giant crystals and palo santo, taking aim at the exploitative, culturally insensitive practices of the wellness industry. It’s followed by old Taoist, Buddhist and German images of quiet, contemplative isolation, and sci fi master Octavia E Butler’s notes to self, filled with pleas of empowerment, before you find a thirteenth century book about centering the body that reads like it’s straight out of a 2018 juice bar.  You then get to sit silently in Chrystel Lebas’ immersive installation of photographs of ancient forests as the sound of a river burbles by. It’s forest bathing as photography. It’s calm, tranquil, but you can’t help thinking: do we really need an artist’s recreation of a forest when we can just, you know, go to a forest?  Upstairs, the ‘Joy’ exhibition tackles ideas of ecstatic happiness. Harold Offeh’s dancers in yellow are isolated but trying to lose themselves. David Shrigley does his usual wry, sardonic thing with drawings of rants and skulls and thumbs. Then there are ancient illustrations of whirling

You’re dwarfed by these paintings as you walk in. Bernardo Bellotto’s five views of Königstein are big, towering, heavy works. They loom over you with their pillars of grey stone and stark, sharp angles. Even when the Venetian painter (1721-1780) doesn't plonk the viewer at the foot of the hill looking up at the royal fortress of Frederick Augustus II - and instead chucks you inside the structure’s towering walls - you’re still just a little mite cowering before the architecture. He was commissioned to do these views as a court painter, and like any court painter his job was to make his boss look big and impressive. And it worked. Bellotto uses every weapon of perspective in his arsenal to create vistas that are intensely dramatic, that tell a story of fearsome power and impenetrable defenses.  There’s a lot of life here too: shepherds shepherding, gardeners gardening, courtiers courtiering. But it’s the fortress and the hill it’s on that stick with you. This was an artist reaching his peak and flexing his muscles in the process. Frederick Augustus II made a very smart hire.

It’s like Trigger’s Broom down in the London Mithraeum. The ancient Roman Temple of Mithras was discovered in the 1950s, moved about a bit, covered in crazy paving, moved into storage and then moved back a few metres from where they first found it, reassembled piece by piece each time. If you move a building from where it was built, is it still the same building? If you rebuild it, is it still itself? That’s one of the questions Korean artist Do Ho Suh is contending with upstairs, where he’s built his own recreation of an ancient temple: the long lost Sach’onwang-sa from the city of Gyeongju.  He’s recreated it based on a single account, imagining how it would have looked in its heyday. A square of stones marks the base and a frame above holds a rainbow of taut, shimmering fabric with a structure of twisting crystalline orange forms hung from the middle. It’s not an especially impressive work - if anything, it looks like a tarted up Argos gazebo - and it feels a little bit like it was just plonked in the space without much care. But what it lacks in that department it goes some way in making up for with its ideas, because a movable temple makes so much more sense when considered in the context of the Temple of Mithras, an ancient place of worship and revelry and prayer that has been endlessly moved and shifted and pushed about. Do Ho Suh’s structure takes that idea as a leaping off point to explore a world of rituals, prayer, transitoriness and power (the original temple was