Free things to do in London this week

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories.  To walk into the London-based artist’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches; you’re safe here, protected, just like Barrington felt as a kid with his grandmother. You’re brought into her home, her embrace. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. But the fun soon stops. The final space houses a dilapidated shop, built to the dimensions of an American prison cell, surrounded by chain link fencing. Its shutters creak open and slam shut automatically. This is a violent shock, a testimony to the dangers facing Black lives in the West: the police, the prison system, the barely concealed injustice.  After all the music and refuge of the rest of the installation, here, it’s like Barrington’s saying: ‘You want this? You want the carnival, the music, the culture? Then acknowledge the pain, the fear, the mistreatment, the subjugation too.’ I don’t think the paintings here are great, but painting’s not Barrington’s strong suit. He excels when he’s collaborating, sampling, sharin

Turns out, the line between erotic and bawdy is pretty thick. And right here in Clapham you’ve got Tom of Finland on one side of it, and Beryl Cook on the other. Studio Voltaire has brought the two artists together for a duo show exploring the links between Tom’s hyper-exaggerated homoerotic pornography and Beryl’s titillating seaside British comedy naughtiness. Let’s get this out of the way, duo shows of long-dead artists like this don’t work. You’re meant to explore the supposed similarities between the works, but you spend your whole time thinking about a nonexistent relationship between artists who never knew each other, instead of just thinking about the work. It’s curation over art. Tom and Beryl are done no favours by being shown together. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities. This could and should have been two separate solo exhibitions. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities But it’s too late for that, they’ve done it, so here we are. Both artists are brilliant in their own way. Tom pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme. His leather clad bikers bulge and ripple, they tease and play, smirk and pinch, fist and lick and spurt and penetrate. It’s idealised masculinity, it’s attraction, musk and spunk being celebrated, glorified, revelled in at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s brave, fun, sexy art. And he makes poor Beryl look tame, which is a bit unfair

Your taste reflects your personality, so all the art in this gallery full of snark, smut and death can only be Damien Hirst’s. ‘Dominion’, curated by his son Connor in his gallery out of art from his own collection, is a portrait of a man through the art he loves, and it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be. The show’s a mixture of peers, friends and idols. There’s a lot of art by Hirst’s mates, but luckily his mates are pretty good artists. Sarah Lucas is here in sculpture and photo; defiant, pissed off self-portraits, sniggeringly offensive toilet humour, soft, erotic bunnies. Gavin Turk pops up again and again with riffs on Warhol and Cattelan, Mat Collishaw flashes a Christ-like wound on his chest. Then there’s Marcus Harvey’s ‘Myra’, the painting that made a nation gag on its supper. It’s incredible to see it in the flesh, this vast portrait of a serial killer made out of child’s handprints, an icon of naughty ’90s culture, the ultimate spark of outrage, it’s like meeting a celebrity. All these works feel nostalgic, a teary nod to the heyday of young British art. Some of these artists have dropped off the radar, some haven’t, but it all feels like the past. It’s not all British. A couple of amazing Richard Princes are dotted throughout (one of the cowboys, some of the jokes, a nurse), and some big glitzy Jeff Koons canvases too. Two American giants of contemporary art on a level with Hirst.  Wit, gore, morbidity, cynicism and a couple of Francis Bacons That’s the fr

Hajime Sorayama dares to ask the questions everyone is too afraid to know the answers to, like: ‘what if there was a sexy robot at the Hindenburg Disaster’ and ‘what if Marilyn Monroe was a sexy robot?’ and ‘what if mermaids were sexy robots?’ and ‘what if Joan of Arc was a sexy robot, but with a genital piercing?’ You’ve always wanted to know, admit it, and now the answers are all right here. The Japanese illustrator has been melding photography with digital printing and painting techniques for decades, creating a collection of instantly recognisable ‘gynoid’ female robots with perfect metal carapaces, pouting cyborg lips and ample robo-bosoms. There’s a sculpture of one of his golden gynoids in the middle of the gallery, reaching for the stars and launching herself into a future of unbound horniness, but the rest of the show is made up of works on canvas. There’s Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, that mermaid, but also a ludicrously sexual Cleopatra and a naked zebra-woman hybrid. Soft, plump flesh is housed in curving, gleaming metal, the tenderness of the female body collides with the harsh reality of steel in slack-jawed worship of perfect future pin-ups. It’s almost painfully randy, throbbing with ridiculous sci fi turgidity.  Throbbing with ridiculous sci fi turgidity You can read a lot into this, if you want. These robots are gods to Sorayama, idols to be worshipped. But are they also a warning about the future of human-cyborg relations? The gallery argues that Sorayama’s

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression. Figures brandish machine guns, they slice their way through dense foliage with machetes, stalk around deserted corridors, all rendered in acidly bright yellows, pinks and oranges.  It’s obviously and heavily indebted to modern ultra-violent videogames, which makes it feel teenage and adolescent, immature and stoned, a 2am gaming sesh rendered in paint. But freezing these gaming moments highlights the intensity and weirdness of the activity: gaming allows you to embody a character who’s out to kill, it allows you to take a life in an act of leisure and relaxation. These paintings act as a sort of kink-infused celebration of violence as distraction, as fun, as a break from reality. A brilliant, atmospheric, intelligently dumb look at violence and leisure But Korine is an artworld interloper, an outsider, he’s doing it wrong; where’s the fine art degree, where are the art historical references, where are the necessary c

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

In 1992, master of modern American conceptualism John Baldessari (1931-2020) was invited to India. On an artist residency in a swanky modernist villa owned by some wealthy industrialists, he set about documenting, sampling and twisting the world around him, just like he’d always done. But here the classic Californian Baldessari-isms (palm trees, traffic lights, etc) are replaced with images of Indian street scenes, piles of mopeds, kites being flown from roofs, men on bicycles, endless beautiful flora. Those photos get overpainted and put next to screen-printed newspaper clippings of cricketers and politicians, collaged with huge truck mudflaps painted by local artisans with cartoony visions of demons, mosquitoes and futuristic trains. All those elements get composed into angular assemblages, a snapshot of India in the 1990s.  But I don’t think Baldessari was patronising or self important enough to think he was actually documenting a nation in flux, painting a portrait of nascent industrialisation or western influence post-independence or anything like that. Instead, I think he saw India as a place rich in aesthetic potential, just like anywhere, somewhere filled with signifiers and symbols he could chop up, reassemble and re-codify. This body of work isn’t the best thing he ever did, it’s like John Baldessari’s holiday snaps. But he’s John Baldessari, so even his holiday snaps are pretty great. 

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over. That act is at the centre of Matthew Barney’s latest film, ‘Secondary’; a quiet, unnerving, uncomfortable exploration of how bodies can be broken, destroyed and remade, and how violence is humanity’s ultimate spectacle. The gallery is decked out like the film set. A stiff red astroturf carpet lies on the floor; a sculptural assemblage of jumbotron screens, like an inverted ziggurat, hangs from the ceiling, a glowing digital object of worship. Two sculptures – one a net made of barbells laid over a sewer pipe, the other two stacked power lifting racks – are totemic testaments to physical anxiety; part-metal, part-plastic, part-hard, part-soft.  In the film, athletes in black and red uniforms wade through a filth-filled sewer, or stretch and warm up on the turf. Their bodies move, twist, prepare for action. We, the viewers, know what’s coming. When it arrives, it passes in a flash, bang, body against body. Stunned silence, a prone man on the floor. An opera singer ululates, a net made of barbells is lowered into the sewer, the act is played and replayed, slowed down and dissected until Stingley’s body shatters. All the bravado of masculinity was nothing but a frail shell waiting to cr

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.

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will hold the eclectic South Bank Summer Market. With over 60 traders, you’ll find a wide variety of bits and bobs to take home with you, from art, jewellery, fashion, kids’ products and more, all created by independent designers from across the capital. If you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site. Food and drink, live sports screenings and DJ sets will keep you occupied between shopping.