Free things to do in London this weekend

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

This regular music market is back, providing artisan produce and street food alongside its mega vinyl booty. Find records on sale from all sorts of indie labels including AD, Because, Big Dada, Brainfeeder, Chess Club, Chrysalis, Dead Oceans, Dirty Hit, Fire, Jagjaguwar, Late Night Tales, Matador, Marathon, Ninja Tune, Secretly Canadian, Third Man and more. Once you’ve flipped through as many sleeves as you can manage take a look at stalls from artists and makers including Babak Ganjei, Donna Harle, This Is Fun Isn't It, Hand Jazz, Kam Creates, Nicole O'Hara, Sri Mckinnon and East London Printmakers. Or, neck back a pint from the London Brewers’ Market. 

Fag-stained, booze-drenched, stumbling and slurring: John Deakin captured the lows of Soho at its height. He was the photographer of choice for Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and all the other artistic degenerates of central London in the 1950s and ’60s. He documented their fracturing lives, and he was commissioned by Francis Bacon to take photos that would become the basis for some of his most important paintings.  A handful of his photos have been brought together in this small exhibition by the influential writer and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain Sinclair, who used them to create a new semi-fictionalised biography of Deakin called ‘Pariah/Genius’. The images on display have been pulled from Bacon’s own archive; they’re in such a state of disrepair, half rotted and faded, torn, creased and splattered with ink and paint. Freud is captured timid and playful, Henrietta Moraes nude and supine, Muriel Belcher forlorn and fragile. Dylan Thomas stands waist-deep in greenery in a graveyard, comical and pathetic. The images are stark, amazing, vulnerable things; but their rips and tears at the hand of Bacon elevate them further. It’s all these figures drinking themselves to death, shagging themselves to death, smoking themselves to death and fading into the past right in front of you. It’s dark, joyless, miserable. It’s incredible.  There are ghostly, harsh paintings by Jock McFadyen on the walls too, as well as books and excerpts of sound and film works by Sinclair. The show functions as a

Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst. Her drawings are even more intense - whirling whorls of fierce spiralling marks on coloured paper, that double back on themselves over and over - but you can only just spy them in the office in the back of the gallery.  But it’s not as objects or images that Kalu’s work is the most interesting. Kalu has ‘limited verbal communication’; creating these sculptures and drawings is an act of expression, a feverish striving for visual communication, a plea for language. The objects are a symbol of that endeavour, but to see them is to be spoken to, reach out to, and brilliantly communicated with.

It’s all getting a bit nihilistic for Barbara Kruger. The American art icon’s show of new work at Sprüth Magers is full of existential dread, hefty pessimism and grim monochrome.  It’s her usual ultra-bold statement art, but in fading shades of grey. ‘End of World’ greets you as you walk in, ‘forget to remember’, ‘long life, crazy desire’ and ‘being and nothingness’ hang in the next room. It’s introspective, gloomy, almost morbid. It’s weird – though not necessarily in a bad way – to see the trademark aggression and energy drained from her work to be replaced with fatalism and misery.  The early black and white collage works upstairs are more familiar, and totally brilliant, full of righteous ire, political invective, poetic meanderings, sneering sarcasm and acerbic wit. ‘We are not sugar and spice’ it says over an image of pigtails, ‘who speaks? who is silent?’ over a cupped ear, ‘make my day’ over a cat trailing raw meat from its mouth. Direct, confrontational, immediate.  Despite being so small, the show ends up being a lot more satisfying than Kruger’s big recent Serpentine exhibition. Seeing the work so simply makes you realise how overthought, over-egged, less immediate and infinitely more disappointing that show was. It seemed OK at the time, but in retrospect it didn’t work. Kruger’s art doesn’t need to be adapted to fit on TV screens, or animated, or interpreted, or rehashed. It felt like a greatest hits show without any of the hits. Her art is best when it’s like th

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.

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile, the USSR, touring a retrospective of his work and making new art in response to all the visual stimuli he encountered. The results are on display here in the first gallery show dedicated to ROCI since 1991, and it’s all classic late-period Rauschenberg. Overlapping, clashing screenprints are a chaotic mess of imagery: architecture, road signs, animals, monuments, flags. Symbols of statehood are overlaid with symbols of everyday life: a bust of Lenin, a topless bather, a squealing boar, the Twin Towers, machinery, newsprint. Rauschenberg is documenting the visual reality of 1980s life under oppressive regimes around the world. By touring the work around those very countries, he hoped to offer a way out, a path towards liberation. It’s a very old fashioned and now-problematic form of cultural outreach. It’s the Western artist as saviour, it’s Rauschenberg thinking that showing his art in oppressed nations will help free their people. It’s naive, arrogant American imperialism under the guise of art. He’s left no space for the artists of these countries, it

Which way, young traveller: will you choose a life of art, literature, music and creative fulfilment (and the likely associated poverty), or a life of corporate subjugation, being slowly suffocated by a suit and tie (and the likely associated financial rewards)? It’s a question being asked by English artist Luke Burton in the slightly queasy, uneasy environs of an art gallery in a private school, where he’s been artist in residence for a year. Watching the kids of this school be encouraged to play, pushed to learn and grow while also being moulded for financial excellence has left Burton conflicted. His art asks: do we want a life of lanyards and conferences, or a life of paintings and poetry? A giant painted lanyard dominates the room, a vast modern shackle tying you to your corporate life. Images of footballs and crossword grids are everywhere, jostling for space with portraits of stiff-collared civil servants. ‘Press’ it says along one wall, ‘release’ on another. There’s all this tension, this desire for play and freedom fighting with the lure of a career in the corporate machine. We want to kick balls, do puzzles, but we’re pushed towards lives in banking and insurance.  Burton sees it as almost unnatural, he sees creativity waiting to blossom in everyone, but being smothered by careerism. I think he underestimates just how powerful the pull of economic supremacy and financial excess is for the average person.  But either way, it’s a modern anxiety, a battle between desir

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.

Unholy desecration, heathenistic violence, sacrilegious iconoclasm; the very flames of hell are licking the walls and ancient wooden beams of this church in Islington (the new home of Castor Gallery), and it’s all because of Fabian Ramirez. This is the Mexican painter’s act of revenge, this is how he gets back at the colonisers for using Christianity as a weapon of conquest and oppression. The works are vast, flame-singed paintings on wood done with encaustic (an ancient method of painting with heat and wax), filled with images of writhing bodies, fires and symbols of religion. In the central altarpiece, a priest and an angel watch on as indigenous gods tumble in flames and snakes coil across the panels. Symbols of christianity battle with Mayan and Aztec gods, nude figures copulate and fornicate. It’s all heady, violent, sensual and deeply spiritual. But this isn’t sacrilegious iconoclasm for the sake of worshipping Satan or anything. This is about righting historical wrongs. In Mexico, indigenous communities have taken to Christianity all while maintaining their native spiritual practices. Ramirez’s work is a violent testament to endurance in the face of oppression, to how culture survives, even when it has been set aflame.