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

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

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.

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.

It’s a nice day for a white wedding on the Cambridge Heath Road. In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms.  A creepy 1930s doll stares out of the window, a veil covering her face, perfect lace squeezing her tiny body. Two blonde wigs hang off a wall opposite twisted, impossibly fragile wedding totems; silver cutlery wrapped in ribbon and flowers, the old something borrowed, something blue. There’s a Polaroid of a dove, another of an androgynous bride, on frames of etched silver.  It’s all perfect, white, fragile, petite, and satisfyingly beautiful in its own way. It’s sort of like the world’s most austere bachelorette party. You could argue that marriage as an institution isn’t something desperately in need of critical discourse in 2024. But Costelloe is adapting it and twisting it to their own needs, to explore how one person’s perfect day is another’s intentional, oppressive and nefarious shaping of gender norms.  

In case you weren’t already aware, you are small, pitiful and insignificant. And if you should ever forget that, all you need to do is go find one of Richard Serra’s vast, deep-black, monumental drawings. Serra, who died only last month, was one of the most important figures in modern American art. He dealt in the void, the primal, the universal, the immense. His rusted steel sculptures made him famous, but this show (the last conceived while he was alive) focuses on his drawings.  There are only six on display; four oblong compositions made of abutting slabs of black and two splattered circles. All are done with thick, noxious paintstick. They’re tar-like, viscous voids, they feel chemical, inorganic, like poisonous elements that should never have been dug out from deep within the earth.  The circle works are the least successful, a bit too obviously cosmic and black hole-y. But the slabs are unbelievably good: huge, suffocating voids that threaten to leach off the canvas and embrace you into their nothingness. There are cracks of bare white canvas showing through - is it light beginning to emerge, or light being slowly swallowed by the darkness? That these drawings share so much of the power of his enormous sculptural work is testament to how good Serra was.  It feels like the latter, like Serra is looking out into the universe and realising it’s there to consume him, that we puny humans can’t fight the vastness of time and cosmic infinitude. To look at these drawings is to

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

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

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

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.