London events in April

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

For a show called ‘Impressionists in London’, there isn’t an awful lot of impressionism here. It’s almost as if the Tate organised a whole exhibition of old French paintings and realised too late that no one knows who any of these artists are. Then, in a total pat-on-the-back, give-that-guy-a-promotion moment of genius, someone came up with the idea of calling it ‘Impressionists in London’ despite the fact that most of the art is by people who had absolutely naff all to do with impressionism. Brilliant, now sit back and watch the ticket sales roll in. Sure, there’s a bit of impressionism here: some stunning Monets, some middling Pissarros and some okay Sisleys. But they’re only part of the story. The show begins with the Franco-Prussian war. France is gripped by destruction, and artists are fleeing for the drizzly embrace of Blighty. There are a couple of introductory photos of Paris and some paintings by Gustave Doré and Monet, but then you get hit with a room full of James Tissot paintings, and that’s where it gets good. Tissot came to England to make a name for himself as a society painter, and boy did he ace it. His paintings of parties in mansions, picnics in the garden, trysts on the Thames are lush, cool, refined and debauched. His colours are deep and luxurious, his fabrics flowing and infinitely detailed. This is society painting at its finest: knowing, cynical and sexy. He’s an obscure and not particularly cool artist, but it’s such a treat to see so many of his

Now in its fifty-third year, the renowned and celebrated annual wildlife photography competition exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum with images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. One hundred images record tiny insects through to massive mammals.

Deep in the bowels of an empty underground concrete cavern in Islington, a dozen-odd professional mourners are singing their lamentations. If watching that sounds like a weak way to spend a gorgeous spring evening, I feel you. For context, I left a group of friends and a whole night of beer on the warmest day of the year to watch Taryn Simon’s subterranean Artangel commission. I went, obviously, under tipsy duress. But what I saw left me overwhelmed, shocked, emotional and heartbroken. Forget the weather and the friends and the beer, Simon’s work is everything art should be, and it’s the best show of the year by far. The mourners enter through gates of neon and head to their stations in this barren concrete bunker in total silence, sitting in alcoves illuminated by bare light sculptures. Then the noise starts. A blind man with an accordion sings, two African women cough and cry and splutter, two men wail over a stinging drone note, a single woman leans her head against the bare, cold concrete wall. The space is freezing, the sound harsh and echoing. It's minimal and beautiful with its monochrome world of concrete and black clothes, it's chaotic and tense. You stumble from mourner to mourner, trying to capture a sense of the heartache they’re bellowing. You’re left in a daze. You can’t concentrate on any of it. Some are too quiet, others are too loud. All the sounds clash and crash against each other, echoing through the space. This isn’t one single mourning event, this is

For generations, the British travelled around the globe, colonised countries and then nicked all their nice shit for our museums. I mean, the British Museum is great and all, but how do you think they got all that good stuff? Our museums, as a result, sort of relegate other countries to cultural footnotes in our own history. Africa is a collection of tribal masks and ceremonial shields, the Arab world is carpets and calligraphy, etc etc etc. American artist Fred Wilson undermines all those narratives. In the work here, Wilson draws lines between Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Lining the walls are old Orientalist paintings and prints where single black figures are highlighted, leaving everything else obscured. A neat little inversion. There are African masks and statues on plinths dotted throughout the space, globes painted totally black, African flags reprinted in black and white, cowrie shells sprinkled on the floor. Then, in the middle of the space, two big black Ottoman-tiled walls, swirling with Arabic calligraphy, stand proud. One says ‘Mother Africa’, the other says ‘Black is Beautiful’. Two huge pitch-black glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling, black glass teardrops drip down the walls. It’s direct, obvious, angry art. Wilson has created a micro-museum of forgotten black history, of conflicting colonial narratives. You feel like he’s grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and screaming into your face: ‘Black people were here! We won’t be forgotten!’ The exhibition

Humanity is capable of abominable acts of violence and degradation. We ignore most of them – they happen somewhere else, to other people – but our capacity for atrocity was laid bare during the Iraq war when images emerged of the humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One showed Ali Shallal al-Qaisi stood on a box, a hood pulled over his head, arms spread wide, with wires attached to his fingers and genitals. Brutal, degrading, vile. A painting of that horrifying act opens Rachel Howard’s show at Newport Street Gallery. His cloak is rendered as dripping, stuttering lines of weeping green and black, his hood is a drooping mask of misery. It’s a brilliant, violent little painting. The rest of the works here are much bigger and translate al-Qaisi’s story into an allegory for Christ’s stations of the cross, a classic art historical trope. Howard does away with obvious symbolism, creating instead these huge, almost entirely monochromatic, sandy-coloured abstracts. They glisten; they look hard, permanent, like polished wood or marble. The only shape in any of them is the box from the photo of al-Qaisi’s torture – a constant, repeating allusion to his suffering. A plinth, or the edge of a crucifix. The paint seems to stutter like a misfiring printer, creating washes of blurry colour, a little nod to Gerhard Richter. There’s also a barren solemnity and austerity that hints at Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Howard’s sights aren’t set on grand emotional gestures but on so

The Hayward Gallery reopens after two years with a bang and two-and-a-half floors of photos by German snapper Andreas Gursky. I say ‘snapper’, but obviously he’s an art megastar, whose massive prints sell for millions. And I say a ‘bang’ but it’s more of a vast low-frequency ‘Oooooaaaaauuuuummmmmm’ sort of sound: the sound of things being crushed flat on to photographic paper. They may only be microns thick, and Gursky might not do conflict, or dispossession, or the other things we expect in twenty-first century photography, but these images are some heavy shit. There’s no fancying about here: the Hayward has played it safe, delivering a solid retrospective. But that’s a good thing. You see how themes and scale develop together. From the get-go, Gursky is about the environments we in the West inhabit. They’re not strictly landscapes, but nor are the figures in them really individuated. A knot of people look at an airport; sightseers clamber up a mountainside. Gradually, they change: a single man is dwarfed by a bridge (‘Ruhr Valley’, 1989); tiny anglers are lost in a huge river landscape (‘Mülheim’, 1989). Then, in the early ’90s Gursky increases both his scale and his use of digital technology, stitching together multiple images, flattening perspective, creating giant, near-abstract reflections of the places we spend our lives. ‘Untitled #1’ (1993) is a shot of grey carpet tiles, but we want them to be fog, or a wild seascape, or anything, just as we want to be anywhere exc

You know how people say that you can tell God is cruel because he lets things like famine and disease and war happen? Well here’s something else you can tell about God: he’s got terrible taste in art, because he lets Bill Viola make videos for his cathedrals.  ‘Mary’ is his second (second!) permanent (permanent!!!) video work in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I asked a member of staff what ‘permanent’ means and was told: ‘Something like 300 years’. Lord have mercy. The first work, ‘Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)’ was unveiled in 2014, and sits in the opposite corner to this new companion piece of permanent (seriously, like, permanent) religious video art.  Let me take you through the work. It starts with a shaven-headed woman – playing Mary, mother of Jesus – breastfeeding a baby Christ as a timelapse of Los Angeles speeds by on a CGI background. Urgh. Then, it cuts to a river running through a red rock canyon. Mary, a different one this time, walks through the water. Then she stands on a mountaintop, sits in front of a fire in the snow, walks through a field and, well, yadda yadda yadda. Images of cracked salt flats, forests and riverbeds get collaged together, all moving in super slo-mo, ultra HD. Then – pow! – black and white shots of piles of dead fish. There’s a metaphor at play for Mary as grieving mother of the world. Then it cuts to Mary cradling the dead body of an adult Jesus, tears streaming down her face in the ruins of a church. The whole thing slowly fades to grainy

The sea throbs and pulsates; a thick, heaving mass of mud, tar, lava and foam surrounds you. But these mucusy waves that US artist Sondra Perry dunks you in are not made of water. They are digitally manipulated versions – wrapping around the walls of the gallery from projectors – of the JMW Turner seascape ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On’. In that painting, the sea has just swallowed 133 dead black slaves. It’s a vicious, overwhelming and staggering work of art, and Perry drags you down into it, letting you kick and scream, gasping for air against the pounding waves of colonial history. In one of the central spaces, a rowing machine is hooked up to screens showing the same waves – you’re metaphorically put on that ship, you become part of the machinery of oppression. Another work here is a bicycle workstation (like a standing desk, but with a static bike attached) facing three screens with a digital avatar ranting against white cultural imperialism. It’s an aggressive, affecting work of art, though there’s a faint whiff of hypocrisy in someone railing against a system that – by showing in a major art institution and doing little to subvert it – they are very much a part of. But the statement, in the end, is simple: centuries of our culture have been built on black deaths. The truth is bigger than that, of course. Colonialism took in swathes of Asia and America too, but Perry’s aim is laser-beam focused. She forces you to recognise a histo

Imagine you’re a squash – as in, a butternut squash. Now imagine what kind of art you would most like, based on your squashy-brained characteristics. For her 2018 Tate Britain Commission for the Duveen Galleries, Anthea Hamilton has created a squash-human hybrid, performed each day by an individual dressed in one of seven outfits inspired by various strains of curcubita (that’s for you, ‘Gardeners’ World’ fans). She then picked a collection of nine sculptures from the Tate’s existing collection, plus one from The Hepworth Wakefield, that might be of liking to the squash. The pumpkin-friendly artworks are bulbous, ballooning mounds of sculpture – the kind you want to sneakily squeeze. Because, the artist reasons, squashes can’t see well so choose their art based on touch. Bonkers, right? But ridiculous as the idea sounds, Hamilton’s takeover is a brilliant and irreverent response to basically everything the Tate, as the grand old dame of establishment art, represents and displays. The dark floor of the pretty, neoclassical gallery is covered with over 7,000 white squares, with the sculptures inside various tiled blocks. It looks like a high-end swimming pool, which is the last place you’d expect to find some hard-skinned vegetables (technically fruit, but shh!) doing whatever the hell they want. There are no rules: they can even take a nap. Which is the attitude that makes the whole thing so much fun. The mishmash of sculptures shoves the modernist curves of Henry Moore