London events in June

Life is more interesting when the carpet doesn’t match the curtains. And blocking out the light in the top floor flat of Raven Row are dark drapes created by artist Martine Syms, decorated in kaleidoscopic motifs of arses and underwear. Behind it, a 360-degree video installation plays out an improvised monologue inspired by Syms’s great aunt. It all takes place in a residential flat reminiscent of a 1965 ‘Coronation Street’ set, where patterned wallpaper and leafy floor designs scream at one another through muddy shades of brown and green. The space is rarely accessible to the public, but the doors have been flung open for ‘56 Artillery Lane’, an exhibition with a feminist gaze that swallows the idea of ‘home’, digests it, and projectile vomits the concept across Raven Row’s five floors in conflicting forms, featuring installations from 14 different artists. Start in this musty tower and work your way down the Huguenot building, allowing yourself to stumble into video art like ‘Poison the Cure’ by Jenna Bliss, an oblique 25-minute look at birth control trials on Puerto Rican women. Relive a 1974 feminist squat exhibition ‘A Woman’s Place’ by SLAG (South London Art Group) using a well-researched, print magazine for the audience to keep, and find physical paintings from SLAG member Kate Walker just around the corner. It doesn’t always come off (cue the inclusion of a dowdy Stanley Spencer painting, which rests beside copper painted furniture, oxidized with piss) but the incong

Poor Donald Trump has been the object of endless art ridicule and rage. There was that painting of him with the itsy bitsy teenie weenie, the mural of him snogging Putin and now there’s Awol Erizku. The young black American artist (best known for taking the most liked Instagram photo of all time, an image of Beyoncé draped in flowers to announce her pregnancy) has filled this dark room with black panthers, broken fences and swastikas. You don’t need a PhD in nodding at art to figure out that he’s not happy. A lot of the work here uses plywood and corrugated metal, left raw or cracked and crushed. It’s the disintegrating streets of America, dragged into the gallery and turned into ire. A black panther stalks through the paintings, scrawled over an American flag, smashing through a white picket fence, paired with a basketball hoop and an African mask. It’s the most powerful symbol of revolutionary black anger, and Erizku splashes it across the space with vitriol. The floor is covered with industrial black metal, hip hop pounds out of speakers, and in the centre of the room  a wooden door is graffitied with Trump’s name and a swastika. These are the broken remnants of an angry nation, laid bare. Yes, there’s something icky about all of this political fire being for sale to the uber-rich, and the symbolism is too obvious and lacking in nuance. But Erizku clearly has something important to say. And when someone is speaking this clearly, you’d better be ready to sit up and l

The yearly prize makes a return, bringing together an international selection of photographers and offering one the £30k prize for their contributions to the medium. Always diverse, always eye-opening. 

Jordan Wolfson raises a baseball bat over his head and smashes it down into another man’s face. He stamps on his head, over and over, squelchy belches singing out with every impact. Then back to the baseball bat – bang, bang, bang – the body’s convulsing, its face a mush. In the background, a cantor sings a Jewish prayer. Then you take the virtual reality goggles off and you’re back in the real world, you feel shaky and disoriented, palms sweaty, arms heavy. ‘Real Violence’ by this young American artist is stomach-turning, shocking and horrifying, but it’s also one of the most important works of art you will see this year. This two-space show is made up of a massive video installation at Kingly Street and two sculptures and the VR work at Davies Street. The sculptures are a wood cabin with a contorted witch’s face for a roof and a massive articulated doll of a boy, all in black, lying prostrate in chains, its face an evil grimace. They’re childhood fairytales with the sugar taken out, leaving behind pure horror. Wolfson has covered the bigger gallery with purple carpet and a collection of flat screen TVs showing ‘Riverboat Song’, a short animated movie centred on an adorable little animated boy, cherubic and mischievous. It lacks the aggression of ‘Real Violence’ but more than makes up for it in nasty intent. We all grew up watching the Roadrunner condemning Wile E Coyote to a million humiliating deaths, and Jerry torturing Tom in countless unimaginable ways – cartoons a

The British artist will be showing a trilogy of films made in the last few years, including 'Greater Fool Theory', which looks at capitalism, anti-capitalism and what it means to be an artist exploring such themes.

Walking into The Showroom, you might think you’ve made a wrong turn into a feminist group’s meeting. But look past the DIY aesthetics and give this exhibition time – you’ll be rewarded by the political resonance and relevance of Alex Martinis Roe’s work. ‘To Become Two’ has few – if any – of the visual hooks visitors might expect from an art show. Instead, the familiar paraphernalia of zine fairs and consciousness-raising groups takes its place: shouty posters, mismatched chairs, a stray book by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. A film installation screened onto makeshift metal partitions narrates the stories of six past and present feminist communities, with a geographical spread ranging from Australia to Italy. They cover a broad span: from experiments in co-parenting and strategies for tackling institutional sexism, to working in male-dominated environments. Given that the longest film is 54 minutes, there’s a lot of ground covered here. Stories of past mistakes and successes offer advice on how to, for instance, deflect the infighting that so often afflicts progressive efforts, or how to arrange a successful meeting. This is filmmaking designed to inform the current generation of feminists. Saving the show from po-faced worthiness is the liveliness and character of Roe’s subjects, young and old. A poster sums it up: ‘It was an unusual way of doing politics. There were friendships, loves, gossip, tears, flowers…’ There’s a palpable sense in this show that the art doesn’t matt

Here’s something that will be news to no one: photography is in crisis. Shock horror! OMG etc, etc. It’s not really, of course, just bits of it. This group show of 14 artists who all use photography in their work spans 40 years, from the ’70s to now, and it looks at a paradox. For the first 150 years of its young life, photography was all rebellious: it questioned value, talent and meaning: the frameworks that traditionally defined art. Then the internet and social media and baboon selfies and Tinder happened, and photography suddenly looked its age, a ubiquitous media parent/enabler: reliable, cheap, undemanding of love. What were artists to do? The answers vary. Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff are the pre-internet old masters here. Once upon a time their work questioned the surface of the world and ideas of ‘reality’. So a grainy Sherman shot from her defining ’70s ‘Film Stills’ series seems removed from time and place and psychologically unanchored. Ruff’s enormous blown-up portrait heads are… big: they crush you with a billboard-size question of what it means to be human. Just as big and just as remote, Gursky’s bleak fractalisation of the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall’s lightbox of a grim concrete outflow pipe above a strange, orange-flecked river both tempt you into the age-old photographic trap: it’s a photo, it must be ‘real’, mustn’t it? These are all masterful works: you should go see them. But they’re also quite sure in their differ

A show of new work by the Scottish artist, whose sculptures and installations are typically big, abstract, colourful, illuminated, and influenced by the lurid signage of cities.

Life is more interesting when the carpet doesn’t match the curtains. And blocking out the light in the top floor flat of Raven Row are dark drapes created by artist Martine Syms, decorated in kaleidoscopic motifs of arses and underwear. Behind it, a 360-degree video installation plays out an improvised monologue inspired by Syms’s great aunt. It all takes place in a residential flat reminiscent of a 1965 ‘Coronation Street’ set, where patterned wallpaper and leafy floor designs scream at one another through muddy shades of brown and green. The space is rarely accessible to the public, but the doors have been flung open for ‘56 Artillery Lane’, an exhibition with a feminist gaze that swallows the idea of ‘home’, digests it, and projectile vomits the concept across Raven Row’s five floors in conflicting forms, featuring installations from 14 different artists. Start in this musty tower and work your way down the Huguenot building, allowing yourself to stumble into video art like ‘Poison the Cure’ by Jenna Bliss, an oblique 25-minute look at birth control trials on Puerto Rican women. Relive a 1974 feminist squat exhibition ‘A Woman’s Place’ by SLAG (South London Art Group) using a well-researched, print magazine for the audience to keep, and find physical paintings from SLAG member Kate Walker just around the corner. It doesn’t always come off (cue the inclusion of a dowdy Stanley Spencer painting, which rests beside copper painted furniture, oxidized with piss) but the incong

Poor Donald Trump has been the object of endless art ridicule and rage. There was that painting of him with the itsy bitsy teenie weenie, the mural of him snogging Putin and now there’s Awol Erizku. The young black American artist (best known for taking the most liked Instagram photo of all time, an image of Beyoncé draped in flowers to announce her pregnancy) has filled this dark room with black panthers, broken fences and swastikas. You don’t need a PhD in nodding at art to figure out that he’s not happy. A lot of the work here uses plywood and corrugated metal, left raw or cracked and crushed. It’s the disintegrating streets of America, dragged into the gallery and turned into ire. A black panther stalks through the paintings, scrawled over an American flag, smashing through a white picket fence, paired with a basketball hoop and an African mask. It’s the most powerful symbol of revolutionary black anger, and Erizku splashes it across the space with vitriol. The floor is covered with industrial black metal, hip hop pounds out of speakers, and in the centre of the room  a wooden door is graffitied with Trump’s name and a swastika. These are the broken remnants of an angry nation, laid bare. Yes, there’s something icky about all of this political fire being for sale to the uber-rich, and the symbolism is too obvious and lacking in nuance. But Erizku clearly has something important to say. And when someone is speaking this clearly, you’d better be ready to sit up and l

Fear, paranoia, anger, poverty, conservatism, unemployment. Sound familiar? 1930s America bears a worrying resemblance to 2017 America: a bubbling cauldron of toxic ingredients, an angry, disenfranchised population, crushed by failure and trying desperately to pull themselves out of the mire. The triggers were the 1929 Wall Street crash, the Great Depression that followed, and the devastating drought that decimated the American farming industry. Suddenly, rural America was being abandoned en masse for the cities. The paintings in the opening room here are filled with the hope of urbanity. A young black couple heading for evening out in Harlem; muscular workers pointing to bright city lights; people gyrating in dance competitions. There are gigantic hulking machines and drunken sailors lolling about on shore leave. But the cracks are starting to show: disenchanted black workers, exhausted union leaders. Edward Hopper’s crisp, minimal, iconic works are full of dark sadness. A solitary man struggling at a gas pump; a woman, tense and forlorn, hiding in the corner of a cinema. Not all the paintings here are good, let alone great, but what a story: the American Dream was leaving people lost in a nightmarish abyss. So it’s no wonder that the ruralists came along. This group of artists longed for America’s pioneer past, when men were men, fields were fertile and women all looked like sad Dutch potatoes. The traditionalism captured here by Paul Sample and Thomas Hart Benton is so

The yearly prize makes a return, bringing together an international selection of photographers and offering one the £30k prize for their contributions to the medium. Always diverse, always eye-opening. 

Jordan Wolfson raises a baseball bat over his head and smashes it down into another man’s face. He stamps on his head, over and over, squelchy belches singing out with every impact. Then back to the baseball bat – bang, bang, bang – the body’s convulsing, its face a mush. In the background, a cantor sings a Jewish prayer. Then you take the virtual reality goggles off and you’re back in the real world, you feel shaky and disoriented, palms sweaty, arms heavy. ‘Real Violence’ by this young American artist is stomach-turning, shocking and horrifying, but it’s also one of the most important works of art you will see this year. This two-space show is made up of a massive video installation at Kingly Street and two sculptures and the VR work at Davies Street. The sculptures are a wood cabin with a contorted witch’s face for a roof and a massive articulated doll of a boy, all in black, lying prostrate in chains, its face an evil grimace. They’re childhood fairytales with the sugar taken out, leaving behind pure horror. Wolfson has covered the bigger gallery with purple carpet and a collection of flat screen TVs showing ‘Riverboat Song’, a short animated movie centred on an adorable little animated boy, cherubic and mischievous. It lacks the aggression of ‘Real Violence’ but more than makes up for it in nasty intent. We all grew up watching the Roadrunner condemning Wile E Coyote to a million humiliating deaths, and Jerry torturing Tom in countless unimaginable ways – cartoons a

The British artist will be showing a trilogy of films made in the last few years, including 'Greater Fool Theory', which looks at capitalism, anti-capitalism and what it means to be an artist exploring such themes.

Vanessa Bell spent her life surrounded by famous people, and has come to be remembered primarily as Virginia Woolf’s sister. But she was one of the most interesting characters of her day and – from the look of this exhibition – one of its finest artists too. This is her first major retrospective, which just goes to show.  She lived and worked within the sexually fluid Bloomsbury Set, painting a group of brilliant posh people who all collaborated and shagged each other. She was excellent at capturing people in creative contemplation: writing, reading, thinking – even (shock horror) knitting. The best pieces here present a clash of tweedy refinement and brash sensuality. Her gaze is sympathetic, accepting, tolerant of whatever the sitter presents her: how very Bloomsbury.  Artistically, too, Bell tried everything. There are forays into abstraction and Braque-style cubism; her naked male forms have a Degas flavour. Even when these forays are derivative they’re still very good. But she is at her best when doing straightforward Post-Impressionist portraits of her muckers, from John Lennon-esque Lytton Strachey to Roger Fry, who actually invented the term Post-Impressionism.  Also included in the ticket price is some modern icing for your cake. Musician and poet Patti Smith began visiting Vanessa Bell’s artistic retreat Charleston, in Sussex, in 2003, and created a project based on turn-of-the-century photography, including Bell’s. You can see it displayed alongside Bell’s own w

Walking into The Showroom, you might think you’ve made a wrong turn into a feminist group’s meeting. But look past the DIY aesthetics and give this exhibition time – you’ll be rewarded by the political resonance and relevance of Alex Martinis Roe’s work. ‘To Become Two’ has few – if any – of the visual hooks visitors might expect from an art show. Instead, the familiar paraphernalia of zine fairs and consciousness-raising groups takes its place: shouty posters, mismatched chairs, a stray book by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. A film installation screened onto makeshift metal partitions narrates the stories of six past and present feminist communities, with a geographical spread ranging from Australia to Italy. They cover a broad span: from experiments in co-parenting and strategies for tackling institutional sexism, to working in male-dominated environments. Given that the longest film is 54 minutes, there’s a lot of ground covered here. Stories of past mistakes and successes offer advice on how to, for instance, deflect the infighting that so often afflicts progressive efforts, or how to arrange a successful meeting. This is filmmaking designed to inform the current generation of feminists. Saving the show from po-faced worthiness is the liveliness and character of Roe’s subjects, young and old. A poster sums it up: ‘It was an unusual way of doing politics. There were friendships, loves, gossip, tears, flowers…’ There’s a palpable sense in this show that the art doesn’t matt

The annual dance and performance returns for 2017 across a number of institutions including the Royal Academy and Somerset House. A programme – chock-full of performances, talks, workshops and other events – will revolve around themes of nationhood, inclusivity and identity politics.  

Here’s something that will be news to no one: photography is in crisis. Shock horror! OMG etc, etc. It’s not really, of course, just bits of it. This group show of 14 artists who all use photography in their work spans 40 years, from the ’70s to now, and it looks at a paradox. For the first 150 years of its young life, photography was all rebellious: it questioned value, talent and meaning: the frameworks that traditionally defined art. Then the internet and social media and baboon selfies and Tinder happened, and photography suddenly looked its age, a ubiquitous media parent/enabler: reliable, cheap, undemanding of love. What were artists to do? The answers vary. Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff are the pre-internet old masters here. Once upon a time their work questioned the surface of the world and ideas of ‘reality’. So a grainy Sherman shot from her defining ’70s ‘Film Stills’ series seems removed from time and place and psychologically unanchored. Ruff’s enormous blown-up portrait heads are… big: they crush you with a billboard-size question of what it means to be human. Just as big and just as remote, Gursky’s bleak fractalisation of the Chicago Stock Exchange and Wall’s lightbox of a grim concrete outflow pipe above a strange, orange-flecked river both tempt you into the age-old photographic trap: it’s a photo, it must be ‘real’, mustn’t it? These are all masterful works: you should go see them. But they’re also quite sure in their differ

A show of new work by the Scottish artist, whose sculptures and installations are typically big, abstract, colourful, illuminated, and influenced by the lurid signage of cities.

Whether it’s Robert Mapplethorpe’s sleeve photo for ‘Horses’ or the cover of Time Out, we’re used to seeing Patti Smith in front of the camera. But next spring Londoners will get a chance to see the world through the singer’s own lens, as 17 of her photographs go on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Visit the gallery’s exhibition of work by Vanessa Bell and you’ll also find a smaller show called ‘Legacy: Photographs by Vanessa Bell and Patti Smith’. Smith’s photos document her residency at Charleston, Bell’s house in Sussex, in 2003, with subjects including Bell’s bed and library. They’ll be displayed alongside Bell’s own photo albums (on loan from the Tate Archives) which capture the Bloomsbury Group of artists, writers and thinkers before the war. It sounds like a fascinating coming together of two groundbreaking artists, so if you’re heading south this spring, don’t miss out.

Work by the American artist who's best known for his delicate, interconnected box sculptures.

A major – and long overdue – survey of the British photographer, whose scenes of inner-city scenes from the '50s and '60s document the seismic period of postwar social change.

One of my greatest fears in life is accidentally destroying art. Just clumsily backing into a sculpture that’s worth more than I am and sending it tumbling fatally to the ground as the artist weeps, with the work’s countless, shattered, priceless shards dripping through their fingers like sand. It keeps me awake at night. So Larry Bell’s ‘6X6 An Improvisation’ is a living nightmare for me. The six head-high glass cubes of the installation are barely held together – the towering sheets just balance against each other, bound only by glue. One good shove and bang, gone. The veteran American artist has made a career out of making me nervous. His minimal geometric abstraction is a whirlwind of near-nothingness – everything is steely, barely-perceptible perfection. There’s two series of works on paper here. One is stripes and ovals made of oxidised metal vapour; the other features swirling shapes covered in rainbows of clashing colours, like oil slicks on the ocean. These are cold, reductive, stark works of art. Bell removes everything that might get in the way of pure geometrics; he gets rid of emotion, interpretation, the whole lot. The cubes of glass – some opaque, some metallic, some clear – pull the same trick, but on a human scale. They reflect you and obscure you, slice you in half, multiply you into infinity. You become a part of the maths, you become the abstraction. By presenting you with nothing but an office cubicle of the future, with nothing but shapes, Bell gives