London events in May

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

If being around fragile objects gives you the sweats and fills you with the fear that you’re seconds away from tripping over and accidentally destroying someone’s life’s work, this exhibition may not be for you. The first room of Susan Collis’s show of new work, ‘All this falling’, is made up of impossibly fragile art. What look like frayed pieces of tarpaulin on the floor and wall are actual single sheets of perfectly detailed and barely-held-together bits of paper. They’re so dangerously slight, so clearly the results of hours of meticulous work, that they make me shakily nervous. It’s a neat continuation of Collis’s aesthetic. She’s made paint splatters out of mother of pearl, screws out of gold and diamonds, but these works seem more focused on fragility and dedication than previous pieces. The other works here are huge sheets of charcoal-black paper, the result of wall rubbings from derelict homes. These big drawings shimmer with the lives that once lived in these spaces, they feel heavy with the destruction of a place. In dereliction, as in tarpaulin, Collis finds something to unpick. What Collis does is uncover the sublime in the mundane. She finds beauty in stains and screws, strength in the fragility of a tarp, a subtle power in the aesthetics that surround us. Maybe there’s beauty everywhere, Collis just seems to know how to point it out.

Magali Reus makes art from mundane, everyday objects. Fire extinguishers, nuts and bolts, rucksacks, mattress springs: things that help the world tick over but are never given serious aesthetic consideration. Out of it comes her tricksy, slippery, faintly neurotic brand of sculpture, currently on display at the South London Gallery. The Holland-born, London-based artist works with a slick form of fabrication – casting in resin, 3D printing, laser-cutting, even creating the webbed fabric that’s used for seatbelts. Images culled from magazine covers and other ephemera are made into tactile reliefs. For all the factory-like processes involved, there’s an icky, bodily quality to these works; they made me think of that weird satisfaction you get from peeling protective film from the face of a brand-new phone. What hobbles so much of Reus’s work is a tendency to make a song and dance of its own existence. In ‘Crane’, casts of pots are left self-consciously on their side; in ‘Sentinel (Latchtail)’, seatbelt fabric spools across the ground with a flourish. Deliberate, yes – but it feels like shop-window merchandising, and cheapens the intricacy of everything else. Which is why the ‘Hwael’ works are the best things in the show, and by a long sight. These fibreglass structures, based on the chassis of a bus, look like enormous versions of those frames you pop the parts of an Airfix model from, studded with little scenes-within-scenes like a cast of a trainer bounded in parcel tape.

Camden Arts Centre on Finchley Road is just down the road from the Freud Museum, former home to the daddy of psychoanalysis. Sigmund was obsessed with dreams, believing them to be a repository of hidden desires ripe for ripping apart on the therapist’s couch. So it’s a neat coincidence that the CAC has also drifted off to the land of nod with ‘Sleep Rock’, the first UK solo exhibition by American artist Sadie Benning. There are 19 new works here, arranged in sequence to resemble film stills, or the individual frames of a graphic novel. The majority of the artworks are small, resin-covered images made up of retro-looking photos and dense, abstract paintings. The rest are large-scale pieces, again made of a mixture of photos and drawings distorted in size. Featuring newspaper clippings of yesteryear’s Hollywood stars, plus an impressive amount of pre-meme snapshots of domestic moggies, these big artworks reiterate the small-town Americana motif recurring throughout the exhibition. But it’s in the shiny, tiny blocks of pop art colour and translucent photos that the dream theme is clearest. Beauty salons, vending machines, pills and faces (loads of faces) are layered under and over semi-psychedelic painted shapes resembling solidified wax drips. It’s like the visual equivalent of that semi-asleep state where your mind flashes up image after image from the day just gone. Only in Benning’s case, it’s not just memories from an individual’s mind, but snippets of info from a who

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.

From its earliest days, photography has probed the hidden: from porn to politics, it’s been there and brought back the evidence. Beyond that, though, is a shadowy place where photographers become so tangled up in what they’re chronicling that roles become blurred. These are not just the margins of society, they’re the margins of creativity. That’s what ‘Another Kind of Life’ is about. Any photography show that kicks off with a room of Diane Arbus followed by one of Bruce Davidson means business and you’d better believe that things don’t get much easier after that. A lot of the themes in the show – sexuality, physical identity, race and marginalisation – are there in every one of their shots of outsiders. Davidson’s 1958 series ‘The Dwarf’ makes you question if his relationship to circus performer Jimmy Armstrong is much different to that of the audience who come to gawp, though Arbus’s 1963 portrait of a waitress at a nudist camp – wearing nothing but a frilly apron – hints that this isn’t simply a freakshow. Some of it is, mind you: ‘Another Kind of Life’ doesn’t shy away from the fact that there’s a big grey area in photography where objectivity, sympathy, voyeurism and titillation get all mixed up. From Larry Clark’s hometown speedfreaks of ‘Tulsa’ to Boris Mikhailov’s hard-to-stomach series ‘The Wedding’ – where he paid homeless alcoholics to enact a grotesque matrimonial picture story – there are a lot of disturbingly complicated relationships here. In fact, there’s so

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

Down in a Mayfair basement, a video shows hands rummaging through burbling innards and blood dripping across naked bodies as an immense, heaving, discordant clash of notes screams out of a church organ. Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is not a man you want to take home to mum and dad. ‘Hi, guys. This is my new boyfriend Hermann – he’s a revolutionary European performance artist who crucifies people and drenches them in animal blood as part of an ongoing engagement with religion, ritual, philosophy and mysticism! The sex is fab!’ Nitsch came to prominence in the ’70s as part of a movement of radical Austrian artists – the actionists – who used their own bodies to create shockingly confrontational art in the wake of WWII. Nitsch has always been the most mystical of them, causing endless controversy with his use of animal carcasses and blood as part of his performance rituals. The video here details one of those events, as part of his ‘Das Orgien Mysterien Theater’ series: blood, guts, religious iconography, tits and dicks. You can see how Catholic old Austria may not have been too into it. The rest of the show is made up of massive canvases doused in paint and blood, covered in priests’ chasubles and bloodied smocks. The whole thing feels like a collection of heretical altars, and that’s sort of what they are. By ripping into the imagery of Catholicism and squidging through the just-dead entrails of huge beasts, Nitsch actually celebrates life. These are a cult’s altars to

You almost don’t want to like it. Great minimalist impresario Richard Serra’s ‘Rift’ drawings are just massive sheets of monochrome black with little white arrows splitting apart the visual plane. That’s it. Big, black monochromes with a bit of white. Simple, repetitive nothingness; monumental dude-art, the drawing equivalent of some macho old guy trying too hard to make up for something. But, annoyingly, they’re great. Serra creates so much tension in the canvases. Up close, the thick, tar-like bile of the works is actually painfully fragile; thin sheets of suspended paper caked in too much pigment, aching to tear. The thin strips of white totally ruin the uniformity, crack your eyes’ attempts to make everything cohesive. They make each work into a series of continents ripping apart unbearably slowly. You can almost feel the trembling, hear the juddering deformation. Are those white slabs the negative space of the empty page, or of work uncompleted? I dunno, make up your own crap. What I do know is Serra’s drawings are grossly overbearing, sickeningly imposing and unbearably tense, and that’s a really, really good thing.

If being around fragile objects gives you the sweats and fills you with the fear that you’re seconds away from tripping over and accidentally destroying someone’s life’s work, this exhibition may not be for you. The first room of Susan Collis’s show of new work, ‘All this falling’, is made up of impossibly fragile art. What look like frayed pieces of tarpaulin on the floor and wall are actual single sheets of perfectly detailed and barely-held-together bits of paper. They’re so dangerously slight, so clearly the results of hours of meticulous work, that they make me shakily nervous. It’s a neat continuation of Collis’s aesthetic. She’s made paint splatters out of mother of pearl, screws out of gold and diamonds, but these works seem more focused on fragility and dedication than previous pieces. The other works here are huge sheets of charcoal-black paper, the result of wall rubbings from derelict homes. These big drawings shimmer with the lives that once lived in these spaces, they feel heavy with the destruction of a place. In dereliction, as in tarpaulin, Collis finds something to unpick. What Collis does is uncover the sublime in the mundane. She finds beauty in stains and screws, strength in the fragility of a tarp, a subtle power in the aesthetics that surround us. Maybe there’s beauty everywhere, Collis just seems to know how to point it out.

Magali Reus makes art from mundane, everyday objects. Fire extinguishers, nuts and bolts, rucksacks, mattress springs: things that help the world tick over but are never given serious aesthetic consideration. Out of it comes her tricksy, slippery, faintly neurotic brand of sculpture, currently on display at the South London Gallery. The Holland-born, London-based artist works with a slick form of fabrication – casting in resin, 3D printing, laser-cutting, even creating the webbed fabric that’s used for seatbelts. Images culled from magazine covers and other ephemera are made into tactile reliefs. For all the factory-like processes involved, there’s an icky, bodily quality to these works; they made me think of that weird satisfaction you get from peeling protective film from the face of a brand-new phone. What hobbles so much of Reus’s work is a tendency to make a song and dance of its own existence. In ‘Crane’, casts of pots are left self-consciously on their side; in ‘Sentinel (Latchtail)’, seatbelt fabric spools across the ground with a flourish. Deliberate, yes – but it feels like shop-window merchandising, and cheapens the intricacy of everything else. Which is why the ‘Hwael’ works are the best things in the show, and by a long sight. These fibreglass structures, based on the chassis of a bus, look like enormous versions of those frames you pop the parts of an Airfix model from, studded with little scenes-within-scenes like a cast of a trainer bounded in parcel tape.

We all like to think we’re immune to the manipulation of the internet: that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s electioneering shenanigans only swung the opinions of poor morons out in the boonies, while we saw through all the BS and voted cleverly and informatively; that targeted advertising has no impact on us and we consume our goods objectively, right? Yeah, probably not, eh lads. And British artist Ed Atkins’s new show is a confusing, overwhelming, dense indictment of our servitude to the internet. He drags you through a muddy bog of food porn, fake tears and medieval costumes and leaves you reeling. The sound of thunder and rain cracks and dribbles through the gallery, there are moans and screams, sad piano chords echoing around the space. The walls are lined with video screens facing huge clothing rails filled with medieval costumes. One video shows sandwiches being made out of piles of human bodies and slices of human face ham. The rest feature a cast of babies and weeping medieval peasants in the rain. Texts around the gallery explain the link between the artificiality of food photography or CGI and our emotional malleability. The idea is that artificiality only serves to amplify emotions.  Look at it as a big parable: Atkins casts us average humans as serfs in a feudal system controlled by the lords of Facebook and Google. The freedom promised by the early days of the internet has been replaced by a deeply unjust system where some algorithm decides what ads we ar

Imagine walking down a gorgeous, glittering, friendly, neon pink corridor that suddenly turns into a dark alley filled with people beating the bejesus out of you. That, in American artist Molly Soda’s world, is how the internet works. The Instamodel-meets-camgirl-meets-artist lives and works online. She creates makeup tutorials, she sings cover songs, she does what people do on the internet. But with Soda, it’s a bait and trap situation. She puts herself out there boldly, nakedly and hairily and waits for the abuse to flood in. One video work finds Soda doing an eyeshadow tutorial. Hung underneath is a 15-metre-long scroll of every comment the video received. Some are kind, plenty are creepy, but the majority are just plain nasty. Many mention her body hair, her teeth, her face. It’s gross and totally miserable, the ugliest side of internet humanity. But what makes it shocking isn’t the content, it’s seeing it made real, physical. You can ignore shitty comments on the YouTube video you’re watching, but here it’s an unavoidable, endlessly unfurling ancient scroll of poisonous bile. It gets even more overbearing with a YouTube video compilation of dozens of girls singing Rihanna’s ‘Stay’, all blasting out at once. It feels like a desperate cry for attention and individuality, a sonic torrent of people saying ‘hey, I’m here, I’m different’, but they all get lost in the great abyss of the internet. The rest of the show is made up of images pasted onto the wall: cute JPEGs

The history of art is full of old dead white blokes. We’ve had centuries of western men dominating the stuff we put in our eyes. Modern and contemporary abstract art is no different – it’s all Kandinsky and Pollock and Rothko, as if a woman never picked up a paintbrush and did some squiggles on a canvas. But – guess what, bozos – they did. And this show of abstract art by women isn't just a powerful statement that women were there too, but that they were knocking up some of the best abstraction in the biz in the process. Just like Lee Krasner, an artist who is constantly relegated to a footnote in art history - she was Jackson Pollock's wife - but who with just one work here proves that her painting was probably just as vital as her husband's. There is so much to like across the two Victoria Miro spaces. Over on Wharf Road it’s mainly recent abstraction. There’s the eye-bending warped op art of Loie Hollowell, the shocking fragility of Dala Nasser’s silver paper coated in druggy grime, the quiet elegance of Etel Adnan, the glossy cutesy sheen of Fiona Rae, Adriana Varejao’s gory slashed Fontana homage, a gorgeous pink and lilac Martha Jungwirth, a brutal Pat Steir, a great sloppy Gillian Ayres (who sadly just passed away). In the Mayfair gallery, you get the older gold: that stunning Lee Krasner, the tiny geometric neatness of Lygia Clark and a huge glorious mess by Helen Frankenthaler. Breathtaking. There’s plenty of underwhelming art here too, it’s not all great, but as

In the suburbs of Las Vegas is an enormous underground bunker. Seriously, like, massive: it has a pool, a house, a garden, a barbecue, everything you could need for an eternity underground. It’s the physical embodiment of the two heartbeats throbbing in America’s chest: grandiose, overblown, chintzy opulence, and abject fear of annihilation. English artist and photographer Juno Calypso found that bunker for sale on the internet and descended to explore it. What she found was a pristine 1970s underground time capsule owned by an ‘immortalist’ cult. Everything was untouched – the perfect white and pink kitchen, the dustless fake roses, the glittering latrine. Walking down into Calypso’s show you find yourself in a recreation of the bunker. Fake grass crinkles underfoot, pink light floods in from the ceiling, a faux-classical fountain burbles in the corner, grooving slow jams float through the air. Calypso appears in the photos on the walls. She’s emerging from the bath in a facemask and glittering diamante bikini, bent over the kitchen counter in a towelling bathrobe. And then you realise there’s poison in the air: you spy a pair of legs on the floor, bare and seen from outside in one image, or wrapped oddly in tin foil in another. She’s a blue spectre nude in the mirror, or a forlorn figure sat on the toilet floor, or a floating corpse in the pool. It’s titillating but noxiously ominous. Everything here crackles with tension and threat. If this is a moment frozen in time

If you watched the Golden Globe-winning series 'Transparent' and were captivated by the sepia-tinted flashbacks to ‘30s Berlin, you’re going to fall in love with this show. If you didn’t get around to watching Jeffrey Tambor star as the parent of three who comes out as transgender later in life - and have no idea what I’m talking about - then head to The Photographers' Gallery anyway, because this is an exhibition well worth shunning time in front of the telly for. Opponents to trans and queer identities sometimes claim that a fluid approach to gender is a strictly 'millennial' invention – before that, men were men (and dressed accordingly) and women were women (and wore organ-squashing corsets, as nature intended). This myth gets a firm smack over the head with a collection of photographs dating as far back as 1880.  The images come from the personal archive of Sébastien Lifshitz, who trawled flea markets, garage sales, junk shops and eBay on the lookout for photos showing people dressed in the apparel of the opposite gender. As such, names and back-stories remain largely unknown. The brilliance of the exhibition is it shows the great variety of ways people have used ‘male’ or ‘female’ clothes to construct identity. Along with photos of the ultra-glamorous Bambi, a 1950s French transsexual cabaret performer, there are images of The Washington Community, a group of men who chose as their fashion inspo the pie-baking suburban housewife. Another highlight are the mock weddi

One look at Medusa would turn flesh to stone. Auguste Rodin was sort of the opposite, dedicating his life and radical art instead to somehow turning stone into living, breathing, rippling flesh. His revolutionary sculptures feel quiveringly close to bursting alive and writhing with movement. He was far from the first to manage that anthropomorphic feat, though. Thousands of years before Augie picked up a chisel, the ancient Greeks were Frankensteining marble to life like nobody’s business. The British Museum’s Parthenon marbles are the most exquisite of the lot – proper wonders of the world – and they were a huge inspiration to Rodin. So here, the BM’s whacked work by the French master next to the ancient sculptures that he was obsessed with. Most shows that put ancient perfection next to modern radicalism do a disservice to both. But this is a gorgeously put together exhibition. It starts on a high: a plaster version of ‘The Kiss’ sits next to two reclining Greek goddesses draped in robes that seem to drip and cascade. The fluidity of the marble trickles into the gooeyness of the kiss, a work that feels like it’s slurping up out of solid rock. ‘The Thinker’, huge and imposing, comes next, contemplating the ancient river god Ilissos. A falling torso nearby echoes the shape of the god Hermes, a dying hybrid creature mirrors a combatting Greek centaur. Rodin’s ancient inspiration is clear and constant. But whereas the Parthenon marbles are idealised visions of human figure

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

Camden Arts Centre on Finchley Road is just down the road from the Freud Museum, former home to the daddy of psychoanalysis. Sigmund was obsessed with dreams, believing them to be a repository of hidden desires ripe for ripping apart on the therapist’s couch. So it’s a neat coincidence that the CAC has also drifted off to the land of nod with ‘Sleep Rock’, the first UK solo exhibition by American artist Sadie Benning. There are 19 new works here, arranged in sequence to resemble film stills, or the individual frames of a graphic novel. The majority of the artworks are small, resin-covered images made up of retro-looking photos and dense, abstract paintings. The rest are large-scale pieces, again made of a mixture of photos and drawings distorted in size. Featuring newspaper clippings of yesteryear’s Hollywood stars, plus an impressive amount of pre-meme snapshots of domestic moggies, these big artworks reiterate the small-town Americana motif recurring throughout the exhibition. But it’s in the shiny, tiny blocks of pop art colour and translucent photos that the dream theme is clearest. Beauty salons, vending machines, pills and faces (loads of faces) are layered under and over semi-psychedelic painted shapes resembling solidified wax drips. It’s like the visual equivalent of that semi-asleep state where your mind flashes up image after image from the day just gone. Only in Benning’s case, it’s not just memories from an individual’s mind, but snippets of info from a who

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