Sophia Al-Maria, Lee Bul, Late Turner: this week's art shows in pictures
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Version 0 of 1. Sophia Al-Maria, Manchester Sophia Al-Maria’s Virgin With A Memory (pictured) sets out to be a series of outtakes, musical soundtracks and documentary footage from the mothballed feature film – Beretta – that the artist unsuccessfully strained to complete. It ends up being a powerfully realised installation that draws unsettling comparisons between the film’s central theme of rape revenge and Egypt’s recent political revolt. Born in Washington to an American mother and a Bedouin father, Al-Maria operates within the faultlines of US and Arab cultures. There’s a documentary sequence of the 2012 Eid al-Adha and a fictional study of the oppressively all-seeing male gaze. It adds up to a clever piece of creative pretence that transforms into something strangely and powerfully moving. Cornerhouse, Sat to 2 Nov RC Lee Bul, Birmingham Growing up under the military dictatorship in 1960s South Korea, Lee Bul (pictured) became familiar with the aesthetic attractions and political deceptions of state-sanctioned fantasy. This exhibition traces early work in which she failed to fit in with the officially sanctioned modes of behaviour, defiantly going out in public disguised as outlandishly erotic full-body sculptures. But the main focus of the show is on recent assemblages suspended from the gallery ceiling like surreal chandeliers. Fashioned from materials that shine and glitter – fragmented mirrors, crystal droplets, decorated shackles – these castellated constructions are as disquieting as they are captivating. Ikon Gallery, Wed to 9 Nov RC Late Turner: Painting Set Free, London In the storms of paint through which Turner’s late-period moody, mysterious land and seascapes swim into view, we can read the medium’s impressionist and abstract future. We get him in a way that his contemporaries, who loathed his later output, couldn’t possibly. The Tate’s survey of these works seeks to redress the balance. It’s less Turner the visionary and more Turner, a man of the dawning Victorian age. While the private painter consistently pushed his style with each work, the show also underlines how he was very much in step with the social issues of his day. Paintings like his depiction of Agrippina’s arrival in Ancient Rome marry experimentation with 19th-century concerns, such as the burgeoning machine age. Tate Britain, SW1, Wed to 25 Jan SS Wirksworth festival, nr Matlock The quaint Peak District market town of Wirksworth has progressively been recognised as the breeding ground of the area’s arty academics and crafty practitioners, with its festival serving up an annual array of quirky fare. It is the way with such events that the art is required to function in the shop windows and community halls through its curiosity value. A highlight is bound to be the presence of the artist-choreographer Florence Peake, who is capable of metamorphosing bodies into multicoloured kinetic abstractions. Various venues, to 21 Sep RC Jack And Archy Marshall, London “Painting made my vision impaired,” sang King Krule, AKA Archy Marshall, on his track, Cementality. Yet fans of the 20-year-old Londoner with a deep, desolate voice will know he creates great artwork. His father and uncle are painters and his brother Jack created the fractured image of the singer clutching a guitar on his first album, 6 Feet Beneath The Moon, somewhere between the paintings of Leger and the artwork of ska label 2 Tone. Here the siblings bring together sound installations, photography, drawing, performance and linocuts. Display, EC1, Tue to 27 Sep SS Horst: Photographer Of Style, London Horst P Horst’s photography conjured the prewar Parisian demi-monde and goddesses of Hollywood’s golden age in sultry shadows and stardust silver. The man could do glamour like no one else. This survey includes the greatest hits he created in his studio: a forbidding Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers in a fluttering wisp of a gown, a rare series of portraits of his “queen”, Coco Chanel. The show also boasts his lesser-known output, including male nudes, nature and travel photography of the Middle East. Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, Sat to 4 Jan SS Bristol Biennial There’s an emphasis on the social in this year’s Bristol Biennial. Many art projects hinge on disconcerting collective and individual experience, like Hug, where a blindfolded audience is hugged by a singer, or Megan Clark-Bagnall’s haystack made from her audience’s anxieties, written on paper, and then shredded and intertwined. Elsewhere, artists explore the dangers of cultural collision, as in Mine, a performance with writer Holly Corfield Carr in an 18th-century grotto, studded with crystals from slavers’ ports. Blind Chance, inspired by a Chinese immigrant killed by a London tourist bus, involves being driven to the city limits where you’re left to find your way home. Various venues, Fri to 21 Sep SS Martin Hamblen, Manchester Last year, artist Martin Hamblen offended the sensibilities of some in his native Preston by using public money to stage a 68-hour performance of taking two steps forward and one backwards up and down the steps of the city’s Harris Museum and Art Gallery. Here in Manchester, his mere 32-hour performance will consist of a similar struggle against fateful circumstances with the artist repeatedly drawing a line in some sand. Despite evidence to the contrary, Hamblen stresses his sanity with a photograph of himself balancing a spirit level on his head (pictured). The title is, of course, Level Headed. But it’s his accompanying display of kitsch, “found” and adapted objects such as a road map of France cut into the shape of Syria and a Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test jigsaw, that more fascinatingly embody Hamblen’s characteristic line of good-humoured absurdist gloom. Castlefield Gallery, to 14 Sep RC |