Marina Abramovic, Wendy Ramshaw, Qasim Riza Shaheen: this week’s new art shows in pictures

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/sep/12/marina-abramovic-exhibitions-gallery

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Emotional Resources, Sunderland

In an era of social media intimacies and reality TV revelations, it could be suggested we’re getting closer to each other. But things aren’t quite so simple for the artists in this group show. In fact, attempts to communicate private feelings in public are seen as fraught with danger. Movingly, the New York artist Moyra Davey harks back to an age of handwritten letters, when melancholy confessions might be intensified by distance and delay. The late Ian Breakwell, a specialist in the potent eccentricities of private diaries, is also here, as is Joanna Piotrowska in an accompanying show capturing the age-old communications of emotional gesture.

Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Fri to 10 Jan

Vicken Parsons, nr Salisbury

At first glance, Vicken Parsons’s paintings of bare interiors in drab hues seem to depict spaces barely worth considering. The outside world does not intrude on this painterly universe; windows, when they appear, open on to plain fields of brush-marked paint. But spend some time with them and you’ll find your perspective shift: that line across the picture plane might delineate a vast horizon, while what first appears to be a cramped space becomes a cavernous hall. This show pairs her well-known works on wood board with recent forays into sculpture: steel blocks that become a three-dimensional base for her experiments with paint. She’s also creating her largest painting to date, across the gallery’s glass facade.

New Art Centre, East Winterslow, Sun to 2 Nov

The Influence Of Furniture On Love, Cambridge

The exhibition title is taken from an early 20th-century essay by the economist John Maynard Keynes, in which he ponders in what ways the design of our domestic environments “suggest to us thoughts and feelings”. Accordingly, this is far from an ordinary gallery show. For one thing it is staged at Wysing Arts Centre’s 17th-century farmhouse, built reputedly from timbers salvaged from the sinking of the Spanish Armada. For another, the exhibition honours the venue’s place as a sanctuary for artists. Artist-curator Giles Round has invited some past visitors back, including his decorative arts company The Grantchester Pottery, to install work in tribute to the venue and host public talks, performances and screenings.

Wysing Arts Centre, Sun to 2 Nov

Pierre Huyghe, Paul McCarthy, London

Be it the statue with a beehive for a head hidden in a park’s sprawling, swampy compost heap at dOCUMENTA13, or the aquarium where hermit crabs set up home in a replica Brancusi head at 2011’s Frieze art fair, Pierre Huyghe’s work is always a must-see event. His gallery has kept the precise content of his first big London show since an acclaimed Tate Modern exhibition in 2006 under wraps until its opening today. The other half of the Savile Row gallery is given over to the master of scatological performance art and pop culture savagery, Paul McCarthy. He’s returning to painting after a four-decade hiatus, with works inspired by the classic John Wayne western, Stagecoach.

Hauser & Wirth, W1, Sat to 1 Nov

Wendy Ramshaw, Middlesbrough

For Wendy Ramshaw, a piece of jewellery is a catalyst for the imagination, a prop for sensuous reverie and role-playing. Her retrospective is installed like a modernist stage set, the gallery’s white-cube ambience cut through with brick-red geometries. Her rings are displayed on mini towers that that look like something retrieved from the filtration inside of a hookah pipe. While more high-profile works such as her Hyde Park Gate commission might be compromised by the populist demands of public art, her jewellery is aesthetically sturdy enough to be termed wearable sculpture.

MIMA, to 4 Dec

Trisha Donnely, Cerith Wyn Evans, London

Trisha Donnelly and Cerith Wyn Evans are an apt pairing for the Serpentine’s autumn shows. Both favour a gossamer touch in conceptual art that’s often mysterious to the point of opacity, but in a good way. The American Donnelly has a gift for quietly stoking awesomeness in lesser-considered corners, be that the huge hunk of carved pink marble she deposited in the shadowy interior of a lofty old stone building in a Venice garden, where it stood like a megalith for some secret cult, or the exhibition of exquisite bird photography she staged at MoMA in 2011. Meanwhile, in the Sackler gallery, Britain’s Wynn Evans weaves complex allusions to creative thinkers and artistic revolutionaries from Proust to Bataille to Fassbinder in his sound and neon works. He plays directly with the question of interpretation in his chandeliers blinking out Morse code and a frieze of neon words.

Serpentine Galleries, W2, Wed to 9 Nov

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Marina Abramovic, London

In Nathalie Djurberg’s animated Freudian fables, people and beasts let their animal desires rip in wonky stop-motion, typically set to tinkly soundtracks created by her partner, electronica composer Hans Berg. For the duo’s first show with Lisson they’re moving on from the explicit fairytale antics to create a psychedelic environment with abstract animated projections, sculpture and music. Animations can be found not on screens, but hidden in urns or projected across tabletops, as if magically bringing the furniture to life. Birds and butterflies are placed amid flashing, hanging neon sculptures and animated drawings, which all move to Berg’s disorienting sounds. Meanwhile, an accompanying show provides the chance to check rarely seen works from performance art figurehead Marina Abramovic’s formative years, 1971 to 81.

Lisson Gallery, NW1, Tue to 1 Nov

Qasim Riza Shaheen, Manchester & Birmingham

In films, video performances, photographs and mixed-media drawings, Qasim Riza Shaheen presents his affecting reflections on love and loss, split between two gallery locations. Manchester-based Shaheen sets the scene with the title of his hometown show Autoportraits In Love-like Conditions. For him, self-portraiture is more a matter of imaginative self-creation than any pretence of authentic self-definition. Filmed in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK, his enactments of queer romance, straight social alienation, and the universal melodramas of unrequited desire are choreographed with painful sensitivity.

Cornerhouse, Manchester, to 2 Nov & MAC, Birmingham, Fri to 30 Nov