Free things to do in London this week

The Barbican’s Curve is a tricky gallery to show art in. So for their latest installation – a series of drawings by Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri – they’ve just not really bothered using it. The actual curve of the Curve, the long arcing outer wall, has been largely ignored except for a thick line of red paint. Ababri’s colourful drawings are instead shown on the much easier to use flat inner walls. There’s a metal curtain at either end of the space, a loud pulsating ambient soundtrack, but otherwise the curve itself is present only in its omission. It’s a disappointing use of the space. And it’s unfair on Ababri, whose art was never going to work in this environment. His simple, diaristic drawings document moments of precarious queer life laced with tons of sensuality, defiance and joy. Nude brown bodies dance and play, rest and embrace. They party in nightclubs, writhe in beds, their limbs tangle, their tongues lick. They aren’t brilliant drawings, but they tell a moving story of sexual expression in the face of sexual repression. The splash of red on the curve’s wall and floor signifies the Arabic letter ‘Zayin’, the first letter of the word ‘zamel’, a homophobic slur in the Maghreb, hissed mockingly at gay men. This is art about how just existing as a queer man can be political, how dancing can be political, how nightclubs can be political, and how art can act as a way of reclaiming all those things.  The ideas are nice enough. But take away the architecture of the Curv

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live.  A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived.  Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him. Film, TV, cartoons and sport were his escape, and his path towards art. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. Two vast orthopaedic boots stand like totems as you walk in, but these aren’t austere miserable corrective devices, they’re psychedelically patterned, ultra-colourful - they’re Wilsher-Mills reclaiming his own history and trauma and turning it into joy. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening A huge body lies on a hospital bed in the middle of the room, its feet massively swollen, its guts exposed. Toy soldiers brandishing viruses lay siege to the patient. Seb Coe, his head transformed into a TV, is the figure’s only distraction. The walls show comic book daleks and spaceships, Wilsher-Mills reimagining his static body as futuristic vehicles or beings with wheels and jets and thrusters. Every inch of the space is covered in pop trivia, or dioramas of happy memories. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical ter

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy. He visited places like Cuba, Chile, the USSR, touring a retrospective of his work and making new art in response to all the visual stimuli he encountered. The results are on display here in the first gallery show dedicated to ROCI since 1991, and it’s all classic late-period Rauschenberg. Overlapping, clashing screenprints are a chaotic mess of imagery: architecture, road signs, animals, monuments, flags. Symbols of statehood are overlaid with symbols of everyday life: a bust of Lenin, a topless bather, a squealing boar, the Twin Towers, machinery, newsprint. Rauschenberg is documenting the visual reality of 1980s life under oppressive regimes around the world. By touring the work around those very countries, he hoped to offer a way out, a path towards liberation. It’s a very old fashioned and now-problematic form of cultural outreach. It’s the Western artist as saviour, it’s Rauschenberg thinking that showing his art in oppressed nations will help free their people. It’s naive, arrogant American imperialism under the guise of art. He’s left no space for the artists of these countries, it

Matthew Krishanu’s work is shrouded in the fog of memory. Across a series of dreamy, washed-out paintings, he digs up his past and recasts it in canvas and paper. Two boys recur throughout most of the show, the artist and his brother as kids. They sit on boats and horses, swim in rivers and seas, clamber over a Henry Moore sculpture. The works look like family snapshots, faded photos of holidays and daytrips that have been painted from memory. It’s as if painting these moments will somehow bring them back, make them real, permanent. In the most striking works here the boys sit on the vast drooping branches of a huge banyan tree. They’re dwarfed by it, lost in this enormous symbol of India. The paint is dripping down the canvas, leaching away, the memories are fading. All this water and greenery is a legacy. In other works his daughter and late wife climb a tree in Epping Forest, or stare out onto an Essex pond. In water and trees is where these memories, these pasts, coalesce into something tangible, long after they’re gone.  The final series of paintings shows Christian churches, priests, nuns and congregations in India and Bangladesh. Krishanu’s mother was a theologian, his father a British missionary. These images are crisper, sharper, firmer than the rest; no fog or haze here, just stark personal history. There’s a temptation to read the Christian works as a comment on religion as a colonising force, or a kickback against the dominance of the white figure in Christian aes

After celebrating its 75th anniversary last year, this multimedia exhibition at the Migration Museum in Lewisham delves into the history of the NHS, and to the thousands of dedicated non-British workers who have contributed to its delivery of healthcare. Through photography, artefacts, and a newly commissioned interactive music video installation, their stories are lovingly told. Around 1 in 6 people within the organisation today are non-British, and many others are descendants of migrant healthcare workers. It’s a wonderful way to gain some insight into how working for such a precious but pressured organisation has impacted their lives.

Obsessive, repetitive, maximal: Nnena Kalu’s art is like an act of physical, aesthetic meditation. She takes textiles, plastic, unspooled VHS tapes, netting and rubbish and binds and rebinds it over and over. In the process, she creates hanging bundled forms of countless colours and textures. They hover like disembowelled organs, hearts and guts constructed out of detritus. They look tense, dangerous, ready to burst. Her drawings are even more intense - whirling whorls of fierce spiralling marks on coloured paper, that double back on themselves over and over - but you can only just spy them in the office in the back of the gallery.  But it’s not as objects or images that Kalu’s work is the most interesting. Kalu has ‘limited verbal communication’; creating these sculptures and drawings is an act of expression, a feverish striving for visual communication, a plea for language. The objects are a symbol of that endeavour, but to see them is to be spoken to, reach out to, and brilliantly communicated with.

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too. His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression. Figures brandish machine guns, they slice their way through dense foliage with machetes, stalk around deserted corridors, all rendered in acidly bright yellows, pinks and oranges.  It’s obviously and heavily indebted to modern ultra-violent videogames, which makes it feel teenage and adolescent, immature and stoned, a 2am gaming sesh rendered in paint. But freezing these gaming moments highlights the intensity and weirdness of the activity: gaming allows you to embody a character who’s out to kill, it allows you to take a life in an act of leisure and relaxation. These paintings act as a sort of kink-infused celebration of violence as distraction, as fun, as a break from reality. A brilliant, atmospheric, intelligently dumb look at violence and leisure But Korine is an artworld interloper, an outsider, he’s doing it wrong; where’s the fine art degree, where are the art historical references, where are the necessary c

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will hold the eclectic South Bank Summer Market. With over 60 traders, you’ll find a wide variety of bits and bobs to take home with you, from art, jewellery, fashion, kids’ products and more, all created by independent designers from across the capital. If you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site. Food and drink, live sports screenings and DJ sets will keep you occupied between shopping.

Turns out, the line between erotic and bawdy is pretty thick. And right here in Clapham you’ve got Tom of Finland on one side of it, and Beryl Cook on the other. Studio Voltaire has brought the two artists together for a duo show exploring the links between Tom’s hyper-exaggerated homoerotic pornography and Beryl’s titillating seaside British comedy naughtiness. Let’s get this out of the way, duo shows of long-dead artists like this don’t work. You’re meant to explore the supposed similarities between the works, but you spend your whole time thinking about a nonexistent relationship between artists who never knew each other, instead of just thinking about the work. It’s curation over art. Tom and Beryl are done no favours by being shown together. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities. This could and should have been two separate solo exhibitions. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities But it’s too late for that, they’ve done it, so here we are. Both artists are brilliant in their own way. Tom pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme. His leather clad bikers bulge and ripple, they tease and play, smirk and pinch, fist and lick and spurt and penetrate. It’s idealised masculinity, it’s attraction, musk and spunk being celebrated, glorified, revelled in at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s brave, fun, sexy art. And he makes poor Beryl look tame, which is a bit unfair

Danica Lundy paints like she’s omniscient, like she can see in multiple dimensions. Her images are full of everything. She takes you inside someone’s chest, through electrical fittings, sends you traversing through the guts of machines and bodies. Time, space, density, memory, love, lust, all can be burst open in her grubby psychedelia. The first painting here shows a fragile, premature baby in an incubator, the artist’s own. A pair of arms reaching in to treat it have been bisected at the elbows; now you, the viewer, are in the scene, caring, healing, in this world of gore and fragility. Then your view shifts to within the mouth of a high school athlete, gulping down water as your teammates stretch around you. Everywhere in these worlds you see exposed rib cages and viscera, you see out from inside machines, or behind a mirror as high schoolers kiss. It’s all rendered in filthy, thick pinks and purples, but with these little goops of clarity and trompe l’oeil precision, with all these endlessly repeating symbols of chewed apples and Umbro logos. It’s very good painting.  The gallery wall texts blather on about power structures and consumerism, but it’s hard to see how that relates. Instead, this feels diaristic and personal, like Lundy is documenting both the most mundane and the rawest, most intense moments of her life–- teenage loves, childbirth, deaths, diners, sports, workplaces – but going so far that she tears it to shreds, exposes too much. It’s as if by ripping the w