Flailing human efforts to cross, contain, and to comprehend the magnitude and power of the natural world? This is classic sublime. Welcome to Bill Viola’s new show at Blain|Southern, where a selection of new video works by the artist will knock you for six.

Viola forces us temporarily out of a life on autopilot and has us think about the broader significance of our everyday actions. The conclusion seems to be – there isn’t much significance. Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures, the work which gives its name to the exhibition as a whole, offers exactly what it says on the tin. Nine screens show torturously repetitive actions – painstakingly sweeping up tiny bits of gravel into a wheelbarrow only to pour them out again, pouring water into a broken glass jug only for it to gush out of the side. Even love and romance come under scrutiny in this bleak work, with relationships whittled down to a looped film of a couple intermittently slapping and tenderly embracing one another, between long, dull periods of standing opposite one another.

It’s a pretty heavy show. Viola certainly doesn’t hold back on addressing the big questions: life, death, and meaning thereof. I came out of the gallery feeling a bit like I’d been run over. Certainly some works are stronger than others, and as a whole the exhibition is no great work of philosophy. But Viola engages the moving image unlike any other and his works are poetic, powerful, and will give you more than a few things to think about. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

Bill Viola: Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures is at Blain|Southern until 27th July. For more information, click here.

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Caulfield is often called a Pop artist. This was a label he resisted throughout his life, and it is easy to see why. Although his use of bold colours, industrial materials and commonplace subjects suggest a connection to works by Lichtenstein and Warhol, Caulfield’s pieces do not have the same brazenly confident vapidity as those of his colourful contemporaries. His reductive compositions are deceptively simple, and are evocative and often unexpectedly touching in their suggestion of personal narrative. Caulfield extracts specific details or moments in time from everyday life – the shapely bends of a curvaceous jug, the undisturbed surface of a body of liquid in a discarded glass – and with them creates melancholic, still scenes with the atmosphere of a stage set hours after a heated performance.

This small show coincides with Tate Britain’s exhibition of Caulfield’s monumental oil paintings, some of which are two metres high. The Alan Cristea Gallery’s range of smaller scale prints provides a more personal portrait of the late artist. Or, at least, a portrait of him as I imagine him to be – contemplative, introvert and exacting, but with a wry humour and a tendency not to take things too seriously. Whether you’re in the mood to laugh or cry, go to see Patrick Caulfield. His work has the capacity for both. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

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Mirza, winner of the Silver Lion Award for a promising young artist two years ago at the Venice Biennale, is known for his ambitious and ground-breaking work with sound, sculpture, space and light. His sensory immersive sonic environments reverberate through the rooms at Lisson Gallery: ‘it’s weird – you can feel it right through your body’ one visitor commented whilst standing in the ‘LED surround sound sequencer’ upstairs at the gallery. Another: ‘this is how my brain works’.

The ‘LED surround sound sequencer’ (another of the bullet points) can be found in an airless and grey soundproofed room, where a ring of speakers are linked up to a small ring of LEDs. The interlinking wires are pulled taut and precisely arranged in a kind of elegant 3-D line drawing, and the lights flash on and off in an unknown automated sequence, communicating with their opposite speakers which pulsate in tandem.

Downstairs, the spotless floor of the gallery is dotted with turntables, wires, pieces of vinyl and great wads of violently angular soundproofing foam mounted at different points on the walls. Crackling, scratching, whomp-whomping sounds pick their way across the room.

Mirzas’s work is not confined to the series of spaces at Lisson Gallery. This week will see the opening of a second audio composition and light installation at the Hepworth Wakefield, where Mirza works with the architecture to distort and change the displays of objects from the Hepworth’s collection of modern British painting and sculpture. His work also expands into the internet sphere, on Vinyl Factory‘s interactive website, where all of Mirza’s samples are available to play with. If you’re nifty with an MP4 and fancy yourself as a potential collaborator, there is also the chance to put together a track  – which might even stand the chance of being released by the record label. (Words: Florence Ritter)

On until June 29th. For more info, visit: www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/haroon-mirza

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Tate Britain has now revealed the products of its labours, and to a resoundingly positive critical reception. The walls of the beautiful, top-lit galleries have been repainted a paradisiacal egg-shell blue, the floors waxed and the dark marble detailing polished to a high shine. It’s a brilliant setting for the history of British art, which is represented by display which have been re-organised to hang chronologically, according to the year the works were made.

This re-hang moves away from the application of ‘movements’ or broad cultural terms which, when retrospectively applied, can be misleading or restrictive of individual interpretation. There are no information panels, only a single date heading up each room. Instead of spending most of the visit peering at the writing on the wall, we are encouraged to look at the objects of art themselves, consider their means of production and kind of the British society for which they were made.

One of the greatest things about Tate’s big re-vamped re-hang is that there is no rush to take it all in at once. There isn’t any pending last weekend or last-chance-to-see, no waiting for that long bank holiday to come around. Take an old school British picnic down to the river before a wander around the collection, pop in on your lunch break, or complete the British experience with an early evening pint of locally brewed ale at a nearby pub. The collection is open all day and every day and, as always, admission is free. (Words: Florence Ritter)

For more info, visit: www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain

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Each of the works on show at both Ayyam Gallery and Edge of Arabia are entitled Dream, and together they form a strange portrait of the artist’s subconscious mind. Working from memories of his own dreams, Dahoul transforms their transitory and uncontrolled narratives into smoothly executed and compositionally well-balanced works of art. Painted in a range of greys, black and white, they have a sobering and stilling effect on the viewer.
Although the works are open to interpretation, it is interesting to read them with reference to Dahoul’s own biographical history. He began numbering his Dream paintings after the passing of his wife, from which time his works became more contemplative and darker, in both spirit and palette. The checkerboard grid patterns, with their stifling repetition and restrictive structure, appeared as a motif after Dahoul was forced to move from his native Syria to live in Dubai.

Although Dahoul uses painting as a conduit for self-expression, there is a surprising regularity, order and logical pattern to his work. The paintings contain visual references to Insular metalwork, Egyptian and Roman art, as well as Arabic calligraphy. Although he is a Syrian artist first and foremost, this widespread range of influences confirms that it isn’t possible to reduce Dahoul’s work to its area of origin. Ayyam Gallery, who raise awareness for and promote art from the Middle East, have this month chosen to show the work of an artist who matches their own broadening scope of influence on the international art scene. And one who, in spite of his initial reluctance to come to see us, quietly admitted that he has loved London. (Words: Florence Ritter)

Safwan Dahoul’s Repetitive Dreams is on at the Ayyam Gallery until June 8th. For more info, visit: www.ayyamgallery.com/exhibitions/safwan-dahoul_2/press-release

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Image by Patrick White

The Museum’s collection includes pieces from the 1490s to the late twentieth century and features exquisite early drawings by established masters Dürer and Rembrandt alongside recent painting and digital work. Many of the works relate to teaching at Slade School of Fine Art, which, since its foundation in 1871 has built its reputation to become the art school to go to in London, if you make the cut. Alumni include John Stezaker and sculptors Rachel Whiteread and Anthony Gormley; the ubiquitous Ed Atkins is a recent graduate as is Katie Paterson, whose work was recently part of the widely-celebrated Light Show over at the Hayward.

There is less scope for the usual graduate show naval gazing in this historically conscious exhibition, which will see the students set themselves in the linage of great art and artists as represented by the Museum’s collection . Go, see, and take a guess at which of the artists will be lucky enough to have their own work interpreted by students a century from now. There are sure to be some surprises. (Words: Florence Ritter)

On until June 9th.  For more info, visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart/exhibitions

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Monory’s direct reference to contemporary popular culture in his painting has had some critics align his 1960s work with Pop art of the period. But Monory produces a more pensive and sombre portrait of the modern world than that of his American contemporaries. Juxtaposing images from advertisements, magazines and newspapers, Monory creates cinematic, dreamlike paintings. Each is bathed in his distinctive Monorychrome filter of yellow, magenta or his signature Monorian blue.

Monory’s unexplained and incomplete narratives suggest that the artist has no intention of uniting his viewers in a shared understanding of the paintings’ content. He creates a narrative climate, but then he stops, and it’s up to us to create our own reality from his ambiguous paintings. No singular truth or meaning to be found? Oh hey Lyotard, the postmodernist theorist who defined contemporary culture by ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. Lyotard saw something in the paintings of Monory that chimed with his own thinking and sent a letter across the French capital to tell him so. The film’s production follows the exchange of a series of letters between the two.

 Lyotard may now have had to make new celebrity friends in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery but Monory is still practicing artist. Space will be showing some of his film work and photography alongside the filmed conversation. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

 On until June 2nd.  For more info, visit: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/jean-fran-ois-lyotard-and-jacques-monory-screens

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in a wide range of media. Bold, blocky coloured pencil drawings hang beside tightly detailed scratchings in biro; chunky, expressive sculptures sit below elegantly abstract geometric patterns in pen. Souzou is full of works that are carefully executed, aesthetically striking and overall memorable for their originality; by conventional measures and in formal terms, the exhibition could be called a success. But this is not a conventional art exhibition as such. You are unlikely to have heard of any of the artists, and they haven’t thought about you as an audience. Neither are they particularly interested in – even aware of – their work’s marketability, or, in some cases, the fact that it is on display at all. All of the works brought together for the Souzou exhibition were created by adults with a range of mental disorders and illnesses, living in social welfare facilities across Honshu, Japan’s largest island. Souzou is a Japanese word that can be translated as either creation or imagination. Some of the works convey or communicate a particular idea or experience, others fulfil an essentially private function; in all cases there is little to no engagement with history and theory. In some ways, this exhibition represents a purer form of art-making, unshackled from a debilitating awareness of critical reception and the art market. The works are very personal to the individual’s particular outlook or perception of the world. Toshiko Yamanishi writes love letters to her mother in the form of multicoloured swirls of jagged patterns; Shota Katsube creates brilliant little action figures out of shiny bin-ties; Ryoko Koda reduces his name to one unique character and repeats it again and again in artfully arranged geometric patterns. Exhibitions of ‘Outsider Art’ like this one always throw into question what it is that defines the ‘Insiders’ of the (fictional) concept of a singular and cohesive Art World. The Wellcome Collection’s exhibition offers an alternative kind of self expression through the visual arts and is not to be missed. (Words: Florence Ritter) Souzou: Outside Art from Japan, Wellcome Collection, runs until Sunday 30 June 2013. Click here for more info.

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Prouvost captures her new environment by reaching out to all of our senses. Her ten-minute digital projection Swallow will have you imagine the taste of fresh, wet, pulpy fruit and the feeling of its flesh between your fingers; hear the hubbub of the street overlaid with chirruping birdsong; remember the feeling of clear, cold ankle-lapping water on your skin. Gleaming silver-grey fish press against velvety raspberries and a coterie of nymph-like women relax and play in a natural pool. There is a real eroticism to Prouvost’s work but the tone is playful, light and clean. It is a film about seduction, but seduction by fruit, running water and the warmth of the sun.

Prouvost is mindful of how her artistic journey to Italy fits historically, and her installation contains visual references to classical antiquity in allusion to the Grand Tour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The film is shown within a freestanding construction which fills the main space of the Gallery, a vast pastel panorama collaged with photocopied material, photographic prints and swaths of paint. Its circular form mirrors the open, gasping soft lips that provide the breathy soundscape to Swallow and embraces the viewer with its world of imagery.

Laure Prouvost’s installation at the Whitechapel Gallery offers a welcome refuge from this miserable weather (and the deep feeling of injustice in being forced to trudge through thick snow in late March). Her new immersive installation is a celebration of sensual pleasure which transports you to paradise and nourishes the soul. Oh – and the fresh raspberries which sit on upturned car mirrors around the gallery walls are replenished every day. Eat as many as you like. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

On until April 7th.  For more info, visit: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/max-mara-art-prize-for-women-laure-prouvost

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