Indian Dancer, 1930. From an Ethnographic Museum

Featuring over 100 pieces of work, the show recognises her career from 1910 – 1970, presenting satirical, feminist and though-provoking cut and paste pieces which  questioned the concepts of beauty, relationships, art-making and the New Woman in a post-World War I Germany. Her experience of working in the fashion industry combined with her rebellious, anti-art sentiment led to her produciing a number of notable works with themes that even resonate today. This includes the teasing Heads of State (pictured below) and High Finance, which presents the relationship between bankers and the army during the economic crisis in Europe in ironic fashion.

Heads of State, 1918-20. Photo: Collection of IFA, Stuttgart

Though her male contemporaries George Grosz, Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters may have got the limelight over the years, this is a rare chance to see the work of a radical artist that shows what women can do when they take charge. Fellas, take note.

Hannah Höch at Whitechapel Gallery is on until March 23.  For more info, visit: www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/hannah-hch

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For more info, visit: billetto.co.uk/events/speedlisteningforbeginners

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Off the back of a pilot  in 2011, UP Projects’ The Floating Cinema is pretty unusual, but it arrives for 10 weeks of programmes as innovative and creative as its cargo-style construction.

“Extra-Ordinary” will feature live art shows, tours along the waterways, a horror weekender – where films will be projected from the boat to the bank side – and a fancy dress screening of Frankenweenie near 3 Mills Studio where it was made. There’s also a number of on-board workshops and talks planned , unveiling some of the more interesting stories about the Lea Valley area where the boat will be regularly docked.

The events are the brainchild of artist duo Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie who say the compact space (which seats 12) will be a place for creative things to happen – and given our love for all things hip and arty, that’s just too good to resist.

For more info, visit: www.floatingcinema.info

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The Camden Pirate Castle is a wonderful community centre, based funnily enough by the lock in Camden, providing a place for young children to learn and play with boats and canoes, as well as offering an indoor space for various activities including yoga and tai-chi and all around doing valuable work for the local community. So join them for their fourth Walk Like A Pirate Day, a 12 mile walk on 22 June alongside London’s waterways to raise money for the centre.

Fancy dress is optional and with no charge to participate and no minimum sponsorship required, so it is a relaxed way to raise money for a great cause and take in the London river scenery.
The walk kicks off at 12pm outside Tottenham Hale tube station with a group photo and will end back at the Pirate House for celebratory drinks for all who survived.

Check out their Facebook event page for details https://www.facebook.com/events/121230691388694/?ref=ts&fref=ts (Words: Lucy Palmer)

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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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Taking place at the Horse Hospital which prides itself on risk, experimentation and innovation, it all kicks off with a short film competition. Featuring seven films, the winner will selected by a secret ballot carried out by the crowd. Rather confusingly, there is an opening party the following evening (an avant garde take on lineality, perhaps?) and the fair on offer here highlights quite what a varied community has built over the last three years. A knees-up that promises Nói Kabát laying waste to your ears (a band who draw on constructivism, futurism and noise theory) alongside writers who do readings standing on their heads highlights that this is not only a festival about film, but a forum for discussion, art, and experimentalism – and that sounds like a fine way to spend the next few days.  (Words: Ed Spencer)

The Underground Film Festival runs from December 6th – 9th. For more info visit www.londonundergroundfilmfestival.org.uk

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If you’re still with me, surphysics is the subject matter here of this exhibition, and is a really rather heartening attempt to create a safe space within the memory banks. It’s a quite lovely idea. Like a self-decimating Russian doll or a dog chasing its own tail, Surphysics seeks to re-understand the source of thought, how we process it, how that is stored, and how it is remembered. It’s a chicken ‘n’ egg take on memory and the creation of that memory.

The artists, Halstead & Kerr, are members of Solina Hi-Fi, a gaggle of artists and music merchants involved in any manner of pursuit – a 24 hour Olympic marathon being a particular achievement. And a focus on collaboration is of importance to Anarch, the space in Deptford which this exhibition features. It seeks to find new spaces to create site-specific work that challenges the artists’ own modus operandi. Here, it is Halstead & Kerr who are challenged to develop alternative work practices –  though I think I’ll let their art do the talking rather than their words. (Words: Ed Spencer) 

Harmattan Cluster runs until January 26th.  For more info, visit  www.anarch.co.uk

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If you’re not familiar with Dreamthinkspeak, they have been around since 1999 mesmerising audiences with their site specific performances. This ensemble of actors, technicians and assorted creatives meld different mediums to create an all immersive journey for the audience, making them winners of the Peter Brook Empty Space Equity Ensemble Award in 2010. With their new gargantuan production, inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci and The Book of Revelation and utilising some avant-garde stage production, Dreamthinkspeak promise a journey through underground passages, the undiscovered nooks and crannies of Somerset House and require you take your life into your hand.
The superlatives flowed last time for their 2004 production Don’t Look Back, described variously as ‘beautiful’, ‘intricate’, ‘terrifying’ and ‘involving’ – and anyone that enjoyed the sold-out You Me Bum Bum Train will love this.  The action doesn’t unfold until January, but shows like these don’t go on sale early for nothing, so grab a ticket while (and if) you can.  (Words: Ed Spencer) 

In The Beginning Was The End runs from January 28 – March 30 2013.For more info, visit http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/performance/in-the-beginning-was-the-end

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Sparkly Brooklyn import Reed + Rader have made their London debut with new exhibition Cretaceous Returns at 18 Hewitt Street. The quirky duo famed for their bright, glitchy GIFs have refashioned the East London location as a prehistoric party house, staging large-scale projections and sound and video works in a space populated on- and off-screen by…dinosaurs. The opening night was a dino-extravaganza with videogame-graphics, dancing and dining on the digital artists’ favourite food – pizza – served up wood-fired style from bespoke street food company Bosco and Bee.

Reed + Rader’s work is undeniably fun. They push the GIF format- perhaps the first real art form of the internet –  to its faux-futuristic limits, creating dynamic and deadpan imagery that never takes itself too seriously. Inherent in their work is a bittersweet nostalgia for the simple pleasures of the early internet age  too– the happy-go-lucky Moldy Peaches era when Pokémon cards and Gameboys, pizza, kitties and cartoons were king.

And yet, beyond their spacey amusements-arcade of imagery, there is the potential for more serious discussions about the ways in which new technologies are to direct the future of art-making. Just as the prehistoric, the nostalgic and the futuristic are jumbled in this new exhibition, so are the categories of fashion, advertising, technology and art, converging to form a new breed of post-Pop art. Reed + Rader don’t only question the boundaries of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art but disregard them all together – with the irresistible audacity of teenagers. Cretaceous Returns is only on until November 20th, so catch the duo and their dinosaurs before they party on back over the Atlantic. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

For more info, visit www.prote.in/feed/2012/11/reed-rader

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Having travelled across the world, this remarkable ‘performative installation’ returns to its original home at Ambika P3, Marylebone Road. The massive monolithic interior of the former concrete testing facility has once again been transformed to become Goebbels’ cavernous laboratory of sound and light. Stifter’s Dinge defies definition: it is at once a theatrical performance, a visual spectacle, a musical sculpture – and yet it is none of these things exclusively.

A towering structure blinking with LEDs supports five pianos which appear to play themselves, singing out short melodies which combine and blend with the clanking and clunking of other components in the installation. Bodies of water bubble and ripple with the reverberations of sound; a thin mist hovers across the scene. Lights flash and dance across the space, casting abstract patterns on vast gauze screens that lower themselves from the ceiling at various intervals. Phantom-like voices hauntingly play out over projected images of idealised landscape paintings. At times meditative, at times unsettling, the experience is totally mesmerizing.

The title of the work translates as ‘Stifter’s Things’, after nineteenth-century writer Adalbert Stifter who was (in)famous for his fastidious, vividly detailed descriptions of nature: part of his attempt to close the gap between the ambiguity of language and the reality of experience. Goebbels uses similar tactics of immersion in his ‘no-man show’. The contemporary composer created this piece for instruments, not their players; and as the only human presence in the room, the audience is made to focus on the objects themselves which appear to perform autonomously.

This is a project to experience, not one to read about. Stifter was right – sometimes language just doesn’t have the capacity to adequately describe nature (or a multi-faceted, sensory-immersive installation). Artangel never fail to deliver the cutting-edge of cool – the newest addition to their list of weird and wonderful projects is no exception and should not be missed. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

Heiner Goebbels: Stifter’s Dinge, in its new drop-in 4 hour long format The Unguided Tour, runs until 18th November. For more info, click HERE.  A series of the original performances run between 13th-18th November.

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