Rathfarnham Castle, 153 Rathfarnham Rd, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14, D14 F439, Ireland

Sven Sandberg: They went and saw a palace hanging from a silken thread

Rathfarnham Castle was, and remains, the original hosting space for Sven Sandberg’s solo show ‘They went and saw a palace hanging from a silken thread’. Currently, it can only be viewed online as the space, along with Ireland’s other cultural institutions, remain indefinitely closed. Presented by Berlin Opticians, a primarily online gallery that operates a nomadic lifestyle in the physical world, often occupying historical buildings, images of Sandberg’s works can be viewed alongside in-situ documentation. Review by Aidan Kelly Murphy

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Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB

Denzil Forrester: Itchin & Scratchin

Spanning the whole of Denzil Forrester’s career from ‘The Cave’ (1978) painted before the artist went to the Royal College of Art, up to works made in 2019 during a first trip to Jamaica, the movement and dynamism of Afro-Caribbean Dub-Reggae scenes with depictions of club nights, sound systems, house parties and Carnival remain the major subject of the work. Review by Piers Masterson

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Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, Avenida Paulista, 1578 / Casa de Vidro Lina Bo Bardi, Rua General Almério de Moura, 200, São Paulo, Brazil

Leonor Antunes: joints, voids and gaps

I didn’t immediately see Leonor Antunes’s works at Lina Bo Bardi’s ‘Casa de Vidro’ (Glass House), which is to say, I saw them without apprehending them to be out of place. The tortuous steel, twisting in controlled but vital serpentines against the dense green vegetation that rushes in through the porous windows, could have merely been part of the eclectic collection of objects dotted around Bo Bardi’s living room. Ultimately, their undulating verticality - an enduring trademark of Antunes’s sculptural practice - gave them away. Review by Inês Geraldes Cardoso

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The Modern Institute, 14-20 Osborne St, Glasgow G1 5QN

Marco Giordano: To Disturb Somnolent Birds

At the threshold of consciousness and sleep, nineteen resin sculptures lit by LED rest on a wooden bench, marking the entry into Marco Giordano’s reverie. Eerie whispers fill the gallery, transporting visitors to continents far away, into a dream-like state. Time is suspended by an ethereal soundtrack; a lullaby calling to “sing or sink” reverberates across the gallery space. Review by Elaine Y.J Zheng

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Upfor Gallery, 929 NW Flanders St, Portland, OR 97209, United States

Danielle Roney: Frequencies of Opacity

Blinking LED lights on the half-moon steel curves of ‘Strata Series: Zero’ and ‘Strata Series: Zero_One’ (both 2020) ascend and descend, irradiating the forms suspended from the ceiling and resting precariously on the floor. They illuminate the voices of migrants. Danielle Roney’s exhibition at Upfor Gallery, ‘Frequencies of Opacity’, imagines how migrants, violently labelled as illegal, could clandestinely occupy institutions and perhaps create renewed borderlands through technology. Review by Laurel V. McLaughlin

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Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

Alina Szapocznikow: To Exalt the Ephemeral

Nearly fifty years after her death, the restlessly experimental oeuvre of Alina Szapocznikow remains unresolved work; a highly significant, even foundational, figure in the history of twentieth-century Polish art, yet her legacy remains elusive to an audience that may be encountering her for the first time. Sitting uneasily between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme and Pop Art, her provocative body of work shifted considerably from a classical figurative manner to one more impermanent, sexualised and haunting. Review by Matthew Cheale

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Simon Lee Gallery, 12 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DT

Donna Huanca: Wet Slit

Donna Huanca’s ‘Wet Slit’ at Simon Lee Gallery provides a bodily experience of her work. Like the ice sculpture encasing Klein blue hair, only present for the show’s inaugural weekend as it shed water to nothing, we are encased by the exhibition in its evolving sounds and smells, moving beyond the visual. The sound of water dripping and splashing, a glass occasionally smashing, plays on loop. Review by Tess Charnley

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Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP

Johanna Unzueta: Tools for Life

Anthropologists have long believed that the use and development of tools has played a key role in the evolution of humankind. Tools and their mechanisation have contributed to the advancement of agriculture, industrialisation and modernisation. Over the last two decades, New York-based, Chilean-born artist Johanna Unzueta has explored the impact of these technological advancements on labour and the human condition, particularly in relation to nature. Her new exhibition ‘Tools for Life’, at Modern Art Oxford (temporarily closed), brings together a body of work composed of large-scale felt sculptures, wearable garments, a Super-8 film shot in a Chilean textile factory, a wall mural and a selection of free-standing geometric drawings. Review by Alex White

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LADA

LADA Screens Tim Bromage : The Lord of Misrule

The Lord of Misrule is new collaborative film by Tim Bromage, filmed by Roger Graham  and performed by Quentin Reynolds.

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Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, St James's, New Cross, London SE14 6AD

Transparent Things

It’s not uncommon for art or exhibitions to draw upon philosophical or literary sources for inspiration. The 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2015 staged daily readings of Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ (1867); the seed for Cally Spooner’s performance at the New Museum, New York in 2016 ‘On False Tears and Outsourcing’ was a scene from Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ (1856); and Tai Shani’s presentation at the 2019 Turner Prize was based on a 1405 text by poet Christine de Pizan. Review by Kirsty White

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narrative projects, 110 New Cavendish Street, Fitzrovia, London W1W 6XR

Rachel Lowe: SPLIT

Eighty black and white slides, created from found photographs of assorted different women, are projected chronologically so as to suggest the life of one individual woman. Having removed the central section, where the female subject should be, from each photograph, the re-assembled images now possess a vertical seam running down their centres. The physical incision enacted upon the images does not remove the woman's presence entirely, leaving the fictional "Elizabeth" of the title, somehow present and absent at the same time. Find out more about Rachel Lowe: SPLIT at narrative projects.

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Collective, City Observatory, 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh EH7 5AA

Julijonas Urbonas: Planet of People

Julijonas Urbonas is an artist, a designer, the former head of an amusement park, a researcher, and the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency - an organisation dedicated to the investigation of imaginary celestial architectural projects. For his exhibition at Collective, Urbonas has created a new iteration of ‘Planet of People’: an evolving participatory installation that explores what would happen if, instead of humans colonising existing planets, there was a planet made entirely of human bodies. Review by Clare Robson

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BALTIC, Gateshead NE8 3BA

Animalesque / Art Across Species and Beings

The curator of the show, Filipa Ramos, says that the starting point is Deleuze’s text 'Becoming-Animal', but it goes beyond the theory. Deleuze, while writing about Francis Bacon, states that between human and animal, there is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility, that is more profound than any sentimental identification. Review by Gulnaz Can

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Mother’s Tankstation, 31-43 Watling St, Usher's Island, The Liberties, Dublin 8, D08 NP48, Ireland

Niamh O’Malley: Placeholder

The first work you encounter on entering mother’s tankstation to see Niamh O’Malley’s ‘Placeholder’ is ‘Gather’ (2019), a balance of strength and delicacy with its coloured glass cuboids that are pierced and supported by a steel bar. This is the only ‘old’ work in this new exhibition and it is hardly old at all having been shown late last year in O’Malley’s ‘handle’ in Dublin’s RHA. Review by Aidan Kelly Murphy

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