Roger Ballen - Manchester Art Gallery

Roger Ballen, Dresie and Casie, Twins, Western Transvaal, 1993

Shadow Land: Photographs by Roger Ballen, 1983-2011 is at Manchester Art Gallery until 13 May. Ballen was born in New York but has lived and worked in South Africa for 30 years. His black and white pictures are distinctive and often disturbing - he describes his work as 'documentary fiction', blurring the line between fantasy and reality. This is his first major show in the UK.

Ballen has recently collaborated with the band Die Antwoord - watch I fink u freeky, the video he has directed for them.
Read article by Sean O'Hagan and see several features collected on ASX: American Suburb X: Photography and Culture.

Roger Ballen, Puppy Between Feet, 1999

Roger Ballen, Eulogy, 2004

Roger Ballen, Sergeant F. De Brun, Department of Prisons Employee, Orange Free State, 1992

Roger Ballen, still from Die Antwoord's I fink u freeky (click on image to play video)

Caro at Chatsworth

Anthony Caro, Capital, 1960

15 works by Anthony Caro are on display in the grounds of Chatsworth House until 1 July. The pieces are from Caro's own collection and span the years from 1960 to 2000. 

Read reviews by Peter Conrad and Robin Blake.

Anthony Caro, Sculpture Seven, 1961

Anthony Caro, Forum, 1992-4

Anthony Caro, Cliff Song, 1976

Anthony Caro, Goodwood Steps,  1994-5

Damien Hirst - Tate Modern

Damien Hirst, Black Sun, 2004 (flies and resin on canvas)

The Damien Hirst retrospective is at Tate Modern until 9 September. The show promises to be both spectacular and entertaining - traits which are both Hirst's strength and weakness. One can hardly fail to be impressed by the physical scale of ambition, to be fascinated or repelled by the flies and viscera. This show is perhaps the moment to decide whether it all adds up to more than energetic showmanship.

Read reviews by Adrian Searle, Laura Cumming, Richard Dorment and Brian Dillon and visit the new Damien Hirst website (featuring live videocam feed from his studio).

Damien Hirst, With Dead Head, 1991 (version of photograph, 1981)

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990

Damien Hirst, A Thousand Years, 1990 (detail)

Damien Hirst, isolated Elements Swimming inthe Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding (Left), 1991

Damien Hirst, Lullaby, the Seasons, 2002 (detail)

Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Gillian Wearing - Whitechapel

Gillian Wearing, Dancing in Peckham, 1994

A retrospective of Gillian Wearing is at the Whitechapel until 17 June.

Wearing is a portraitist - of sorts. This exhibition includes all her best known films and photographs which characteristically explore the gap between appearances, feelings and identity. Her signature work, for example, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992-93) for which Wearing approached strangers and invited them to pose for a photograph holding a sign saying whatever they wanted... precisely mines that space as does a later video work, Confess all on video. Don't worry, you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994).

Other notable works include 10-16 (1997) in which the recorded voices of children aged 10-16 are lipsynched by adult actors; 2 into 1 (1997) in which a mother and her twin sons talk about each other in the others' voices.

More recent work includes a series of self-portraits as members of her family, her younger self and and selected photography 'greats' - Warhol, Arbus, Mapplethorpe. 
My favourite of her works is Dancing in Peckham (1994), a film of Wearing, herself, dancing, alone, in a shopping mall in Peckham to the music inside her head.

Read reviews by Adrian Searle,  Laura Cumming, Alastair Sooke and an interview with Tim Adams.
Watch an introductory video on the Whitechapel website, Dancing in Peckham, an extract from 2 into 1.

Gillian Wearing, Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say, 1992-93

Gillian Wearing, still from 2 into 1, 1997

Gillian Wearing, Self-Portrait aged 17, 2003

British Design 1948-2012 - V&A

Robin Day, CS17 television, manufactured by Pye, 1957

British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age is at the V&A until 12 August.

The period of the survey is determined by the London Olympics of 1948 and 2012 - dates which, as Rowan Moore points out in his review are somewhat arbitrary in terms of British design. Reviews have been generally positive - such a survey could hardly fail to offer genuine pleasures - but qualified by the view that flag waving celebration slightly overshadows any attempt at critical analysis. 

Read reviews by Rowan Moore, Alastair Sooke and Jay Merrick.

Gallery installation of 1950s design for the home

Lucienne Day, Calyx furnishing fabric, manufactured and sold by Heal & Son, 1951

Malcolm Sayer, Jaguar E-Type, 1961

Jamie Reid, God Save the Queen, poster, 1977

Patrick Keiller - Tate Britain

Patrick Keiller, still from Robinson in Space, 1997

The Robinson Institute is an installation by Patrick Keiller in Tate Britain which draws upon the Tate collection and archive. 

Keiller is best known for his trilogy of 'Robinson' films: London, (1994), Robinson in Space (1997) and Robinson in Ruins (2010): 

In these film-essays, the fictional, unseen scholar Robinson and his companion, the ‘narrator’ … undertake journeys around England. In each film, these rogue flâneurs set out to study a particular ‘problem', which leads to meditations on the failings of capitalism, economic, environmental and cultural decline, the post-industrial landscape, and myriad literary, historical and occult threads that weave into a secret history. In the films’ measured pacing and crisply edited combinations of words and images, Keiller has a Ballardian capacity to find the poetry in a supermarket car park, a deserted US airbase nestled in the English countryside, or of lichen slowly consuming a metal road sign… “I think what is most urgently required to address the economic/environmental crisis is the political will to do so, followed by a certain amount of forward planning. Neither is much in evidence. But art, especially landscape art, has a key role. [French philosopher] Henri Lefebvre wrote that ‘to change life we must first change space’. Art can do this.” (From "The long awaited return of Patrick Keiller" - Phaidon)

Read reviews of the exhibition by Adrian Searle and Laura Cumming, an article by Owen Hatherley and an interview on Frieze Blog; watch a short video of Keiller talking about his films; see excerpts from London, Robinson in Space and a trailer for Robinson in Ruins; read an article about Robinson in Ruins by Brian Dillon.

The exhibition continues until 14 October.

Patrick Keiller, still from Robinson in Ruins, 2010

Patrick Keiller, still from Robinson in Ruins, 2010

Patrick Keiller, still from London, 1994

Installation shot of exhibition by everydaylife.style

Installation shot of exhibition by everydaylife.style

Installation shot of exhibition by everydaylife.style

Simon Linke: Untitled (Portraits) - Karsten Schubert

Simon Linke, Untitled (Eva Hesse), 2011

Simon Linke: Untitled (Portraits) is showing at Karsten Schubert until 20 April. This series of monochrome portraits of selected artists - Eva Hesse, Claude Monet, Robert Rauschenberg and others - are drawn in pencil from images found in Artforum and then covered in a colour wash of oil paint. This is a departure in style, but a continuation of Linke's mining of Artforum. He is best known for his succulent, impasto paintings of the magazine's covers and advertisements. See selected examples below, included here just because I like them so much. (In view of the imminent Damien Hirst fest (Tate Modern from 4 April) it seemed appropriate to include a couple of Linke's 'Hirst' works.)

Read the late Stuart Morgan on Linke in Frieze from 1997; see more work at simonlinke.com

Simon Linke, Untitled (Claude Monet), 2011

Simo Linke, Hirst/Nader

Simon Linke, Hirst/The Elusive Truth

Simon Linke, Opie, 2006

Simon Linke, Artforum May 2007