At venues throughout the steel city – ranging from the Graves Gallery through to a former foundry at Furnace Park – Art Sheffield takes on a broad theme of economic systems and cultural exchange. It’s a great excuse for an art extravaganza in a city that for so long has been disappointingly short of contemporary art outlets. The oldest work in the entire event will be hard to beat: a Joseph Beuys installation from 1980 titled Wirtschaftswerte (Economic Values) is typical of the great German artist-cum-showman-shaman. But Los Angeles-based Edgar Arceneaux takes up the challenge at CADS Snow Lane with a high-tech sound-and-video piece.
Various venues, to 14 Dec
RC Photograph: PR
Dayanita Singh is as likely to call herself a novelist as a photographer, but the Indian artist likes to spin her stories using images rather than ink. She started out as a photojournalist but now her pictures push beyond media cliches of exotic or poverty-plagued India. Instead, she probes lives poised between tradition and modernity, with this series exploring the tension between old traditions and new ways of thinking. They include her richly hued shots of factories and tower-blocks, melancholy black-and-white quiet interiors, and surreal images capturing nightfall’s transformations.
Hayward Gallery, Tue 8 Oct to 15 Dec
SS Photograph: PR
There’s natural magic at work in this show of Dorothy Cross’s alchemical creations, which are inspired by her home on Ireland’s rugged west coast. Her foxgloves made from black bronze and human finger bones are the stuff of gothic fairytales, and the video Teacup sees a delicate china cup become an ocean where sailors row against rolling waves. Many of her pieces work by incorporating the sea. A bronze cast of a child’s foot paired with a rubber diver’s fin found washed up on the beach, for instance, could be the fossilised remains of a boy evolving into a merman. Cross’s most bewitching offerings, though, are often her most simple, such as new video Sea Cave, where her camera explores the dark interior of a watery cavern.
Turner Contemporary, Sat 5 Oct to 5 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
Elmgreen & Dragset could give former Through The Keyhole presenter Loyd Grossman a run for his money with their latest installation of rooms whose objects hint at a fictional inhabitant’s life story. The Danish/ Norwegian duo pulled off a similar trick at the Venice Biennale a few years ago, transforming the Nordic pavilion into an art-filled bachelor pad with a corpse in the pool. Here, the art culled from the V&A’s collection includes paintings of a tumultuous, Romantic landscape and a handsome Newfoundland dog, a marble bust of a beautiful boy, a poster for the seminal art show This Is Tomorrow, and a fig leaf that once protected the modesty of the museum’s plaster copy of Michelangelo’s David.
V&A, SW7, to 2 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
Ged Quinn makes paintings that appear like collages of apparently unrelated images. He takes a classical landscape then undermines the atmospheric calm with references to war crimes and other unnerving subjects. Quinn’s work adds up to an intriguing and bewildering meshing of historical and stylistic quotations. Astute viewers might spot half-obscured allusions to the work of 17th-century painters Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael and French new wave film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, while two portraits play off the tension between poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was openly affiliated with Nazism. At times these thematic collisions come across merely as a play of incongruities, but more often there seems to be a quizzical game going on.
The New Art Gallery, Wed 9 Oct to 5 Jan
RC Photograph: Todd-White Art Photography
Vered Lahav’s art is subtly evocative. It hints at becalming scenarios that nevertheless seem to contain the potential to disturb and unnerve. Here, 100 resin-injected poppy seed casts rest on a bed of sand next to a sculptural bell jar containing a continuous mobile cascade of white feathers (pictured). Even more enticingly, Lahav intimates memories of childhood bedtime fears with a series of images of kitsch ornamental owls, photographed against a dead night sky, and an accompanying set of knowingly naive drawings of fairytale reveries. Lahav leads us down the nocturnal garden path and leaves us there, slightly tremulous, wondering: what on earth?
mac, to 17 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
This collection of performance videos and sculptural installations involves 20 contemporary artists whose work has some affinity with the melancholic humour of the silent movie star Buster Keaton. His artfully choreographed tragicomic antics are seen by some as precursors of the absurdist disillusionments of the more radical art of our time. There’s certainly conceptual work here, with Fischli & Weiss's video Der Lauf Der Dinge, which features rubbish bags, car tyres and flammable foam that collide and react to create a series of ever-escalating scenarios. Erwin Wurm’s work is more Keaton-esque; it features an image of a bloke putting a pen up his nose.
Warwick Arts Centre, to 14 Dec
RC • This was amended on 11 October 2013. The earlier caption said wrongly that Der Lauf Der Dinge was "aping Honda's ad The Cog". Photograph: PR
Don’t let the parlour-game delicacy of Kara Walker’s art fool you. In her animations and drawings – which are provocatively dubbed as being by the “Celebrated American […] Negress” – this leading artist uses the cut-out silhouettes that once entertained genteel folk in shadow puppet performances. Yet while working in a quaint visual language of bygone days, her take on the history of slavery in the deep south is anything but sanitised. Nor is it some cheap exercise in finger-pointing. Instead, she fashions a tragicomic orgy where graceful figures are caught up in a constant round of hungry sexual transactions and brutality. It’s uncomfortably pungent, with pointed racial stereotypes, while the roles of abuser and victim slip and slide.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Fri 4 Oct to 5 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
