Bruce Munro’s light installations have elicited oohs and ahs at sites across the world for the last decade. His configurations of LED technology and recycled packaging have provided a 21st-century alternative to stained-glass windows in cathedral cloisters, glowed like flowers in night-time gardens, and cascaded from ceilings like sparkling frozen rain. Three of these works have been installed in the grounds of Waddesdon Manor, including the plastic bottles full of sound-responsive LED lights that flickered to music within Salisbury Cathedral two years ago. A meditation on synaesthesia, Munro’s conflation of tinted light and music is a kind of colour you can hear. Complementing this, Brass Monkeys is a stack of clear globes filled with slowly pulsing blue and white fibre optics that suggests a luminous jellyfish.
Waddesdon Manor, to 1 Jan
SS Photograph: Mark Pickthall
Four artists unpick the threads of biography and role-play with witty, poignant and occasionally horrific results in this thoroughly engaging show. Harold Offeh attempts to recreate differing visions of black identity from iconic record sleeves, including Grace Jones’s Island Life and the anonymous man holding three balls in his mouth from the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street (pictured). Philip Newcomb invites you to get intimate with his miniscule works hinting at physical insight. There’s a double take of recognition in Miguel Aguirre’s paintings of actors playing historic personages – Kingsley as Gandhi, Brando as Zapata. Meanwhile, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde’s epic animation Prehistoria is a take on the dawn of man, with roughly inked cartoon plane-crash survivors enacting a cannibal creation myth.
Maria Stenfors Gallery, to 21 Dec
SS Photograph: PR
This exhibition’s title, Thought Collision Factories, might sound a little cryptic but it precisely evokes Dennis Oppenheim’s spirit of intellectual provocation and incendiary production. During the run of the show, three firework signs will be ignited in front of the Institute’s buildings (pictured). Inside the gallery, one automated sculpture emits a cacophony of explosions while another is conveniently loaded with a candyfloss machine. This is on-the-move art that refuses to be stilled by theoretical analysis, art that attempts to stay one step ahead of sober-minded interpretation and provokes us to feel before we indulgently estimate or opinionate.
Henry Moore Institute, Thu 21 Nov to 16 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
The Museum of Art Onomatopoeia is a make-believe gallery dreamt up by artist Charles Avery for his fictional realm, The Island. It’s hosted at the very real Pilar Corrias gallery, where Avery’s imagined space has been temporarily installed in the form of a series of his drawings documenting its latest group exhibition. The virtual works in the exhibition have been curated by Tom Morton. Yes, it’s a convoluted set-up, designed perhaps to reflect on the complex machinations of the contemporary art world, but it covers a vast array of apparently contrasting and contradictory art forms, ranging from Sol LeWitt’s purist formal abstractions through to the psychic intimations of sculptor Louise Bourgeois, all coolly delineated in Avery’s graphics.
Pilar Corrias, W1, Wed 20 Nov to 20 Dec
RC Photograph: Claire Dorn
The Goa-based performance artist Nikhil Chopra has cultivated a complex repertoire of characters, from a gentleman dandy inspired by his grandfather to the stereotyped hirsute native. For his three-day performance (28-30 Nov) and accompanying show in Wolverhampton Art Gallery, he’s displaying previous works (pictured) and posing as a portrait painter in a studio mocked-up from the gallery’s collection of Victorian artefacts. These include teapots and furniture created in the British empire’s far-flung outposts, which catered to the new craze for all things oriental. The set’s focal point, though, is the 19th-century painting An Egyptian Beauty, whose loose-haired maid holding a swollen vessel plays to the era’s racist notions of sensual, exotic eastern women.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Sat 16 Nov to 5 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Once renowned throughout the world as an arena of creative experimentation, the innovative agendas of our art schools are being compromised by workaday considerations such as ground rents and economic returns. Painfully aware of this, artist Paul Winstanley recently spent two summer holidays photographically documenting art school studios in all their vacated spaciousness. Here he uses the studies as source material for oil-on-panel paintings: a series of white-on-white interiors, here and there besmudged by the remains of last semester’s daubings and spillages. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but it builds up to a haunting memorial to the lost days of creative potential.
Kerlin Gallery, Fri 15 Nov to 7 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
Aided by the modernist technical expertise of Ryder Architecture, artist Sara Barker infiltrates the Baltic with her characteristic spindly constructions. Fashioned from precariously slotted-together metal rods and slats, Barker’s sculptures are composed of emptinesses. Interior room-like spaces (work pictured) are demarcated by thin frameworks of aluminium and steel that are often delicately coloured with pale watercolour washes. The rural atmosphere suggested by such restful tones is contradicted by a distinctly urban build-up of industrial cement and glass fragments.
BALTIC, Fri 15 Nov to 2 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Katy Moran once compared her form of abstract painting to glimpsing something interesting across the street before taking a closer look and letting the mystery dissolve. It’s that initial buzz of intuitive recognition that her fuzzed, amorphous abstractions capture; what Francis Bacon referred to as the difference “between paint that conveys directly and paint which conveys through illustration”. For her latest works, she’s started cutting up existing paintings and collaging them together to create colourful jolts. Previously, bright hues might have only flared briefly amid black or dirty cream, but now she’s using the whole rainbow.
Modern Art, WC1, Fri 22 Nov to 22 Dec
SS Photograph: Todd White
