Ghost stories are a Christmas tradition for some and there’s plenty here to set teeth chattering: the real skulls of ancient Incans, antique anatomical drawings, and rare prints by Dürer and Goya included. It’s all thanks to Richard Harris, a retired antiques dealer whose eccentric collection boasts treasures aplenty. The curiosities and artefacts represent an extensive survey of death across diverse cultures, from a medieval skeleton puppet to a carved wooden skull from Japan. Some of the present-day momento moris include Mexican artist Marcos Raya’s paintings on vintage photos, whose long-dead subjects stare at us from behind the mask-like skulls he adds.
Wellcome Collection, NW1, to 24 Feb
SS Photograph: Wellcome Images/PR
This survey of Middle Eastern photography reveals there are no simple definitions of identity in the region. The photography itself is as diverse as the experiences it circles. There’s plenty of photojournalism giving us headline news, like rioters burning a portrait of the Shah in 1970s Tehran, or the torso of a Kurdish fighter, stuffed into a Bryan Adams T-shirt, with an amply stocked gun belt. The chief impression, though, is of experimental work short-circuiting assumptions. Egyptian artist Nermine Hammam’s digitally manipulated images (pictured) that seem to teleport young soldiers into kitschy landscapes are memorable, as is Raeda Saadeh’s mummy-like self-portrait.
Victoria & Albert Museum, SW7, to 7 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
A wonderful pairing with the Artist Rooms’ touring show of enigmatic sculptures by Jannis Kounellis, Liliane Lijn’s Cosmic Dramas is a set of three sculptural image-and-text quandaries. Having seemingly more in common with the cut-and-paste poetics of her American contemporaries John Ashbery and William Burroughs than any of the considerably less literate artists of her time, she has called some works “poem machines.” The stuff of primal vibrations, they appear to attempt some kind of magnetic influence or irresistible magic.
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, to 28 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Sheffield welcomes back one of its minor masters for a historical reassessment. Leonard Beaumont was born in the city in 1891 and produced many of his most audacious prints there. His early modernist promise was soon compromised by money-earning duties at the Sheffield Telegraph, and as design consultant for Sainsbury’s. After stylistically dabbling with the bold angulated thrust of vorticism, Beaumont settled down well at the always creatively middling Royal Academy. There are moments of charm here, as he records his tour to Madeira and Tenerife, but Beaumont is most convincing and impressive when wielding a drypoint medium to record the industrial face of Sheffield.
Graves Art Gallery, Sat 22 Dec to 14 Sep Photograph: Hazel Drummond/PR
