A compact version of Diaries, a tough, intimate show focused on the diaries and video portraits of postwar German artist Dieter Roth, was the high point of last year’s Edinburgh festival. Its terrific centrepiece is Solo Scenes, 128 videos documenting Roth’s everyday tasks – reading, working, going to the loo – during the final year of his life, when he had been diagnosed with an alcohol-related disease. Inevitable decay had long been his subject; his preferred materials, the perishable kind. Here, folders are stuffed with receipts, napkins and tickets (anything under 5mm thick that passed his way), while his diaries are crammed with fleeting thoughts, doodles and to-do lists.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Fri 17 May to 14 Jul
SS Photograph: PR
Brian Griffiths’s installation These Foolish Travels, sets the stage for some serious make-believe in Norwich Castle for this year’s Norfolk & Norwich festival. The scouts’ tents, marquees and every kind of canvas shelter in between, which he’s erected in the cavernous medieval keep, suggest a time when roving minstrels pitched up and put on a show, though many of Griffiths’s are dyed black and decorated with images of distant constellations. He has also been getting busy with the Arts Council collection in the Castle, curating Shortcuts & Digressions (Sat to 8 Sep), a show of fellow British sculptors and conceptual artists, including Helen Chadwick, Adam Chodzko and Cathy Wilkes.
Norwich Castle Museum And Art Gallery, Sat 11 May to 2 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
Contemporary artists attempt here the age-old ambition of transforming the mundane into the magical by variously indulging in creative forms of second infancy. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane set the scene with their Folk Archive, a celebration of common creativity, including scarecrow-making, fairground painting and a lineup of painted clown eggs each neatly labelled by name: Auntie Pearl, Lord Pandrum, Will ‘E’ Droppit and Conk. Doug Fishbone has adapted a digital, back-projected, lifesize, body-shaped cutout he found directing pedestrian traffic at Luton airport to present his sleazy salesman virtual mannequin. Martin Creed is here with his multiple-balloon installation, displacing half the gallery space with a precisely measured amount of air.
The Public, Wed 15 May to 29 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
This year, Liverpool’s photography festival takes as its overall focus the wide-ranging subject of self-image, and manages to hold the theme together more than most similarly ambitious events. It is subtitled Who Do You Think You Are?, and the intrigue here lies in the contrasting perspectives, from the portraits of fashion snapper Rankin to the early 20th century photographer Weegee, who had an uncanny ability to arrive at crime scenes in New York’s Lower East Side before the police. Fifty years or so later, Martin Parr and Tom Wood are seen beginning to develop their empathetic vision of Merseyside working-class life. A different tack was being used more recently by Eva Stenram, as she subtly transformed crude sex-mag images into restrained scenarios of erotic suspense.
Various venues, Fri 17 May to 15 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
Whether it’s Uncle Sam, Mother Russia or Britannia talking, the state isn’t always the most subtle seducer but it certainly is forceful, as this enthralling exploration of the art of propaganda reveals. There’s emotional manipulation aplenty, be it the image of Liberty made up like a 1940s movie star, demanding money for the war effort on a second world war bond stamp, or the Russian cold war poster where the same American symbol of freedom is reduced to a surveillance tower for cops who peer at the populace through her eyes. The variety of persuasive material, and the many areas of public life it touches, is eye-opening. Campaigns opting for a lighter touch include the potato man on the cover of a Dig For Victory-era cookbook.
The British Library, NW1, Fri 17 May to 17 Sep
SS Photograph: Campbell-Johnston Collection
The characters Rodney Graham plays in his cinematic photographs often dream big, following in the footsteps of creative heavyweights from Kurt Cobain to Morris Louis. The large triptych at the centre of his latest show sees him pose as a modern-day version of the 19th-century champion rower Max Schmitt in Thomas Eakins’s painting, which celebrated his friend’s win in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill river race. Yet in Graham’s version, the white-haired chap taking five in a kayak seems more hobbyist than hero. That Schmitt won the race again and again, forever trying to better his speed or get one up on his competitors, surely appeals to the artist, long fascinated by our compulsion to repeat, make the same mistakes, and create variations.
Lisson Gallery, NW1, Fri 17 May to 29 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
Vitor MM Azevedo’s paintings and sculptures transport the distinctive Portuguese mood of saudade from his native Lisbon to this newly launched gallery in downtown Derby. Although the word has no equivalent in English, it might be defined as a melancholic yearning for a lost place or absent person. While mostly used in reference to the traditional song form of fado, the passionate sadness of saudade seeps into the lyrical aesthetics of much of the country’s visual art, including Azevedo’s. The most beautifully sorrowful of the works on show here are a recent series of small-scale but highly evocative paintings. Atmospherically resonant, they appear to embody the artist’s nostalgia for his homeland.
Artsmith LIVE, to 19 May
RC Photograph: PR
Stephen Sutcliffe’s videos are an irreverent mixture of found sounds, texts and images. Sampled from old voice recordings, film and TV footage, his fragmentary references are set off against each other in a crazy collage of cultural disorientation. The highbrow art of Shakespeare, Chopin and Beethoven is overlaid with wry cultural commentaries by Alan Bennett, Christopher Logue and Morrissey. Outwork, the central piece here, is named after Jacques Derrida’s essay reflecting on the influence that titles, prefaces and introductions can have on any response to an artwork. Sutcliffe exploits the idea to maximum absurdist effect.
Tramway, to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
