These 26 images hymning the outlaw antics of the infamous late 19th-century bush ranger and outlaw Ned Kelly are probably the most widely recognised paintings in white Australian history. While Nolan follows the bare facts of the Kelly story, he transforms his character into a quixotic dreamer who somehow reflects the wild pioneering spirit of the Australian outback. As Kelly’s beady eyes peek out at the forbidding landscape from a self-welded helmet of metal-plated armour, Nolan pits his lone antihero against both the forces of nature and the encroaching powers that be. These paintings might well have looked like eccentric illustrations when they were first presented in the 1940s, yet their awkward, enamel-on-board techniques come across as fittingly mainstream today.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 27 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
Beatrice Gibson’s Agatha is a must for those who like their sci-fi high concept. She stars as our guide to a beautifully bleak planet. All black slate and harsh gorse, it was shot on 16mm in north Wales. The landscape’s not the only thing that’s stripped back: this is a world without speech. Its inhabitants communicate in other ways, like walking, or “colour changing”, and their perception of the world around them is finely tuned. An eccentric soundtrack of string and wood instruments gives a clue to one of Gibson’s sources. Agatha is based on a dream the experimental British composer Cornelius Cardew once had. His “anyone can do it” approach to making music with untrained orchestras has been an important touchstone for the British artist’s previous collaborative films.
Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, Sat 17 Nov to 9 Dec
SS Photograph: PR
Sheaves of paper stack up like tottering Towers of Babel in Dayanita Singh’s new black and white photographs. It seems no shelf, cabinet or desktop has been left empty in the archives she’s chronicled from all over India. Although these images make a different first impression to Singh’s recent lushly coloured work, they continue her interest in that eerie moment when the everyday world slips into the realm of fantasy. These parchment-crowded rooms could easily feature in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s mind-bending short stories about libraries and labyrinths.
Frith Street Gallery, WC1, Thu 22 Nov to 26 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
At just 26, Helen Marten been getting the kind of critical attention most artists spend their whole careers dreaming of. To date, her dizzyingly eclectic output has included a polystyrene Tintin frozen mid-dash, and a delicate wooden wall sculpture garnished with an air freshener. Steeped in design of all creeds and stripes, her references careen from comic-book heroes to shop displays and comedy fonts such as letters made from women’s bodies. She’s interested in the way things look, how they can seem sparkly and new-fangled one second and dated the next. When it comes to tackling the rampant proliferation of stuff in the digital age, Marten’s work is as hyper as the internet.
Chisenhale Gallery, E2, Fri 23 Nov to 27 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
Emerging from the minimalist and constructivist abstract art tendencies of the 1960s, Ernest Edmonds has developed a body of painting, drawing and computer-generated art that now seems to have been prescient of our digitalised age. This kind of thing has often been termed “process-based”, more concerned as it is with objective mathematical systems than with any indulgence in subjective expression. The show includes early hand-written algorithms and punch cards used to generate abstract colour and light programmes.Edmonds has also been commissioned to present a “light sculpture” in which flicker-rate, sound, colour and shape are electrically triggered by the visitors’ movements.
Site Gallery, From Sat 17 Nov to 2 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Since 1993 when Peter Doig won first prize at Liverpool’s John Moores exhibition, he’s established one of the most distinctively recognisable, outlandishly successful bodies of work in British painting. Back then, his charming landscapes appeared dangerously close to the pastel-shaded sparkle of amateur romanticism but it soon became clear that there was something far more resonant than surface sentimentality going on here. Doig’s sweet colours verge at times on the nauseous and his subjects’ obvious derivation from film and photography sit uneasily with his improvised manner. It’s as if he has brought these reflections back from trips, half awesome and more than half awful.
The MAC, Fri 16 Nov to 20 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
Cindy Sherman is a razor-sharp dissector of types, using makeup and prosthetics to pose as the trophy wife or diva-ish transsexual, to mention a few of the characters she’s starred as in fantastical photographic self-portraits. In the late 1980s, however, she took a rest from the role play. The stars of her Sex Pictures are medical mannequins subjected to a grand guignol of pornographic acts, with shades of Goya’s Disasters Of War. Curator Todd Levin pairs this series with her Broken Dolls, black and white shots of mutilated action figures. For all the gore, these pixtures are no less an exercise in theatrical artifice than the works where Sherman takes centre stage. She gives us sex and violence, pushing our fascination with cruelty to extremes.
Sprüth Magers, W1, Fri 23 Nov to 26 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
Beat Streuli presents his photo and video portrait of pedestrians of the world. Working throughout Birmingham, New York, Brussels, São Paulo, Sydney and Cape Town, Streuli captures city life in a series of close-up meditations on human variety. While almost all his subjects might be easily categorised as cosmopolitan, chic and middle class, their get-ups shift vastly in style: streetwise Hispanic kids sit alongside black girls with braids and Arabic hijabs meet Indian saris. Throughout it appears to be a world of privileged calm and cool. Streuli’s passersby might sometimes step out alone but their smartphones assure us they are in no way loners and without the artist’s contagious panache it would seem to be no deeper than a global fashion show.
Ikon Gallery, Wed 21 Nov to 3 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
