Haroon Mirza infiltrates galleries and, wielding unlikely combinations of low and high technologies, orchestrates sound and light waves to often enchanting affect. Here, silent light works glow amid sculptural walls of tessellated foam while, next door, a hand-crafted antennae transmits the live sounds of the River Calder flowing past outside. Customarily the hushed ambience of the gallery is of course deliberately insulated, so here the artist turns the gallery atmospherically inside-out, enabling us to focus on what is usually ignored. Following in the Zen-influenced tradition of John Cage, Mirza’s dream seems to be to open our eyes and ears to what’s already in the here and now.
The Hepworth, Sat 25 May to 29 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
Curated by the critic Brian Dillon, this show’s reach is expansive, setting contemporary artworks like Katie Paterson’s images of deep space next to historical curiosities. These include marvellous beasts that once stunned Europeans, like the taxidermy walrus that the Victorian hunter James Henry Hubbard brought back from Canada. The patterned surfaces of surrealist and sociologist Roger Caillois’s coloured stone collection are an invitation to stare and imagine, while an American nuclear facility’s Rolodexes provide a glimpse into the administration of military secrets.
Turner Contemporary, to 15 Sep
SS Photograph: Alex Braun
Bodil Manz’s eggshell porcelain appears with almost ghostly serenity amid the late-19th century domestic interiors of Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House, with its fireplace inglenooks, stained-glass windows, hessian wall-hangings and carved-wood panelling. Manz’s ceramic vessels seem both somehow primal in their formal purity and super-modern in their abstract integrity. Their overall colour scheme tends towards white with restrained blocked-in stripes, and it’s easy to imagine her working away in the studio, turning them out with painstaking perseverance. Featuring around 40 pieces, this exhibition charts a lifetime touchingly dedicated to all-too-breakable charms.
Blackwell, Fri 24 May to 1 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
It’s the time of year when students fling open the doors of London’s creative schools and put on shows with the hope of snagging the interest of the leading gallerists, collectors and clients focused in the capital. Conceived by former graphics student, Tamsin O’Hanlon, Free Range is a one-stop shop for work by graduates from regional arts institutions. The roster of shows sees different disciplines – fashion and design, photography, art and finally interior architecture – each get a two-week slot. There’s truly something for everyone, from sonic art to weaving, jewellery and illustration.
The Old Truman Brewery, E1, Fri 31 May to 15 Jul
SS Photograph: PR
Paul Evans’s The Spirit Is A Bone is an intriguing series of ambiguous drawings and watercolours secreted away in a bureau desk. Accompanying Evans’s work are a succession of similarly evocative poems by Chris Jones. The images appear to visually echo exhibits in the museum’s natural history display, as if they are jottings or musings on the passing of time. The desk is the most recent addition to an ongoing programme intended to entice visitors into a more creatively engaged relationship with the museum’s collection of local cultural rarities. This new permanent installation, with its hints of biological intimacies and suggestions of mortal obsessions, complements the museum’s cabinets of curiosities perfectly.
Derby Museum and Art Gallery, ongoing
RC Photograph: PR
Technology, progress and rationality certainly don’t march hand-in-hand in this survey of Thomson & Craighead’s videos, which put the outer reaches of the internet in the spotlight. Belief features a cast of the delusional and indoctrinated spreading the word via YouTube. Further online shenanigans include spam email karaoke, which brings a surprising pathos to those questionable pleas from people with overseas investment opportunities. The art duo’s version of The Time Machine is the highlight: a true befuddling of sequential time and narrative logic, but the pair also know how to have a bit of playful fun. Here is a signpost which indicates how far away it is from the north or south pole.
Caroll Fletcher, WC1, to 26 Jul
SS Photograph: PR
Jeremy Gardiner attempts to go beyond the outward appearance of a landscape to reveal its almost geological structures. While his monoprints, directly lifted from various organic reliefs, are often rather slight in their craft-like attractions, many of his collaged paintings display a more fragmented composition. At his best, Gardiner transcends generalised back-to-nature improvisations and starts to make reference to the underlying spirit of the landscapes. Travelling through Dorset and Cornwall to the far reaches of Greek and Brazilian volcanic islands, he brings back a steadily growing ingrained sense of what makes a place special: a rock face, the unique morning light and precise sea tone. Gardiner is obviously in love with these places, and it shows.
Northumbria University Gallery & Baring Wing, Fri 24 May to 5 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
Making death and destruction bearable, and even beautiful, is one theme of the loosely connected works in Jordan Baseman’s absorbing show Deadness. In a series of photographs, the dirty amber skies above wild fires in Tasmania are portrayed with all the epic grandeur of a Turner painting. Meanwhile, we get cool-headed analysis via a sound work where a sociologist discusses the practice of embalming, its practical aspects and emotional function in comforting the bereaved. Slide projections of corpses arranged amid satin-lined caskets and floral displays from the Victorian era to the present do more than simply illustrate these ideas. If the notion that photographs, like embalming, freeze time and hold back death is familiar, this particular strand of funeral photography isn’t.
Matt’s Gallery, E3, Wed 29 May to 21 Jul
SS Photograph: PR
