Nina Yuen likes to confuse her audience. The Hawaiian-born artist’s video biographies seem convincing enough, but their credibility tends to be deliberately undermined by bad lip-synching and an unlikely wide range of personal recollections. Here she tells the story of a mother whose son – apparently a childhood friend of the artist – went out without a coat on a winter day, and was found dead several months later. A voiceover recounting the missing-persons report is combined with a Raymond Carver poem and a fragment of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. It’s to the artist’s credit that compositions of such obviously non-factual fragments effectively convey a convincing sense of real-life loss.
Chinese Art Centre, to 11 May
RC Photograph: PR
Everything in the art of Frenchman Fabrice Hyber is a matter of on-the-go, up-for-grabs, open-ended possibility; parts of his exhibitions are used as catalysts for future ones. There are constant media mutations between scrawled drawings, sculptural sheds, storyboard improvisations, epoxy resin-encrusted canvases, pile-ups of fruit and veg, and the overall installation framework of a salt marsh landscape. Tentative jottings are afforded as much consequence as meticulous constructions; false starts valued as much as compositional conclusions. It’s a world of poetic cross-associations, image mutations, and stream-of-consciousness narratives.
BALTIC, to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
This first UK survey charts Bernadette Corporation’s two-decade assault on the relationship between art, fashion and politics. The New York collective undercut the early-90s capitalist dream, not to mention artist-fashion collaborations, with ironic haute couture. Post 9/11, the corporation shifted their focus to protest. Their film Get Rid Of Yourself documents Black Bloc anarchists at G8 summits, though their words are performed by hipster actor Chloë Sevigny. Meanwhile, Reena Spaulings, BC’s multi-authored post-apocalyptic picaresque novel, has its model heroine hobnob with leftwing theorist and thinker Slavoj Zižek, sing hit pop songs, and set off bombs at an A-list cancer benefit Strokes gig.
ICA, SW1, Wed 27 Mar to 9 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
When it comes to the big questions about the future of art, the artist-musician duo Juneau Projects aren’t sitting on their hands. Recent works include kitting out the tail section of a plane in the middle of a deer park as an artists’ studio for the aftermath of a catastrophe. For their latest show they’ve invited Southampton locals to submit homemade work – be it poetry, flower arranging, fanzines or wood carving – for an anything-goes celebration of creativity.
John Hansard Gallery Central, to 27 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Japan seems to have a more acute relationship with so-called “outsider art”: work driven by personal obsession, created by those on society’s fringes, which at its most compelling allows a glimpse into the stranger places the human psyche might go. This show features 46 artists from Japan whose works translate their private cosmologies in fascinating ways. Profound feeling is turned into a vortex of rainbow colour in Toshiko Yamanishi’s drawings, while Marie Suzuki’s intricately patterned images of monster breasts and orifices have an erotically charged edge.
The Wellcome Collection, NW1, Thu 28 Mar to 30 Jun
SS Photograph: Wellcome Images
Britain’s Lynn Chadwick set out his sculptural agenda in the early 1950s. It was a period of postwar existentialist uncertainty lightened by modernist optimism as he, alongside UK contemporaries Reg Butler and Kenneth Armitage, rose to art-world fame with their semi-abstract hybrids. Now, in a picturesque Lake District setting, there’s a chance to reassess Chadwick’s mid-20th century metal work. It must be admitted that many pieces, with their half-hearted cubism and not-quite surrealism, look derivative, but Diamond Lil, an iron and glass three-legged thing, still looks like it’s crawled out of some all too believable futuristic nightmare.
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Thu 28 Mar to 15 Jun
RC Photograph: Roger Crosby
In the hands of such specialists of serious make-believe as installation artist Tony Oursler and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, a cast of inanimate puppets can come to embody the most complex of social scenarios and the most poignant of psychological quandaries. Oursler in particular can animate a crudely crafted doll with projected monologues that are all the more profoundly melancholic for being so obviously half-amateurish. The protagonists here tend to be loners, tricksters, transvestites, impostors, zombies and alter-egos. Oursler and Pasolini are joined here by the likes of Heather & Ivan Morison, Edwina Ashton and Spartacus Chetwynd, to invest puppetry with some of the effective magic of tribal ritual or the sleight of hand of a seance.
Eastside Projects, to 18 May
RC Photograph: PR
The 365 puppet-like figures that make up Geoffrey Farmer’s installation The Surgeon And The Photographer are a truly motley crew. The Canadian artist collages their faces and bodies together from pictures of ancient sculpture, African art, celebrities, adverts and everything else in between. Their eyes are mismatched; ears sprout where they’re not supposed to; fingers are gigantic. They strike a chord with Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python as well as the demonic hybrids of animal, vegetable and mineral cavorting through Bosch’s phantasmagorias. Like Shakespeare’s fairies, they work through dreams, but Farmer’s tribe pools the whole world’s culture.
Barbican Centre: Curve Gallery, EC2, Tue 26 Mar to 28 Jul
SS Photograph: Rachel Topham
