For her show, Liquid Land: Legacies Of Oil And Power, Azerbaijani photographer Rena Effendi documents the everyday lives of those defiantly carrying on in some of the most polluted areas of the former Soviet Union. There are the elderly women who returned to Ukraine’s dreaded exclusion zone, the restricted area around Chernobyl’s reactor four which exploded on 26 April 1986. Then there’s Effendi’s father, a dissident scientist and entomologist who devoted his life to studying butterflies amid the unlikely setting of the industrial ruin of the petroleum-rich Absheron peninsula. It’s a grim collection of images that, in its particular details, is nevertheless defiantly eartening.
Impressions Gallery, to 22 Jun
RC Photograph: Rena Effendi
David Batchelor is best known for his sculptural assemblages of neon-lit detritus. Precariously towering structures of stuff picked up around the streets of London are brightly lit from within to create monuments to the city’s nocturnal display of sparkling, flashing and dazzling enchantment. His 3D work constitutes one of the most convincing depictions of the metropolitan landscape in contemporary art. Less known are the paintings, drawings and working studies that receive their first substantial airing here. As with the sculptures, Batchelor’s 2D works tend to be mix-ups of a wide variety of media: oil pastel, gaffer tape, highlighter pen. While more abstract than the sculptures, his geometric grids seem just as illuminated by a spirit of urban delight.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Sat 4 May to 14 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
Jutta Koether’s hectic canvasses look like Day-Glo tangles of painterly knotweed and show off her varied skill set. For three decades she’s crossbred her work as an artist, critic, poet and musician, and her paintings – a dense graffiti of quotes and images – marry pop culture, art history and literature in a punky, dashed-off style. Here she updates Poussin’s legendary painting cycles, The Four Seasons and The Seven Sacraments. Her seasons are those of fashion and finance: Baptism depicts German Formula One world champion Sebastian Vettel, while Confirmation features exhibition tickets sealed in clear acrylic.
Arnolfini, Sat 4 May to 7 Jul
SS Photograph: PR
Karin Ruggaber mines the world around her for sculptural inspiration: hard, unyielding concrete from outside buildings and soft malleable fabric from the inside are two of her favoured materials. Here, one of the painterly constellations of abstract concrete shapes she’s best known for evolves across the floor in dusty blues and reds, pale yellow, earth and putty colours. Where previous friezes consisted of curving forms spread out like floating amoeba, now more awkward angular shapes join in. A video only shown through the gallery’s website makes a curious counterpoint to Ruggaber’s duets between the manmade and organic. When seen through her lens, what might otherwise be written off as ordinary apartment blocks become rich landscapes of colour, shape and texture, from scratchy verdant foliage to smooth columns.
PEER Gallery, N1, to 29 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
It must be great to live in Keith Arnatt’s world. Common objects appear to conspire to provide moments of delight for his camera. One scrap of junk finds itself juxtaposed with another to set up a deadpan visual joke. The young Buenos Aires-born artist Alek O also recognises the power of ready-made objects to embody experiential depths. Taken out of context and subtly reworked, her family mementos resonate with the convincing particular characteristics of personal histories. YOU – to which Arnatt has also contributed – is a group exhibition of contemporary art work by the internationally renowned likes of Felix González-Torres and Rivane Neuenschwander which invites you to interact with its often cryptic enticements.
Mostyn, to 7 Jul; Alek O exhibition to 14 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
Lead artist for this year’s House series of at-home art commissions within the Brighton festival, Mariele Neudecker is fitting mysterious land and seascapes into the confines of the Regency Townhouse in Hove. Discover video of the south-west Indian Ocean’s deepest beds in the basement and a huge replica iceberg on the ground floor, its glassy bulk reflected in a tarnished mirror. However, while her sculptures, photos and videos transport you to far-off places, what you see is never the full story. Neudecker is interested in the way photographic imagery always crops and frames the world.
Regency Townhouse, Hove & Lighthouse, Brighton Sat 4 May to 26 May
SS Photograph: PR
When it comes to Israel-born, London-based artist Oreet Ashery’s politically piercing work, wacky doesn’t cover it. She’s created a cult to messianic Jewish figure Shabbtai Zevi in a Kentish fisherman’s hut. Her performances include shaving heads and adding body hair to transform herself and others into notorious macho leaders. Her forays into identity politics have also seen her pose as an Orthodox Jewish man, a Norwegian postman and a rabbit. Billed as somewhere between a theatre troupe and takeaway delivery service, Party For Freedom, her travelling project with Artangel, is inspired by the radically changing landscape of Dutch politics and features film, live performance and music. Anyone brave enough can invite the party to their home.
Various venues, to 22 Jun, invitation form at artangel.org.uk
SS Photograph: PR
Katie Paterson creates a vast universe where an ordinary turntable, synchronised in time with the Earth’s rotation, plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Accompanying it, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is translated into Morse code, sent into space via radio transmission, then returned to Coventry refracted by the moon’s surface, before being retranslated to play in the gallery on an automated piano. A microphone is set up to record the live melting of the Earth’s largest glacier, and a map charts the exact locations of 27,000 dead stars as they have been observed by humankind. Paterson makes us feel both sad, happy and amazed to be so small in such a world. Her work is deceptively low-tech yet connects us, with wry humour, to vast natural forces.
Warwick Arts Centre, to 22 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
