Josh Kline, Oxford
When it premiered at the New Museum’s art triennial in New York earlier this year, Josh Kline’s video installation Freedom was an instant hit, used by countless critics to sum up that survey show’s dystopian post-internet vision. Now making its UK debut, it features Teletubbies dressed in riot gear, with actors reading social media feeds about torture on the screens in their bellies. The highlight, though, is a video in which President Obama’s features are mapped on to an actor’s to give a no-holds-barred speech that never actually happened. In place of smooth politicking he outwardly decries an America split by hatred. OK, Kline’s mix of real-world horrors versus disembodied digital life isn’t exactly subtle, but his commentary on soft power uses direct punches to get an urgent message across. skye sherwin
Modern Art Oxford, Sat to 18 Oct
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Boolean Expressions, Cork
The 19th-century autodidact George Boole not only rose to the position of first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Cork, he also contrived mindboggling systems of “Boolean” algebra and symbolic logic that can be seen as precursors of today’s computer science and microelectronic engineering. Artists have long been fascinated by numerical and geometric systems, and never more so than in our era of digital communications, as this exhibition sets out to indicate. The clean-cut minimalism of Sol LeWitt transcends clinical fastidiousness to evoke some kind of structural essence, while Tatsuo Miyajima choreographs a maze of LEDs to delineate something approaching the “nothingness that lies beyond all understanding”.
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, to 8 Nov
RC
It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, Manchester
“It was a dark and stormy night…” The opening line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, has been parodied as melodramatic cliche and adapted as a narrative prompt in a free-associational game akin to Consequences. Here, it’s the starting point for an evolving collaborative installation, and the gallery has gone to pains to select participants who have already displayed a penchant for surreal make-believe. A giant sculptural eyebrow and a cast of maneki-neko cats feature as protagonists for Graeme Durant. Lindsey Mendick’s ceramic cornucopias are as camp as they are kitsch, while Jemma Egan conjures hypnosis from ennui with a looped video of frankfurters on the move. Whatever conclusions are drawn here remain to be seen, but it’s doubtful they will be of the “happy ever after” variety. rc
Castlefield Gallery, Fri to 6 Sep
RC
Beauty And Balance, Cambridge
Long before artists such as the 2008 Turner nominee Goshka Macuga turned staging art in unconventional settings into an art form in its own right, there was Jim Ede of Kettle’s Yard. For 60 years people have enjoyed work by pioneering modernists such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Joan Miró amid antique furniture and ceramics in these low-beamed Cambridge cottages, which he transformed into an alternative venue for art appreciation. Now Kettle’s Yard is reversing the process, transferring Ede’s homely vision to one of the city’s other cultural landmarks, the Fitzwilliam Museum. Beauty And Balance features key works from Ede’s collection, including Miró’s Tic Tic. A great example of Ede’s subtle touch, he drew out this work’s chromatic contrasts, where surreal abstractions dance over a plane of Miró’s delicious sky blue, by offsetting it with a simple lemon on a pewter dish. ss
Fitzwilliam Museum, to 30 Apr
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Fig-2: Veronika Hauer, London
The ICA’s programme of 50 week-long shows has defied the usual exhibition-making rules. Curated by Fatoş Ustek, Fig-2 has so far seen newbies and established names – such as Tom McCarthy and Charles Avery – showing more spontaneously and experimentally. The 34th week belongs to Veronica Hauer, an Austrian artist and editor of the online art mag Nowiswere. Hauer is obsessed with language, be it written or bodily. Her show includes clay figures and posters exploring the jester, that anarchic cultural archetype who plays the fool while offering council to kings, with accompanying video work transmitting poetry through the medium of semaphore signals.
ICA, SW1, Mon to 30 Aug
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Dan Perfect/Tommaso Corvi-Mora, Rochester
Dan Perfect’s abstract paintings flit intriguingly between traditional physical mark-making and modern technology. They begin as improvised drawings, which are then developed on a computer. The resulting canvases – dominated by murky greens and blues or hot oranges and fuchsias – are gorgeous to look at. Painterly dashes, often rendered on screen first with a “tablet pen”, suggest free-floating forms against voids of lush colour. Shapes, like eyes and breasts, emerge from these panoramas, bringing together our primal visual instincts and a digitally enhanced world. Like Perfect, Tommaso Corvi-Mora is an art world veteran, the London dealer for sculptor Roger Hiorns and painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. He also makes surreal ceramics, which resemble De Chirico’s faceless heads or chessmen with great hats, and blur the bounds between useable vessels and sculpture.
Rochester Art Gallery, Fri to 14 Nov
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Paddy McCann, Belfast
After a day in the studio, a painter can emerge feeling distinctly at odds with workaday versions of reality. There’s something about the potent messiness of paint that tends to blur the edges of fixed visual definitions. Paddy McCann’s work is unashamedly emotive and poetic. He records memories, both personal and collective, from subjective perspectives. Emerging from a tradition of Irish lyrical expressionism, he sets his painterly figuration against the documentary “facts” presented by contemporary news reports and the image banks of officially recorded history.
The MAC, to 18 Oct
RC
