British artist Helen Marten is not yet 30, but has already made a name for herself. Sculptor Richard Wentworth dubbed her the most promising young artist in 2010, while the New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently compared her to a young Cindy Sherman. Her films render everything from snails to designer lamps as eerie but immaculate digital animations. Her sculptural installations, meanwhile, fuse handmade and found objects. All are a kind of Alice Through The Computer Interface. Her first show with leading London gallery Sadie Coles has ceramic clothes, potpourri assemblages and silk-screened cats (pictured), and promises plenty of leftfield fun.
Sadie Coles, W1, Wed 29 Jan to 15 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock’s new show Critical Décor: What Works! purports to question art-world exhibitionism, featuring a series of illustrated texts that often seem impossibly self-referential. Trestles, drawing boards and filing cabinets are set out to imply earnest academic research, but anyone attempting to grasp meaningful conclusions is likely to be frustrated. References to socialist German playwright Bertolt Brecht and French painter Gustave Courbet suggest a subversive agenda but the density of composition deliberately reflects the kind of theoretical complexities that so easily alienate the general public.
Lanchester Gallery, to 2 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
How heavy is the burden of Poland’s recent past? About 1.2 tonnes according to Christian Jankowski’s new film, Heavy Weight History. With a talent for using TV formats for his own devices, here, in a reality TV-style stunt, Jankowski’s irony is as hefty as a dumbbell when a sports presenter explains how one bygone figurehead fought for the dignity of the proletariat. Meanwhile, a weight-lifting gang, exalt in the glory of raising a giant bronze bust (pictured) by 20cm. The failed socialist dreams and troubles of an earlier era are seemingly blown away in a murky cloud of low-rent TV stardust. Complimenting this, an earlier film, Crying For The March Of Humanity, sees him play on telly’s hysterical side, restaging a Mexican telenovela, except with all dialogue replaced by wailing.
Lisson Gallery, Thu 30 Jan to 8 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
The young artist John Skoog’s films bring a lush, cinematic grandeur to fragmented vignettes shot in the bleak fields and dark woods of rural southern Sweden. In his earlier works, what might seem random moments – children playing with machinery in a barn, teens smoking, a car journey and even the day-to-day business of baling hay – take on a quiet menace that would do the most tense Scandi-thriller proud. His latest film is shot around a fortified farm, its buildings encased in cement, old bikes and spring beds. Now the cement has worn down, allowing a mess of metal to reappear. Skoog presents it as a peculiar kind of landscape art, eroding amid a rye field.
Towner, Sat 25 Jan to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
The 2012 Turner prize-nominee Spartacus Chetwynd has now transformed herself into Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and here presents a series of sculptures, paintings, performances and installations featuring new characters such as Brain Bug and Cat Bus. Cultural cheek is also a characteristic of the accompanying show of paintings by Tala Madani. These are works (pictured) that might tease and tempt us in with their façade of retro-innocence, yet images are redeployed so that, for example. illustrations from 1950s Learn To Read books reflect on gender roles.
Nottingham Contemporary, Sat 25 Jan to 23 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Architecture might be the king of the arts, towering over us and decreeing how we experience space. But for most of us, its effects can be invisible. This show sets out to change that, through a series of walk-in, touch-and-smell installations that bring architecture’s subtle power to life. The contributions come from a cross-generational range of leading international talents, who emphasise the intangible. Irish duo Grafton Architects’ (pictured) principle materials here are light, imagination and memory. Meanwhile, Pritzker prize-winning starchitect Alvaro Siza evokes the rich backstory of the Royal Academy building itself.
Royal Academy, W1, Sat 25 Jan to 6 Apr
SS Photograph: Alice Clancy
A highlight of the inaugural exhibitions at Leeds’s Tetley arts centre is the latest version of Simon Lewandowski and Sam Belinfante’s installation The Reversing Machine (pictured). The mechanical sculpture is a choreography of cogs, levers, slide carousels and flashing lights with a turntable capable of playing specially recorded vinyl discs at its centre. Visitors are invited to enter the Palindrone Jukebox and spin records of their choosing, backwards of course. The duo have conceived the work as an embodiment of sequences of time experienced within the modern-day metropolis. Curtains open and close to suggest the changing light of day as a pencil continually draws a perfect circle on an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
The Tetley, Sat 25 Jan to 28 Feb
RC Photograph: Tim Deussen
While the real-world function of diagrams might be to simplify practical problems, these contemporary artists use diagrams to lead us astray. Typically, the chemical element Cu (copper) in Simon Paterson’s periodic table becomes, for some perversely obscure reason, the symbol for John Thaw. The purpose of Angela Bulloch’s “pixel box”, despite its appearance of precise usefulness, turns out to be the production of over 16.7m purely abstract colours. Mark Titchner’s burnt wood carving WHITE STAINS (pictured) does in fact function as a QR code but one that when scanned with a smart-phone takes you to a pornographic poem by Aleister Crowley. Further systematic waywardness is conducted by Langlands & Bell who update the world map so that places without airports simply no longer exist.
Holden Gallery, to 28 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
