Free things to do in London this weekend

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories.  To walk into the London-based artist’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches; you’re safe here, protected, just like Barrington felt as a kid with his grandmother. You’re brought into her home, her embrace. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. But the fun soon stops. The final space houses a dilapidated shop, built to the dimensions of an American prison cell, surrounded by chain link fencing. Its shutters creak open and slam shut automatically. This is a violent shock, a testimony to the dangers facing Black lives in the West: the police, the prison system, the barely concealed injustice.  After all the music and refuge of the rest of the installation, here, it’s like Barrington’s saying: ‘You want this? You want the carnival, the music, the culture? Then acknowledge the pain, the fear, the mistreatment, the subjugation too.’ I don’t think the paintings here are great, but painting’s not Barrington’s strong suit. He excels when he’s collaborating, sampling, sharin

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will hold the eclectic South Bank Summer Market. With over 60 traders, you’ll find a wide variety of bits and bobs to take home with you, from art, jewellery, fashion, kids’ products and more, all created by independent designers from across the capital. If you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site. Food and drink, live sports screenings and DJ sets will keep you occupied between shopping.

Turns out, the line between erotic and bawdy is pretty thick. And right here in Clapham you’ve got Tom of Finland on one side of it, and Beryl Cook on the other. Studio Voltaire has brought the two artists together for a duo show exploring the links between Tom’s hyper-exaggerated homoerotic pornography and Beryl’s titillating seaside British comedy naughtiness. Let’s get this out of the way, duo shows of long-dead artists like this don’t work. You’re meant to explore the supposed similarities between the works, but you spend your whole time thinking about a nonexistent relationship between artists who never knew each other, instead of just thinking about the work. It’s curation over art. Tom and Beryl are done no favours by being shown together. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities. This could and should have been two separate solo exhibitions. They both depict bums a lot, but that’s about the extent of the similarities But it’s too late for that, they’ve done it, so here we are. Both artists are brilliant in their own way. Tom pushes macho musculature and hyper-male bravado to an erotic extreme. His leather clad bikers bulge and ripple, they tease and play, smirk and pinch, fist and lick and spurt and penetrate. It’s idealised masculinity, it’s attraction, musk and spunk being celebrated, glorified, revelled in at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s brave, fun, sexy art. And he makes poor Beryl look tame, which is a bit unfair

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live.  A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived.  Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him. Film, TV, cartoons and sport were his escape, and his path towards art. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. Two vast orthopaedic boots stand like totems as you walk in, but these aren’t austere miserable corrective devices, they’re psychedelically patterned, ultra-colourful - they’re Wilsher-Mills reclaiming his own history and trauma and turning it into joy. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening A huge body lies on a hospital bed in the middle of the room, its feet massively swollen, its guts exposed. Toy soldiers brandishing viruses lay siege to the patient. Seb Coe, his head transformed into a TV, is the figure’s only distraction. The walls show comic book daleks and spaceships, Wilsher-Mills reimagining his static body as futuristic vehicles or beings with wheels and jets and thrusters. Every inch of the space is covered in pop trivia, or dioramas of happy memories. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical ter

The Barbican’s Curve is a tricky gallery to show art in. So for their latest installation – a series of drawings by Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri – they’ve just not really bothered using it. The actual curve of the Curve, the long arcing outer wall, has been largely ignored except for a thick line of red paint. Ababri’s colourful drawings are instead shown on the much easier to use flat inner walls. There’s a metal curtain at either end of the space, a loud pulsating ambient soundtrack, but otherwise the curve itself is present only in its omission. It’s a disappointing use of the space. And it’s unfair on Ababri, whose art was never going to work in this environment. His simple, diaristic drawings document moments of precarious queer life laced with tons of sensuality, defiance and joy. Nude brown bodies dance and play, rest and embrace. They party in nightclubs, writhe in beds, their limbs tangle, their tongues lick. They aren’t brilliant drawings, but they tell a moving story of sexual expression in the face of sexual repression. The splash of red on the curve’s wall and floor signifies the Arabic letter ‘Zayin’, the first letter of the word ‘zamel’, a homophobic slur in the Maghreb, hissed mockingly at gay men. This is art about how just existing as a queer man can be political, how dancing can be political, how nightclubs can be political, and how art can act as a way of reclaiming all those things.  The ideas are nice enough. But take away the architecture of the Curv

Matthew Krishanu’s work is shrouded in the fog of memory. Across a series of dreamy, washed-out paintings, he digs up his past and recasts it in canvas and paper. Two boys recur throughout most of the show, the artist and his brother as kids. They sit on boats and horses, swim in rivers and seas, clamber over a Henry Moore sculpture. The works look like family snapshots, faded photos of holidays and daytrips that have been painted from memory. It’s as if painting these moments will somehow bring them back, make them real, permanent. In the most striking works here the boys sit on the vast drooping branches of a huge banyan tree. They’re dwarfed by it, lost in this enormous symbol of India. The paint is dripping down the canvas, leaching away, the memories are fading. All this water and greenery is a legacy. In other works his daughter and late wife climb a tree in Epping Forest, or stare out onto an Essex pond. In water and trees is where these memories, these pasts, coalesce into something tangible, long after they’re gone.  The final series of paintings shows Christian churches, priests, nuns and congregations in India and Bangladesh. Krishanu’s mother was a theologian, his father a British missionary. These images are crisper, sharper, firmer than the rest; no fog or haze here, just stark personal history. There’s a temptation to read the Christian works as a comment on religion as a colonising force, or a kickback against the dominance of the white figure in Christian aes