Harminder Singh Judge, Nottingham
Among the multiple influences on his recent work, the artist Harminder Singh Judge lists religious and cultural forces such as Buddha, Norwegian death metal, John the Revelator and Jesus. A British-born Sikh with a taste for religious history and rock music, Judge obviously likes to unite disparate elements just to see what aesthetic surprises and stories might arise. His range of creative materials is equally diverse: fibreglass sculpture, sound, neon, drawing, light projection and live performance. So cross associations are conjured between cult ritual, pop posing, mythical symbolism and advertising logos. Perhaps the art lies in the fact that the audience is left unsure whether Judge is presenting a serious message or jokingly taking it for a ride.
New Art Exchange, to 3 Jul
Robert Clark
Dorothy Bohm, Manchester
Titled A World Observed 1940-2010, here's the first major retrospective of more than 200 images by the Prussian-born, London-based photographer Dorothy Bohm. "The photograph fulfils my deep need to stop things from disappearing. It makes transience less painful," she says. With displays of her cameras and a studio reconstruction, this show presents her as a photographer of the old school, moving from black and white to colour prints, but always using the camera to capture special moments of the random world: a mother and child walking their dog, a woman passing beneath a lifeguard lookout or besuited men looking through binoculars at something far away.
Manchester Art Gallery, to 30 Aug
Robert Clark
David Osbaldeston, Manchester
In Luigi Pirandello's play Six Characters In Search Of An Author, the line between theatrical artifice and real life dramas is intriguingly, and unnervingly, blurred. Here, in an installation titled Out Of Time (The Light Of Day/The Action Of The Play), the artist David Osbaldeston pays personal homage to the play's continuing relevance amid a culture in which the factual and fictional seem to be increasingly digitally mixed. The external surface of the gallery will be wallpapered with cover designs for the play, while, inside, the stage is set up for images of 20th-century controversies such as the 1992 Los Angeles race riots or 1993's Waco siege.
Castlefield Gallery, to 6 Jun
Robert Clark
Rachel Harrison, London
Rachel Harrison's art feels restless, but purposefully so. Pop culture, art history, politics, puns, junk shop finds and handmade sculptures come together in the New Yorker's assemblages. In America, she's known as a daring, imaginatively brawny sculptor, and her first UK solo show should not be missed. Its single installation, Indigenous Parts, is a maze of plinths on which witty oddball combos of objects make allusions to figures as far-flung as Johnny Depp and Fats Domino, sparking dizzying associations of ideas.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Fri to 20 Jun
Skye Sherwin
Rineke Dijkstra, Liverpool
Rineke Dijkstra's video and photo art is a remarkable study of the yearnings and vulnerabilities of growing up, from uneasy adolescence to becoming a self-defined adult. The poignancy of her images relies on an almost incongruous compositional and technical restraint. In the past, Dijkstra has set her subjects against backdrops of blank walls or grey seas, seemingly in order to emphasise their often painfully awkward poses. These are people who are self-conscious of their own emerging individuality, unsure of the appropriateness of their bodies and clothes. Here, she presents two new video works based on watching children sketching the Tate's famous Picasso painting, The Weeping Woman.
Tate Liverpool, Tue to 30 Aug
Robert Clark
Otto Zitko And Louise Bourgeois, Bristol
There's more dividing Austrian artist Otto Zitko and 99-year-old Louise Bourgeois than the half century between their birthdays. One look at Bourgeois's intimate drawings and Otto Zitko's thrusting installation suggests they're polar opposites. Or are they? From an early 1946 work depicting cannibalism to her recent suite of 60 drawings, Je T'aime, we're in familiar Bourgeois territory. Rosebud-like swirls suggest bodily protrusions or mental spirals and the theme of psychological bumps and bruises dominates. By contrast, Zitko's uninhibited abstract dashes and squiggles spread out across walls. His coloured lines cocoon the gallery, as if he's hungry to contain the world or obliterate it with his mark-making. Entitled Me, Myself And I, this show makes for a provocative pairing, raising key questions about selfhood and our relation to the external world.
Arnolfini, Sat to 4 Jul
Skye Sherwin
Jannis Kounellis, London
The poetry of ordinary stuff might not be a new idea but it's a productive one, at least when it comes to the Greek artist Jannis Kounellis. This leader of arte povera, or "poor art", the radical art movement that flowered in 1960s Italy, first shook up sterile gallery spaces with the stuff of real life from sacks of beans to live horses and parrots. He now has a room of his own in Tate Modern, but this marks his first public gallery show in London since 1982 and features a vast new installation made with coal, metal and glass bottles.
Ambika P3, NW1, to 30 May
Skye Sherwin
The Concise Dictionary of Dress, London
With psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and fashion curator Judith Clark orchestrating proceedings, this walk-through "dictionary" is less a comprehensive guide to all things sartorial than a take on clothing as a gateway to the mind. Anxiety, wish and desire are the three not-unrelated categories through which Phillips and Clark are investigating the Victoria & Albert Museum's offsite storehouse in this latest commission from Artangel. A vast archive of rarely seen fashion through the ages resides in the old Post Office bank HQ, Blythe House in west London. Accompanied by definitions from Phillips's alternative dictionary, Clark's installations are spread throughout this mysterious, gloomy pile with its lights dimmed to preserve the thousands of strange artefacts and precious curios it houses. An hour-long tour taking in everything from courtly pomp to swords and togas springs some unexpected readings.
Blythe House, W14, Wed to 27 Jun
Skye Sherwin
