PJ Harvey, John Akomfrah, Grace Schwindt: this week’s new exhibitions

Adam Dant, London

Adam Dant’s ink on paper drawings craft alternative realities that rival Tolkien for imaginative world-building. Although they often resemble fantastical antique maps or pamphlet pages from bygone eras, the crazy universe they conjure is rooted in our own. His latest show, The Budge Row Bibliotheque, takes a psychogeographer’s approach to one of his favourite subjects, the City of London. The title refers to a lost street that once housed everything from distillers to skinners before evolving into the financial district. In recent years, it has dissolved into a giant building site. Dant probes its past and possible future in a vast wall drawing, while smaller works explore other famed city locations.

Bloomberg SPACE, EC2, to 15 Mar

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John Akomfrah, Coventry

Any showing of John Akomfrah’s moving video biography of the sociologist Stuart Hall, who died last year, deserves notice. Making extensive use of his personal archives, the installation conjures a multilayered celebration of Hall’s central principle: that ethnic, sexual and cultural identity are open to recreation. What’s truly remarkable is Akomfrah’s interweaving of intellectual insight and poetic evocation. Hall may have been a major influence on university cultural studies departments across the world, but this film breaks away from the self-referential sobriety of academic cultural theory, quoting everything from the visionary prose of Virginia Woolf to the gospel of Mahalia Jackson.

Warwick Arts Centre, Sat to 7 Mar

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PJ Harvey, London

PJ Harvey is a unique figure in British music. The rock poet and politico’s state-of-the-nation addresses and love songs as raw as scraped shins call to both heart and head. Famously reticent in interviews, it’s only as a performer that she gives anything of herself away. Her sell-out project conceived with public art maestros Artangel plays on this. For a month she’s on show, recording her new album behind a one-way glass wall in a specially designed New Wing studio in Somerset House. The actor Tilda Swinton did something similar with Cornelia Parker, who sealed her sleeping like Snow White in a glass box in 1995. Harvey is taking her experiment with display further, playing on her impermeable aura while laying bare the process behind her sound.

Somerset House, WC2, to 14 Feb

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Gideon Mendel, Plymouth

Photographer Gideon Mendel has travelled the world recording social upheaval and calamity at ground level. This includes the HIV epidemic in Africa and the effects of climate change across India, Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, Thailand and the UK. Last winter’s Somerset floods are the main focus here. Mendel draws out the personal dimension to the deluge, showing a familiar world turned upside down. A suburban glass summerhouse sits marooned in the middle of a lake, its interior filled with an ominous sepia-tinted glow. Elsewhere, couples pose as if for family portraits, but for the waders they’ve donned as water sloshes around their feet.

Plymouth Arts Centre, Sat to 15 Mar

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Ruth Proctor, London

It is no surprise to learn that Ruth Proctor was a champion ice skater before she turned to art. Her performances, videos and paintings are rooted in the physical spectacle of sport, using everything from snooker felt to juggling rings. For Still Not Fixed, Proctor has transformed the John Jones Project Space into an unconventional ice rink, meaning visitors will have to strap on skates and hit the ice if they want to see what’s hanging on the walls. Those navigating her slotted-together jigsaw ice floor are as much on show as the work, of course, a fact emphasised by the cartoon eyes that the artist has set peering down from the gallery’s large windows.

John Jones Project Space, N4, Sat to 28 Feb

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Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Wakefield

The duo of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson remind us that the rolling hillsides of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, dotted with the back-to-nature abstractions of Hepworth and Moore, are in fact a cover for the coalfield from which the Bretton estate drew its wealth. But the pair are too good as artists to resort to obvious environmentalist mud-slinging. Instead, in the Park’s 18th-century St Bartholomew’s Chapel, they present an installation of enchanting intricacy and ambivalence. Within a framework copied from the rose window of Paris’s Sainte Chapelle, they project 152 separate films dedicated to coal’s historical and cultural import. Images range from hand-carved coal sculptural busts to the architecture of the nearby Drax power station. An accompanying plainsong soundtrack revives William Jasper Nicolls’s 1898 The Coal Catechism. The overall effect is hypnotic, rhythmically flaring from darkness to flame and back again.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to 19 Apr

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Grace Schwindt, Sheffield

Grace Schwindt’s Only A Free Individual Can Create A Free Society is a video installation whose feature-length duration and thematic elaboration are purposely composed to frustrate any conclusive assessment of the recent history of libertarian politics. To list the basics of its many-faceted aspects: 11 figures dressed in changing costumes fashioned variously from silk, velvet, cardboard and aluminium enact a series of modern balletic movements. A soundtrack includes fragments from a telephone conversation with a German taxi driver as he recounts observations from his activist student years, relating to such radical 60s and 70s left-wing groups as the Frankfurt School, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction. Then, accompanying the projection, there’s a translucent porcelain vase precariously balanced on a plinth. Schwindt’s work, very obviously far from being a political tract, comes close to pondering the elusive quandary of freedom itself.

Site Gallery, to 28 Feb

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Boyle Family, Kendal

During the 1960s, Mark Boyle and Joan Hills collaborated to project the amoebic-psychedelic light shows that formed a backdrop to the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Later, joined by their offspring Georgia and Sebastian and collectively working under the name Boyle Family, they created the no-less mind-boggling sculptural reliefs on show here. It’s a simple idea: using random methods, select a small rectangle of ground anywhere on the Earth’s map, travel to the space and record its features in minute detail, then meticulously reproduce the features in 3D images that appear deceptively realistic. Otherwise unremarkable sand, sea, grass and rubble become the focus of wide-eyed wonderment.

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, to 14 Mar

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