What to See Across London This February

Linder | Hayward Gallery, London | 11 February – 5 May

Born in Liverpool in 1954, Linder – née Linda Mulvey – is perhaps best known for having created the artwork for Buzzcocks’ 1977 single ‘Orgasm Addict’, which depicts the lithe, naked body of a woman whose nipples have been slyly replaced with a pair of smiling mouths, and whose head is an iron. As an image, it is a perfect introduction to the artist’s work: a primal scream of anti-domestic, anti-patriarchal rage combined with a pornographic moan of feminine pleasure, designed to titillate and terrorize in one fell swoop. Photomontage – a medium that allows the artist to steal directly from mainstream sources for the purposes of countercultural subversion, as seen in the works of Hannah Höch and, later, Martha Rosler – lends itself fairly seamlessly to the creation of feminist art. It can make the familiar newly unfamiliar, even surreal, and Linder’s merging of female figures and domestic machines, of pornography and flowers, ably expressed the unmooring, vaguely hallucinatory quality inherent in occupying the world as a woman and being asked to embody several contradictory states at once: prettiness and filthiness, wifeliness and wantonness, an almost mechanized functionality in both the bedroom and the kitchen. – Philippa Snow  

Claudia Martínez Garay | GRIMM Gallery, London | 9 January – 22 February

In a contemporary culture undergirded by maximalism, the powerful symbolism of a modest object can easily be underestimated. Yet, even a simple depiction of a flute, a religious uniform or a facial outline can hold multiple meanings. Celebrating the revolutionary potential of absence, Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay’s ‘Borrowed Air’ interweaves etching, printmaking and painting – mediums that, within contemporary art, have tended to be saturated by the European canon – to introduce striking portrayals of Andean history that ask who gets to shape collective narratives and why. – Ivana Cholakova

Gregg Bordowitz | Camden Art Centre, London | 17 January – 23 March

‘This Is Not a Love Song’ is centred around the third instalment of a film trilogy that I started making in the early 1990s. The first two were Fast Trip, Long Drop [1993] and Habit [2001]. The last film, Before and After (Still in Progress) [2023], is a kind of anthology of performance works I made that directly relate to the two earlier films. Fast Trip, Long Drop was an experimental documentary about me – a Jewish, queer man living with HIV at the height of the AIDS epidemic – which also featured lots of fictional elements and employed many strategies found in poetry; it has a very collage aesthetic. It was almost a decade before I made the sequel, Habit, and, although I always wanted to make a third film, it took me even longer to arrive at Before and After.' – Gregg Bordowitz

Rotimi Fani-Kayode | Autograph, London | 31 October – 22 March

Featuring an array of black and white prints by the late photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, ‘The Studio – Staging Desire’ at Autograph, London, presents the male body in varying states of undress. These untitled works, many of which are on public display for the first time, capture the sensuality of the male form in images at once dramatic yet understated.

As a queer, Black émigré in a largely straight, white, Euro-American artworld, Fani-Kayode operated from a place of political and sexual rebellion where, as he insisted in his 1988 essay ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, Black men ‘can desire each other’. Now memorialized by a gold plaque, Fani-Kayode’s apartment at 151 Railton Road in Brixton, south London, provided both a haven from the right-wing revanchism of the 1980s and a gateway to imagined queer utopias. It was here that the sensuous works on display in ‘The Studio – Staging Desire’ were made: images of men with muscled arms and torsos embracing, lifting each other and posing seductively in latex gear. – Tendai Mutambu 

Acaye Kerunen | Pace Gallery, London | 15 January – 22 February 

Acaye Kerunen’s large sculptural works seem to have their own heartbeats. In ‘Neena, aan uthii’ (See Me, I Am Here), pieces made from woven, organic materials hang from the ceiling, gently drifting or rotating to the rhythm of visitors’ movements. Others are wall-based, formed from fluid lines that undulate and protrude forwards, casting animated shadows. Several fixed, self-contained sculptures sit upon plinths. Kerunen’s lines are expressive and intricate, informed by mathematical patterns and processes but retaining a shaggy, playful appearance. Each work features strong symbolic elements, which challenge and subvert gendered and colonial power dynamics in the artist’s Ugandan homeland. – Emily Steer

^{Main image: Linder, Vol de nuit (detail), 2024, photomontage, 28 × 22 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Modern Art, London; photograph: Michael Brzezinski}