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ALEXANDER HODA from 20-11-2008 to 09-01-2009

The Arts Gallery, University of the Arts London, 65 Davies Street, London W1K 5DA, T: (+44) 020 7514 6448. First major solo show of new works by Alexander Hoda. This show will present a challenging, controversial and unique body of work exploring fraternal relationships and how they can be understood through sex, violence, jealousy and the grotesque. Figurative groupings of deformed, post-apocalyptic creatures, finished in his signature materials latex and rubber dominate the show. Hoda's works shock us into confronting our own fears, anxieties and fantasies; his sculptures challenge us to question our fundamental understanding of love, sex, pride and death.

TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK from 20-11-2008 to 10-01-2009

James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 714 9500. Fourth gallery exhibition by artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. The artist’s densely layered works incorporate text, drawing, collaged paper, plastic, felt, fur and paint to create a collision of symbols and visual tropes that evidence Hancock’s singular vision and distinctive means of storytelling. Hancock is well known for evolving his absurdist narrative across a wide variety of media that includes painting, collage, sculpture, print and the performing arts. In this exhibition, Hancock will present new paintings, drawings and a set of prints entitled Fix published at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers.

SIMRYN GILL from 20-11-2008 to 22-03-2009

Museum of Contemporary Art, 140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney, T: (+61) 2 9245 2400. Simryn Gill’s work questions the coherence of systems that humans create to ‘know’ the world around them. Working with a myriad of materials, including books, plant materials, photographs and other found objects, she encourages the viewer to reject a rigid classification of their surroundings in favour of arrangements which offer uncertainty, disturbance and new possibilities.

GAIA PERSICO from 21-11-2008 to 14-12-2008

Monika Bobinska, 242 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA, T: (+44) 020 8980 9393. Gaia Persico’s animations, installations and drawings are all direct descendants of real-life observations made whilst travelling as a part time air-hostess. The 'snapshots' of these urban, metropolitan infra-structures and sprawls are created in-situ, sitting by the window of the hotel room she happens to find herself in, using either her lap-top or simple hotel stationary. The drawings are succinct, with the human presence implied rather than actually seen, focusing on air-conditioning vents, fire escapes, pylons, piping, television aerials, satellite dishes, elevator shafts, staircases and architectural details.

M/M, 'JUST LIKE AN ANT WALKING ON THE EDGE OF THE VISIBLE' from 21-11-2008 to 17-12-2008

The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 219 2166. 'Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible' is the first US museum exhibition devoted to the work of Paris-based designers M/M (Paris). Founded in 1992 by Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag, M/M (Paris) works at the intersection of art, commerce, and design. Rooted in an expanded conception of visual communication, M/M’s multi-disciplinary approach extends to artistic collaborations, product design, and commercial projects. A trademark of M/M’s design throughout the last decade has been the use of freehand drawing, collage, and traditional printmaking methods. M/M recurrently mixes photography, scanned imagery, and the drawn mark to create a distinctive visual language that grows and develops with each project. This exhibition will feature a newly commissioned project consisting of 41 wood-and-metal stools painted with silk-screened graphics. Designed specifically for the Drawing Room, the installation will use one of M/M (Paris)’s signature letterform alphabets to compose the exhibition’s titular phrase. The project reflects the designers’ use of a sign or a graphic mark to construct a space or generate a form.

PAUL DORAN, METTE WINCKELMANN, DALE MALNER from 21-11-2008 to 20-12-2008

Western Exhibitions, 119 N Peoria Street, 2A, Chicago, T: (+1) 312 480 8390. Three-person show of new paintings by Paul Doran, Dale Malner and Mette Winckelmann. Doran's small, gritty paintings remind one of Arthur Dove upon first view. Small and seemingly clumsy, like Dove’s early forays into abstraction, Doran seems to be channeling early modernism. However, Doran’s palette (greys, blacks, subtle stabs of pink, yellow or brown) and his strange forms feel contemporary, like a rougher, faded version of a Monique Prieto painting or some of the more abstract work of Luc Tuymans. Mette Winckelmann's new paintings, meanwhile, take the geo-morphic grid of her earlier works (and of Sonia Delaunay's) and offset the hard-edges with brushy coloration within the grid’s cells, as if coloring in an Excel Spreadsheet. Lastly, Dale Malner is the wild card in this show in several senses: he doesn’t look back to early modernism; his work is much more emotionally charged; and in this show, his work will be much bigger than Doran and Winckelmann’s intimate canvases. He does, however, look back, in this case, to late Guston and to Martin Kippenberger. Malner’s paintings develop from his drawings, born of imagination, executed primarily in small drawing books, often during travel.

AARON VAN ERP from 21-11-2008 to 21-12-2008

IBID Projects, 21 Vyner Street, London E2 9DG, T: (+44) 020 8983 4355. Dutch artist Aaron van Erp creates grimly humorous paintings that depict everyday objects such as shopping carts, mattresses and potted plants within bleary landscapes. The landscapes themselves are composed of large, vaguely defined areas of paint, and are punctuated by partially-rendered figures. Although there is a decidedly sombre and violent narrative element to these compositions, the disconcerting atmosphere is made absurd by the seemingly random placement of incomplete figures, buildings and household objects.

KATE STREET, 'LITTLE DEATH' from 21-11-2008 to 21-12-2008

Nettie Horn, 25b Vyner Street, London E2 9DG, T: (+44) 020 8980 1568. First UK solo exhibition by British artist Kate Street, featuring a selection of wall-based sculptures, the finale to her 'Little Death' series, and a collection of botanical drawings. Kate Street uses words, proverbs and mythologies as a starting point to create sculptures tinged with a tongue-in- cheek approach to language. The results are often sculptures, or rather assemblages, that consist of intricately crafted components tinged with sombre qualities. Street uses the form of the funeral wreath, constructed as a response to loss and sublimation, to explore the boundaries surrounding the dual aspect of her work – the associations created between the imagery and her search for meaning through communication and language.

CLAUDIA HART, 'DIGITAL BAROQUE' from 21-11-2008 to 27-12-2008

Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery, 1044 West Fulton Market Street, Chicago, T: (+1) 312 492 8828. Instrumentalizing Baroque emotional expression to counteract the sterility of technological culture, Claudia Hart’s 'PhotoMortifications' series continues the artist’s interest in creating unexpected relationships between the long-assumed opposition between women and the natural world and men and technological innovation. This series integrates computer models of digital sculptures that are also output as figurines from a Rapid Prototype 3D printer. The realistic computer models of a female nude are digitally manipulated - even mutilated - creating irregular yet seemingly organic deformations. These figures, which evoke a rotting or decay, are juxtaposed with their very creation: the so-called rational permutations of computer-generated imagery. Hart proposes, then, a digital Baroque, contrasting the emotionality of the figures with the anonymity of digital culture.

DANA HOEY, 'EXPERIMENTS IN PRIMITIVE LIVING' from 21-11-2008 to 03-01-2009

Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 680 9467. Exhibition of new photographs by Dana Hoey, in which insects, old women and plastic tools are the inhabitants of a potential world. 'Experiments in Primitive Living' is a cycle of 40 photographs that imagine what we wiould be like under 5 different weather conditions – ash, freeze, thaw, flood and drought. It is a deliberately leveled archive of different photographic styles: product shot, scientific photo, portrait and epic narrative all occupy the same walls. Because the subjects in the pictures are also on equal ground – for example, the spore and the face merit the same size and resolution – the old categories serve not as aesthetic end-games but as an homage to the camera's old ability to inform, to sell, to turn you on, or to tell a story. In this possible world, there is a power vacuum, an absence of infrastructure, and now the overlooked have stepped in. Old women may rule, silently. The small detail may outlast the large story. The icicle may outlive the guitar player.

MATT MULLICAN, 'A DRAWING TRANSLATES THE WAY OF THINKING' from 21-11-2008 to 05-02-2009

The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 219 2166. Featuring over 100 works from throughout his artistic career, including never-before-seen drawings, notebooks, rubbings, video, and mixed media installations, this exhibition will be the most comprehensive of Matt Mullican’s work in drawing in the United States to date. For over three decades, Mullican has created a complex body of work concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Ranging from schematic diagrams and arcane symbols to explicit text-based drawings, installations, and self-created cosmologies, Mullican’s work classifies, orders, describes, maps, and represents an understanding of the world, using drawing to collapse the division between subject and object.

Y.Z. KAMI, 'ENDLESS PRAYERS' from 21-11-2008 to 11-02-2009

Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 14 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW, T: (+44) 0207 490 7373. In his first one-person exhibition in a UK institution, Y.Z. Kami shows two group of works that he has created during the past twelve years. The most striking works are without doubt Kami’s large, frontal painted portraits of ordinary people, each of whom fills its canvas, often measuring three metres by two metres. Despite their imposing size and intense presence these portraits are neither flattering nor psychological; rather, they depict the subjects as they are, absorbed in their own world. This characteristic, together with their fresco-like quality, executed using a special painting technique, endows the images with a certain lack of materiality resembling that of the Fayum portraits which were painted to accompany Egyptian mummies in their graves. In some of the paintings the eyes of the subjects are closed, but in others they are open and they gaze either inwardly or at a fixed point in the distance. In most cases it is difficult to establish eye contact and each painted figure seems to carry its own distinct history within itself.

JASON YATES, 'MARGINAL FUNCTIONAL: FAST FRIENDS FOREVER' from 22-11-2008 to 20-12-2008

Fingered, 255 McKibbon Street, #207, Brooklyn, New York, T: (+1) 646 508 3048. Jason Yates' influential series 'Fast Friends, Inc.' synthesizes pop-cultural histories in the form of highly obsessive, large format xerographed and hand coloured drawings covered in novelty stickers, googly eyes, reflective mylar, yarn, and glitter. These extremely laboured, one-of-a-kind posters were exhibited, free for the taking, in public spaces around Hollywood and proliferated on internet social networks such as MySpace, often promoting gigs for like minded bands such as Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Black Dice, and Animal Collective. Fast Friends, Inc. is cultural hijacking; a representation of fear, the failure of the collective, the fetishism of the collapse, the language of mania, anger, regression, absurdity, redundancy, misinterpretation, formal cannibalization, and the theatre of excess and dysfunction.

DARREN ALMOND, 'NAIL TO NAIL' from 22-11-2008 to 20-12-2008

David Patton Los Angeles, 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles 90012, T: (+1) 213 626 2524. 'Nail to Nail' will be British artist Darren Almond's first exhibition in Los Angeles, and will feature his recent film 'Bearing', which depicts a sulphur miner in remote Indonesia, together with a series of photographs and a trainplate.

ROBERT LONGO, 'NIGHTS BRIGHT DAYS' from 22-11-2008 to 10-01-2009

Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 North Robertson Blvd., Los Angeles, T: (+1) 310 273 0603. For this exhibition of new work by Robert Longo, whose title is taken from a Shakespearean sonnet, the celebrated artist continues working on a monumental scale, creating meticulous charcoal renderings that expand across multiple panels. Exhibiting extreme contrasts of light and dark, his subjects take on a sculptural quality within the drawings' saturated, velvety surfaces. Longo isolates his subjects in a deep black space, depriving them of any real-world setting and transforming them into universal symbols that resonate in our collective unconsciousness. The artist heightens the psychological drama of these emblematic subjects through the use of extreme scale and hyperrealism, creating powerful images that elicit universal reactions such as primal fear and hopeful compassion. Longo’s signature black-and-white charcoals imbue his subjects with a haunting and potent emotional resonance, turning a representation of a shark or an impassive face into a timeless commentary on the mythological struggle between humankind and nature.

SUPERTOYS: ON PLAY, AFFECTIVE MACHINES, AND OBJECT RELATIONS from 22-11-2008 to 18-01-2009

Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA, T: (+44) 0117 917 2300. 'Supertoys' explores toys, affective machines, and play. Artists, technologists, children and adults examine how toys operate as 'transitional objects' in allowing feelings to be carried between the human subject and external objects. The exhibition also explores the idea of reciprocal relationships with intelligent toys and robots, and our related hopes and fears. In the science of Artificial Intelligence a basic question remains: will we succeed in building robots that think and feel like we do? This in turn raises questions about the nature of emotion and whether we can replicate human affect in machines, or whether robots can develop their own 'feelings' independently. Includes work by Codemanipulator, Chris Cunningham, Dunne + Raby, Natalie Jeremijenko, Kahve Society, Alex McLean, Philippe Parreno, Unmask Group and guest robots.

NEVER LET THE TRUTH GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD STORY from 22-11-2008 to 31-01-2009

Site Gallery, 1 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS, T: (+44) 0114 281 2077. This exhibition explores the tension between language and image through a selection of film and video works including seminal work from the 1970s produced by John Smith and Hollis Frampton and more recent work by Stuart Croft, Ryan Gander, and Wilhelm Sasnal, presented in a viewing environment designed by artist Matthew Harrison. The work included self-consciously plays with the power of narration, the voiceover and the use of text to draw attention to language’s role in film form and its influence on authority, structure and memory. The works deal with the telling of a story, but with a playfulness in relation to the mechanisms of narration, which is particularly seen in film and video where the two registers of image and language can be manipulated separately.

MARCO EVARISTTI from 22-11-2008 to 22-02-2009

Nikolaj, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center, Nikolaj Plads 10, DK - 1067 Copenhagen, T: (+45) 3318 1780. Through photography and video, this exhibition documents Marco Evaristti's three landscape projects from 2004 to 2008, in which he uses colour to make interventions in places that condense Western notions of unspoilt nature: the icebergs of the Polar region, the highest mountain peaks, and the desert. Evaristti's projects disrupt these well-known settings and point both to our notions of virginal nature and to the disproportion between his quickly degradable interventions and the far more radical and lasting damages to nature caused by our culture.

DUNCAN CAMPBELL, 'BERNADETTE' from 23-11-2008 to 18-01-2009

Hotel, 53 Old Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6QA, T: (+44) 020 7729 3122. New work by Irish-born artist Duncan Campbell, who is interested in the seductive power of stories. With a nod to Samuel Beckett's humour, his work juxtaposes the inherent promise of storytelling with the breakdown of narrative and the inevitable disintegration of meaning. Campbell's artistic production spans across several media. He is known for setting up the artist-run radio station 'Radio Tuesday' as well as for his knitted versions of nightclub posters. More recently he has turned to filmmaking, in enigmatic yet compelling works such as 'Falls Burns Malone Fiddles' (2003) and 'o Joan, no...' (2006).

THE DREAM OF FLUXUS from 25-11-2008 to 15-02-2009

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA, T: (+44) 0191 478 1810. This exhibition at BALTIC explores the history and works of Fluxus through the renowned Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. This unprecedented exhibition of over three-hundred and fifty works from 1961 – 1978 is the largest display of Fluxus ever mounted in Britain.