What to see around London

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Bow Arts

Those attending Bow Arts’ double-bill, held in a former office space on Shaftesbury Avenue in the West End, will be asked to pull up a chair. Take a Seat, one of two site-specific and interactive exhibitions, presents 40 artist-made chairs (available for sitting) which react to the clerical environment. The results include a wooden stool with a spade for a leg and a chair that looks like a frantic cat. In the second exhibition, Absurd Visions, Rosie Gibbens’ Parabiosis explores the pregnant body with sculptures that combine puppets and machinery, while Tim Spooner’s A New Kind of Animal consists of creatures of electrical wire and fake fur under furniture or holding court in the conference room. October 8-November 3, bowarts.org

A man in navy jacket stands in front of a painting of a woman in faded colours, like a vintage photograph. She is shown wearing a floral blue shirt and drying a teacup; a man in a shirt and tie stands beyond a doorway in the distance — Part of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s installation ‘It Will End in Tears’ © Jo Underhill / Barbican Art Gallery

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Barbican

London’s Barbican arts centre originally devised its Curve space as a sound barrier to contain the noise that emanated from its concert hall, but now it hosts bold exhibitions. Botswana-born Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum became fascinated by its “liminality”, the idea of in-betweenness, when she was thinking about her show there, and so, for her first solo show at a major UK institution, she has arranged a series of drawings, paintings and installations that immerse visitors in an imagined 20th-century colonial outpost. The show, an interconnected map of film sets, domestic spaces and colonial bureaucracies, hovers between places real and fictional. To January 5, barbican.org.uk

A museum space has multicoloured partition walls covered with large-scale collages of black and white photographs. Two large sculptures in woven straw have multiple limb-like forms — A Haegue Yang installation in Beijing, China, 2015 © Haegue Yang, courtesy UCCA, photo: Tang Xuan

Haegue Yang, Hayward Gallery

An installation by Haegue Yang may consist of collages referencing pagan paper rituals, sculptures made from tangled light bulbs or large hand-knitted vegetables. Her sources of inspiration are similarly extensive, from folk tales to pioneering Modernists. In Leap Year at the Hayward Gallery, participants will walk through a curtain of reverberating blue and silver bells and observe layers of Venetian blinds hanging from the ceiling set to a musical score. October 9-January 5, southbankcentre.co.uk

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