Art / Exhibitions

Some 25 years after the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Yorkshire Sculpture Park is staging an exhibition by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. In his words, "Freedom of speech...is the very essence of human rights", and his work explores freedom and its restriction in capitalist societies.

The park is in the grounds of Bretton Hall, and this exhibition is showing in its newly restored 18th century chapel.

Shortly after Henri Matisse's death the writer and artist John Berger wrote a short illuminating essay on Matisse's work in which he remarked, "I can think of no modern artist with less interest in history or psychology." He was born in the year that the Cutty Sark was launched and died the year in which the first hydrogen bomb was tested.

The title of Burak Delier's show is inspired by recent social movements. The artist argues, "When we consider the recent uprisings in Istanbul, Tahrir Square and Occupy New York, we can see that the rioters don't have a programme. Nobody knows exactly how we'll become free."

Burak is a Turkish artist living in Istanbul who has been politically engaged for many years. This is his first exhibition in Britain.

This is the first European exhibition of the Pearlman collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, and it's a real treat.

Henry Pearlman was a rich American businessman who was as proud of the wheeler-dealing it took to acquire the paintings as he was of the paintings themselves, but don't let that put you off.

Just what is it that makes Tate Modern's current retrospective exhibition of Richard Hamilton's work so different, so appealing? Of course this is a rather tongue in cheek reworking of the title of Hamilton's now iconic 1956 piece, "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" Hamilton was, I would argue, one of the most interesting, innovative and enjoyable artists working in Britain from the late 1940s until his death in September 2011.

Cinema was in its infancy when revolution in Russia toppled the old order in 1917. From the beginning photography and film were seen as important educators by the new workers' government.

Lenin argued that finance for film should be divided between the popular and a cinema that widened the base of the revolution. For millions film brought the outside world into the their lives. Film could only be "real".

Hannah Hoch was one of the great revolutionary artistic innovators of the early 20th century. Along with Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz and John Heartfield she led the way in developing what has become known as photomontage or collage.

The avant-garde Berlin Dadaist group, of which Hoch was a member, was the most politically developed of the Dadaist groupings that sprang up across Europe and the US from around 1916. The Berlin Dadaists would use their new method of working not as a mere innovative technique in their "art practice" but, crucially, as a weapon.

Tate Britain reopened in November. The oldest part of the building has been restored, combining some of its most architecturally impressive parts with new elements. New learning studios and archive space follow the opening in May of new galleries to display "the best of British art."

£45 million has been spent on the overhaul and it's clear that a lot of the cash has come from big business. One space has been named the Sackler Octagon, while rooms that focus on particular artists or themes are given to us by BP.

Paul Klee has been described as "the left's favourite artist". This reputation stems in no small part from the use by the German critic and writer Walter Benjamin, in a typically poetic analogy, of one of Klee's works in his Thesis on the Philosophy of History:

His work is seen as straight talking stuff and "much loved" - no art school rubbish here. I naturally grew up loathing him.

This exhibition shows him in a wider context. In fact, nearly all I thought about him was wrong. He was not working class but brought up very upper middle class and only fell into the lower middle when he was in his 20s. He was not self taught and based his art on late French impressionism - until the 1940s he was shown more in Paris than in Britain.