The Aotearoa New Zealand-born engineer-turned artist has created an art park of usable, social sculptures in the gallery’s underground Tank space, including a barbecue, playground and sauna

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It’s 4pm on a Thursday and I’m in a sauna underground at the Art Gallery of NSW, the hot, cedarwood-scented air a sharp contrast to the cool concrete cavern I’ve just stepped in from. Inside the gallery’s subterranean Tank – a 2,200 sq metre chamber that was once a second world war oil reservoir – Sydney-based artist Mike Hewson has repurposed a 1980s shed, gutting its faux-wood veneer and replacing it with western red cedar, from which he’s also created ornate church-style pews for seating. The windows are now stained glass; the floor and ceiling are lined with travertine tiles left over from one of the gallery’s older wings.

Clearly, this is no ordinary sauna. It’s one of several surprising sculptural works in Hewson’s playful exhibition The Key’s Under the Mat, opening this weekend. There are also change rooms, a steam room, barbecue, sound recording studio, laundromat and playground – all fully functional. You can borrow towels, shorts, slides and T-shirts for free, or bring your own swimsuit (no bikinis).

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Britain’s favourite contrarian duo depict the past 25 years, ancient Egypt showcases its incredible artists and the great performance artist stages skeleton orgies – all in your weekly dispatch

Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures
The couple who have made art together since the 1960s depict life in 21st-century Britain, as they see it.
• Hayward Gallery, London, from 7 October until 11 January

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Revealing tantalising new details about the real lives of artists and craftspeople, this show takes you beyond the death mythology and into the realm of magic

Who knew there were famous artists in ancient Egypt with unique styles, depicting what they saw and felt? Well, most of the time there weren’t, although this exhibition does introduce you to one. From the Old Kingdom to the time of Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptians expected very much the same things of their artists, in a style that barely changed. An extraordinary limestone stela, or engraved slab, that was lent to the Fitzwilliam by the Louvre shows how young Egyptian artists were taught to see in the “correct” way, to make nature conform to the official style. A square grid demonstrates how to calculate proportions to render, for instance, a cat in a perfectly still profile, like a little feline god, an abstraction that was to be repeated for millennia.

Yet Made in Ancient Egypt strives to take you beyond the sublime formal facade to glimpse the artists or, as it calls them more cautiously, “makers” behind the golden coffin portraits and pharaohs’ statues. “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” asked Bertolt Brecht in his poem A Worker Reads History. Here they are, the metalworkers, woodworkers, weavers. In a wooden model made about 4,000 years ago, female workers seated on the ground weave on a loom while others stand spinning thread. You can see a fine example of such women’s handiwork, a white dress made 4,500 years ago. It hangs up, spooky as hell.

Withypool, Somerset: This is a landscape where things can lie hidden – not least a bronze-age structure that is more trip hazard than landmark

Seen from the barrow at the top of Withypool Hill, the common stretches away south like a lion’s back, tawny grass glinting as the land dips and then rises to the open skyline. Apart from a bridle path worn through like a rubbed seam, and a distant, narrow thread of road, the ground appears empty. But it’s not – we’re only a few hundred metres from a bronze‑age stone circle.

Forget the mighty 4-metre-tall megaliths of Stonehenge, this modest, ground-hugging construction could almost be mistaken for a series of natural stony outcrops. The 29 miniliths are less than knee-high, set earthfast among wiry mats of heather and whortleberry, more trip hazard than landmark. Absent from early maps, the monument wasn’t rediscovered until 1898, when a rider, led astray in the mist, stumbled over one of the markers.

Artist’s installation looks into two 1970 shootings that symbolise cultural divides that still shape US politics

The Kent State shootings – when four college students were shot dead by the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest in May 1970 – is seen as a seminal moment in modern US history. The iconic photograph of a young woman screaming as she kneels over the body of a peer came to symbolise the political and cultural divides that still shape US politics, while the event was immortalised in the song Ohio by Neil Young.

But just 10 days after Kent State, another campus shooting – this time of two black students by the police at Jackson State – went relatively unnoticed. It’s a juxtaposition the artist Naeem Mohaiemen brings to bear in his new film installation, Through a Mirror Darkly, at London’s Albany House.

Squad confiscates works from Parma exhibition after consulting Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation in Catalonia

Italy’s art squad on Tuesday seized 21 artworks from a major exhibition in Parma dedicated to works by Salvador Dalí on suspicion they were falsely attributed to the Spanish surrealist.

The show, entitled Dalí, Between Art and Myth, had only been open for a few days at Palazzo Tarasconi before police confiscated the allegedly forged works, including drawings, tapestries and engravings.

A fearless war photographer, a peerless surrealist, a chronicler of Egypt and Syria … a new exhibition at Tate Britain explores how Lee Miller became one of the most urgent voices of 20th-century art

From Colin Firth’s wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice to Meryl Streep’s safari gear in Out of Africa, Cosprop’s outfits achieved cinematic realism

When the costume designer John Bright founded the period costume house Cosprop in 1965, it was out of a desire to give the clothes seen in film and TV “a greater realism” than viewers had been used to previously. “I decided that if we made the stock as real as possible, it would be universal,” Bright says. “The truth is the truth for all times.”

Over the intervening 60 years, that relatively simple mission led to the creation of some of the most notable costumes of all time: the Regency-era shirt that, once wet, turned Colin Firth into an instant heart-throb in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice; the safari gear worn by Meryl Streep in 1985’s Out of Africa, which ended up inspiring countless high-fashion runways; Johnny Depp’s dishevelled 1720s Pirates of the Caribbean suit, so artfully soiled that you can practically smell it through the screen.

This year’s Turner prize contenders, a colourist’s triumphs and immersive gaming in the gallery – all in your weekly dispatch

Turner prize
Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa strut their stuff and compete for the now time-hallowed contemporary art award.
• Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, from 27 September until 22 February

The Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist’s monumental installation, featuring a family tree stretching 65,000 years and a memorial to Indigenous deaths in custody, opens in his home state after making history overseas

WARNING: Contains distressing and offensive content

In a darkened room, I squint to read the blurred typeface of a newspaper article that makes my stomach lurch.

It tells of a station owner who set a trap for a group of Aboriginal people by filling a cannon with powder and broken bottles and leaving it near a bullock carcass.

A vibrant period for art in the city is celebrated in a new exhibition that goes from the rise of celebrity to hyper-capitalism to the devastation of Aids

With Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties, gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan aims to make the case for the 1980s as a vital – and currently relevant – decade of artistic output. The blockbuster show has brought together a who’s who of 80s art, with major pieces from Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, Cindy Sherman, and many others.

The goal for Downtown/Uptown is quite simple: to showcase the decade’s best art for new generations. “I was thinking about what art was pivotal to the moment,” said Brett Gorvy, show co-curator. “And also what over time has become pivotal. We’ve been lucky to be able to access the greatest paintings of so many of these artists.”

The Brown Collection, London
This gloriously eccentric personal museum by painter and former Turner nominee Glenn Brown is a mesmerising delight as it cheekily imitates the nearby Wallace Collection

You will find The Brown Collection in a Marylebone mews not far from the Wallace Collection. With its name and location, painter Glenn Brown cheekily suggests that this personal museum of the art he collects, plus his own creations, is on a par with London’s famous gallery of rococo paintings and ancien regime clocks. The joke works best on your phone map where you can see how close they are.

The current exhibition Hoi Polloi is curated by Brown and supposedly looks at representations of “the ordinary man” in art. It’s a satirical nudge at claims to social worthiness by public galleries for there is zero purpose or theme here, just a mixing and merging of the curious and eclectic in fascinating juxtapositions over four floors of a luxuriously restored building that even has a gothic cellar reminiscent of the one in the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Here you can be spooked by one of Gillian Wearing’s lifelike masks.

Exhibition featuring fragile and rarely seen watercolours explores artist’s jaunts in and around Avon Gorge

He was so keen on clambering around the craggy cliffs of the Avon Gorge as a teenager that he was nicknamed “prince of the rocks”.

An exhibition featuring rarely seen JMW Turner watercolours inspired by his nimble explorations of the gorge is opening at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. They are so fragile that they are rarely brought out of careful storage and may not be seen again for a while.

Every two weeks, a language is lost – and by the end of the century, half of the world’s 7,000 tongues could have vanished. We meet the artist using eyeliner and chokeberries to rescue everything from Ogham to Arablish

In his studio, Sam Winston appears less artist, more linguistic alchemist. He is experimenting with manufacturing inks out of tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes, the juice of Belarusian chokeberries imported in a 100g packet small enough to make it past customs and a strange brew of kohl eyeliner from the Middle East and galena – the mineral form of lead sulfide – from Wales.

The coloured substances are used to conjure words on to giant canvas flags that will soon hang from the ceiling of London’s Barbican Centre – connecting a group of poets’ native languages with materials from their native landscapes. The quintet speak marginal or at-risk languages covering five continents, and their newly commissioned poems all speak to their sense of home.

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich
This exhibition asks whether art can diminish the human capacity for violence – but you might want to throttle someone after seeing this nonsense

Collaborating with a fragrance company, the Sainsbury Centre has developed a scent designed to calm and induce a mood of peace. You can sample it in a “multi-sensory reflective space” created to display a Monet landscape lent by the National Gallery, one part of a constellation of exhibitions and events centred around the question: Can We Stop Killing Each Other? But by this point the only question I was asking is, why did I fall for it and make the trip to this glass house on the University of East Anglia campus?

Jago Cooper, its director, is full of bright ideas. He’s set out to inject energy into the home of the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection with such wheezes as declaring all its artworks to be “alive” – and staging shows around Big Questions of Our Time. Maybe this particular question is too big, but I think if it had been broken down and some logical clarity applied there might have been something to say – instead of saying nothing, which is what this windy absence does.

He is arguably America’s greatest living painter, elevating everyday black life to the level of epic, jaw-dropping masterpieces. Now, for his biggest European show, the artist talks us through his disturbing new works

History weighs on Kerry James Marshall, though not all that heavily. When he talks about the hefty subjects of his art – from slavery to civil rights – he does so with a disarming, disquieting lightness. Maybe that’s because at almost 70 years old, and at the peak of his popularity, he’s seen it all.

Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few blocks away from where the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a white supremacist attack that killed four young black girls, took place in 1963. When his family moved to Los Angeles, they ended up right in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day uprising fuelled by growing racial tension in the poorest part of the city.

Documents include letters calling for recovery of bodies and a falsified safety log that was part of a cover-up

Poignant records relating to a colliery disaster in the 1930s that lay unseen for decades at the National Archives are being put on display close to the site of the mine in north Wales.

Among the documents at the west London archive are petitions and emotional letters calling for the bodies trapped in the underground explosion at the pit in Gresford to be recovered. Despite the heartfelt entreaties, the vast majority remain there.

Readers respond to Jonathan Jones’s view that the chain of galleries is losing its identity as more dynamic rivals flourish

The analysis by Jonathan Jones of what’s gone wrong at Tate was spot-on (Shrinking audiences, a cash crisis and rivals on the rise: what’s gone wrong at Tate?, 12 September). All the truly memorable exhibitions we have seen this year were in the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, the Wallace Collection and the Royal Academy. Frankly, the Tates have not had a single show that excited us since Peter Doig (2008), Lynette Yiadom‑Boakye (2020), Frida Kahlo (2005), and Richard Deacon and El Anatsui in 2016.

The universally loved, wondrous art of painting is eschewed in favour of performance nonsense, boring videos and hideous installations.
Ann Eastman
London

Kerry James Marshall unveils a triumphant vision of Black America, the executed queen of style gets her own show, and Hitchcock puts the knife in – all in your weekly dispatch

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
America’s superstar painter shows his carnivalesque pictures which make Black people the triumphant heroes of art history.
• Royal Academy, London, 20 September until 18 January

Michael Werner Gallery, London
Artists as varied as Sarah Lucas, Gwen John and Georg Baselitz are called upon by critic-curator Hilton Als to chime with the writer of Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys was a perpetual outsider. Born Welsh and Creole into largely black Dominican society in 1890, she was out of place everywhere – too foreign for Europe, too Caribbean for Britain, too white for Dominica, and much too female to be taken seriously as a writer for most of her lifetime.

But her literary influence continues to grow and resonate, especially with American critic and curator Hilton Als. His group show is a heady, passionate, experimental love letter to Jean Rhys – to her literature, her in-betweenness, her life of unbound creativity in a postcolonial world – in the vein of his previous exhibitions-as-portraits of Joan Didion and James Baldwin.