As we enjoy a mild and occasionally sun-kissed start to the Autumn season, the hulking relic that is Battersea Power Station - still the largest brick building in Europe - provides the venue for the biggest winter sports and music festival to ever hit these shores. The tongue-twistingly titled 'Free Sports On 4 Freeze' begins on Thursday 23rd October, featuring a world-class line-up of the cream of the snowboarding and skiing fraternity. The Snowboarding......

Bow: home of the grime star, and self-styled E3 Ninja, Wiley, and not known as the demilitarised zone for nothing, yagetme, um, bruv. The Nunnery had changed dramatically on the outside since last time we'd visited, six or so years ago. There were pretty lights with a hint of the illuminated flourishes of New Spitalfields market. Talking to one of the gallery staff they were surprised that the lights had lasted potential feckless youth......

We told you about the "Wouldn't It Be Nice..." exhibition at Embankment Galleries several weeks back but dropped in there again yesterday to check out what artist in residence, Chosil Kil, was up to. The PR was abuzz with the fantastic image of the artist literally dismantling Somerset House’s ‘Skin & Bones’ exhibition, to construct her own work, Cocoon no. 4, from the bits. The less exciting reality is that Kil is using debris......

Nobuyoshi Araki has a worldwide notoriety for photographing beautiful women in intricate and perilous bondage (Kinbaku) in the name of art. Unsurprisingly, some of his work has been branded pornographic. Known also as erstwhile photographer of Bjork, this is his first London show since a major retrospective at the Barbican in 2005 and reveals him as an exquisite fetishist of female flesh. This series of large, black and white photographs, selected from a Kinbaku......

At the opening of Beer Exposed last night we earnestly hoped to have our palates wowed and our beer knowledge enhanced. The expo has the strapline "explore, educate, enlighten" but we can reliably report that what's actually going on is a whole bunch of people getting delightfully drunk on many different types of beer and only realising it when they start giggling at a man dressed in a Chinese jacket with the nametag "Angus".......

Anything with the words "featuring Jedi Jugglers" fills us full of dread. Well, fills us with a mental image of middle class boys called Crispin or Nathan wearing combat trousers and flicking their dreadlocks around whilst earnestly juggling like soldiers going off to war in 1914. But this "illumination extravaganza", is in the crypt of St Pancras Church on Euston Road, which fact alone guaranteed our attendance at their public opening. Great pains were......

From tomorrow, watch out for brand new poster art works, inspired by the ubiquitous tube roundel, which is celebrating its 100th birthday, on a platform near you. The posters are teasers to tempt you to an exhibition of 100 new roundel artworks at the Rochelle School in Shoreditch, where we told you to go and see the Le Gun thing, between 8-30 October.......

You presumably already know about the collective of illustrators that is Le Gun, and their superb book/magazine of illustrations, and other artistic goings on. Well, this time they've put on a show. A queue? A bloody great big queue greets us as we try and enter the show, hidden away on Arnold Circus behind Shoreditch Church, like a lost location in a children's book. Thankfully the queue is only for the bar, and we......

Museum of London's latest's wheeze is to bring magic and mystery to their Late in the form of one Pete Hathway who will be performing street magic and cunning trickery to astound you a week today, whilst mystical tours of the galleries will be pointing out the more sinister objects, like witch balls and curses in Roman gall. Ew. To get the atmosphere just right, they need a suitable soundtrack and are stumped. We......

An exhibition of photographs taken by London prostitutes is currently running at the rather swish Baltic Restaurant in SE1. In an innovative attempt to give a voice to these vulnerable and marginalised women, stuck in the cycle of prostitution, drug addiction, abuse and homelessness, the U-TURN Project gave them cameras and basic photography skills so that they could document their lives. Change the Picture is a partnership between the U-TURN Project and the excellent......

The former Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia has been under hoarding for some time now, awaiting a wholesale mixed-use redevelopment. Late last year a group of local artists twigged that the iconic building was about to disappear with all its secrets and embarked on a last minute crusade to create work about the building, its history, and previous and future occupants. The developers granted them unlimited access to the site over a string of Saturdays......

The bones of old Londoners can tell a lot about how they lived - and died - in the city as Wellcome's latest exhibition, opening today, proves. Old burial sites are found from time to time around the city during construction works, for example the remodeling of Spitalfields Market and the Jubilee line expansion. Twenty six skeletons, recovered from 10 different locations across the city and analysed by the Museum of London are on......

Next time you turn down a proffered tête-à-tête with a chirpie cabbie, you could be missing out on a satisfying cultural exchange. Who knows whether your driver is a painter, origami champion or candle-stick maker? Black cab driver Dominic Shannon has spent nine years of his career taking pictures of city life, warts and all. While other cab drivers pass the time by attempting to splash foolhardy tourists standing in close proximity to puddles......

An entire catwalk of models dressed as Tilda Swinton; a dress covered in bells that you can hear before you can see; one model wearing an entire collection… such is life in the fabulous House of Viktor and Rolf installation at the Barbican. Including samples of each collection’s couture, as well as pieces of their early work and live footage of their innovative shows, the epicentre of the exhibition is a giant doll’s house,......

If you went through Stratford Station this morning you might have found the Stratford Grapevine thrust into your paw, in place of the usual news lite freesheets. What you might not have realised is that it was art. You probably thought it looks more like a community involvement initiative, celebrating Stratford on the road to 2012 and mustering local people into a renewed sense of - well, community. And you'd be right. There will......

Dan Shipsides, Several sequenced problems on Contemporary Art (Frieze), installation view, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo by Andy Keate. Peckham. The mere mention of this seemingly blighted borough is enough to send some running for the hills. Much in the same way as mentioning Hackney in the 1980s would do. But this just makes its treasures more special. We aren't ashamed to say we are fans of Peckham. South London Gallery, created in the......

Beak Street's finest: The Riflemaker. Unsurprisingly enough, it hasn't changed its Soho location since the last review. It has changed the artwork on display in the main room on the ground floor though. Daniela Schönbächler's exhibition is, to be frank, a bit hit and miss. We were unmoved by the big painted abstracts. We didn't loathe them, we didn't love them. There, now on to the good stuff. We did like the rest of......

We were unprepared for the sheer expansiveness of the Brunswick Gallery, set beneath Bloomsbury's Brunswick Centre, north of Holborn. It's a vast room with high ceilings underneath the Centre. Divination, a travelling group show, exhibited in artist run spaces has arrived in London via Hamburg and Paris and certainly makes good use of this immense space. Bit of the show were a turn off. For example, we were not keen on the video piece......

Fashion as Art, ay. It's all over London at the moment. You can see The Supremes' costumes at the V&A; fashion meets architecture at Somerset House; and Viktor and Rolf's crazy creations are turning heads at the Barbican. Trouble is, they're all a bit flamboyant and ostentatious for these simpler, sustainable-solution-searching, credit-crunching times. If only London could offer us something more timeless, ageless, structured, nay, minimalist to soothe our muddled fashionistas' heads... …like this......

We love our Flickr friends, we really do. Where would we be without our obliging and outrageously talented photographer friends happy to share their work with us in the Londonist Flickr pool and be sent off on snap happy adventures once in a while? How marvellous then to see one of ours making good. Chutney Bannister's been a Londonist stalwart for some time and was one of our earliest Londonist Behind The Lens-ers. He's......

The British Library isn't always so good at promoting their free exhibition space, but they do tend to lay on something special for those who happen to wander in. Make a point of doing so for this summer's exhibit, The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India's Great Epic, which takes the narrative potential of the museum show and runs with it. Walking through the exhibit is an experience in storytelling -- is, in fact,......

Nathan Horton: Controlled Explosion Number 2 Last time we talked about St Pancras Crypt, we were considering buying a London Borough. This week, the tone was rather more sombre with a group show, Responses to Conflict and Loss installed in these meditative, subterranean vaults. The Crypt is nigh on perfect for this sort of show. Its damp, fusty smelling waft and many vaulted rooms, nooks and crannies, with displaced gravestones lying around and family tombs......

Soho East. That's surely what Shoreditch has become. The Forster Gallery is one of the new breed of expensive gallery you'd normally expect to see in Mayfair, yet set in the (Nathan) Barley fields of Shoreditch. It's similar to Eyestorm in that it goes for artists that sell, and sell at relatively high prices. OK, time to come clean. This Londonista has been a fan of this artist's work since first seeing it in......

Last night, we attended the launch of Darwin 200 at the Natural History Museum. If he was still alive, Charles Darwin would be an actual living legend, due his 200th birthday on 12 February 2009. Clearly he's dead but that's no excuse not to have a national programme of activities around his life and work, especially since it's also nearly 150 years since the theory of evolution was pronounced and "Origin of the Species"......

Earth shattering revelation of the day: Met Commissioner says parents key to bringing up children who don't carry weapons. Yep, apparently so. Unlikely news of the day: Hayward Gallery goes psycho. We'll be there later this week. Motoring news of the day: Lorries park up and protest Faintly amusing news pun of the day: Pawn very popular. Hah. Ha ha. Marvel-lous news of the day: 3D comic book superheroes to go on display Image......

Vyner Street is like a scruffy version of Cork Street set in the tubeless expanse of Hackney. Well, replace the expensive established artists, with the up and coming avant guard and replace the suited rich art lovers at the private views, with eccentrics, artists, and critics (not that there isn't considerable crossover between those categories, obviously). One Thursday a month the place is abuzz with art openings, and people spilling out onto the street......

The subject of the Museum in Docklands' latest exhibition should require no introduction from Londonist. Since he first struck in 1888, Jack the Ripper entered into London folklore as much as Dick Whittington, Pearly Kings and Queens or the 'Don't be a sinner, be a winner' bloke on Oxford St. What this impressively serious exhibition does, however, is remind visitors that underneath all of the London Dungeon gore, Jack-the-Ripper tours and bad-taste T-shirts, lies......

Marcel Duchamp Fountain 1917 Tate © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ Paris and DACS, London 2007 This exhibition highlights the work of three justifiably important 20th century artists: Picabia, Man Ray and Duchamp. Let us stop you right there. The show hasn't gone dada over a urinal. Although a 1960s replica of the infamous urinal does feature. This exhibition shows the progression of these three artists through the earnest art movements of the first half of......

Art lovers: brace yourselves for the onslaught of tutting, snorting and Daily Mail outrage that breaks out every summer. That's right - the Turner Prize shortlist was announced this morning. Mark Leckey is the biggest name on a list with no celebrity artists on it; his combinations of film, performance and sculpture have made him odds-on favourite with the bookies already, and the obsession with Felix the Cat in his work should get him......

This show, in a former light factory building located on the no-mans land between the City and Shoreditch/Hoxton, is an exhibition of video art and photographs by Ruth Hinkel-Pevzner. Yes, yes, we know, it sounds like an edgy, late 90s, East London Art cliché. Frankly, we weren't expecting to like this show. A significant amount of video art tends to be badly made short films excused by the 'art' tag. Yet, while the stills......