Ashitha Nagesh

This exhibition is a chance to see some of the beautiful and highly-affecting work by artists shortlisted for this year's Deutsche Börse Photography Prize at The Photographers' Gallery. It is fantastic, and a really good way to experience four entirely different approaches to contemporary political art photography in one place. 

Callous and charismatic, Bruce Nauman's mindf**k at Hauser & Wirth is a psychoanalytical playground of manipulation, uncannily questioning our innocence and confusing our senses. 

Martin McGinn's new works in Volume 1 pay homage to the Modern Masters. Deceptively simple, they nod to history and play with the politics of reproducibility. This exhibition takes the viewer a step back from the taxidermy and neon lights of the postmodern art world, looking back at contemporary art's predecessors.

Both Gaiety and Breaking the Ice, when viewed together, are a fair introduction to Soviet and post-Soviet art, but I couldn't help but feel that the attempt to include such a wide spectrum of works detracted from the exhibition as a whole.

RA Now is essentially a showcase for all living Royal Academicians – and as you would expect, this includes some of the biggest names in contemporary art. There are some beautiful pieces on display, although its organisation suffers ever so slightly from the diversity of the works.

This show is absolutely beautiful. In Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire, the British Library have selected works that not only document the rise and decline of this vast empire, but also fully embody Mughal spiritualism and aestheticism.

A simultaneously disturbing and beautiful collection, documenting the vibrant, and yet also distressing, nature of change and revolution in the twentieth century. Everything Was Moving is a touching exhibition that perfectly encapsulates the political revolution and dynamic cultural changes of the period.

Piotr Janas’s work is the height of contemporary abjection, and the epitome of what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘the grotesque’. This exhibition pares down the human body into singular parts and organs, defined not only by their excretion of faecal and sexual fluids, but primarily by the ways in which they experience extremes of pain and pleasure.

The Pleasure Principle at the Hoxton Art Gallery is an exploration of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the same name and how it exists in today's culture. These works are self-conscious in their bright colouring, shininess and sexually explicit nature, and in seducing us, they themselves engage with our pleasure principle.