Gersht's powerful new show uses film and photography to bear witness to the second world war, while a great British wit hits the Hayward – all in your weekly missive from the art frontline
Exhibition of the week: Ori Gersht – This Storm Is What We Call Progress
The face of 85-year-old Yehudit Arnon glows in darkness, marked by time and suffering but also by achievement and triumph. As a child she was ordered to dance for guards at Auschwitz. She refused. Her punishment was to stand outside in the snow – she does not know for how long. She told herself that if she survived she would become a dancer – and she did.
Now on screen in Ori Gersht's film about her, that strong face grows smaller then bigger again, as memory recedes and flares into life. It is 67 years since the end of the second world war, but the archive of witness must never close. Beside her, the other half of the split screen shows expanses of bleak white snow.
In the exhibition's other, equally haunting film, a man treks through similarly harsh conditions as he follows a path through the Pyrenees used by refugees from occupied France in the 1940s. The words of the critic Walter Benjamin, who killed himself while trying to escape on this mountain route, are read on this film's soundtrack. Benjamin's words speak of progress as a storm: the storm drags the backward-looking angel of history ever forward.
The walker in the mountains becomes a tiny figure in a snowstorm.
The most murderous war in history gets more distant as we start to lose living contact with so many of its survivors. Yet the past lives, it flames up, through works like these. And what of more difficult memories still? A series of photographic works by Gersht depicts blossoms in Japan, and invites us to meditate on Kamikaze pilots and Hiroshima.
Gersht proves himself both an eerie landscape artist (with a camera) and a passionate portraitist. The three strands of history that his works at the Imperial War Museum relate are three threads of memory that his films and pictures keep alive. Dignity and sorrow make for a powerful exhibition that answers the military hardware in the Imperial War Museum with flowers and snowflakes.
• At Imperial War Museum, London SE1, until 29 April
Also opening this week
Turner and the Elements
The seascapes of Turner on the shore where he was inspired to paint them.
• At Turner Contemporary, Margate from 28 January until 13 May
David Shrigley
Wit of our time, and one of the best British contemporaries never to have won a Turner. Maybe this year?
• At Hayward Gallery, London SE1, from 1 February until 13 May
Sean Scully
Abstract painter of quiet and earthen power.
• At Timothy Taylor Gallery, London W1, until 11 February
Migrations: Journeys into British Art
How migration shaped our art history. Absorbing or repellently theoretical? Let's see ...
• At Tate Britain, London SE1, from 31 January until 12 August
Masterpiece of the week
Bronze Apollo, known as Chatsworth Head, Ancient Greek (c 460BC), at British Museum
Gaze into the empty eyes of this bronze head and you feel the power of the god Apollo, who killed the monster Python and flayed the satyr Marsyas. Reason and classical calm are associated with Apollo, and yet he could be driven mad, like any of us, by love – when he insulted Cupid, the love god sent him on a wild goose chase after reluctant Daphne.
Ancient Greek sculptors made many of their best statues of bronze, but very few bronze figures from the classical period survive – so this work from the best age of Greek art is a very precious glimpse of the original beauty of the gods. Gaze on Apollo. He gazes back, sightless but all-seeing. This head is, in every sense, divine.
Image of the week
What we learned this week
That LS Lowry snubbed being made a sir no less than five times
That Charles Dickens was obsessed with interior design
Why Alain de Botton's temples for atheists are an unholy conceit
What a cape made by a million spiders looks like
Lastly ...