Being loved-up or lovelorn on St Valentine's Day, or taking an anti-amour stance is so desperately passe. Celebrate for celebration's sake: with tears, histrionic convulsions or paroxysms of woe -- what could be more outre? Loss: An Evening Of Exquisite Misery honours the lily-livered libertine, the self-indulgent depressive, the miserable flaneur. Dress to depress with the theme of decaying beauty, and loaf about with melancholic panache in the book-lined vaults of Hedges & Butler (the hidden away hang out du jour). Ponder the world's weight on your shoulders and exacerbate your grief by chopping onions, watching the saddest films in the world and listening to The Tear Duckts and other assorted performers of woe. An extra plus is that the night is sponsored by Hendrick's Gin, so you'll be able to drink away your pain if nothing else.

Dan Graham is a conceptual artist and critical thinker whose career has spanned nearly five decades. Graham has worked closely with Robert Smithson, Laurie Anderson and Vito Acconci, and yet has managed to escape the notoriety of many of his peers. He has maintained an acute perception of socially relevant criticism and often uses music and counter-culture as a means of deconstructing the familiar dogmas embedded in the daily grind. Many of Graham's installations use urban planning and architectural methodologies to subvert our expectations of space and structure, often calling attention to the unintentional formality assigned to new architecture and public space. His seminal video work Rock My Religion took a hard look at the relationship between "holy rollers" and the emergence of rock music as a means of achieving spiritual enlightenment, and was based on Patti Smith's controversial assertion that rock is religion. This is an excellent opportunity to glimpse a cross-section of the practice of an individual whose career has been as diverse as his talents.

Russell Maliphant and Lea Anderson, among the UK's best-known cutting-edge choreographers, are just two of the artists who have choreographed sections of this major multimedia collaboration to be performed in the Great Hall at St Bartholomew's Hospital, commissioned by the ICA, Wellcome Trust and about a dozen of the arts councils of the Western world, Australia in particular. With no less than four choreographers, a dancer, seven special effects specialists and biomedical computer science experts, three sound designers and two directors -- composer Stevie Wishart and dance filmmaker Margie Medlin -- this is an ambitious dance installation and real-time art experiment. Virtual, mechanical and live elements come together on stage in the Great Hall at St Barts, creating new choreographies from sensory data. The performance promises to include real and virtual dancers, live musicians, and lots of extraordinary high tech interactivity.

NB: Quartet runs for four nights from 15/02 till 18/02.

William Hogarth's tremendous and varied output has fashioned him a coat made of scraps of all disciplines. The exhibition at Tate Britain, recently shown at the Louvre, brings together the painter and printmaker, as well demonstrating that Hogarth was a theorist and polemicist, a satirist and the director of his own art school. A contentious character, Hogarth has drawn contemporary comparison with the troubled singer, sometime poet, and all round libertine, Pete Doherty. And the musical references do not stop there. Musicologist Gavin Plumley explores in his talk, "Stravinsky's Progress", how Hogarth's pictures have produced a pastiched musical and literary following. Igor Stravinsky was one such follower, who after seeing A Rake's Progress in Chicago in 1946, began writing his own operatic fable on the subject in collaboration with WH Auden and Chester Kallman. Indeed, Hogarth's true brilliance lies both in his interdisciplinarity and atemporality, where the subjects and themes of his pictures continue to speak meaningfully to a modern day audience.

NB this event is free and no booking is needed (people are seated on a first-come, first-served basis) and has been programmed in conjunction with Hogarth, which runs at Tate till 29/04. On 07/03 (6:30pm) catch, Satire And Pictures: Steve Bell, Toby Young And Guests, another interesting talk programmed in conjunction with the exhibition.

It's been quite some year for Bonobo's Simon Green. Since his new album, Days To Come, was released to critical acclaim last October he's gone from selling out the wonderful yet compact Luminaire to this weekend's headlining show at the Forum. Recruiting a full band, including the likes of Cinematic Orchestra's Tom Chant and Ninja Tune label mate Fink, has allowed Green to create a more expansive palette of sound that takes in touches of folk, jazz and soul alongside his leftfield beats and breaks and which has been wowing audiences around the world. In a bizarre move, support comes from the incredible Fujiya & Miyagi whose punk-funk krautrock-disco might not seem the most obvious complement to Bonobo but are more than worth schlepping across London for in their own right.

Performance art creates a space for pure possibility: the potential that you'll love or hate it, be confused or transported, participate or recoil. But for all this ambivalence, performances also quite often rely on a unique experience usually induced by the artist in presentia. What happens if the artist is taken out of the equation? Can performance exist in the absence of its creator? Absent Without Leave picks up where the Situationist artist Vito Acconci left off in the early '70s. A succulent selection of artists including among others Dan Colen, Terence Koh, Michael Sailstorfer, Jordan Wolfson and Systems House present works with their own take on the concept of "the performer" and its place in the creative process. Will they go where no artist has gone before? Maybe not, but Elmgreen & Dragset's free-standing VIP door, Jeppe Hein's Invisible Moving Wall and Kirsten Pieroth's shredded broom just might lead you to redefine the often used and abused term "performative". You might even find yourself seduced by their clever creations.

NB: runs till 17/03. Jeppe Hein's work is also currently on view at the Barbican (till 29/04).

Before east London became the destination du jour for hipster doofuses, Brixton held sway as the number one night spot in London with the Dogstar its focal point. Some years later, the Dogstar is still going strong and has recently undergone a revamp (much needed, some would say) with a charity shop boudoir look and the reopening of all three floors. Saturday night jump off Hands Up! takes the limelight with a splendid lineup. Daddy G from Massive Attack joins Disastronaut and Duncan from the Zzonked Soundsystem in the main room for some raw block party action which is likely to test the shiny new 12k soundsystem. Room two has a special guest from the Ed Banger stable in Vicarious Bliss. He is joined by John Power (Furthur Promotions) and wrongtom, tour DJ for Hard-Fi and responsible for Cassetiquette, so far one of this year's best mixtapes, with proclaimed "ingenues of the indie-electronica new wave" Enemy Voices also performing live. In the VIP room, Lina Riot, Dogstar resident and DJ for new Brixton indie night Long Slow Kiss On The Lips, is joined by professional ligger tonypoland (Slutty Fringe) and likely to be playing all sorts of scenester music.

Two big names should bring the punters to Fabric's big rooms this evening. Room two plays host to Colin Dale -- the ex-Kiss FM man who blundered into DJing when he was just out of school with the likes of Westwood, Fabio, et al. While those DJs blazed respective trails in popularising (or commercialising) the hitherto relatively underground sounds of rap and drum and bass, Dale went deeper into techno. To this day he remains one of the UK scene's best-known and most individual talents, famed for his hard and funky sets which often incorporate elements of old-school rave, yet which still remain accessible enough not to sound out of place in a superclub. In the main room, alongside the usual suspects, you can hear Ivan Smagghe -- part of Blackstrobe and at least partly responsible for electro's horrifying march across east London a couple of years ago -- who combines tech-house and acid-drenched basslines with snippets and edits of his own for a truly unique set.

For all those sofa cineastes out there, the marvellously plush Everyman is offering a chance to learn more about the unrivalled "Master of Suspense" in this first of four weekly Screen Salons tracing Hitchcock's career. Profiling his early years in London, writer Ian Haydn Smith discusses how in the silent film years Hitchcock developed a cinematic signature of suggestion that was totally unreliant on dialogue -- a style that he continued to use to great effect with the arrival of sound. Excerpts from his early films, including the silent The Lodger and his first "talkie" Blackmail will be featured, together with a screening of the wonderfully convoluted suspense classic The 39 Steps. A huge hit when released, the film features that favourite Hitchcockian character -- the wrongly accused man -- and was the first of Hitchcock's films to introduce the soon-to-be-infamous MacGuffin device. Subsequent weekly salons will examine his Hollywood years and feature screenings of Notorious (25/02), Vertigo (04/03) and Marnie (11/03).

NB: this Hitchcock Screen Salon runs every Sunday from 18/02 till 11/03. For film buffs another good event taking place on Sunday 18/02 (12:30pm) is the Kubrick Masterclass with Simon Channing-Williams (producer of Secret & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake...) and Helen de Winter (author of What I Really Want To Do Is Produce) at the Curzon Soho.

Inspired by an article in The New Yorker, entitled "Jumpers: The Fatal Grandeur Of The Golden Gate Bridge", and the fact that more people have chosen to end their lives there than anywhere else in the world, first time filmmaker Eric Steel trained his unflinching camera on the bridge for an entire year in 2004 to stimulate debate around the dark, unfathomable, tragic subject of suicide. Of the 24 people who committed suicide from the bridge in 2004, Steel focuses on three lives in detail -- Gene Sprague, Lisa Smith and Philip Manikow -- analysing their pasts with family and friends. He also explores in less detail the lives of three others -- David Paige, David Rubenstein and James Singer. All are stories of alienation, extreme desperation, personal loss and, above all, mental illness, to a lesser or greater extent. This is insightful, moving material. However, Steel finds it harder to get an angle on the bridge's particular attraction to those contemplating suicide, trading in broad terms like "beautiful", "fascinating" and "romantic". And it's difficult not to feel voyeuristic as the camera picks out individuals on the bridge, wondering who could possibly be the next to jump. Very definitely thought-provoking filmmaking.

NB: The Bridge is released in London on 16/02. For lighter material check out Hot Fuzz (from the team behind Shaun Of The Dead and cult sitcom Spaced) which is released on the same day.

In the wake of postmodernism, is it possible for an artist to clearly reference historical sources of inspiration and still make personal work? Karen Kilimnik is one of a rare breed of artists whose work maintains a unique quality while clearly exploring popular culture and a romantic aesthetic of centuries past. Perhaps her oil paintings and installations are unique because they borrow without irony. Her portraits of young women, lush landscapes and depictions of domestic animals would run the risk of being quaint, were it not for the fact that all have a subtle disquieting quality to them. Their small scale, lavish colours and familiar subject matters are engaging in a very intimate way, but it's the imperfect rendition of certain details and the slightly crooked expression on the subject's features that lingers long after you've moved away from the work. It's that very touch of perversity that allows her to represent icons of popular culture such as Hugh Grant and Kate Moss alongside images of Tsarist Russia, classical ballet and fairytales without the subject ever dominating the aesthetic interest of the work. She doesn't reproduce common images, rather she induces a different experience of the well-known icons of our culture by tweaking them just enough so we still recognise them yet can't quite express why they've lost their ability to comfort us.

NB: runs till 09/04.

Hamilton, Ontario is probably used to being under the shadow of Toronto so its inhabitants are trying hard to impress. Taking nothing away from the Torontonian titan of everything zeitgeist Jesse F Keeler (Death From Above 1979 and MSTRKRFT), Hamiltonian rhythmster Kieran Hebden can now say there are two new sounds to hail from Canada's fourth-largest city. Junior Boys have been pleading that melodic vocals can work with stripped-down beats since 1999. Thankfully the fashionista tide has washed up their style onto the front line of right now. So there's no need to go all the way to Canada to get something lyrical that you can dance to. Last time MIA's ex-squeeze Diplo went on a hunt for new music, he plumped for Brazil, but instead of pulling a Gilles Peterson and coming back with yet more hackneyed grooves, he found art school kids bastardising anything they could find with messy samba beats and rhymes. They were Bonde do Role, party friends of CSS and soon to release a riotous debut album that should see their tunes getting some airtime outside Favela Chic (where they're on repeat). And while we're on the subject of joyous repetition, those boys from school Hot Chip are there to fill in the gaps.

Perhaps only Rene Magritte would have appreciated the irony of Einsturzende Neubauten's legendary ICA performance in 1984, as the sold out event was advertised as "Concerto For Voice And Machinery. This is not an Einsturzende Neubauten concert". A 25 minute performance of descendingly beautiful noise, the protagonists took a Dadaist approach, utilising a symphonic selection of instruments -- cement mixer, a ruined piano, broken bottles, power drills, chain saws and a healthy dose of attitude -- to antagonise and thrill the crowd. As a near riot ensued, with suggestions that the band were digging through the stage to search out hidden tunnels in London's Mall in a psychogeographic exploration, the ICA closed down the night. 23 years later, artist Jo Mitchell reflects upon these escapades by re-staging the night with look-alikes. Less "Stars in their Eyes", and more "Sawdust and Glass in your Eyes", the night will navigate ideas of representation, display and the playfulness of our knowing postmodernist culture. Hard hats and protective goggles recommended.

Sarah Bridgland's miniature sculptures were one of the few highlights of last year's otherwise lacklustre New Contemporaries exhibition. Tiny paper and card vignettes, Bridgland's work looks like a dainty pop-up toy theatre, where the stage has collapsed and all the actors and props are collapsed into an unruly heap. Delicate, cut out figures of soldiers, airplanes and pop culture debris suggest a pleasure in craft and materials that contradicts their subject matter: the pantomime violence and consumer excesses of contemporary culture. A whimsical, ephemeral approach unites Bridgland with the other artists in Air Guitar And Two Teaspoons, most of whose sculptures look like they would blow away at the merest mention of a sneeze. Racheal Pengilley and Antonia Grant have created an installation out of salt and sugar, Aisling Hedgecock prefers polystyrene balls, and Richard Woods lives up to his name with a precariously balanced wooden plank sculpture. Further optical trickery animates Flore Nove-Josserand's 3-D op-art grid while Matthew Lutz-Kinoy's multicoloured bunting emphasises the refreshingly un-macho, folksy air of this elegant show of new tendencies in sculpture.

NB: runs till 24/02.

Michael Craig-Martin placed a glass of water and called it An Oak Tree -- it is only that because we agree it to be so. This was the acorn that grew into Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree that finally runs in London after reaping garlands from Edinburgh and beyond. Crouch himself plays a stage hypnotist who in a car accident killed a girl whose father is now his onstage volunteer. The father is played by a guest actor (at press night a luminously moving Sophie Okonedo) whose only qualification is that they must not have read or seen the play before they step onstage for a unique performance, guided and prompted by Crouch through various means. That those means are visible to us and act equally on us, indeed that the entire slipperiness of its artifice is made absolutely transparent, its contradictions never allowing us an easy mental hold on the piece, all make for a dizzying transcendence. Crouch and his collaborators (and clearly you must collaborate yourself for this to work) craft through well-honed simplicity an alarmingly hilarious and shredding experience of grief and loss. And it is also itself a definitively and defiantly brilliant piece of theatre.

NB: runs till 04/03.

"Too weird to live, too rare to die", an expression used by Hunter S Thompson to describe his attorney and sometime accomplice, has been commonly used to describe Thompson himself, especially since his untimely death just under two years ago. A man of diverse talents and father of Gonzo journalism, Thompson is famed for living the wild life, and for his unique brand of eccentricity that involved copious amounts of drugs, guns and peacocks. He was the epicentre of a unique scope of Americana, and while it has been vividly pictured in his written work, we rarely get the chance to glimpse the world through Hunter's eyes. Gonzo is the first exhibition of Thompson's work outside of the USA, and accompanies the launch of a book by the same name released by AMMO Books. An exhibition of photos taken by and of "the good doctor", the series is a beautiful, nostalgic portrait of life on the edge in America. This show is a must-see for any real Thompson fan, as well as a genuinely glossy and saturated picture of the days when danger was just good fun. Mahalo.

NB: runs till 10/03.

The Movement Of People Working is a series of more than 20 films by minimalist all-rounder Phill Niblock. Niblock says of his films "I am interested in eliminating film time and montage, sequencing, narrative line, development, plot, all of the things usually relevant to film, and concentrating on stasis, reiteration of a single idea", the result being a series of intensely moving scenes of global normality and working life -- fishing, labouring, sewing, construction -- raised to the level of art. In their first UK showing, the films, mostly in a vivid technicolour that has a whole set of its own evocations, are being shown on 12 separate screens and are accompanied by Niblock's own music (or as he speaks of it, "clouds of sound"). The combined effect of the music and films is an overloading of the senses, with the eyes wanting to look everywhere at once, unable to make out anything specific before being dragged to look somewhere else while the ears are assailed but similarly unable to latch onto anything. Niblock's audio and visuals offer different ways of subverting -- the one by offering too much, the other by (on the surface) not offering enough. This show represents a rare minimalist son et lumiere experience.

NB: runs till 10/03.

Anselm Kiefer's vertiginous installation Jericho in the Royal Academy's grand courtyard is breathtaking. Two colossal concrete towers rise up to level with the classical architecture that surrounds them. Each is constructed of five or six cast concrete bunkers piled on top of one another, steel reinforcement chords sticking out like spikes, with sheets of poisonous lead layered in between, creating a precarious vision of towers just about to topple. The allusions of Kiefer's apocalyptic vision to historical and contemporary conflict are clear.

Aperiatur terra at White Cube's new central London gallery further explores ideas of man-made destruction and natural disaster on a biblical scale. Quoting from the Book of Isaiah the title of the exhibition translates as "let the earth be opened"; gigantic canvases of thickly layered paint display cracked, scorched and ravaged earth. With written references to mythical and historical wars they evoke the muddy fields and churned up terrain after battle. Upstairs at ground level an uprooted palm tree bisects the gallery, its fronds creeping into the reception area. The wall beside it is tiled with 18 of Kiefer's "paintings", layered with organic matter -- brambles, palm leaves, dried thistles -- and paint; they are like the contents of a sketchbook stuffed with pressed flowers and squashed insects writ large.

NB: Jericho is on view at the Royal Academy till 30/04 and Aperiatur terra at White Cube, Mason's Yard till 17/03.

It's a testament to the rise of CSS, aka "Cansei de Ser Sexy" (which translates into English as "Tired of Being Sexy"), that this extra Astoria show, added due to exceptional public demand, is being previewed over two months early. This Brazilian electro indie-pop band blend their sound with their interest in design, cinematography and fashion, singing in both English and Portuguese. It's a self-consciously "cool" aesthetic and sound, but it all makes sense and there's something instantly appealing about hearing broken English compositions entitled "Meeting Paris Hilton" sung with a strong Brazilian accent. Their debut self-titled album, not released in the UK until May of this year, has already garned critical acclaim, and will undoubtedly have already been procured by some via import or through Soulseek. Currently playing NME's first ever Indie Rave Tour with The Sunshine Underground, New Young Pony Club and Klaxons, genuine commercial success surely awaits these zany Brazilians. They're young, fun and Brazilian, enough reasons to make them appealing. This gig will surely sell out by April, so take heed of this advance warning.

Well-versed in choreography, critical theory and economics, Tino Sehgal creates rule-based situations that address the historical relationship between art institutions and their visitors. His pieces eschew anything that could traditionally be considered an artistic medium (as well as visual documentation and reproduction, for that matter), thriving instead on the contingencies of transient, interpersonal exchange. An ambulatory conversation in This Progress (2006); the entreaty for discussion in This objective of that object (2004): Sehgal's are surprisingly affective experiences, which illuminate many of our behavioural norms whilst offering new modes of engagement. For his last in a trilogy of annual exhibitions at the ICA, alternatively titled This Success or This Failure (2007), the London-born, Berlin-based artist relinquished the lower gallery to a group of schoolchildren and invited them to spend each day playing without the aid of objects. KF caught up with the artist to learn more.

To read the interview click here.

Isolation speaks of many things -- Baudrillard has spoken of loving someone as isolation, wiping out traces of the shadows. Some see the Internet as absolute isolation, whilst others long for this moment of abandonment. What place music and sound plays in an understanding of the notion of "isolation" is explored here in an outstanding new release from the Australian label Room40, featuring new works from Stephen Vitiello, David Toop, Richard Chartier, Greg Davis, and KF's very own Scanner. You can disregard suggestions of syrupy sugar hiccup coated ambient noodlings, and immerse yourself into a world of textures, fields of sound detail, landscape recordings, oscillating natural vibrations of the earth, elegantly reflective solitudes, interweaving weatherfronts of graceful, arching luminous sound. Close the curtains, don headphones and disappear for a moment.

To buy On Isolation online click here.

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

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