Featuring night workers and news reports from another dimension, nominees for the prestigious prize are taking their diverse, boundary-pushing films on tour. We meet the artists up for the prize

Scientists in Netherlands using eye-tracking and MRI scans found ‘enormous difference’ between genuine works and posters

It was a truth known to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell back in 1968, but now scientists have caught up with them: there really ain’t nothing like the real thing .

A neurological study in the Netherlands has revealed that real works of art in a museum stimulate the brain in a way that is 10 times stronger than looking at a poster.

A shocking period of upheavals, from power grabs to nuclear tests, caused India’s artists and activists to innovate. The Barbican in London is exhibiting the defiant ones

India is the world’s largest democracy. In this year’s national election, which was staged over seven phases from April to June , nearly 650 million voters cast their ballots. Democratic rituals, for all their flaws, seem so profoundly to be embedded in the Indian political landscape that it can be easy to overlook the country’s experience of brutal authoritarian rule. Narendra Modi’s erosion of democratic institutions is not so much a novelty as an informal reprise of Indira Gandhi’s rule less than half a century ago.

In 1975, faced with sustained labour strikes, mass protests on the streets and a court ruling disqualifying her from holding public office, Mrs Gandhi suspended the constitution and declared a state of internal emergency . Her opponents were thrown in prison and the press was censored. This was the soft aspect of her rule. The truly harrowing story unfolded in the villages and towns, where the prime minister’s son, Sanjay, fixated on curbing India’s population, launched a mass sterilisation programme . More than six million men were subjected to forced surgical procedures in one year: some were mutilated. Sanjay’s drive to beautify India’s cities resulted in forced displacement of innumerable people. In Delhi, the police opened fire on the residents of a slum who attempted to resist peacefully. The memory of the “Emergency” – as the period is universally remembered – can still make people shudder today.

Japan House, London
This mouthwatering show celebrates Japan’s fine art of creating delectable duplicates – the work of craftspeople since the 1920s, all intended to tempt customers into restaurants

Twinkling pearls of salmon roe gleam on top of succulent slices of taro, while a platter of oysters glistens under the gallery spotlights. A bright red crab sparkles next to slices of seared tuna that glow with almost radioactive intensity, alongside a shimmering slab of intricately marbled wagyu beef. Around the room spreads a gob-smacking buffet of the plumpest grapes, freshest sashimi and silkiest bowls of broth imaginable, as if plucked from a parallel universe where everything looks fresher, brighter and better-tasting than reality.

The parallel universe in question is the Japanese restaurant window – a place that has long gleamed with astonishing displays of impossibly realistic replica dishes, or shokuhin sanpuru , designed to lure customers inside. Honed over the last century, this dazzling art form has now been brought to Britain in the form of a mouthwatering exhibition at Japan House, the cultural centre operated in London by the Japanese embassy. Marvels of soft diplomacy in action, every show here seems calibrated to make you want to jump straight on a flight eastwards – or, in this case, run to the nearest Japanese restaurant.

The exhibition programme has so far focused on more conventional notions of regional craft, ranging from the metalwork of Tsubame-Sanjo to the artefacts of the Indigenous Aiynu people in Hokkaido, but this show tackles a ubiquitous commercial phenomenon head on, with exquisitely appetising results. An exhibition has never made me salivate so much.

Tate Modern, London
Opening up his screaming world of repressed terrors and tin-foil asteroids, this trip through the late Detroit artist’s prolific career offers no safe spaces

Cacophonous, confusing, rammed with videos, audio works, sculptures, architectural models, photographs, drawings and handwritten statements, Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit is a full-on speed trip through the American artist’s life, reaching right back into his Catholic, working-class childhood in Detroit. The show swerves by the artist’s teenage troubles, his time in bands and then college in Ann Arbor and at CalArts, and on through his full-tilt career right up to his sudden, grim and horrible death by his own hand, at the age of 57, in January 2012 . At the end of that year, an extensive survey of the artist’s work (which had been several years in preparation) opened at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam . The mid-career survey became a sudden full stop. But Kelley’s influence continues, and he feels as current now as at the time of his death.

Ghost and Spirit opens with a white-draped apparition with a monkey-like head peaking round the darkened entrance to the show, and ends with a video of a firework dripping flames from a bridge at night, where, according to urban Detroit legend, a spirit is invoked if the bridge is firebombed. Teen-flick myth though it is, the flames dripping through the dark evoke something more than kerosene.

At Tate Modern, London from 3 October to 9 March

Turner Contemporary, Margate
Melting candles, rotting trees, a huge curtain of apples and a chalk mine 3D-printed into life … these impermanent spectacles turn art into theatre

The Anya Gallaccio exhibition you see at Turner Contemporary will not be the same as the Anya Gallaccio exhibition I saw. In the brief interval between my visiting Preserve, and the publication of this review, certain objects will have diminished and others flourished. As with sensitive entities of the natural realm, each artwork in this exhibition has its own intrinsic seasonality.

La Dolce Vita, first staged in 1994, is a bank of candles melting into freeform waxy puddles on a huge sheet of foil. The candles are replaced as they melt. By show’s end they will flicker atop a wavy mass having constructed their own sculpture with only the barest intervention. To visit during its earliest phases of growth is to encounter the work before it accrues charisma.

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect

When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results.

As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms.

Portrait hung in cheap frame for decades, with wife describing it as ‘horrible’ and family mulling getting rid of it

A painting that was found by a junk dealer while he was clearing out the cellar of a home in Capri, and was regularly decried by his wife as “horrible”, is an original portrait by Pablo Picasso, Italian experts have claimed.

After he stumbled across the painting in 1962, Luigi Lo Rosso took the rolled-up canvas home with him to Pompeii, where it hung in a cheap frame on the living room wall for the next few decades.

As her hard-hitting works go on show in Manchester, the Midlands-based artist reveals the emotional toll of making such political, personal work

For most of her life, Barbara Walker has poured her anger about political and personal events into her art. “When I’m trying to understand something, I turn to my work; it feels cathartic,” she says. “ Maggi Hambling said your art should be your best friend. Those words really resonate with me.”

Creating art helped her when her son, Solomon, was being repeatedly stopped and searched by Birmingham police as a 17-year-old; the difficult period inspired a series of pieces, Louder Than Words, combining portraits of the teenager with reproductions of the handwritten police tickets issued to him. The absurd pretexts cited by West Midlands police for stopping him are painstakingly reproduced: “Seen acting suspicious, pointing at bar staff through window.”