A major retrospective of Peter Kennard’s dissenting images, the V&A goes for Swifties and The Hay Wain arrives in Bristol – all in your weekly dispatch

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent
The veteran montage artist and activist gets a retrospective of his incisive images.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London , until 19 January

Kunstmuseum Den Haag tour sparks senses of people with dementia and their carers

Eight people approached a fragrant carpet of lavender in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag gallery. Four of them had dementia and four were their relatives and carers. “Put your nose nearer the ground and smell it, it’s wonderful!” called Annie Versteeg, 88, to Bwieuwkje Bruinenberg-Haisma, 90, in her wheelchair nearby.

“This tour is about colour and here we have a colour and it goes with a smell,” said Yke Prins, the museum guide. “Do you know what it is? It is lavender. What does it make you think about?”

Artist known for photographic work was commissioned to create A Taste of Home in Terminal 4 tube station

The UK needs more public art that confronts the major issues of the day, according to Joy Gregory , the award-winning artist who has just unveiled a new project at Heathrow airport that was inspired by more than 100 asylum seekers.

Gregory, who is known for her photographic work and won the £110,000 Freelands award recently, was commissioned by Transport for London (Tfl) to create 24 billboards mounted in the airport’s Terminal 4 underground station ticket hall.

Collectives such as Pattern Up use the visual signifiers of well-known brands to deliver satirical statements. ‘It’s something everyone can relate to – which is dark,’ they say

Labour’s landslide win in the general election saw many Conservative MPs experience a Portillo moment . Top Tories including Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg were unseated by discontented constituents. But, a few days before, something a wee bit different took place: a Portaloo moment.

Overnight, a mobile toilet popped up on the streets of Shoreditch, east London, complete with a Polling Booth sign and ballot paper loo roll. A true safe seat, if you will. It was the latest potty-mouthed installation from Pattern Up , a collective of young artists formed in Brighton but now operating across the UK and Ireland. The stunt encouraged voters to consider spoiling – or, in an act of dirty protest, soiling – their ballots. “Obviously not everyone should spoil their ballot. But any vote was already spoiled anyway because the main two parties were so similar,” a spokesperson for the group says.

It was not the only stunt Pattern Up pulled for the election; the group also mocked up a set of Stuck Up Starmer and Soggy Sunak action figures and put up posters suggesting Tory voters should go to Specsavers .

From ancient fist-fighters to futurists on bikes, from starchy archers to a naked runner frozen in time … as the Games kick off in Paris, our critic ranks the finest depictions of sport in art

Sport, in particular athletics, gives artists great opportunities, as well as huge challenges. Running, jumping, throwing, fighting, swimming – these ways of using the human body offer much to sculpt, paint, photograph or film. And that has been true since ancient times. The Olympic Games were not just about bringing the different Greek states together in friendly competition: athletics was also central to discovering how to portray people in motion, often in revolutionary ways. Although the ancient Egyptians played ballgames and other sports, depictions of these in their tombs are flat and static. Greece’s Games, by contrast, inspired a great artistic leap forward as sculptors and vase painters learned the language of speed.

The revival of the Olympics at the end of the 1800s coincided with the birth of modern art – and, just as classical artists were inspired by athletics, their modern counterparts have seen the physically elite through eyes liberated by cubism and besotted by pop. Here are the 20 greatest results, the best sporting artworks of all time.

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Striking images spanning 50 years of protest, power and political villains fill this dark-as-hell show of DIY photomontages

At the pivotal moment of a good joke, the familiar takes an unexpected turn and the world appears tilted on its axis. It is a stretch to describe Peter Kennard’s dark-as-hell photo collages as jokes, but there is certainly shared methodology. Kennard weirds the familiar, creating jarring juxtapositions, and delivering electrifying visual shocks by way of punchline.

Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel Gallery covers over 50 years of Kennard’s work. His golden period arrived in the late 1970s and 1980s – the era of Thatcher, the GLC under Ken Livingstone and the protest camps at Greenham Common and Faslane. The political foes were iconic, the protests popular, and a flourishing print culture offered rich material to work from.

Hull’s David Remfry was ‘artist in residence’ at the legendary hotel, portraying dominatrixes, drag acts and rock stars – including an annoyingly twitchy Dee Dee Ramone in a room smelling of glue. He relives a ‘magic time’

Memorialised in song by former residents Bob Dylan , Leonard Cohen and Nico , New York’s Hotel Chelsea has housed an astonishing clientele of artists, writers and mavericks including Brendan Behan, Arthur C Clarke (who called it his “ spiritual home ”), Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock. In 1994 the British artist David Remfry , then 52, joined this esteemed roll-call when he relocated to New York ahead of an exhibition of works he intended to paint in the city. He went on to spend 17 years at the Chelsea, drawing and painting its remarkable denizens. “I was in heaven,” he says. His pencil portrait of punk pioneer Dee Dee Ramone is part of this year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition.

Raised in Hull and now based in London, Remfry arrived at the Chelsea check-in desk that summer with “17 pieces of luggage, no reservation and no money. Stanley Bard, the owner, asked me, ‘David, how much do your paintings sell for? And how many do you paint a year?’ I think he was figuring out how much he could charge me.”

Tate Modern, London
Is it love or just a summer fling? Oscar Murillo has invited the public to add their own paint to his canvas – but I wouldn’t be tempted. Would I?

Look at me – I’m Jackson Pollock! Doing action painting in the Tate Turbine Hall!

I usually dread interactive art. I prefer to look at art silently, passively and, assuming it’s good enough, to absorb its nuances and meanings slowly. Why do some artists insist on making us doers rather than observers? Queuing with my family to enter the oval arena that Oscar Murillo has set up for us, the masses, to paint his latest work, I even started questioning the financial side. Murillo is a successful artist who will also open a doubtless lucrative show with Gagosian this summer . And he expects people, especially children, to paint his latest hit for free? Seeing his own fussy works on display in Tate’s Tanks, I suppose he needs all the help he can get.

In Athens, the birthplace of republican rule, a new exhibition is exploring art it inspired, from pop art shootings to spies lurking in the Parthenon. Ironically, dictators steal the show

No place on Earth should have more authority to speak about the enduring appeal of democracy than the place that first came up with it. But a new art exhibition in Athens seems reluctant to shout about its credentials. You have to walk right to the end of the National Gallery of Greece’s show, past 137 works by 54 artists, before you come across anything like a claim to authority – and even then it’s far from triumphant.

Rika Pana’s paintings of the Parthenon, set against backgrounds of melancholy blue and muddy green, accentuate not the steadfastness of the ultimate symbol of Athenian democracy, but its eventual ruin. In three paintings, from the series The Erosion of Civilisation, the pillars of the temple – commissioned by the radical democratic reformer Pericles in the 5th century BC – look like plumes of black smoke, the uncertainty of its iconic outline emphasising its own perishability.