A yearly international arts festival in Watou, a culturally-minded village in the Westhoek region of Belgium (just ask fans of Gregorian music). Locations such as barns and stables serve as creative scenery for stories from young and well-known curators (Jan Van Woensel, Christophe De Jaeger, Joost Declercq) and the Dutch author Oscar Van den Bogaard, with Willy Tibergien, director of the Poëziecentrum in Ghent selecting a whole range of poetry. Experimental works, both indoors and out, the Festival mixes up the generations and artistic disciplines and features Celine Butaye, Masashi Echigo, Miks Mitrevics and Jan Op de Beeck, ao.

Now in its 41st edition, Les Recontres D'Arles Photograhie is an international photography festival that features numerous workshops, exhibitions, colloquiums, projections & other activities. The event will also see the announcement of the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie 2010 prize-winners, with the company also supporting the Clicks for Classes project (a countrywide scheme that saw schoolchildren & photographers working to reinvent the class photo) and France 14.

Olek (the Polish-born, Brooklyn-based Agata Oleksiak, who recently blogged on http://agataolek.com that 'Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet') has invigorated the art of the hook with her public installations, wearable sculptures, performance pieces and costumes. As one of the artists featuring in Weaving In & Out she will perform the suitably loopy Crocheted Grapefruit, in a collaborative exhibition curated by No Longer Empty that seeks to explore the immediate and larger spatial, cultural, aesthetic, urban and environmental contexts, potentials and interactions of the show's site -  the raw ground floor of a residential property called Tapestry in a new 'green' development in East Harlem. Textiles, construction and bridging are prominent in many of the artworks, with the 'Weaving' a metaphor for the intertwining actions, projects and ideas. Participating artists also include Isidro Blasco, David Antonio Cruz, Manny Vega and Carol Warner, ao.

No Longer Empty is a non-profit organisation that organises public art exhibitions in empty storefronts and buildings in New York City and was 'conceived as an artistic response to our present economic condition'.

As the biggest art project of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010, Emscher Art 2010 reflects a huge project to regenerate and renaturise the areas along the River Emscher. For this event attention is focused on the so-called Emscher Island, where 40 artists have created 20 works at sluice gates, in the canal or on the surrounding industrial wasteland. With participating artists including Monica Bonvicini, Rita McBride, Mark Dion,  Ayse Erkmen, Jeppe Hein, Olaf Nicolai, Tobias Rehberger and Tadashi Kawamata, the exhibition can be reached by boat, bicycle and car.

His name might not ring immediate bells for all, but the work of sculptor Tom Claassen has very much become part of the Dutch landscape: daily thousands of motorists past his five vast elephant sculptures at a traffic intersection outside Almere; each year, vast numbers of air travellers stream past his ‘Snowmen’ at the entrance to Schiphol Airport’s D pier; his rabbits play on the grass next to the Kunsthal in Rotterdam and a seven-metre-high figure stands in front of the town hall in Hoofddorp. This major retrospective of Claassen's work will be on show in and around the exhibition centre and will include works normally sited in public spaces – like his horse sculpture from De Plantage in Utrecht and a huge, stylised rat called Brigid from the Kröller-Müller Museum.

You've seen the pictures, visited the building, now experience the play. The Bilbao Effect by Oren Safdie is being billed as a work that 'puts contemporary architecture on trial'. Frank Gehry, whose success with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao sent the world's city marketeers into a formulaic frenzy, isn't actually dragged into the dock, but the disguise is thin.  The plot centres on one 'Erhardt Shlaminger', who is a 'world famous architect who faces censure by the American Institute of Architects, following accusations that his urban redevelopment project for Staten Island has led to a woman's suicide.' The said project is apparently a Museum for Contemporary Contemporary Art, which one colleague describes as a 'toaster on steroids'....This is a blind preview, so no judgement on the satirical bite of its content, but alongside an architectural send-up, the play seeks to 'explore whether architecture has become more of art than a profession, and at what point the ethics of one field violate the principles of the other.'

Housed in several locations in Berlin, this year’s Biennial takes as its focus how contemporary artists respond to the theme of the present. Or moreover on reality, what it means to different people, how it relates to different situations and how with so many different visions of what reality means whether that ultimately leads us to question contemporary art, and its relationship to reality. The Biennial’s theme is contextualised by an exhibition with works by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), curated by the American art historian Michael Fried, as well as work such as photography by Michael Schmidt.

The 28th outing for this contemporary art fair brings together paintings, sculptures, photography and video from established galleries and up-and-coming talents too. The expo, expected to greet some 30,000 professionals, collectors and art lovers over its three days, also offers visitors a chance to participate in numerous talks (organised by the contemporary art museum MuHKA) and debates. Additional highlights include a display of large scale site-specific work by artists living and working in Belgium (organised for the 4th time in a row as the expo’s Artist Project) and a Performance Platform, giving performance art its own place within the show.

Most of us understand quarantine to mean a strategy of separation and containment. While this description is not inaccurate, the 18 artists, designers and architects involved in this exhibition ask us to look beyond quarantine’s basic definition to consider its wider implications. The multi-disciplinary group participating in this show considers the physical, biological, ethical, architectural, social, political, temporal and even astronomical dimensions of quarantine through a variety of works. Such works touch on issues ranging from urban planning, geopolitics and international trade through to ethics and immigration.

Raqs Media Collective is based in New Delhi and brings together the work of three artists: Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Much of their collaborative output explores the relationship between contemporary art, historical enquiry and philosophical speculation. This particular exhibition was inspired by the collective’s visit to Tyneside in 2009 and the North East ‘s maritime history, specifically recent photographs documenting the giant Swan Hunter shipbuilding cranes leaving the River Tyne to be repurposed in India. The visit has resulted in the production of a body of work that reflects the collective’s diverse specialisations and includes sculpture and poetry.