The twist: Kwami is actually Günter Wallraff, Germany’s best-known investigative journalist, who blacked up and wore an Afro wig for this film.

When I went to the screening at the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University in London, I thought the film would be very predictable – but found it very disturbing. The everyday racism towards people of a different skin colour was much worse than I expected and ranged from casual disparaging remarks to outright aggression.

It won’t come as a big surprise that Kwami does not get the apartment (the landlady says afterwards: “He was so black, like Heidi Klum’s guy, horrible!) and is not welcome at a German campsite (where he is openly told by the attendant that his skin colour is the problem) or on allotments in Berlin (there is a comical scene where he wants to take away an allotment application form but the official in charge won’t let him take it home). When he and a (real) black friend want to apply for a hunting licence in Bavaria and offer to show a driving licence rather than a passport as ID, the officials threaten to call the police. And at a city festival, other people move away when he sits down with his beer on the same bench.

Kwami doesn’t get any sympathy when he tells the owner of a guard-dog training centre in Cologne that he has already been attacked twice by skinheads and wants his dog to defend him. The owner first tells him the centre is full, then quotes absurdly high joining and membership fees. A little while later, after Kwami has left a white German manages to sign up immediately for a much lower fee.

Racism appears to be worse in East Germany where people are less used to seeing black faces, and in conservative Bavaria. The film features a lot of highly prejudiced older people. But younger people can be equally racist, for example a group of football fans, and even in Cologne Kwami can’t get into a nightclub because he is black, and gets thrown out of a local pub at the end.

Speaking at the screening, the director, Pagonis Pagonakis, stressed that the film isn’t purely about racism – it’s about the instant rejection of those who look/are different, whether they are black, punks or simply outsiders that don’t seem to fit into the local community.

Wallraff, 67, and his team travelled across Germany for over a year to make this film. Black on White was filmed with tiny cameras hidden in Wallraff’s clothing and Pagonakis’ glasses, as well as small HD cameras used by the team from a distance. “People thought we were tourists,” said Pagonakis. “Even when I was standing next to him, because I am white and he is black, they never thought that we could be friends.” Amazingly, most people in the film gave their permission for the footage to be used afterwards – because they thought they’d done nothing wrong.

The film sparked a huge debate in Germany and is the most controversial of Wallraff’s films to date. He was criticised by Germany’s black community, including the Berlin Africa Council, who said he can’t claim to be a spokesman for black people and can’t really imagine what it is like to be black in Germany.

In the film, casual racism turns into aggression when Kwami is threatened with physical violence on a train with east German football fans but is saved by an 18-year-old policewoman. He narrowly escapes a fight in the opening scene when he is told “White people in Europe, and apes in Africa” and also gets punched in a bar. The only positive moments are when other customers step in to protect him in the bar and in another scene when he and a black mate manage to get work.

The reality is even worse: Pagonakis said Wallraff’s black friend never goes out alone at night in Berlin for fear of being attacked.

Little known over here, Wallraff is a household name in Germany. He made his reputation as an undercover reporter in the 1980s when he posed as a Turkish guest worker in Lowest of the Low (Ganz unten), exposing the poor working conditions faced by immigrants. He was sued by the Axel Springer publishing house after he worked for the right-leaning tabloid Bild for four months in 1977 and wrote two books about the experience, accusing the paper of questionable journalistic methods.

In his other recent films, he worked in the callcentre industry and slept rough as a homeless person.

Casual racism is by no means restricted to Germany. After the screening, a black woman in the audience said she had experienced similar problems outside London. Holidaying in the Lake District and Devon, she was told on several occasions that a B&B was full when her white friends were able to get a room. And in France, it is very hard to rent an apartment when you have an Arab name.

Events range from spending the night in a World War II shelter to watching Victorian surgery by gas light in the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe. Museums at Night ties in with the European event of the same name (La Nuit des Musées) and promises to be a lot of fun.

Galleries and museums feel very different at night. It’ll be much quieter than during the day, without masses of tourists and hordes of school children romping around you.

There are adults-only events, like the paranormal ghost investigation and sleepover at Chatham’s Royal Dockyard, and a wide range of family-friendly events. You could watch military manoeuvres at the Royal Marines Museum, or try your hand at space and astronomy activities at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Norwich offers ghost walks and other events linked to its medieval past.

Or you can witness a surgery demonstration – you can even volunteer to be the patient – at the Old Operating Theatre, hidden in the roof of St Thomas Church near London Bridge, where in the nineteenth century amputations were carried out by gaslight in a speedy 27 seconds.

If the war rocks your boat, the Cabinet War Rooms are again offering people the chance to spend the night in their World War II shelter. In Weston-super-Mare, the Helicopter Museum will go back to the Blitz with air raid sirens sounding and giant searchlights illuminating the place, where over 50 flight simulators will link up to recreate a gigantic air battle.

For details of all venues and events, visit the Museums at Night webpage (www.culture24.org.uk/museumsatnight), where listings will be continually updated right up until the weekend itself. You can book by going direct to the museum websites (all the links are on the webpage). Some events are free.

Events with limited capacity like sleepovers are likely to sell out – last year the Cabinet War Rooms sleepover sold out weeks in advance.

Tate Britain begins with a mid-career retrospective for Turner Prize winner Chris Ofili (pictured), probably best known for his intensely coloured elephant dung paintings (27 Jan - 16 May), as well as a major Henry Moore show (24 Feb - 15 Aug). In the autumn comes an Eadweard Muybridge retrospective, centred on his revolutionary photographs of animals and humans in motion, which are still used by animators (8 Sep - 6 Jan 2011). The Tate will also show drawings by Rachel Whiteread at the same time, most of which have never been shown before in a public gallery.

Over at Tate Modern, there is an exhbition devoted to the American abstract Expressionist painter Arshile Gorky, who was born in Armenia and survived the Turkish genocide (10 Feb - 3 May), alongside an exhibition of Theo van Doesburg, a key figure in the Bauhaus movement and the founder of De Stijl (the White Stripes are big fans) (4 Feb - 16 May). His design, typography and architectural work will be shown alongside contemporaries such as Hans Arp, Piet Mondrian, Constrantin Brancusi and Kurt Schwitters.

Also at the Tate, Exposed, Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera is on at the Tate from 28 May until 29 September and includes work by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Nan Goldin, followed by shows of contemporary experimental artist Francis Alÿs (15 June - 5 Sep) and Gauguin (30 Sep - 16 Jan 2011).

The British Museum has Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler until 24 January, followed by Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa (4 March - 6 June) and Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings (22 April - 25 July) which looks at drawing as an art form in its own right, rather than as just a tool in the making of a painting.

Don´t miss the Hoerengracht show by American artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz at the National Gallery, which recreates a street from Amsterdam´s Red Light district and finishes on 21 February. The National ends the year with Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals (13 Oct - 16 Jan 2011). 

The Hayward Gallery will shut for repairs during the first half of this year, and reopen on 17 June with site-specific work by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto. Move: Art and Dance since the Sixties is next (13 Oct - 9 Jan 2011), including work by Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman.

Of the smaller galleries in London, the Serpentine Gallery will devote its first show of the year to Richard Hamilton (3 March - 25 April), followed by photos by Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans (26 June - 20 Oct).

Don´t miss Frank Auerbach at the Courtauld Gallery, which finishes on 17 January. It shows his paintings of London building sites made after the war.

This is followed by an exhibition centred on Michelangelo´s drawing The Dream of Human Life, which he probably gave to the Roman nobleman Tommaso de Cavalieri (18 Feb - 16 May), alongside letters and poems addressed by the artist to his lover.

Also interesting will be an exhibition that looks at the making of Cézanne’s Card Players and Man with a Pipe alongside related portraits of Provençal peasants, including rarely seen preparatory oil sketches and drawings  (21 Oct - 16 Jan 2011).

Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy

Most memorable for a cannon that fired crimson wax pellets at a wall, spattering wax everywhere, and a 40-ton block of red wax that moved very slowly on a track through five galleries oozing wax on the walls and floor. A riot of the senses. Just how the RA is going to get the wax off its previously pristine white walls is a mystery.

Mark Wallinger: The Russian Linesman, Hayward Gallery

Curated by Wallinger, this fascinating exhibition brought together a motley collection of artworks that have inspired him, as well as some of his own works, loosely tied together by the theme of frontiers and thresholds. (The show was named after the football official who allowed England’s disputed third goal in the 1966 World Cup. He was actually from Azerbaijan.) There were stereoscopic photographs; a couple of rocks, one real, one a painted bronze cast; previously unseen footage from the Balkan wars in the 1990s where it is impossible to tell which side is which; a video of a dancer performing in an empty theatre; and Tacita Dean’s Foley Artist sound and video installation, which followed the technicians creating radio and TV sound effects.

Altermodern, Tate Britain

Curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s theoretical spin on the exhibition was a bit over the top, but it was an engrossing selection of contemporary art, including old faves like Tacita Dean’s The Russian Ending, as well as Marcus Coates’ hilarious video ‘Firebird, Rhebok, Badger and Hare’. It showed the artist in a meeting with the mayor of an Israeli town where Coates tries to solve the problem of youth crime by contacting animal spirits during a shamanic trance. It started with him walking into the mayor’s office, wearing a badger on his head and a hare poking out of his light blue Adidas tracksuit top and said, ‘Please ask me any question you like’, whereupon the mayor asked him how he should tackle youth crime. Soon enough Marcus is making the most incredible animal sounds while the mayor looks on.

Miroslaw Balka, How It Is, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern (until 5 April)

Wander up the ramp into the huge dark steel container and experience the darkness for yourself.

Anthony Gormley’s One & Other, Trafalgar Square

Thousands signed up to take their turn on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (pictured). As one critic wrote in the Guardian: ‘There was something very poignant about the sight of a single human on a space designed for a massive statue.’

Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting, Hayward Gallery (until 10 January)

A retrospective of the 72-year-old American artist, famous for Standard Gas Station (where the building is squeezed into a narrow diagonal perspective).

Turner Prize show, Tate Britain

A good and largely uncontroversial show this year. Enrico David made me laugh and I loved the other three – Lucy Skaer’s whale, Roger Hiorns’ atomised jet engine (and his magical grotto Seizure for which he got nominated) and the surprise winner Richard Wright’s Rorschach blot-like wall paintings.

Grayson Perry, Victoria Miro Gallery in Islington

It turns out the self-declared ‘transvestite potter from Essex’ also produces amazing etchings, such as Print for a Politician. And his Walthamstow Tapestry was amazing – it encapsulated so much of life today.

Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, Tate Liverpool

A feast of colour. Outside the exhibition, a video showing the making of a Sol Le Witt wall painting was even more impressive.

Isa Genzken, Whitechapel Gallery

The enlarged Whitechapel Gallery reopened with a retrospective of the German sculptor. I liked her early work best – radios and receivers made from concrete and massive coloured resin windows.

Turner and the Masters, Tate Britain

Many of Turner’s paintings were actually a new version of an old master – and he usually came out on top. I loved the fact that he once sneaked into the Royal Academy summer show just before it opened to add a red buoy in a seascape – which showed off his subtlety against a rival painting full of reds next to his.

Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, Tate Modern

Two of the main artists of Russian constructivism in the early 20^th century demonstrating their way of thinking in paintings and drawings. It is a shame that there weren’t more actual pieces alongside the drawings showing their clothes and furniture designs.

The private view was packed with a trendy Shoreditch crowd and not a suit in sight. The bar manager told me that all the events have been very popular but despite the location it is not a place where City workers go. Not such a bad thing, I thought to myself.

CAMP’s first art show was inspired by the idea of Baudelaire’s flâneur, with the artists exploring what attracts, repulses and stirs them about the city.

A flâneur-type figure features in David London’s video A Part Apart, which can be viewed through a red or a blue screen. It follows a man on his wanderings through the city – some of it was shot close by. Some of the images are quite beautiful, but I failed to see how viewing the video through colour filters adds anything to the ‘immersive experience’ that the L.A. artist wanted to create.

The bar was dissected by coloured woolen threads – David MacDiarmid’s Geometry of Space (pictured above) – that created a meandering route around the space and invited the viewer to follow it. A nice intervention in the space.
Two other works stood out in this show: Wayne Chisnall’s The City sculpture and Aisling Roycroft’s light boxes. Chisnall’s towering wooden piece is made up of tiny display cases and cabinets made from found materials like skulls, insects and fossils, a kind of modern cabinet of curiosities. Or a nightmarish vision inspired by Jorge Luis Borges.
He explains that much like the inhabitants of a big city, each compartmentalised environment plays out its own narrative, seemingly oblivious to that of its neighbour. Apparently the piece is worth £30,000! It dates back to 1999. Chisnall has made several similar works such as Book Tower.

Roycroft also works with found objects and scrap materials. Her light boxes are made from old windows behind which she put bits of lace – domestic objects found in the public realm. It is impossible to see inside those slightly seedy ‘windows’ and to find out who lives behind, good burghers or more dubious characters.

I also liked Kerim Aytac’s photos. Highlighting the absence of people, they are shots of traces left by humans in the urban landscape. One person that stepped into a shot has been wiped out. Chisnall presents the photos as crime scenes where no obvious crime has been committed. It is hard to piece the fragments back together, the story will always remain incomplete.

The show was curated by Stephanie Pochet, a researcher on the South Bank Show (which is sadly coming to an end soon).

Botanists of the Asphalt runs until 5 January.

The City Arts & Music Project, 70-74 City Road, London EC17 2BJ

After all the furore surrounding Britain’s best-known contemporary art prize in recent years (controversial for unmade beds and lights being turned on and off), a degree of calm has returned this year. The tabloids struggled to spot anything controversial… apart from a naked bum in Enrico David’s display.

David, who is described as a surrealist, is the odd one out – while his installation of paper maché Humpty Dumpties on skis and an elongated black cloth figure  draped over a stage made me smile, I failed to see the ideas behind them. The other three are all serious contenders for the £25,000 prize: Roger Hiorns, Lucy Skaer and Richard Wright.

It is important to remember that the artists get judged on the work they were nominated for – which can be considerably different from what’s on show at Tate Britain. So for example, Hiorns was nominated for pouring copper sulphate into a derelict south London flat and transforming it into a magical grotto shimmering with blue crystals (pictured).

The ‘alchemist’s display at the Tate pales in comparison. A landscape formed of heaps of grey powder on the floor turns out to be an atomised passenger plane, alongside two lumpy sculptures made of plastic and cow brain.

Lucy Skaer, who draws a lot, is also interested in transformation, and puts images from newspapers or the internet through a long process to make drawings, sculptures and films. She has been nominated for her solo show at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, where she showed sculpture and drawings such as a recreation of Hokusai’s Great Wave composed of thousands of tiny black spirals, and for A Boat Used as a Vessel at the Kunsthalle Basel.

Her sperm whale at the Tate is her most eye catching installation so far.  It is situated behind a wall and only visible through vertical slits – which makes it impossible to see the whole skeleton from the side and appears to distort the form. The whale in its entirety can only be seen from the front where it is foreshortened. The piece plays with our perception and creates a certain frustration – I loved it. In that sense it reminded me of Plato’s Cave (where prisoners see shadows of objects rather than the real things).

Skaer has also recast Brancusi’s Bird in Space in compressed coal dust as a flock of 26 black birds standing huddled together on the floor, or upright letters (the piece is entitled Black Alphabet).

Richard Wright paints on walls and ceilings, sometimes covering entire rooms with his delicate patterns. There is an unobtrusive, small but perfectly formed red design over the door as you enter his room at the Tate (but you only see it if you turn around). The first thing you see is a large baroque composition in gold leaf on the wall straight ahead, made up of symmetrical, Rorschach blot-like patterns that echo certain structures on the floor. It is certainly a pleasure to behold, ever-changing as the light shifts on the gold leaf when you move, but I wouldn’t go so far as saying that Wright’s paintings have the power to fundamentally transform a space, as the blurb states.

It’s going to be a close-run thing between Skaer and Hiorns, but my money is on Hiorns for his dazzling flat transformation Seizure (incidentally, he is also the bookies’ favourite).

The winner will be announced on Channel 4 on Monday, 7 December.

I was immediately impressed by the Polish artist’s giant steel container, which fills about half the Turbine Hall (behind the bridge) and is raised from the floor on steel legs. I never imagined it would be so big. You can even wander underneath it which is a bit unnerving. Until you hit a ramp that leads into the open end of How It Is on the other side.

I walked up the ramp and faced a black, open void. Well it would have been completely black had it not been for the crowd of people, some unsuitably dressed in white clothing that reflected the little light that there was, some taking pictures (with flash) in blatant breach of the guidelines.

The multitude of screaming, rollerblading children frolicking in the space also didn’t help. I don’t really blame them for making this their playground, but did find it hard to appreciate the void.

It is a space that cries out for silence.

The idea is that you are completely enveloped by impenetrable darkness, which assumes mass and density, and distorts the senses.

It turns out How It Is is the title of a novel by Samual Beckett, which features a monologue by someone who remembers his life while crawling through endless mud. The piece also conjures up Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Literary references aside, the container reminded me immediately of the cattle trucks that took millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps. Much of Balka’s other work evokes the Holocaust, his videos and photos taken around Treblinka and Birkenau and sculptures using soap, hair and ash.

He says, though, that his art is not about the Holocaust, but “about being”.

I’m gutted that I missed his show at the White Cube Mason’s Yard at the turn of the year. He installed a wooden walkway around the edge of the gallery that had no obvious destination.

I think I will try to go back to the Tate when it is less busy…

Guediguian, son of a German mother and an Armenian father, is best known for his gritty films depicting working class and immigrant life in Marseille, where he was born in 1953.

He grew up hearing the story of Manouchian the Armenian, one of the principal characters in Army of Crime. So it is perhaps not surprising that he turned his gaze on the wartime French underground movement, a group of foreign partisans which became known as the Army of Crime.

The film opens with dozens of prisoners being carted to their execution in 1944, while a voice on the soundtrack reads out a long list of names each followed by: “Mort pour la France.” What is striking is that hardly any of the names are French.

Then we go back a few years to June 1941 when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. It turns out most of the characters – Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Armenians and others – live in the same street in sunny Paris where they go about their everyday lives. Several of them are Jewish.

Despite the sombre subject matter, the film is brightly lit to reflect the “light that only these young people glimpse in a world going through the darkest period of its history”, Guediguian has said.

We see Missak Manouchian, an Armenian poet who is married to a Frenchwoman, get arrested as a suspected communist and released again after denying his political affiliations. He is then recruited to lead a cell of the communist resistance group FTP-MOI, which is made up of immigrant workers.

He persuades several youngsters - many are under 20 - to abandon their guerrilla activities, including the young Hungarian communist and idealist Thomas Elek, and the Polish Jew Marcel  Rayman who after his father’s deportation starts shooting German officers in the street (having approached them under the pretext of wanting a light). They join Manouchian’s resistance group and we see how it develops into a potent force, led by a man who is initially reluctant to kill. At regular intervals, we hear pro-Nazi propaganda broadcasts from the Vichy regime.

There are some humorous moments when one of the young resistants can’t bring himself to blow up a brothel frequented by German soldiers because there are too many young, pretty girls. He drops the pin of the grenade in the street and the group spend a long time looking for it, before replacing it with a pin from Manouchian’s wife’s sewing kit.

Inevitably, the group is betrayed by a French concierge and Marcel’s Jewish girl-friend Monique, who tries in vain to help her deported parents by sleeping with a local French police inspector, who gets promoted for uncovering the group. The partisans undergo unspeakable torture but, apart from one leader, give nothing away. At the end, before they face the firing squad, they are paraded to be photographed for the Affiche Rouge, the red poster that denounced them as an Army of Crime.

I later found out that the only woman in the group, the Romanian communist Olga Bancic, was deported to Stuttgart and beheaded with an axe, because of a French law that banned female executions on French soil.

Convincingly played by its large, young cast, the film delivers a gripping account of a true story and reminds us of the apathy or even collaborationist stance of many French people during the German occupation. The writer-director says he can’t make a film that doesn’t stem from a vision of the world, a moral that needs passing on. He has created a powerful film to achieve this, and the images still linger in my mind.

The star of the show is undoubtedly the Walthamstow Tapestry, not least because it is big (15m long and 3m high) and new (it was made for this exhibition). It has been snapped up by Norman Foster, apparently for just £150,000.

But I found myself more drawn towards the two large colour etchings on the opposite wall. One version of Print for a Politician (2005) now hangs in parliament, which Perry is immensely pleased about.

Done in the style of traditional etchings of towns and landscapes, it is also reminiscent of the Chapman brothers’ huge Hell installation where tiny toy soldiers committed unspeakable atrocities.

But Perry’s work is much more benign and tongue-in-cheek – he has drawn, in great detail, a  landscape with different social groups scattered randomly on the surface. Everyone he could think of is there – minimalists, male chauvinist pigs, parents, Satanists, women, fundamentalists, gays, thick people…

In his own words: “I was thinking what fun it would be to label everybody socially. I wanted people to look at it and feel that they associated themselves with at least some of the people and think ‘in the end, we are all just as bad as each other’.” The map took over a month to draw – and made me want to pick up a pencil straight away.

Map of Nowhere (2008) similarly lays bare various aspects of human existence in medieval/Renaissance map form. The blue-and-white etching, reminiscent of Delft tiles (partly because it has been printed from five plates and the edges are visible) features a beautifully drawn Hogarthian street scene at the bottom.

From this emerges a giant male figure enclosed by a circle packed with images, corporate brands and social labels. The chap’s abdomen is filled with despair, uncertainty and doubt, and to the left chavs and Asbos are locked away in a compound, not far from buildings representing big corporations like Apple, Ikea and Tesco. Perry’s transvestite alter ego also features as Saint Claire.

In a separate box on the other side, a nasty-looking individual sports tattoos all over his body ranging from sexism, racism and ageism to fear on his abdomen. Lower down in the groin area, there is porn, beer and football are emblazoned on his balls and shopping on his penis (!)

Beauty, truth, peace and love form their own little bubble, well outside this human universe – and countered by Nowhere on the other side. There is so much detail that I wish I could have taken the work home and studied it at leisure. And the drawings are amazing.

Perry - who memorably declared “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner prize” when he collected it in 2003 - is best known for his multi-layered glazed pots, some of which are also on show here.

The Walthamstow tapestry, which charts human life from birth to old age, also teems with people, animals and corporate brands, but on a much larger scale. Why Walthamstow? That’s where Perry lives but the name also refers to William Morris, a key figure in the 19th-century craft movement, who was born there.

Key moments are a giant woman giving birth to a red baby on the left, a woman in a headscarf clutching an expensive-looking handbag in the middle (described by Perry as “the Madonna of the handbag”) and an old man with a strong resemblance to Jesus on the right.

Along the way are (smaller) people going about their daily lives, surrounded by many of the world’s biggest brands such as Starbucks (represented by a church), luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, carmakers e.g. Ford, media organisations including the BBC and Reuters. … The list goes on and on.

A “ship of fools” is surrounded by the names of troubled financial institutions such as RBS, HSBC and Northern Rock, although Lehman Brothers is missing (a misspelled Merril Lynch also features). No wonder the tapestry has been dubbed “the Guernica of the credit crunch”.

It is an exciting show and for those who haven’t seen it there’s some good news - it has been extended until Saturday.

The collectors (and celebrity artists Tracey Emin and Grayson Perry) had already been and gone – most work is sold on the first day, before the fair opens to the public – and by all accounts they are spending big again. Gallerists, haunted by memories of last autumn when art spending slumped as the financial world came close to meltdown, breathed a sigh of relief. White Cube sold “Stations”, a ceramic installation by newcomer Rachel Kneebone, for a reported £200,000.

Ane Buelow of Danish gallery Andersen’s Contemporary told me: “It was horrible last year. We only sold one very expensive piece and that was it. This year we’ve sold a lot. Prices have gone up.” Are we back to pre-crisis levels yet? She pauses, then says: “Yes.”

Rather appropriately, a Communist-style red banner declared “Long live and thrive Capitalism” at the Andreiana Mihail Gallery’s stand from Bucharest. And four short films entitled “The Financial Crisis” by Danish art collective Superflex guided us through sessions with a bespectacled hypnotist “to reveal the crisis without as the psychosis within”. Close-ups of his facial stubble, slowly moving mouth and droning voice made for oddly compelling viewing.

Frieze is a slick affair, especially compared to its smaller rival, the Zoo art fair – which focuses on up and coming artists, cultivating a more cutting edge image, and has moved to four disused Victorian warehouses in the East End this year. But, perhaps in response to Zoo, the Frieze organisers set up an exciting new area this year, called Frame. Located in an annexe, it was populated by younger galleries showing more experimental work - art that has been produced specially for Frieze and hasn’t been shown before.

Most of the fair’s video work was to be found here, alongside Club Nutz, a reconstruction of “the smallest comedy club” in the world, normally located in Milwaukee in the US. The 4m x 4m miniature night club manages to cram in a stage, bar, DJ booth, disco ball and a bouncer. The Milwaukee club is even smaller, says co-founder Tyson Reeder. When I squeeze in, he promises everyone who tells a joke a free beer and proceeds to show a video by Charles Irvin, entitled Membrane Lane, a faux conspiracy documentary on the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

A split-screen video installation by Laurent Montaron at galerie schleicher + lange next caught my attention. It showed two seemingly identical films side by side that were slightly out of synch. They followed a boy’s wanderings and  somewhat peculiar actions. It made me think about parallel universes. As the work’s description says, small discrepancies between the two films make you wonder whether the real film – or reality – is not somewhere in between.

Here are some of the other highlights:

Canadian artist Gareth Moore’s installation “Neither here nor there” (pictured) was snapped up by the Tate in the first half hour last Wednesday. The Tate trust gets to go around the art fair first before the private collectors are allowed in, and bought six artworks this year.

The artist turned bits from discarded chairs he found in Berlin into a series of flags. “They aren’t normal flags - they refer back to the chairs, their character and history,” said Markus Luettgen of the Berlin gallery Luettgenmeijer, which represents Moore. He is reluctant to tell me the installation’s price tag, but says that work of this size normally sells for €30,000. He also thinks that Frieze’s new Frame area has been very popular.

Alan Kane’s collection of his parents’ art – from kitsch ceramic figurines to artificial flowers – suggests that his parents’ collecting is just as worthy as any other art collecting.  Free postcards featuring the artefacts were up for grabs. The installation is not for sale - his parents were keen to have it all back in their lounge. “Mum and Dad are coming to pick it up later,” said Ashley Gallant of London gallery Ancient & Modern. Kane is trying to sell the rights to reprint the postcards and has so far had two enquiries from private collectors, but is hoping a public institution might be interested. Any takers?

Elsewhere, in the main Frieze area, Jim Hodges’ “the dark gate” stood out (at the Stephen Friedman gallery). A wooden room was set in a pitch black space. Staggering through the darkness I entered the room, which was lit by a single light bulb, through swing doors. The wall straight ahead had been removed and replaced by long steel spikes which pointed inwards towards a central round opening through which I peered into darkness, a seemingly endless space. The room looked and smelled like a sauna – the tips of the spikes were laced with a fragrance made by the artist to draw attention to this focal point. I got a different feel for the space when I walked around the room in the dark and looked through the spikes from the outside.

I left feeling physically and intellectually refreshed!