Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years
I say "punk", you say safety-pins, studded leather jackets, Vyvyan in the Young Ones, angry leftovers drinking White Lightning at the back of the 134 bus, and the Sex Pistols's special edition, 30th anniversary double CD. Every cultural movement has its own temporal location: that social point in history that creates it, defines it, gives it strength and meaning. Today, punk has long lacked any such meaning, teetering now on the knife-edge of castration. But in the '70s it had, as a movement, a vitality that was profound and inspiring. The Barbican's new exhibition delves into New York and London during the period of punk's prominence, looking to the works of Basquiat, Nan Goldin and a young Derek Jarmin to shed some light on its seedy, darkly intense reality. Somehow more than a bunch of mohicaned kids on Camden Lock charging innocuous tourists £1 for a photo.

Twinkle Troughton
Remaining on the vague subject of Britishness, Twinkle Troughton's exhibition at East London's dark, old horse of a bar, Dragon, is an enjoyable, if unsettling dissection of all things Queen and Country. Her collages draw from the last fifty-odd years of this fine nation, bringing together everyone from Pete Doherty to Peter Stringfellow, Carry-On caperers to the Queen herself, Elton John (the Queen himself) to John Cleese, in arrangements that are aptly reminiscent of those great Monty Python animations of yore. Troughton sets her delightfully clunky, monochromatic newspaper-cutouts in brightly-coloured vignettes full of action and sub-plot, the result being rather like a fairy-tale taxidermy exhibition for the Heat generation.

New Blood
From co-founders Cartier-Bresson and Capa and onwards through the last 60 years, Magnum photographers have been renowned the world over for their individuality and the power of their vision, collectively responsible for some of the most memorable images of the 20th Century. As a group, Magnum Associates Antoine D'Agata, Jonas Bendiksen, Trent Parke, Mark Power and Alec Soth represent the photographic co-operative's "New Blood", and this collective exhibition at their Print Room is a captivating and moving reflection of the diversity of styles and subject matter that continues to distinguish this unique agency, and the changes that it has undergone in our changing world.