Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.

Today we amuse ourselves with Facebook clips of talking cats, but in the 1850s they had stereographs, pairs of identical photographs that, viewed through special lenses, become suddenly and gloriously three-dimensional. Vistas open up as if by magic, the illusion of space all the more beguiling for its transience. The act of looking through a special pair of glasses is a little bit like peeping behind a curtain, the intimacy of the encounter adding a slightly voyeuristic frisson to all manner of subject matter from landscapes to mock-ups of popular paintings.

Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work.

An exceptionally wide-ranging exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings and lithographs by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) commemorates the 50th anniversary of his death. Amidst the flurry of Giacometti exhibitions – the National Portrait Gallery’s Pure Presence last autumn and a huge exhibition at Tate Modern to come next spring – this anthology is unmissable for the different contexts it offers.

You wouldn't judge a painting on how it would look in your own home, but textiles are different: in fact it is exactly this assessment that counts. A length of fabric laid flat is a half-formed thing: it needs to be cut, stitched and draped before we can appreciate it, and even then it must take its place within an interior, domestic or public, before we can really understand it. Fabrics need – to coin a terrible, but useful expression – to be activated.

This exhibition – the UK's first major exploration of the history of Sicily – highlights two astonishing epochs in the cultural history of the island, with a small bridging section in between. Spanning 4,000 years and bringing together over 200 objects, it aims to "reveal the richness of the architectural, archaeological and artist legacies of Sicily", focusing on the latter half of the seventh century BC and the period of Norman enlightenment, from AD1000 to 1250.

“Look at the pictures”, yells apoplectic Senator Jesse Helms as he brandishes a clutch of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, “a known homosexual who died of AIDS”. It's 1989 and Senator Helms is doing his level best to close down an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Contemporary Arts Centre, Cincinnati and have its director, Dennis Barrie, indicted for obscenity.

It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).

The exhibition starts promisingly. You can help yourself to an orange from Roelof Louw’s pyramid of golden fruit. Its a reminder that, for the conceptualists, art was a verb not a noun. Focusing on activity rather than outcome, these artists were committed to the creative process rather than the end product. The idea was what mattered, and if it led to an open-ended exploration, so much the better.

Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography focuses on two contrasting generations. Beginning in the 1970s, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld travelled America photographing things that are so ordinary, yet so odd, that they transcend the familiar to become surreal. And alongside them are five Europeans, 20 or so years younger who, by and large, seem glued to their computers.