Since leaving Turkey in July, Little Amal, a 3.5 metre (11ft 5in) tall puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl, and her entourage of about 25 people have navigated Covid border restrictions to walk across Europe to the UK. Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, was created by Handspring, the company that made the equine puppets in War Horse. The puppet represents the millions of children forced to leave their homes in desperate situations. The global pandemic has made them more vulnerable than ever
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
‘People felt threatened even by a puppet refugee’: Little Amal’s epic walk through love and fear
From being pelted with stones in Greece to receiving a papal welcome in Rome, the giant girl’s migrant trek from Syria to Manchester provoked powerful responses
In Greece, far-right protesters threw things at her as she walked through the streets, local councillors voted to ban her from visiting a village of Orthodox monasteries, and protests in Athens meant her route had to be diverted. In France, the mayor of Calais raised objections to her presence.
At times, the 8,000km journey across Europe of a 3.5m-tall puppet child refugee highlighted the hostility experienced by refugees who have been travelling along the same route from the Syrian border to the UK for years. Elsewhere, this ambitious theatrical project has triggered the scenes of welcome its artistic directors hoped to inspire when they embarked on this walk in July.
Continue reading...‘It feels really natural’: hundreds pose nude for Spencer Tunick shoot near Dead Sea
US artist returns to site for third time to highlight plight of Dead Sea, which is receding by about a metre a year
Hundreds of models wearing only white body paint have walked across a stark desert expanse near the Dead Sea, part of the latest photography project of American artist Spencer Tunick.
The 54-year-old photographer visited the spot in southern Israel as a guest of the tourism ministry to portray for the third time the shrinking Dead Sea via nude subjects.
Continue reading...Gandhi in heels? Maria Callas statue hits the wrong note
Critics compare figure of famous soprano erected in Greek capital to an Oscar statuette
Drama in life, drama in posterity. For Maria Callas, Greece’s greatest diva, there is, even 44 years after her death, no let up from the artistic wrangling that was her lot.
But this time the uproar is focused on a statue erected at the foot of the ancient Acropolis, opposite the Roman theatre where the world-renowned opera singer made her debut.
Continue reading...How Dalí’s ‘lips’ sofa began life … on the back of an envelope
Newly opened archive of art patron’s papers reveals a previously unseen sketch for the surrealist work
One of the world’s best-known pieces of furniture, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa, started life as a sketch on the back of an envelope, research in the archive of a Sussex country house has revealed.
The sketch was unearthed at West Dean near Chichester, the former home of Dalí’s patron Edward James, and experts say it reveals the extent to which James was involved in the creation of the 1930s sofa. Alongside the lobster telephone, also the result of a collaboration between Dalí and James, it is one of the emblems of the surrealist movement.
Continue reading...As important as the Taj Mahal? The Palestinian refugee camp seeking Unesco world heritage status
For 70 years, the ramshackle Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem has been a site of displacement. Why is this ‘heritage of exile’ not enough for Unesco to grant it the status it gives Macchu Picchu and Venice?
The Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem doesn’t look much like your usual Unesco world heritage site. For a start, there are no souvenir stalls or swarms of trinket hawkers. Instead, cracked concrete walls covered with Arabic graffiti frame the entrance to a corner shop, where an old photocopier stands next to a few meagre shelves of provisions. A taxi loiters on a potholed street between piles of broken breeze blocks, while electricity cables and phone wires dangle precariously overhead.
But a new exhibition at London’s Mosaic Rooms sets out to argue that this ramshackle site of mass displacement should be considered worthy of the same protected status as Machu Picchu, Venice or the Taj Mahal. “We want to destabilise conventional western notions of heritage,” says Alessandro Petti. “How do you record the heritage of a culture of exile? When world heritage sites can only be nominated by nation states, how do you value the heritage of a stateless population?”
Since 2007, Petti has been working with Sandi Hilal, leading DAAR, the Decolonising Architecture Art Research collective, treading nimbly between the worlds of architecture, politics and development. For the last seven years, they have been working with Palestinian refugees in the Dheisheh camp to compile an unlikely dossier to submit to Unesco, arguing for the location’s “outstanding universal value” as the site of the longest and largest living displacement in the world.
Isn’t it good, Swedish plywood: the miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper
Skellefteå has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks. And now it has one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings. We visit Sweden to see what a climate-conscious future looks like
As you come in to land at Skellefteå airport in the far north of Sweden, you are greeted by a wooden air traffic control tower poking up from an endless forest of pine and spruce. After boarding a biogas bus into town, you glide past wooden apartment blocks and wooden schools, cross a wooden road bridge and pass a wooden multistorey car park, before finally reaching the centre, now home to one of the tallest new wooden buildings in the world.
“We are not the wood Taliban,” says Bo Wikström, from Skellefteå’s tourism agency, as he leads a group of visitors on a “wood safari” of its buildings. “Other materials are allowed.” But why build in anything else – when you’re surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forest?
Continue reading...From concealed penises to Barbra Streisand: how Frieze got its mojo back – review
Regent’s Park, London
After decades of fun, noise, fame and money, the London art fair has found its soul. But there’s still plenty of outrage and sleaze at the grown-up Frieze
I was relieved when I finally found the hidden willies. At times, the first post-pandemic Frieze art fair is so relaxing you could fall asleep in one of its classy lounges. So it was good to see Lindsey Mendick flying the flag for subtle outrage. At the Carl Freedman Gallery booth I come across her lustrous, decadent ceramic vases, whose wounded sides spurt octopus arms. Mendick should be on next year’s Turner shortlist if the Tate has any desire to save its dying prize. Then Freedman showed me another detail. From one of the pots protrude penises like shiny wet worms. It turns out there’s sleaze at the new, grownup Frieze after all – you just need a longer attention span to find it.
The art world has looked into itself during the pandemic. And it’s found that art has to be be more than just fun and noise and fame and money … it has to be sustaining. But how does a cultural sphere that has spent decades celebrating shallowness suddenly find its inner light? At first sight, Frieze has simply gone numb with shock.
Continue reading...‘Museums overlooked these artists’: celebrating the forgotten women of abstract art
In a new exhibition, the female abstract artists between 1930 and 1950 whose work was sidelined at the time finally get their space in the spotlight
In 1934, the abstract painter Alice Trumbull Mason wrote her sister, Margaret Jennings, a letter, noting that she was eager to resume painting, which she had temporarily stopped in order to raise her children.
“I am chafing to get back to painting and of course it’s at least a couple of years away,” Mason wrote. “The babies are adorable and terribly interesting. I’m not saying anything against them, but … I can’t be just absorbed in them.”
Continue reading...K-boom! How the unstoppable stars of K-pop went gunning for the art world
First came K-cinema, then K-pop and K-TV. Now South Korea’s young stars are conquering the world with K-art. But what do their dark visions say about their nation’s psyche – and ours?
Ohnim is having a blue period, just like Picasso. Over Zoom from a gallery in Seoul, the Korean rapper Song Min-ho, better known as Mino to K-pop fans but Ohnim in the art world, shows me a painting he finished the previous evening in collaboration with artist Choi Na-ri. It depicts a blue crouched figure, like a depressed version of Rodin’s Thinker. It may be still wet but will soon be shipped to London’s Saatchi Gallery for an art fair that showcases work by three of Korea’s biggest K-pop stars.
The meeting of K-pop and K-art is making the art world lick its lips. Businessman David Ciclitira, who set up the StART Art Fair at the Saatchi, says: “K-pop stars have immense reach through their social media. Guys like Mino, Henry Lau and Kang Seung-yoon, whose work will be in the show, have six to seven million followers each on Instagram. In Seoul, fans queue round the block just to see a work of art by any of them. Then they fight each other to buy. I don’t suppose it’ll be quite like that at the Saatchi Gallery, but you never know.”
Continue reading...Capsule of 1765 air reveals ancient histories hidden under Antarctic ice
Polar Zero exhibition in Glasgow features sculpture encasing air extracted from start of Industrial Revolution
An ampoule of Antarctic air from the year 1765 forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition that reveals the hidden histories contained in polar ice to visitors attending the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow.
The artist Wayne Binitie has spent the past five years undertaking an extraordinary collaboration with scientists of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who drill, analyse and preserve cylinders of ice from deep in the ice sheet that record past climate change.
Continue reading...Unseen Van Gogh sketches that rework scorned masterpiece to go on display
Preparatory work for ‘redoing’ of The Potato Eaters – savaged in his lifetime – to feature in exhibition
A collection of Vincent van Gogh’s preparatory drawings sketched ahead of a planned “redoing” of The Potato Eaters, a masterpiece brutally slated by buyers, friends and family at the time of its painting, are being exhibited for what is believed to be first time.
The Dutch artist considered his depiction of a peasant family from the village of Nuenen in Brabant eating a meal of potatoes as one of only four of his works that could be regarded as important, alongside The Bedroom, Sunflowers and Augustine Roulin (La berceuse).
Continue reading...A microcosm of segregated America: Michael von Graffenried’s best photograph
‘The people of New Bern liked the fact my ancestor founded their town. But the atmosphere changed when they realised I was there to show reality, not promote a touristy vision’
The guy on the left is Frank Palombo, the former chief of police of New Bern in North Carolina, a town I have spent the last 15 years photographing. In 2006, an organisation called Swiss Roots invited me to document New Bern as part of their mission to promote a positive image of Switzerland – my country – in the US.
They approached me partly because my ancestor is the settler Christopher von Graffenried, who founded New Bern in 1710 after conflict with a Native American tribe known as the Tuscarora. I knew nothing about him and, initially, neither the project nor my family history interested me. But a month later, I changed my mind – it was a chance to find out whether Swiss-held prejudices about George Bush’s America were true.
Continue reading...‘We want dignity’: the vanishing craft of Kashmir’s papier-mache artists
Award-winning artist Maqbool Jan is one of a handful still practising the ancient artform, but without government help he fears it could be lost
Kashmir’s ancient papier-mache artworks are famous throughout the world. The art form is a staple of the luxury ornamental market, and has a rich and long cultural lineage. It is closely associated with the advent of Islam in Kashmir, and depicts scenes from the Mughal court, Arabic verses from the Qu’ran, Persian poetry, as well as Kashmir’s iconic tourist attractions.
However, this ancient art form is vanishing, with only a handful of artisans left practising.
Continue reading...‘I didn’t really watch any tennis’: how Martin Parr captured the Grand Slam’s real champions
The photographer toured the four tournaments shooting thrilled fans instead of sweaty stars. He talks about why street photography is becoming impossible – and life after his cancer diagnosis
It’s the morning after the night before at the US Open and the sports sections contain images of triumph and defeat. Ecstatic Emma Raducanu lying prostrate on the tennis court. Bereft Novak Djokovic sobbing into his towel. The photographer Martin Parr would have liked to have watched the finals, but he’s been unwell and incapacitated, stuck on one floor of his house with the TV on the other. He briefly considered watching on his laptop but it just seemed too much bother. “I like tennis tournaments,” he says, a little sheepishly. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that I like tennis per se.”
In this, one suspects, he is not alone. Parr’s new book Match Point offers a vivid globe-hopping tour of the four grand slam tournaments, bounding from Melbourne to Paris to London to New York and mingling with the spectators as they ogle their iPhones or sunbathe on the grass or guzzle iced coffee at the refreshment stand (the book was commissioned by the Italian coffee firm Lavazza). Most people, he points out, visit Wimbledon in the same spirit that they would attend Ascot or the Chelsea flower show: it’s a social event, an excuse to dress up. They might spend the entire day in the grounds at SW19 and go home without seeing a single ball being served.
Continue reading...‘People arrived for work and got vaporised’: how Kikuji Kawada captured the trauma of Hiroshima
The holy grail of Japanese photobooks, Kawada’s Chizu was five years in the making and changes hands for £25,000 a copy. Now a new edition revisits his personal archeology of a nation’s pain
Kikuji Kawada was 25 when he visited Hiroshima for the first time. It was July 1958 and he had been assigned by a Japanese news magazine to assist Ken Domon, a renowned photographer 14 years his senior. As Domon worked in and around the Hiroshima Peace Park, Kawada found himself drawn to the ruined shell of a once ornate, steel-framed building that had been badly damaged, but somehow remained standing, when America dropped the first atomic bomb on the city at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, obliterating everything else within a mile radius.
“That’s when I found them,” he would later recall, “the stains on the walls of the rooms beneath the dome.” The bomb had been dropped from almost directly above the building, which was then called the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. Alone in the dank ruins, Kawada realised that the stained walls held the only traces of some of the dead. “When the place was destroyed,” he told Aperture magazine in 2015, “there were about 30 people (who) had arrived for work and ended up vaporised. The place had a horrible atmosphere. Just looking at it was overwhelming.”
Continue reading...Embracing vitiligo: Ugandan artist dispels skin stigma with portraits
People with the condition can face being seen as ‘cursed’ in the east African country, says Martin Senkubuge, whose art aims to make them proud of their skin
It was a confrontation with a female Michael Jackson fan that first drew Martin Senkubuge’s attention to the skin condition vitiligo.
Senkubuge, a Ugandan artist, was describing his tattoo of the musician to the woman at an art exhibition in Kampala in 2019, when he accused the pop star of bleaching his skin.
Continue reading...Anish Kapoor on vaginas, recovering from breakdown and his violent new work: ‘Freud would have a field day’
Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He’s scared to talk about it – but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world’s blackest black
At 67, Anish Kapoor, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas – the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture – the artist is exposing his innards. That’s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world’s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he’s about to unveil that may disconcert. “They’re very, very violent,” he confesses. “And I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what’s in me. I can’t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don’t know how to. But I recognise that it’s there.”
The works, about to go on display at Modern Art Oxford, are beautifully painted yet brutal: full of images of bloodletting, decapitation and disembowelling. Kapoor seems to have taught himself to paint the human figure in order to desecrate it. At his London studio, there are stacks of these blood-soaked canvases depicting huge wounded bits of bodies and purple organs spattered on the walls.
Continue reading...Leonard Cohen goes to the doctor: Ian Cook’s best photograph
‘He said he had to see a throat specialist then added: “Do you want to come along?” Later, we drove to a party with me sitting on his lap in a limo’
In 1979 Leonard Cohen was in London for a few days on a European tour and I had been assigned to photograph him by the US magazine People. I arrived at the Dorchester Hotel and was shown up to his room. He announced that he had picked up some sort of larynx infection on the plane and that he might not be able to perform. He said that he had an imminent appointment with a Harley Street specialist. My heart sank and I thought: “There goes the assignment.” Then he said brightly, “Do you want to come along with me?”
We hopped in a taxi and I followed him into the surgery. The doctor examined him, sat him in a chair and gave him a nebuliser. With his dark glasses on, a scarf wrapped around his neck and a large silver-coloured mask covering his nose and mouth, he looked quite bizarre but it made an unusual photograph, not like any others I’d seen of him. Forty minutes later, much to his relief – and mine – he said he felt much better.
Continue reading...Danish artist delivers empty frames for $84k as low pay protest
Denmark museum of modern art says Jens Haaning’s Take the Money and Run violates legal agreement
In an unexpected reinterpretation of an earlier work, a Danish artist has left a museum with empty frames, a depleted bank account and red faces all round.
Rather than applauding Jens Haaning’s artistic commentary on modern capitalism, the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in northern Denmark has said the artist is in violation of a legal agreement – and in possession of more than $84,000 belonging to the institution.
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