Daxing international, said to be world’s largest single-building terminal, to handle 72m passengers
China has opened a vast, multibillion-dollar airport in the country’s capital, in the run-up to a major political anniversary.
Less than five years after construction began, the 450bn yuan (£50bn) Daxing international airport was officially opened on Wednesday in a ceremony attended by the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping.
Continue reading...Masterpiece was kept in the home of notorious Sicilian, who sliced off a piece in order to make a deal with Catholic church
A Caravaggio masterpiece stolen from a Palermo church 50 years ago and listed among FBI’s “most wanted” stolen artworks, was kept in the home of a powerful mafia boss, who sliced off a piece of the canvas in order to convince the Catholic church to make a deal for its return, according to previously unseen testimony from the priest who tried to recover it.
In an video interview filmed in 2001, but locked in a drawer and now revealed exclusively to the Guardian, the parish priest of the Oratory of San Lorenzo revealed astonishing details of the October 1969 theft of Merisi da Caravaggio’s Nativity With St Lawrence and St Francis.
Continue reading...The project earned criticism for its price tag, but it is being seen as a positive sign for the health of New York libraries
Strategically positioned on the bank of the East River, across the water from the United Nations headquarters, New York city has a shimmering new addition to its skylines.
Unusually for such prime real estate set among parkland, panoramic views of Manhattan and convenient transport links, this $40m development in Queens is neither an upscale apartment block, exclusive members club or the offices of a huge corporation.
Continue reading...An unexpected post-Mugabe boom has caught the attention of international art collectors
In a makeshift studio, in an empty house on a ridge with a spectacular view of trees and blue sky, two artists are setting out brushes and paint. Half-finished canvases lean against walls. The bustle and noise of the city is far away.
Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude and Helen Teede are among a new wave of young artists in Zimbabwe who are attracting attention from collectors and curators worldwide. Both now work in a converted house surrounded by forest, a 40-minute drive from the capital, Harare.
Continue reading...From big-scramble zebra crossings to a man in a hedge, the award-winning street photographer revels in the life that swirls around him
Continue reading...The artist and serial prankster Maurizio Cattelan denies stealing 18-carat loo entitled America from Blenheim Palace
The artist who made a solid gold toilet reportedly worth £4.8m has denied orchestrating its theft in a Banksy-style prank.
The 18-carat working loo was ripped from a wood-panelled room at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill, in the early hours of Saturday.
Continue reading...The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects
Ever since Mexico City was founded on an island in the lake of Texcoco its inhabitants have dreamed of water: containing it, draining it and now retaining it.
Nezahualcoyotl, the illustrious lord of Texcoco, made his name constructing a dyke shielding Mexico City’s Aztec predecessor city of Tenochtitlan from flooding. The gravest threat to Mexico City’s existence came from a five-year flood starting in 1629, almost causing the city to be abandoned. Ironically now its surrounding lake system has been drained, the greatest threat to the city’s existence is probably the rapid decline of its overstressed aquifers.
Continue reading...The annual Infra Jatra festival, named after the god of rain and heaven, is celebrated by worshipping, singing, dancing and feasting in Kathmandu valley
Continue reading...Along a forest road in the small town of Monte Negro in Rondônia state, just south of the Amazon basin, cowboys from the area’s vast cattle ranches display their talent at a rodeo. In recent years, Monte Negro has expanded as a key cattle town with a strong cowboy culture
Continue reading...Visitors have been asked not to share photographs of exhibits including Arno Breker statue
An exhibition of Nazi design has opened in the Netherlands to protests and a request for visitors to the museum not to take and share photographs for fear of the exhibits being glorified on social media.
The Museum of Design in Den Bosch is showcasing sculpture by Adolf Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker, a 1943 VW Beetle, photos and Leni Riefenstahl films from the era, in what is being billed as the first great exposition of the “Design of the Third Reich”.
Continue reading...‘It was innocence amid war – this tiny girl who should have been enjoying her childhood trapped in this catastrophic battle’
I was one of the last photographers left in Mosul during the final days of the battle to liberate the Iraqi city from Islamic State in July 2017. I have covered the humanitarian consequences of war for three decades, but the sheer horror I witnessed during this conflict felt different.
There was no end to the cruelty. The stream of suicide bombs, grenades, car bombs, and snipers was relentless. People were forced to watch their loved ones die in front of them. And when civilians did reach the point of escape, Isis would use them as human shields.
Continue reading...The German photographer, who worked on the Duchess of Sussex’s Vogue cover, was best known for his 90s portraits of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and others
German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, who died on Tuesday aged 74, was renowned for black-and-white portraits that appeared in magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker, as well as his refusal to retouch images. Recently, Lindbergh photographed women for the “Forces for Change” issue of British Vogue, guest-edited by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, including Jane Fonda, the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.
On the duke and duchess’s official Instagram account, Meghan shared an image of herself with the photographer, captioned: “His work is revered globally for capturing the essence of a subject and promoting healthy ideals of beauty, eschewing photoshopping, and preferring natural beauty with minimal makeup.”
Continue reading...Paris’s Tutankhamun exhibition is a record-breaking hit – but scarabs, pharaohs and man-eating monsters have been thrilling us for centuries
Paris’s current mania for Tutankhamun should come as no surprise. The Grande Halle de la Villette exhibition of 150 objects found in the tomb of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh is now France’s most-visited exhibition ever, having attracted over 1.3 million visitors. Many of the objects on show – “wonderful things”, in Howard Carter’s words, including mini-coffins, a gilded bed and a calcite vase – have left Egypt for the first time for the Treasures of the Pharaoh exhibition, which will move to London’s Saatchi Gallery in November.
The exhibition’s popularity echoes the wave of “Tut-mania” that swept the west almost 100 years ago when Carter first discovered the boy-king’s tomb. Suddenly everyone seemed interested in Egyptology, evident in the fashions, arts, culture and advertising of the time, and most enduringly in art-deco architecture such as the Chrysler building in New York – especially its distinctive elevator doors – and the Carreras Cigarette Factory in London, with its line of sleek black cats guarding the entrance. US president Herbert Hoover named his dog King Tut, and there were calls for the extension of the London Underground’s Northern Line that linked Tooting and Camden Town to be named Tutancamden.
Continue reading...An upcoming exhibition at London’s House of Illustration collects 185 posters and magazines from Cuba’s golden age of design, from the 1960s to the early 90s.
“The posters tell us that Cuba sees supporting the struggles of liberation movements internationally as an integral part of its own revolution,” says curator Olivia Ahmad.
Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics is at House of Illustration, London N1 from 27 Sept to 19 Jan
‘The light was soft … They were so graceful. They are the last peasants, the last of their kind’
In 2012, I travelled to Transylvania to document what is effectively the last remaining bucolic landscape of Europe. England, for example, has lost most of its hay meadows because of large-scale agriculture, but in Romania this kind of small-scale sustainable way of farming persists. It survived the Ceaușescu regime. It survived the EU. Today, however, it is a vanishing way of life as young people increasingly choose to migrate to western Europe in search of work and faster money.
I spent three weeks in Maramureş in the northern Carpathian mountains, exploring life in six tiny hamlets, each with no more than 500 inhabitants. It was August, the height of the haymaking season. Families worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. These women were from a village called Breb. I saw their haystacks from the road as my translator and I drove past. I shouted “stop!” and ran out of the car towards them. They smiled at me, but we didn’t talk, they just carried on with what they were doing. It was late in the day, and they were getting ready to go home. The women wear trousers to make hay because the wind blows their skirts up. Here, they were putting their headscarves and their traditional skirts back on. Then they gathered their baskets, in which they’d brought their lunch, and walked back to the village. I followed. The light was very soft, and the shadows long.
Cutting hay and stacking it is physically demanding, I tried doing it myself and failed miserably
Continue reading...Thabiso Sekgala’s solo show features work taken by the late South African photographer offering nuanced, alternative narratives about life in contemporary Africa. His work focused on the idea of home and the personal, political or economic conditions that determine our relationship to it.
Continue reading...‘Monstrous’ and ‘malevolent’ sculpture Quasi alarms office workers and divides opinion
A “terrifying” five-metre tall sculpture of a hand with a face has been flown in from the South Island to perch on top of a contemporary art gallery in the New Zealand capital of Wellington.
It fixes passers by with a disapproving expression. Meant to liven up the Civic Square that was damaged in a 2016 earthquake, the work has instead alarmed and terrified locals, who have described the work as “a Lovecraftian nightmare [that] has come to life”.
Continue reading...The illustrated city: Its main arts institution may be sinking, but the city’s influence on artists and thinkers from Carrington to Trotsky cannot be so easily erased
Continue reading...Opened in 1993 with hopes of rejuvenating one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighbourhoods, the central bus station is now an eclectic mix of commerce and culture
Continue reading...Despite its poverty, Kibera is a vibrant place where people survive in testing conditions, both physical and mental. These images by four photographers born and bred there capture the spirit of Africa’s largest slum.
An exhibition, ‘Kibera: Living in the slum’, is on show at the Guardian’s London offices until 31 August
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