Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK talking to young women about the issues important to them in 2020: public safety, body image, social media and feminism. Their research found that girls are fed up and frustrated with the lack of real progress on gender equality.
Continue reading...Category Archives: Art and design
Painting found inside Italian gallery wall confirmed as a Gustav Klimt
Gardeners discovered Portrait of a Lady while clearing ivy at gallery in Piacenza
A painting found hidden in an Italian gallery in December is an authentic Gustav Klimt piece stolen almost 23 years ago, experts have confirmed.
The Portrait of a Lady was one of the world’s most sought-after stolen artworks before it was found concealed in a wall of the Ricci Oddi modern art gallery, the same gallery from where it went missing in the northern city of Piacenza.
Continue reading...Ickworth embraces enforced darkness to spotlight art collection
Rotunda at National Trust property exploits gloom from scaffolding to stage exhibition
A 200-year-old Italianate palace, hidden away in the Suffolk countryside and currently encased in more than 270 miles of scaffolding, is to hold an exhibition that is only taking place because it is undergoing £5m of conservation works.
Ickworth, a Georgian estate and one of the most photographed of all National Trust properties, will on Satuday open its magnificent but leaky Rotunda to show off world class works of art and objects which few people know are even there.
Continue reading...Conga and carnival: Havana’s jazz festival – in pictures
New Orleans and Cuban musicians join in Havana’s annual jazz festival, defying Trump’s efforts to weaken US-Cuba relations
Continue reading...Vivian Suter: the rainforest-dwelling artist who paints with fish glue, dogs and mud
She was ignored for decades, but now Suter has been rediscovered as a pioneering eco-artist. We meet her, and her 97-year-old collagist mum, in the wilds of Guatemala
A large dog romps across a blue and white canvas, leaving a trail of brown paw prints. “Oh well,” shrugs Vivian Suter. “They’re part of the work now. I don’t think anyone will mind.” I realise Bonzo – one of three Alsatian crossbreeds that shadow the artist wherever she goes in her Guatemalan home – has just put the finishing touches to an artwork that will shortly be on public display thousands of miles away.
The painting lies on the floor of her “laager” – a storage barn open to the elements, apart from a metre-high stone wall, which you have to clamber over with the help of a rickety chair. The wall is to guard against mudslides, she explains, gesturing at a ghostly tideline that rings the interior. Most of her works hang from a rack; the piles on the floor are for three upcoming exhibitions in Berlin, London and Madrid. Having just opened a 53-piece installation at Tate Liverpool, Suter is halfway through choosing the 200 works that will feature in her Camden Arts Centre exhibition, which opens next week.
Continue reading...Here’s what could be lost if Trump bombs Iran’s cultural treasures
The US president has warned Iran he will obliterate its cultural sites. Here is our guide to the nation’s jewels, from hilltop citadels to a disco-ball mausoleum
If carried out, Donald Trump’s threat to target “cultural sites” in Iran would put him into an axis of architectural evil alongside the Taliban and Isis, both of which have wreaked similar forms of destruction this century. The Taliban dynamited Afghanistan’s sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; Isis has destroyed mosques, shrines and other structures across Iraq and Syria since 2014, some in the ancient city of Palmyra. Not, you might have thought, company the US president would prefer to be associated with.
Does Trump know what would be lost? Probably not – but he’s hardly the only one. The fact that the country is rarely visited by western tourists is not due to a lack of attractions. With a civilisation dating back 5,000 years, and over 20 Unesco world heritage sites, Iran’s cultural heritage is rich and unique, especially its religious architecture, which displays a mastery of geometry, abstract design and pre-industrial engineering practically unparalleled in civilisation. This is is not just Iran’s cultural heritage, it is humanity’s.
Continue reading...John Baldessari, US conceptual artist with a sense of humour, dies aged 88
Baldessari saw his work, juxtaposing painting, text, video, sculpture and more, as a counter to the world’s po-facedness
John Baldessari, the Californian conceptual artist known for his witty and provocative image-making, has died aged 88.
Baldessari was known for countering what he saw as a po-faced conceptual art scene with colour and humour. He once videoed himself being forced to write lines in a notebook: “I will not make any more boring art.” Such pieces were devised in the 1970s, after Baldessari had grown so disillusioned with his painted works that he took them to a San Diego funeral home and had them incinerated. He called the work The Cremation Project. Baldessari then baked the ashes into cookies and exhibited them at the seminal 1970 show Information at Moma in New York. After this, he felt free to embrace a wider palette beyond painting, working with text, video, photo collage and sculpture, among other forms. Recently, he had turned his attention to the world of emojis, blowing them up on canvases in a playful exploration of one of his key fascinations – the intersection between images and words. “How can you not be interested in emojis?” he told the LA Times in 2017. “They just look so stupid!”
Continue reading...The murals brightening a Delhi slum – in pictures
Raghubir Nagar has been given a colourful makeover by the Delhi Street Art group, drawing art lovers and selfie-snappers to a rundown area that they would never normally visit
Continue reading...Barriers, barbed wire and borders in the head: Josef Koudelka’s Holy Land
The Magnum photographer grew up behind the iron curtain. As a documentary charts his journey where Israel and Palestine meet, Koudelka talks about challenging official narratives – and himself
There’s a surreal moment near the start of Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a documentary about the acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka. He has pointed his lens at one of the concrete barriers that separate Israel and Palestine but has been stopped by an official and a heavily armed soldier. His local assistant, Gilad Baram, is trying to smooth things over. “It might result in a book,” Baram tells the soldier. “He is a one of the most renowned photographers worldwide. He is a photographer with an agency called Magnum.”
Suddenly the atmosphere changes. “Magnum? Ah, I know it,” says the soldier, his stern face breaking into a smile. A short discussion later, a friendly handshake and all is well.
Continue reading...France blocks export of €24m Cimabue artwork found in kitchen
Renaissance work sold to foreign bidder has now been declared ‘national treasure’
France has blocked the export of a tiny early Renaissance masterpiece found in a French woman’s kitchen that fetched more than €24m (£20.5m) at auction and became the most expensive medieval painting ever sold.
Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century Florentine painter Cimabue, had hung for decades above a cooking hotplate in the kitchen of a 1960s house near Compiègne, north of Paris, before it was spotted by an auctioneer who had come to value furniture for a house move.
Continue reading...Romania comes to terms with monument to communism 30 years after Ceaușescu’s death
Bucharest’s notorious Palace of the Parliament bears witness to the folly of dictator shot dead on Christmas Day 1989
Bucharest’s most notorious building sits atop a small hill in the centre of the city, appearing squat despite its 84-metre height, due to its vast length and breadth. The Palace of the Parliament, as it is now called, is a monument to dictatorial folly whose benefactor was executed before he could see it completed.
Christmas Day will mark 30 years since Romania’s communist-era dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was tried and shot dead along with his wife, as the last revolution of 1989 swept through what was perhaps the communist bloc’s most repressive state.
Continue reading...Banksy’s nativity – with bullet hole in place of star – unveiled in Bethlehem
Scar of Bethlehem designed to make people think about how Palestinians live in divided city
Banksy’s latest piece – the artist’s take on a nativity scene – has been unveiled at a hotel in Bethlehem.
The Scar of Bethlehem features a nativity scene with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus, but instead of a star hanging over the crib there is what appears to be a large bullet hole piercing an imposing grey wall.
Continue reading...How do you stop a megacity grinding to a halt? A cartoon
Until four years ago Dar Es Salaam had no public transport. Artist Popa Matumula looks at the impact a new bus system is having on the city’s legendarily bad traffic
Continue reading...The censor is watching: China’s mega photo fair – in pictures
Life on green trains, wild animals caught unawares and 55 ‘sweetheart’ portraits that angered the authorities … here the highlights of China’s biggest photography show
To visit the Lianzhou Foto festival, one flies along the banks of the Pearl river delta and into the heart of Guangzhou. Witnessing this mega city from the plane is to suddenly realise the immensity of modern China. Roughly 50 million people live in this urban sprawl surrounding Hong Kong.
Lianzhou is a four-hour drive from Guangzhou into the forested mountains of Guangdong province. It is perhaps an unlikely destination for a major arts event. But in 2005, Duan Yuting, a 47-year-old former photo editor for a Guangzhou newspaper, chose the city to found the festival, now firmly established as China’s leading contemporary photography event.
Continue reading...Brexit with rollercoasters: the £3.5bn London Resort fantasy theme park
With its rickety rides, fire-breathing dragons and Arthurian castle, the enchanted realms proposed for the Thames Estuary park are little Britain writ large. Will its High Street have a closed down library?
A circular building topped with a union jack dome rises from the trees on the Swanscombe peninsula in Kent. With its flag tightly wrapped around a glass bubble, it looks like a little Brexit capsule, safely sealed off from the free movement and free markets of the outside world.
This is the proposed entrance pavilion to the London Resort, a £3.5bn theme park planned for the Thames estuary. This walled kingdom of themed “lands” would rise from the muddy marshes by 2024, just as Boris Johnson nears the end of this term as PM. The first images of this planned dreamland were unveiled a few days before the election and the project now seems like a fitting metaphor for the result. Why elect a government that would address social welfare, tackle rising homelessness and fix the NHS, when you can build a parallel fantasy world instead?
Continue reading...Banana artwork that fetched $120,000 is eaten by ‘hungry’ artist
Performance artist consumes masterpiece in front of crowd at Art Basel in Miami, but ‘the idea’ apparently lives on
An artwork that sold last week for $120,000 and was hailed as “a symbol of global trade” has been eaten, in what might seem a fitting end for something that was an ever-ripening banana duct-taped to a wall.
The piece, titled Comedian, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was on show at the international gallery Perrotin at Art Basel in Miami when New York performance artist David Datuna ate it, saying he was hungry.
Continue reading...The eerie blue glow of Bangkok at night – in pictures
From the shanty towns of Khlong Toei to the hidden parts of Chinatown, Cody Ellingham walked Thailand’s capital every night for five weeks to photograph the city for his book Bangkok Phosphors
Photographic discovery is a window into Soviet-era Ukraine photo essay
In the remains of a bombed-out Soviet darkroom, hundreds of rolls of film were discovered rotting among the rubble by the photojournalist Samuel Eder earlier this year. He shares his experience in recovering these fragments of history and of reuniting them with their subjects
When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, transforming thriving communities into ghost towns overnight. As classrooms became sniper nests, family homes became barracks and community centres turned into ammunition caches, precious remnants of peacetime life were consumed by the war. Among these lost relics are the remains of a bombed-out Soviet photographic lab – with hundreds of rolls of film left rotting among the rubble.
Continue reading...Danish artist seeks to stop his work being cut up to make watches
Faroese art provocateurs want to use canvas of Tal R’s Paris Chic as raw material
A court in Denmark will rule on Monday on whether to prohibit a pair of Faroese art provocateurs from destroying a painting by the Danish artist Tal R and using pieces of the canvas as decorative faces for a line of luxury wristwatches.
Dann Thorleifsson and Arne Leivsgard, who five years ago founded the Kanske watch brand, bought Paris Chic, one of Tal R’s brightly coloured Sexshops series, for £70,000 at the Victoria Miro gallery in London in August.
Continue reading...Archive of blood: how photographer Letizia Battaglia shot the mafia and lived
Her shocking pictures told the truth about mafia murders – and earned her death threats. Ahead of a powerful film about her extraordinary life, we meet the woman who dared to confront killers. Warning: contains graphic imagery
Letizia Battaglia can still remember the first corpse she photographed: a man lying beneath an olive tree in a field in rural Sicily. It remains a viscerally unsettling image, made all the more so by its telling details: the dead man’s shoeless left foot, the resigned gaze of the policeman guarding the body, the olive leaves hanging low over the spreadeagled torso. The fact that he was a mafioso murdered in a local feud is, insists Battaglia, neither here nor there. “Everyone,” she says quietly, “is equal in death.”
What has stayed with her, over 40 years later, is the smell that hung in the summer air that day and was carried on the breeze. “It was very hot and he had been dead for a few days,” she says, drawing deeply on a cigarette. “Now, as soon as you ask about this photograph, it comes back to me. I can almost feel it, this atmosphere of death.”
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