Chugging through townships, maize fields and scrubland as the sun rises, Zimbabwe’s only commuter train is cheap and reliable – two qualities its passengers cherish in a downwards-spiralling economy
Each morning sleepy travellers walk to the tracks and clamber aboard Zimbabwe’s only commuter train as it prepares to leave the Cowdray Park settlement at 6am and embark on its 12-mile (20km) journey into Bulawayo, the country’s second city.
Continue reading...Installation will transform cathedral floor to mark 50 years since Apollo 11 moon landing
It’s hard to imagine anything less like a lunar landscape than the medieval glories of Lichfield Cathedral. But this summer, an artist will transform its magnificent tiled floor into a representation of the moon’s surface to mark half a century since Neil Armstrong took “one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind”.
The three-spired cathedral in Staffordshire has commissioned the art installation as part of its annual summer show, which this year is called Space, God, the Universe and Everything. Peter Walker, the cathedral’s artist-in-residence, will also use light and sound installations inspired by space and the planets.
Continue reading...Street artist Mr June brings facades to life with his abstract, colourful designs
The Dutch artist David Louf, who goes by Mr June, is the person behind these striking 3D hexagon murals, which have appeared on walls from Berlin to the Bronx.
Louf grew up in Amsterdam immersed in hip-hop and graffiti, and turned to graphic design as an adult. Eight years ago he moved back to street art and now combines his skills to create vibrant, abstract murals on buildings across the world.
Continue reading...Instagrammer Jonathan shares his obsession with the city’s doors, from the grand to the graffiti-ridden
It is only natural to feel curious about what goes on behind the imposing, archaic or graffiti-ridden doors of our cities.
Instagrammer Jonathan knows this feeling all too well. For the past year and a half he has been photographing the doors of New York from the grand to the scruffy, presenting a unique view of this well-documented city.
Continue reading...Survivors of the Kinglake bushfire of 7 February 2009, which took 120 lives, talk about their struggle to move on
“Half the town is on medication, and the other half should be.”
That’s bushfire survivor Anne Dixon’s dark-humoured attempt to describe how people from the mountain-top hamlets around Kinglake are coping 10 years on from Black Saturday.
Continue reading...Thanks to the Kazakhstan city’s loss of capital status in the 90s, rare mosaics, sgraffiti and other artworks escaped destruction
When Jama Nurkalieva and a small group of colleagues conducted a site survey of a disused Soviet-era panoramic cinema in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, they had no idea what lay behind the internal plasterboard wall that faces out towards the street – until someone spotted a narrow gap.
As the caretaker shined a light into the darkness behind, the group caught a glimpse of a man’s head. Out came the toolbox and the rest of the artwork was slowly revealed: a Soviet-era sgraffito by the graphic artist Eugeny Sidorkin that had been lost and forgotten for decades.
Continue reading...Monday was Mauni Amavasya, the new moon day and most significant bathing day, particularly if it falls on a Monday. At the Hindu festival pilgrims bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers to cleanse them of sin and liberate them from the cycle of life, death and rebirth
Continue reading...About 13,000 people are kept in slavery in the UK. Amy Romer’s book The Dark Figure* reveals the terrifying ordinariness of the sites of their captivity
In 2013, a 22-year-old Hungarian woman responded to an online ad for a babysitting job in London and, after a telephone interview, was offered the post. When she arrived in Budapest to travel to London, she was met by three men who confiscated her mobile, drove her to Slovakia and forced her on to a coach bound for Manchester.
There was no babysitting job. Instead, the woman had been “bought” for £3,500 by a Pakistani man and was told to prepare for marriage. After being held captive at various Manchester addresses, she finally alerted the police from a house in Cunliffe Street, Chorley, where she was rescued and later repatriated home.
Continue reading...Louvre blockbuster marking 500 years since artist’s death may end up a casualty
He was a Renaissance master – painter, scientist, engineer and inventor – who was hailed as one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
But as Europe stages a year-long frenzy of events to mark 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Italy and France are engaged in a diplomatic tussle over him that threatens a blockbuster exhibition at the Louvre in Paris.
Continue reading...A museum in New York claims to be the only collection focusing on the KGB’s espionage operations in the world. The newly opened exhibition hall, housed in a former warehouse on 14th Street, is home to 3,500 original period objects, which the designer of the museum, Julius Urbaitis, has gathered after 30 years of research around the world
Continue reading...Artwork thought to be homage to the 90 people who died in an Islamist attack on Paris venue
A mural by British street artist Banksy on a fire-exit door at Paris’ Bataclan theatre, where Islamist militants killed 90 people three years ago, has been stolen, the venue has said.
The work, one of a series of murals painted last June in the French capital and attributed to Banksy, showed a veiled female figure in a mournful pose.
Continue reading...Apichatpong Weerasethakul to receive £40,000 for his political artwork Invisibility
The Palme d’Or winning film director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won one of the UK’s most important and lucrative contemporary art prizes.
On Thursday evening, Weerasethakul was named winner of the eighth edition of the Artes Mundi prize, a biennial competition rewarding political art from across the world. It comes with a prize of £40,000, the largest visual art prize in Britain.
Continue reading...An urban photo essay of the Chinese territory made between October and December 2018
Continue reading...A collection of vintage ski and winter sports posters up to a century old – some worth thousands of dollars – is about to be auctioned in New York. The resorts advertised range from Europe’s Alpine jewels to the mountains of Canada, and all offer fun in the outdoors
Continue reading...Sleek, pared-back, industrial elegance – that’s how most of us think of Bauhaus, the modernist design group born in Germany in 1919. But that was only one side of this short-lived but longlasting movement…
• Norman Foster, Margaret Howell, Michael Craig-Martin and others on Bauhaus’s rich legacy
The Bauhaus, simply put, was a German school of art and design that opened in 1919 and closed in 1933. It was also very much more than that. It was the most influential and famous design school that has ever existed. It defined an epoch. It became the pre-eminent emblem of modern architecture and design. The name has become an adjective as well as a noun – Bauhaus style, Bauhaus look. And now it is coming up for the centenary of its founding, which shows both that what was called the “modern movement” is now part of history and that its influence is very much still around us.
It is nowadays usually clear what the word “Bauhaus” means – design stripped down to its essentials, the rational and elegant use of modern materials and industrial techniques, clarity, simplicity, cool minimalism. The device on which I am writing this and the one on which you might be reading it follow these principles. So (with greater or lesser degrees of bastardisation) do buildings without number around the world, countless domestic objects, road signs, the lettering on a tube of toothpaste or the design of a car. The Bauhaus brand is consistent, coherent and universal. Its best-known creations, the tubular steel chairs of Mart Stam and Marcel Breuer or the steel-and-glass building built to house the school, reinforce its image.
Continue reading...After Norway’s Storelgen stole Mac the Moose’s place as world’s tallest, a Canadian city hopes to ‘stick it to Oslo’ by increasing their statue’s size
For three decades, the Canadian city of Moose Jaw took pride in its status as the home of the world’s largest moose statue.
Standing at a majestic 10 meters tall, Mac the Moose has weathered brutal winters, graffiti and even the inglorious loss of his jaw. His recognition was so great that in 2013, he was named the city’s most popular celebrity.
Continue reading...Photojournalist Finbarr O’Reilly has been covering Dakar fashion week for over a decade. He charts the city’s burgeoning style scene
Alongside its golden beaches, glitzy nightclubs and vibrant music scene, Senegal’s capital, Dakar, is emerging as a key African fashion hub.
Continue reading...Winter Night in the Mountains part of first Harald Sohlberg show outside Norway
Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a classic symbol of dread that has been hailed as the ultimate icon of contemporary politics – but a very different Norwegian painting is the country’s favourite.
Continue reading...In a country where myths about albinism can have deadly consequences, an organisation set up to battle discrimination is having a profound impact
Paschal Merumba has suffered prejudice from the day he was born.
His mother refused to breastfeed her “cursed” baby, the second child in the family born with albinism; the first had already died of neglect. Merumba was thought to have contaminated the community. He was made to eat apart and sleep on the floor.
Continue reading...Police called after 16th-century painting disappears days before expert due to visit
It is a storyline worthy of a Hercule Poirot whodunnit. After confiding in just 20 trusted people of his suspicion that a painting in his church was a lost masterpiece, a priest in the small Flemish town of Zele, 45 miles north of Brussels, has had to call in the local police over its sudden disappearance.
Pastor Jan Van Raemdonck, 61, turned to the detectives after two women laying flowers in the nave of the Sint-Ludgerus church last Friday morning discovered that the 16th-century painting, known as the Holy Family, had gone missing from its usual position by the altar.
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