“That is the archaeology I am unearthing: The spectre of police violence and state control over the bodies of young Black and Brown people all over the world.” - Kehinde Wiley As I was walking through the dimly lit halls of this show this morning, all I could think about was the news of the umpteenth shooting in the US, the one in Buffalo where a 19 year old killed 10 people. In a way, I felt like I was at the crime scene. And that was it. I realised I had no desire to rea

I had been following Nikolay Lukin on Instagram for some time, and this morning he followed me back. Дякую, Микола. His latest post is a week old, it shows us a wildflower meadow and trees in bloom in Odessa, which Nikolay captioned: Spring walks hand in hand with death. The work I have chosen is not recent, it's from 2016. The Ukrainian people have been living with Russian invaders since 2014, when Putin dispatched his army to the country's borders for 'military operations',

The first lockdown was nothing short of surreal. And although we were all at home and terrified of not knowing what the heck was happening, I find that now many of us are unashamedly nostalgic about some of some of its unexpected benefits. Namely a world that was suddenly cleaner, quieter. A world where nature was liberated and allowed to have a renaissance. A world whose eerie stillness was possible because of the lack of human presence. This is story behind this fascinating

"Mariupol is always covered with smog. On the other side of the sea is occupied Crimea - my home. 20 km away in the east, the war continues daily, but people just rest on the beach tired of the conflict. This beach is full of mines and people with guns. It has been going on for 2 years and people don't even notice it anymore because they are tired. They are tolerant to death, weapons, violence, war. I also came to the beach. For screaming. I looked at the sea, which is the bo

"There will be a painting that shows our victory, for sure." - Kinder Album (interviewed by Bird in Flight) The truth is we do not know that there will be, but I can but hope the artist is right. For now, I'm counting the little dot-like heads in her painting. I think I counted around 80, but after a few they seem to blend into one. It must be my declining eyesight. So I remind myself that each dot represents a person running from their home, one of the hardest things imagina

"During the quarantine period, I began to create staged self-portraits at home. In the photo, which was the beginning of the series, I seem to be hiding behind house plants in the corner, symbolically and succinctly denoting the existing dead-end state of each person during a pandemic. In my subsequent works, although I turn to self-irony, nevertheless, photographing myself in the nude, I live moments of self-acceptance. Over time, the series of self-portraits went beyond the

Artem Volokitin was born in 1981. He lives and works in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, home to 1.4 million people and less than 20 miles from the Russian border. Kharkhiv was therefore an obvious target for the invading forces. Last Sunday, Russian troops entered the city and started bombing it to the ground. We know the strategy, we have seen it in Aleppo. And in Chechnya before then. In response to the upheavals of 2014, the so called Revolution of Dignity, the sub

There are moments in life when our fear is such that we scramble for ways of taming it, in the hope that this crippling fear will somehow dissolve. And when we feel at our most powerless, all sorts of coping mechanisms kick in as we go down unexplored avenues trying to believe we can do something, anything, This is one of those moments. Me, I turn to art, like I always do. So today I'd like to showcase the work of Marina Skugareva, born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1962. I don't know

Today Instagram is aflood with red hearts, declarations of eternal love, schmaltzy quotes and unmissable promotions. And while swathes of people around the globe enthusiastically celebrate romance, it would appear that the origins of Valentine's Day are rooted in unspeakably gruesome rituals performed by the ancient Romans. So here I am jumping on the bandwagon with this Banksy piece, which first appeared on a wall next to Prince of Albert pub in Brighton, the LGBTQ capital o

"Good artists copy; great artists steal." - Apocryphal quote The history of modern and contemporary art is littered with instances of appropriation. Picasso famously adopted cultural imagery from African art assimilating, not without controversy, tribal art aesthetics into his Cubist works. Later on, albeit in different ways, and to name just a few, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman all purposely borrowed and incorporated elements from other visual

The Vase of Flowers by Jan van Huysum is one of the best still lifes that the Amsterdam-born artist produced between the end of the XVII century and the first half of the XVIII century. It is certainly one of the most sumptuous and breathtaking still lives I have ever laid eyes on. It's a triumph of bright colours, sinuous patterns of lines, sensuous textures and airy volumes. It's a symphony, it's a dance, it's a delicate and intoxicating scent. It's a superb example of the

"When I went to New York in 1992, I recognized that there was a genre called installation art, and had an idea that I will pop out from walls. I wanted to pop out from walls, from stuffy walls." -Yun Suk-nam Reminiscent of the Dadaist and Surrealist objects that lost their function to be transformed into something attractive and unsettling, the Godmother of Korean Feminist Art has produced beautifully upholstered armchairs and sofas that you cannot sit on. I love the contrast

Current rabbit hole update: scandals and crimes in the art world, of which I am delighted to inform you there is an abundance of. One episode of Ben Lewis' superb podcast ART BUST tells the story of American art dealer turned fraudster Inigo Philbrick's spectacular fall from grace. It's a compelling listen, during which Lewis also points out the dismally shoddy due diligence and the opacity of the resale market that de facto enabled the jaw-dropping magnitude of Philbrick's s

"The whiteness of meringue becomes for me of great poetic preoccupation; it's like snow, like frost ... like ... purity.'' - Wayne Thiebaud Wayne Thiebaud, who passed away on Christmas day at the age 101, was to cake what Giorgio Morandi was to bottles. Both artists kept painting the same objects again and again throughout their life. This enduring fascination with seemingly banal everyday objects was such that it can only be defined as devotion. One could argue that there is

Whether it’s the first one or the latest of many, a visit to Florence’s Uffizi is bound to leave you breathless. Such are the quality and the breadth of its collection, it’s like embarking on a relentless quest for the best picture, with the disarming awareness that it’s impossible to pick one. So you just keep going, room after room, masterpiece after masterpiece, soaking it all in until you’re almost drunk. Hoping that at least a tiny fragment of the exhilarating energy tha

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” - Second Amendment of the American Constitution (ratified in 1791). I'm not even going to get into the relevance to today's society of something written 230 years go (a militia?). Suffice to say that the United States are home to more privately-owned firearms than human beings. That's right, 393 million guns versus 328 million peop

"If I have to change my lifestyle, I don't want to live." - Robert Mapplethorpe In this powerful self-portrait Robert Mapplethorpe looks us straight in the eye. The glowing black background and the focused use of light make his head and his hand look almost detached from his torso, as if floating in mid-air. The skull sceptre he is so forcefully holding in the foreground symbolises the awareness that death was coming for him. Mapplethorpe would die of an AIDS-related illness

“I always use simple elements, I don’t want to add or subtract anything. I never even wanted to deform either: I isolate and I represent. Domenico Gnoli (1933-1970) This superbly displayed show tells the story of the enigma that is hidden in the everyday object. Gnoli’s hugely rewarding canvasses celebrate the mystery of the ordinary, the unsuspected magic of the familiar. The artist, who died at a painfully young 36 years of age, explored reality by zooming in on the detail

From the Wunderkammers of Renaissance to this day, the Global West has a museum for everything. From sex to death, from vaginas to phallic specimens, from lawnmowers to chamber pots, there's a museum for it. It's how we showcase, celebrate, preserve, categorise, educate, shape narratives and tell stories. The Museum of Homelessness is a charity run by people who have themselves been homeless. I believe this may be one of the very rare instances when a community has taken cont

Like many, I have been following the recent events unfolding in Afghanistan. I have mostly been feeling sad and powerless while thinking about how badly the Taleban takeover has affected our Afghani sisters' hard-won rights from the comfort of my home where I enjoy peace and freedom. It's easy to get cynical and think that throwing money at something so huge and tragic doesn't do anything to solve the problem, but the reality is that women journalists in Afghanistan are facin