"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

It's that time of year again, the retail bonanza that is Black Friday is upon us. Although there have been warnings that in 2020 more than 90% of alleged super deals were actually the same price or cheaper in the six months prior the sales event, an estimated 60% of adults in the UK will be making purchases for a total of £8.7 billion. Deleting my Amazon account just over a year ago was one of my proudest and self-righteous consumer moments. My brother mocks me for my micro r

'My piece is not talking about old slave ships; it's about what happens today' says Romuald Hazoumé about his multimedia installation 'La Bouche du Roi' (The King's Mouth), now on show at the Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition. Finally, the museum world starts tackling its colonial past and attempts to tell the true story of how the Golden Age of European imperialism came about and flourished. The Beninese artist shaped over 300 petrol cans into tribal masks and piled them up t

“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

Violence against women and girls is a human rights violation and a public health epidemic. It occurs daily across the world and is widely underreported. Globally, an estimated 736 million women aged 15 and older have been subjected to some sort of physical, sexual or psychological violence at least once in their life. That's almost 1 in 3 of us. Thanks to the generosity of knitters from all social and cultural backgrounds, since 2015 Viva Vittoria has been covering Italy's mo

It's been 15 years to the day since Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for fearlessly and relentlessly telling the truth. Anna was gunned down in the entrance hall of the block of flats where she used to live in Moscow. An investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta, Anna was a staunch human rights advocate and a strident critic of the Kremlin. I have read all her books, often struggling to make sense of a reality that is far, far away from mine. "A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter

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

At long last, my reading drought has come to an end. I am currently re-reading the original version of The Life Before Us written in 1975 by French author Romain Gary under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar. This extraordinary novel tells the story of Momo, the abandoned child of a prostitute, the mother he will never know. Mere pages into this second reading, I was reminded that Gary used the verb 'se defendre', to defend oneself, to describe what prostitutes do. I am puzzled by t

Earlier this week, a near-total ban on abortions has come into effect in the state of Texas. This means that after six weeks of pregnancy, when many women don't even know they are expecting, it will be impossible to legally terminate a pregnancy. And no, there will be no exceptions in case of rape or incest. What's more, this new law allows citizens to sue abortions providers as well as anyone helping a woman to have an abortion. Say a friend is driving you to the clinic, yes

It's been a year since the last presidential elections in Belarus. As Alexander Lukashenko was being crowned for the 6th consecutive time, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest. I remember seeing photos and video footage and realising how much courage it took to just be out there in a country where a violently repressive regime has all but wiped out independent media, arrested political opposition leaders forcing them out of the country and where any

There are wounds so deep they never really heal. They are the wounds we share with other people, whether we know them or not, the wounds that remain open no matter how long it's been since they were inflicted. These wounds define us, they speak of who we are and where we come from. This is the story of one of these wounds. On the morning of Saturday 2 August, at 10:25am, a time bomb hidden in an unattended suitcase detonated inside Bologna railway station. The explosion was s

It's not the first time that this blog talks about Marcus Rashford. The 23-year old mancunian footballer used his social media platform to twice force the Government into a U-turn over the extension of free school meals and support grants for children from low-income families. Just thinking about that needing to happen makes my skin crawl, but that's Tory Britain for you. Rashford used to rely on those meals, he has spoken very openly about having to sometimes go to sleep wit

According to the Financial Times, Abu Dhabi is planning to spend $6bn on various cultural projects to diversify from oil. This is not a new strategy. After the emergence of Dubai as the playground of the Middle East in the early 1990s, the Abu Dhabi government set out to develop a vision that would transform the UAE into a world-class cultural powerhouse. Culture is thus a tool in a long-term political-economic strategy that aims to diversify revenues and address concerns aro

"I would like everyone to read, not so they become writers or poets, but so that no one is a slave anymore." - Gianni Rodari I recently came across this quote by one of Italy's most celebrated and imaginative children's writers and I loved how it framed the argument. We don't read to become erudite bores, we read because when we do our world gets bigger and better, and because reading is a catalyst for freedom, intellectual and otherwise. This is really prosaically put and I