They've only gone ahead and done it. I'm not even going to get into why those late SCOTUS appointments were so crucial. You know why. Nor am I going to tackle the absurd pro-life vs pro-gun debate. Because what happened yesterday is all about meddling with women's reproductive rights, it's all about control. But also about social status and race. This decision winds back the clock almost 50 years, removing the right to safe pregnancy termination from millions of women. Aborti

Paula Rego died today. The art world has lost one of the greats. I'm so glad I got to see her some of her work one more time at the Venice Biennale, where it inhabits an entire room in the Central Pavillion. Rego didn't paint to please the viewer, she painted to unsettle them. Her pictures tell uncomfortable, ambiguous, and sometimes downright disturbing stories that we struggle to make sense of. And the longer we stand in front of them, the more we are intrigued and confused

On 11 June 1946, the Italian people voted in an institutional referendum to replace the monarchy with a republic. I won't lie, it was closer than I like to think, but they did it: 12,672,767 votes for the Republic vs 10,688,305 for the Monarchy. Importantly, this was also the first time that women voted at national level. As the journalist Anna Garofalo recalls: "The ballots that arrived at home inviting us to do our duty had a silent and peremptory authority. We turned them

"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

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

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

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

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

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

"I try to make bright paintings, but every time I fall into the shadows, maybe because darkness is the ultimate condition of things, whereas light is only temporary." - Nicola Samori in an interview to Art Tribune Darkness and light. Oh how they coexist and engage in an epic struggle in Samori's striking body of work, which is uniquely atmospheric and haunting. It is clear he is a classically trained painter, and a very good one he is, too. His bold brushstrokes sweep across

"Political activity does not interfere with my work, it feeds it. And if I'm interested in racism and fighting racism, then that should show up—will show up—in my work.” - May Stevens A committed civil-rights activist and feminist, between 1967 and 1976 Stevens produced a series of paintings called Big Daddy, where she addressed and channelled her anger towards her own father's racist views. Painted at the end of that period, Dark Flag marks the 200th anniversary of the Decla

"I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. " David Bowie, 2003 It's that time of year when the UK Cabinet Office Honours and Appointments Secretariat publishes the list of the recipients of the honours, of which some 2,000 are dished out every year. The honours system is designed to reward exceptional achievement or service, an entirely common and laudable practice. It's when we look at the titles that we realise t