Art and design – parsian news

‘With Cate Blanchett in my ears, I become an insect on the wing’ – our writer merges with a rainforest

Using astonishing VR technology and just his own breathing, our writer dies, disintegrates, then merges with an Amazonian forest. Could he become a sequoia tree next? What about stepping into a black hole?‘Breathe in,” says Ersin Han Ersin. “Breathe ou…

‘Breathe in,” says Ersin Han Ersin. “Breathe out.” Look, I feel like saying, I’ve been doing this inhale-exhale malarkey for decades. But what Ersin is trying to get me to do, inside this dimly lit warehouse on the banks of the Thames, is synchronise my breath with the soundtrack to a Colombian Amazonian rainforest, or rather one that has been digitally simulated. Only then will I properly be able to enter Breathing with the Forest, a virtual reality installation created by the Marshmallow Laser Feast collective.

Ersin, its co-creative director, is urging me and my fellow visitors to transcend our individual selves, overcome species hubris, and merge with nature. We should remember that our every exhale is an airy gift to trees, who return the compliment by supplying us with oxygen that flows into our own tree-like lungs and throbs out as blood from the heart, off out to branching arteries that feed our every cell. It’s all a bit like eco yoga.

‘A frenzy of judgement’: artist Candice Breitz on her German show being pulled over Gaza

The Jewish filmmaker’s exhibition was cancelled when she commented on the Israel-Hamas war. She argues that Germany is weaponising false charges of antisemitism to chilling and repressive effectThe Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery, in western Germany, …

The Jewish filmmaker’s exhibition was cancelled when she commented on the Israel-Hamas war. She argues that Germany is weaponising false charges of antisemitism to chilling and repressive effect

The Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery, in western Germany, announced last week that it has cancelled an exhibition of your work which was due to open in spring 2024. What happened?
On 24 November, my studio received a call from the director of the museum, announcing that she would likely be forced to cancel the exhibition, which we had been working on for three years. Given the current climate in Germany, I immediately assumed that the cancellation had to do with views that I have expressed in relation to the ongoing carnage in Israel-Palestine. Little did I know that the exhibition had in fact already been cancelled at that point, prior to any conversation with me.

Was the exhibition about Israel-Palestine?
The plan had been to show my work TLDR, a 13-channel video installation that features a community of sex work activists in Cape Town during 2017. In short, the exhibition had nothing to do with Israel-Palestine.

Primal dreams: the world’s wildest winter masquerades – in pictures

Photographer Jason Gardner travelled for more than 15 years documenting carnival traditions across the world, capturing the costumes and traditions that link participants to ancestral folklore Continue reading…

Photographer Jason Gardner travelled for more than 15 years documenting carnival traditions across the world, capturing the costumes and traditions that link participants to ancestral folklore

Turner prize winner Jesse Darling: ‘I’ve been a dancer, a decorator and a circus clown’

Kicked out of art school, the former squatter, barista and sex industry worker tells us what his barriers-and-bunting work says about Britain today – and why he’s obsessed with ‘Bond-in-drag’ film Skyfall It’s not often you laugh in a contemporary art …

It’s not often you laugh in a contemporary art exhibition, but I did in Jesse Darling’s room at the Turner prize show. There’s an energy and wit to his sculptures, made from crash barriers and red-and-white plastic tape; to his jaunty, priapic candles attached to walls; to his hammers bound up with ribbons and bells and placed in glass cases (their inherent masculinity spoofed and transformed, as if they were fetish objects from some future religion). “This was the most public gig I’m ever going to do in Britain,” he says of the exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne gallery. “I mean, the British public reasonably don’t care about contemporary art, because they’ve got plenty of bad things to deal with, especially at the moment. But the Turner prize does feel a bit like public property, and rightly so. So the whole British thing in this show is quite on the nose. I won’t do it again.”

Darling, 41, lives in Berlin: his observation of the state of Britain is that of someone who has become something of an outsider. He has talked of his shock at coming back to a post-Covid UK that seemed dilapidated and run down. Berlin, with its decent childcare system and welfare support, feels more hospitable. But the exhibition is not only about Britain. It is, more generally, about the impermanence of things; the fragility of what we take for granted. The unusually engaging film produced to accompany the show (such films are an annual part of the Turner prize, usually a dutiful studio interview to contextualise the work) makes that clear.

Virginia museum to return 44 stolen or looted works to Egypt, Italy and Turkey

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts says it received ‘irrefutable evidence’ 44 ancient art objects had been stolen or lootedVirginia’s state-run fine arts museum has begun the process of returning 44 pieces of ancient art to their countries of origin after la…

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts says it received ‘irrefutable evidence’ 44 ancient art objects had been stolen or looted

Virginia’s state-run fine arts museum has begun the process of returning 44 pieces of ancient art to their countries of origin after law enforcement officials presented the institution with what it called “irrefutable evidence” that the works had been stolen or looted.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced in a news release on Tuesday that it had “safely delivered” the pieces to the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York, which it said had conducted an inquiry into the artworks as part of a broader investigation, along with the Department of Homeland Security. The DA’s office will facilitate the return of the objects to Italy, Egypt and Turkey, according to the Richmond museum.

Sunshine returns to St Petersburg: Claudine Doury’s best photograph

‘This was taken during the city’s White Nights festival. There were girls standing in the streets, eyes closed, arms outstretched. Others were singing, dancing and drinking champagne. This girl didn’t move for a long time’It was 21 June 2012, the longe…

It was 21 June 2012, the longest day of the year, and around a million people were in St Petersburg for the White Nights festival. This annual city-wide event celebrates the brief period when skies reach twilight but never darkness. In most of western Europe – including France, where I’m from – pagan sun celebrations have largely been forgotten, although there are gatherings at Stonehenge in Britain and the midsummer celebrations in Sweden. However, in the northern regions of eastern Europe, the rituals remain, steeped in centuries of tradition. In these places, there is little-to-no sun for many months of the year. So when it comes, everyone worships it.

This image is part of Solstice, an ongoing body of work documenting pagan summer rituals. In over a decade, I’ve travelled through Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland studying how different communities celebrate the summer solstice, marking the return of light after so many months in near-complete darkness.

The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks review – a gobsmackingly huge space spectacle

Lightroom, Kings Cross, LondonThis potted history of Nasa’s space exploration featuring gigantic and crystal clear footage is invigorating if slightly hampered by its school science toneTom Hanks is the narrator and co-writer of this colossal and immer…

Lightroom, Kings Cross, London
This potted history of Nasa’s space exploration featuring gigantic and crystal clear footage is invigorating if slightly hampered by its school science tone

Tom Hanks is the narrator and co-writer of this colossal and immersive multimedia family entertainment event or next-level school trip, about Nasa’s historic Apollo moon landings and the planned new Artemis missions. It’s taking place at Lightroom, the innovative new digital art performance venue at London’s Kings Cross – recently the site of Bigger And Closer, an immersive show about David Hockney.

With the audience gathered in the darkened arena-type area, seated on little upholstered double-stools dotted about, Tom Hanks’s likably folksy and nerdily enthusiastic voiceover booms out telling us that this floor space is the size of Mission Control, Houston. Soon, gobsmackingly huge photo images of the moon’s surface and our own planet Earth are flashed up around the walls, also great film footage of the astronauts bouncing and floating, and all with the cathedral vastness and crystal clarity that they have probably always deserved but never before got from TV screens or even movie screens.

In this vein, we get a celebratory potted history of Apollos 11-17 with tasters of the Artemis project, and all with marvellous visuals – though you have to keep rubbernecking to ensure you’re not missing something behind you. The effect is something between video art display at a gallery and the hour-long science-themed films of the early days of Imax.

‘From the counterculture to high society’: Larry Fink’s career in pictures

Whether shooting civil rights marches or Studio 54 style icons, the politically conscious photographer – who died last month – cast a critical eye on the American class system Continue reading…

Whether shooting civil rights marches or Studio 54 style icons, the politically conscious photographer – who died last month – cast a critical eye on the American class system

‘From the counterculture to high society’: Larry Fink’s career in pictures

Whether shooting civil rights marches or Studio 54 style icons, the politically conscious photographer – who died last month – cast a critical eye on the American class system Continue reading…

Whether shooting civil rights marches or Studio 54 style icons, the politically conscious photographer – who died last month – cast a critical eye on the American class system

Royal Society Publishing photography competition 2023 – in pictures

The microscopic world hidden within an autumn leaf has won the Royal Society Publishing photography competition 2023. Overall winner Irina Petrova Adamatzky researches the electrical activity of fungi, slime moulds and other micro-organisms, at Unconve…

‘I unintentionally captured this scene while collecting samples of slime moulds in a field near my home in Somerset, noticed them the evening before and had intended to gather samples to measure their electrical activity for our research. However, my attention was diverted by a simple autumn leaf that, although seemingly ordinary, held something intriguing within. I gathered it, along with my samples, and the following day I was amazed to discover what appeared to be another world within the confines of that unassuming leaf’