June 20 – July 27, 2024

Why the stories of The Decameron have made eyes pop – and inspired a new comedy

June 26 – July 27, 2024

June 1 – July 25, 2024

Why there's ongoing debate over the Games' purpose-built athlete areas

June 21 – July 26, 2024

June 10 – July 20, 2024

Deadpool sequel is occasionally wry and entertaining, but the action is 'a slog'

Foundwork is pleased to announce the open call for the 2024 Foundwork Artist Prize, its annual award for emerging and mid-career artists working in any media. The honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant and remote studio visits with each of the esteemed jurors. The honoree and three shortlisted artists will also be invited for interviews as part of the Foundwork Dialogues program.

‌

2024 Jury: Rachel Uffner, founder of Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Olivia Aherne, Curator at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Monsieur Zohore; multidisciplinary artist based between Richmond, New York, and Abidjan; Mohamed Almusibli, Director and Curator of Kunsthalle Basel; and Lorraine Kiang, cofounder of Kiang Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong.

‌

‌

New recordings reflect musician's complex legacy

June 22 – July 27, 2024

The man who served on opposite sides in two world wars

From luxury vintage to eco-friendly fabrics, a smart guide to swimming in style

Stars of a stomach-churning film discuss risking life and limb for 'art'

Glen Powell to Zendaya: the younger actors with real box-office clout

Farhad Moshiri, one of Iran’s most influential contemporary artists, died on July 16 at 61. The Third Line gallery, the Dubai gallery that represented him, confirmed his death.

“Our journey with Moshiri began in 2006 with New Paintings by Farhad Moshiri at our first space in the UAE. Since then, we’ve cherished witnessing his ever-evolving practice,” the gallery wrote on Instagram.  “Our thoughts are with his family. Farhad Moshiri will be deeply missed, remembered as both a friend and artist. May his soul rest in eternal peace.”

Moshir was renowned for his marriage of Persian visual traditions and Pop art sensibilities. American consumerism and advertising, pop music and comics mingled with Persian embroidery and calligraphy. His work sparkled, literally: beads, glitter, and faux gems often embellished his figuration, subverting subtle indictment with a precious levity. 

“He not only established the first wave of contemporary art post 1979, but also became one of the rare artists who radically, and successfully, brought all of the great craftsmanship, iconography and storytelling inherent in Persian culture and history into his contemporary practice,” Sotheby’s director for Middle Eastern and contemporary art Ashkan Baghestani told the National. “The breadth, diversity and scope of his output in this sense was unparalleled.”

Moshiri was born in 1963 in Shiraz, Iran, to a family that owned cinemas. Speaking to Artnet News in 2017, he recounted a childhood watching American films. The cinema was left amid the Iranian Revolution, when his family immigrated to Los Angeles, where he earned a fine arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in 1984. His explorations in installation, video, and painting coalesced around his great influences: Pop art and conceptualism. (He was sometimes called “the Middle East’s Andy Warhol,” a cliched moniker that has been applied in many variations to artists of the Global South.)

10 min read

This blog post was written and researched by MOX volunteer Iulia Costache.

Iulia Costache is a Cowley Road resident keen on social research, community and writing. She is a Monitoring and Evaluation consultant with a background in Psychology and Anthropology. An aspiring poet, she often frequents Oxford Poetry Library’s workshops and events. She writes historical blogs around a myriad of topics, but she is particularly interested in diversity, identities and Oxford’s world-leading innovations, contributions and discoveries. 

Want to write your own Oxford-inspired post? Sign up as a volunteer blogger.

William Buckland’s Megalosaurus

William Buckland (1784 – 1856) was a theologian, geologist and palaeontologist, born in Axminster, Devonshire, who is often credited as being the first to make a scientific description of a dinosaur. From a young age he developed an interest in fossils, collecting Ammonites and other shells with his father. In 1801, he was granted a scholarship to Corpus Christi College at Oxford to study classics and theology. He graduated with a BA in 1805 and received his MA in 1808, being ordained as a priest a year later. During this time he attended lectures taught by John Kidd on mineralogy and chemistry. In 1813, he took up Kidd’s position incorporating geological and palaeontological content into his teaching, and thus becoming the first reader in geology. His lectures were well-attended by students and senior university members alike, mostly due to the liveliness of their nature, featuring dramatic gestures, horseback riding and even acting out certain animal behaviours.

The city of Boston announced thirty new public art initiatives, including a slew of monuments to underrepresented episodes of local history. The initiative is funded by a $3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the largest of such investments ever made into Boston’s public art program.  

“This investment in public art programs is groundbreaking and will support our efforts to highlight the many cultures, talents, and histories of our residents. It is an honor to see this innovation through art,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement.

Seven artists and organizations have been commissioned to realize public art installations. ​​A Trike Called Funk will work with local graffiti artists for an homage to local practitioners; the Kinfolk Monuments Project is invited to create virtual monuments to under-celebrated Black historical figures; Alison Yueming Qu and Jaronzie Harris have been tapped for an homage to Boston’s Chinatown; artists Katherine Farrington, Roberto Mighty, and Ruth Henry, and LaRissa Rogers and Zalika Azim, are also set to participate, with more details forthcoming. 

However, the most prominent artist to be involved may be Hank Willis Thomas, who will present The Gun Violence Memorial Project, a commemoration of the weekly toll of gun violence in the United States.

The project will be the latest major public art commission in Boston for Thomas, who was previously commissioned to create a monument to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King for 1965 Freedom Plaza which honors 4 local civil rights leaders from the 1950s through the 1970s. That monument, titled The Embrace, was unveiled in January 2023.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

THE HEADLINES

PEEKABOO. A self-portrait of the coal miner artist Norman Cornish has been rediscovered on the reverse of one of his crowded pub scenes, reports The Art Newspaper. The hidden picture features a grimy young man with tousled hair. Cornish, born in 1919 in county Durham, UK, was described as “the last of the pitman painters” when he died in 2014, although by then he had long since become sufficiently famous and prosperous to leave the mines, work full time as an artist, and be awarded an MBE. The undated self-portrait features on the back of the obviously later Bar Scene, on loan from the Durham County Council collection to an exhibition opening this week at the Bowes Museum, County Durham. It was discovered during conservation work at the museum. It had never been shown to the public before.

TEN THOUSAND THUNDERING TYPHOONS. Tintin is the hero of a series of 24 comic albums created by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, aka Hergé. Artist Xavier Marabout (b. 1967) has landed himself in legal trouble after painting the character hitting on a pin-up girl, reading a gay magazine, transporting a chick in a garter belt on his motorcycle, not to mention other unexpected scenarios. Almost 40 of his acrylic paintings were taken to court by the Tintinimaginatio company, which manages the commercial exploitation of Hergé’s work, and condemned as counterfeits by the Rennes Court of Appeal. Marabout is known for mixing cultural references, from cartoon characters to the subjects of great masters. In one of his compositions, for instance, Tex Avery’s libidinous Wolf meets naked women painted in the style of Picasso.

THE DIGEST

There is an affinity between trees and bodies held in the language of limbs. This affinity is what makes the soft folds of pastel-colored fabric in Tamara Kostianovsky’s sculptures—life-sized trunks splayed across the gallery floor, innards exposed—so quietly disturbing. The title of her exhibition at Paris’s Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, “Nature Made Flesh,” underscores this parallel of extremities. Citing the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world,” which posits an elemental matrix bodily and worldly matter, Kostianovsky probes a corporeal way of being in the world, one she witnessed firsthand as a child in her father’s surgical practice. Describing an early familiarity with blood, fat, and skin, the artist transforms fabric into flesh and uses that flesh to sculpt a fantastical world. The effect can be whimsical, as in her array of fabric mushrooms that spread across a tree stump pinned to the wall. Incorporating black fabric into a number of pieces, referencing recent forest fires and their attendant burning and decay, Kostianovsky signals that her world is not entirely separate from our own.

Though Kostianovsky’s sculptures are made from discarded textiles, they nonetheless have the clean, sweet softness of freshly tumbled laundry. She cites the origins of her practice in an accidentally shrunken garment. Some of her pieces are made of her father’s clothes, invoking the lingering intimacy that comes from a textile’s proximity to the body. The exhibition program calls this “upcycling,” but it’s much more than a useful convenience or a signal of sustainability: feeling the echo of a T-shirt’s wearer in the veining of a tree reminds us of the interconnectedness of our material world.

In other sculptures, however, Kostianovsky pushes against the softness of her chosen medium. A series of carcasses titled “Tropical Abattoir,” (2019–23), hung as if in a meat locker, couple the excruciating detail of caricature with the bright color of cartoons. Made from upholstery fabric, the stuffed skins have a homey familiarity that makes the violence of their presentation all the more jarring.

Emerging from exaggerated ribs are rare birds made of equally vibrant fabrics, a combination of life and death that Kostianovsky calls “tropical abattoir” in reference to her upbringing in Argentina. The work hangs in canny dialogue with the museum’s collections: an 18th-century still life on the opposite wall is a reminder that flayed flesh has long been a subject of art. Housed in a 17th-century mansion filled with both period pieces and artefacts of the history of hunting, the museum relies on a robust program of contemporary art to generate critical reflection on the relationship between humans and nature.

What is the upshot of seeing the world as flesh? Kostianovsky’s work suggests embodied entanglement can be a means of repairing a colonialist approach to nature, especially when surrounded by reminders of extractive exoticism fashionable amongst the European aristocrats who would have been the original inhabitants of the museum’s opulent rooms. Her “Foul Decorations” (2020) series hews most closely to the lavish style of the French Rococo. The series is modeled on wallpaper featuring tropical flora and fauna—often including imaginary birds—that was designed to transport its beholders to an elusive paradise underwritten by the insidious work of colonialism. In Kostianovsky’s recreation, three-dimensional fabric birds “invade” the space, taking over the walls and by extension, the environment. Based on indigenous rather than imaginary fowl, Kostianovsky’s work offers the birds a kind of homecoming, returning them to their native environments. Given a dimensionality absent in the original wallpaper, the birds sound an ultimately optimistic note. While the show does not shy away from representing decay and destruction, the irrepressible vibrancy of Kostianovsky’s work conjures a world that feels vividly alive.