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.

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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.

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Turkish authorities have banned an exhibition that explores the art and history of the country’s transgender community, the Art Newspaper reported Thursday. Authorities shut down the exhibition, titled “Turn and See Back: Revisiting Trans Revolutions in Turkey,” by an order of a district governor who said the show “incited the public to hatred.”

“Turn and See Back” was staged at the non-profit space Depo Istanbul, which was established by Osman Kavala, a Turkish arts administrator who was arrested by the Turkish government in 2017 and placed in solitary confinement following accusations that he had helped fund terrorist groups and led an organization that supported the failed military coup in 2016.

Turkey’s right-wing populist president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s has long led a crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community, including blocking the Muslim world’s largest LGBTQ+ march, Istanbul Pride, since 2015 and labelling LGBTQ+ individuals as “deviants.” 

“Calling people ‘illegal’ is part of a process that now aims to dehumanize and criminalize LGBT+ people,” Jiyan Andiç, the show’s co-curator, told TAN. “This exhibition was a way of saying: ‘We are not a threat, perverts or groups managed from abroad, but we have always been here.’” Andiç emphasized that the exhibition aimed to humanize and represent the transgender community. Despite promoting the show mostly by word of mouth, it attracted hundreds of visitors. 

Depo Istanbul plans to appeal the ban, but said it remains doubtful of a successful reversal. The editor of the online art journal Argonotlar, Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, who has been tracking censorship in Turkey, told the Art Newspaper that the show’s cancellation was unique: the Turkish government hasn’t overtly banned an art show in at least a decade.

A union representing faculty and staff members at the University of the Arts has filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the Philadelphia art school, which abruptly shuttered earlier this summer.

The complaint, filed with the National Labor Relations Board, alleges that the school declined to “furnish information” following attempts the negotiate severance pay and other matters in the wake of the school’s closure this past June. News of the complaint was first reported by Artnet News on Thursday.

A representative for UArts did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

This complaint comes as UArts faces another pending legal action: a class action lawsuit from nine employees who allege that the school broke the law by failing to provide 60 days’ notice, as is required for mass closures or layoffs of more than 100 people. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office and state officials have also said they are investigating the school.

Prior to its closure on June 7, UArts held a reputation as one of the nation’s most high-profile art schools. It had opened 148 years ago, and its list of alumni included Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Alex Da Corte, and Deborah Willis.

When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak took the stage for the final talk on Wednesday at the Christie’s Art + Tech Summit, a sea of iPhones rose into the air to photograph tech’s living legend. And while Wozniak came off as the archetypal excitable inventor, he quickly bemoaned tech companies’ recent turn away from making reliable, problem-solving products. 

“I see two digital worlds,” Wozniak said. The first, he said, was the moment he came up in, dominated by the invention of new products people could buy. The second is the present, with its focus on endless updates and subscription plans. It’s perhaps no surprise then that Wozniak spoke fairly derisively about artificial intelligence, an ill-defined, hyped technology with vague applications that has nevertheless raked in hundreds of billions of dollars in private capital (as well as government subsidies) in the US alone, according to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

“I used to ride my bicycle over to the Stanford campus to watch a machine pick up a blue ball and put it into a blue box,” Wozniak said. “It only understood simple rules and now it understands more.” 

Wozniak openly struggled with the imbalance between the value of the new technology and the investment it has garnered, not to mention the high costs it incurs—and he wasn’t the only one at the conference to do so.

Though Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame said he made a nice chunk of change investing in NVIDIA, a leading AI company, he spent most of his talk focusing on buying watches, advertising on cable, and doing business in the UAE. When it comes to AI, O’Leary said, the industry is quickly approaching the “show me” phase and finding out that most of what hyped-up tech founders call AI is really just run-of-the-mill data mining and science. 

If you’ve ever wondered how noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo—famously depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa—lived, look no further than a historic 700-year-old villa outside Florence, Italy, that recently hit the market.

The estate, now on sale for $19.6 million, is located on 66 acres among the Scandicci countryside. The villa was constructed around 1300 and by 1498 was owned by the Giocondo family, not long before Leonardo painted Lisa. It eventually passed to the Antinori family, from which it derives its name as the Villa Antinori di Monte Aguglioni.

Complete with four floors, the villa is roughly 43,000 square feet, including 14 bedrooms and 15 full baths. An entrance through an iron gate leads to a cypress-lined path into the garden and service entrance. It also boasts an entrance hall, five lounges, a dining room, a library, and an at-home gym, as well as also staff quarters, an elevator, a second floor terrace, and an antique iron veranda.

Though there have been renovations over the centuries, the residence still maintains many period details, among them a polygonally planned private chapel which serves as a “clear example of seventeenth-century religious architecture,” according to the listing.

Additional buildings on the property include a caretaker’s house, an orangery, a greenhouse, and varied agricultural buildings.

April 25 – July 27, 2024

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April 28 – July 21, 2024

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June 7 – July 13, 2024

April 26 – July 13, 2024

June 14 – July 14, 2024

May 24 – July 14, 2024

June 1 – July 13, 2024

May 9 – July 8, 2024

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EARLIEST NARRATIVE PAINTING. New evidence backs findings that the earliest known cave paintings were not made in Europe, and reveals they were older than first thought. Thanks to new dating technology, researchers have determined that a newly discovered artwork in the Indonesian Leang Karampuang cave on the island of Sulawesi is now the world’s oldest-known cave art, reports Reuters. The dark red depiction of a large pig and three small, human-like figures was created a minimum of 51,200 years ago, according to researchers using new laser dating technology, which analyzes calcium carbonate crystals on top of the painting. This makes the image the oldest evidence of narrative storytelling in art. “There is something happening between these figures. A story is being told,” said Griffith University archeologist Adam Brumm, one of the study leaders who published their findings in the journal Nature. Another cave painting in Sulawesi was re-dated using the new technology to be at least 48,000 years old, all of which predate the earliest, undisputed European cave paintings. “This discovery of very old cave art in Indonesia drives home the point that Europe was not the birthplace of cave art, as had long been assumed,” said Brumm.

VIRGIN MARY VANDALISM. A new, wooden statue depicting Mary giving birth to Jesus, conceived by Esther Strauss and carved by Theresa Limberger, was beheaded with a saw on July 1, in Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, not long after it was installed. Police have begun an investigation and are looking into an apparent letter of confession posted on the platform Telegram, signed “Catholic Resistance,” reports the dpa and the German Press Agency. The controversial statue was intended to encourage discussion, as part of a project about female roles and gender equality, according to the National Catholic Reporter. The vandalized art piece showing a Mary in labor, her full belly and spread legs exposed, will remain on display until mid-July, though it will now be kept in the dark and placed behind a glass door. “You shouldn’t see the image of the destroyed sculpture,” a spokesperson told dpa, adding no photos were published of the beheaded statue. “This violence is an expression of the fact that there are still people who question women’s rights to their own bodies. We must take a firm stand against this, said the Vienna-based Strauss in a statement.

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9 min read

This blog post was written and researched by Thomas Sturgess

As an undergraduate history student at Oxford Brookes University, I get to explore a wide range of historical topics. My personal interests in political and cultural history were complemented by my placement at MOX as I could explore a unique part of Oxford’s history and further my research skills.

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History

The system of twinned towns in the UK is not one commonly known to the public, despite its long history dating back to the end of World War 2. In an effort to foster peaceful relations, various towns and cities in European countries such as Germany, France, and the Netherlands were formally linked to locations in the UK; the earliest established links included the likes of Dresden and Coventry, who both suffered heavy damage from bombings, and Oxford’s own link to the Dutch town of Leiden. From the 1970s to the 2000s, the town twinning scheme was boosted by the expansion of the European Economic Council (later European Union), and international events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991. By 2006, there were over 2000 formally twinned UK towns and localities. In recent years, due to a lack of resources within local governments, some have come to question the value and necessity of town twinning outside of economic and trade advantages, however the cultural and educational opportunities should not be understated. Oxford is one of the leading cities in the UK for town twinning, with its most recent twin being Padua, Italy in 2019 – home to Italy’s second oldest university, and Europe’s oldest covered market, Padua is home to many students and cyclists just like Oxford!

The Bangkok Art Biennale has announced its lineup of the 45 local and international artists set to participate in its fourth edition, scheduled to open on October 25.

The artists hail from 28 countries and according to organizers, approximately 25 percent of the works featured will have never been exhibited before.

The artists include Algerian-French installation artist Adel Abdessemed, Italian ceramicist and visual artist Chiara Camoni, Singaporean time-based media artist Priyageetha Dia, French-American multi-media artist Camille Henrot, South Korean sculpture designer Choi Jeong Hwa, Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh, Japanese multidisciplinary artist Aki Inomata, Scandinavian sculptural artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Hong Kong-based conceptual artist Isaac Chong Wai, and New Zealand video artist Lisa Reihana. Also included will be works by French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, German artist Joseph Beuys and Guerreiro do Divino Amor, who represented Switzerland at the most recent Venice Biennale.

The theme of the 4th edition is “Nurture Gaia”, showcasing artworks exploring femininity and ecology and the event will take place across nine venues across Thailand’s capital city. The theme was announced last October.

This year’s venues include local museums, galleries, a shopping mall as well as three ancient heritage sites: Temple of Dawn (Wat Arun), Temple of the Reclining Buddha (Wat Pho), and Temple of Iron Fences (Wat Prayoon).

Real estate mogul and arts patron Jorge Pérez slammed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, calling the politician’s recent slashing of arts and culture grants from the state budget “a horrible message to send” to the people of Florida.

As the chairman and chief executive of the Related Group, Pérez has built a real estate empire in Miami and donated hundreds of millions to arts organizations in the city, including $80 million to a contemporary art museum that bears his name.

“A lot of the people who are coming from New York are involved in the arts, participate in the arts,” Pérez, who has appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list, said in an interview with Bloomberg about the budget cuts. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”

Last summer, Miami Beach sold $97.6 million of municipal debt to help fund theaters, concert venues, and museums, in push to cleanse the city of it’s “Spring Break or Bust” reputation.

Earlier this month, DeSantis vetoed more than $32 million in arts and culture grants from the 2025 state budget, which led both politicians and supporters of the arts to warn that the move could disadvantage institutions across Florida state.