Artist Sin Wai Kin’s practice as a storyteller draws attention to the gaps between the stories we are told and the lives we live, asking who is given the power to tell us these stories and what these stories enforce. The London-based artist’s latest film, Dreaming the End, compounds this thinking. As so often is the case within Wai Kin’s practice, this work looks at our relationships to our bodies, our bodies’ relationship to the world, and how, in the space between these two, our sense of identity manifests.

Commissioned by the Fondazione Memmo in Rome and made on location around the city over the course of a year, the film features characters which regularly populate Wai Kin’s work, The Storyteller and Change, who move through a looping narrative rich with references, cycles, transitions, and the binding of language, taking tropes from various cinematic genres like thriller, noir, and fantasy to bring this to bear.

As we sat in the Fondazione’s courtyard earlier this year, Wai Kin spoke of their connection to the city. “Rome is a city of narrative and of history so that had to be something that was deeply entrenched in the work,” they said. “My practice is so much about storytelling, and what better place to think about the history of storytelling than Rome, where everywhere you turn there is architecture or a monument that is solidifying history—there is an inevitability of this history and truth and power.”

Sin Wai Kin, Dreaming the End (film still), 2023.

The film is rich with layers and sited in the city’s infamous architecture: the gardens of Villa Medici, the interior of Palazzo Ruspoli, and the spaces of Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (now owned by Fendi). This anchor to the real is what gives the work its potential, makes the abstract tangible. Dreaming the End follows the characters as they move through the winding narrative of talking statues, triangular apples, and endless staircases. There is a surreal edge within the work that is amplified by speculative fictions that course through much of Wai Kin’s oeuvre.

“I was trying to think about all these narratives in this work and create a fantasy that speaks to reality more accurately than most nonfiction,” Wai Kin said.

A new annual initiative aimed at supporting experimental artists around the world is being launched by Tate Modern.

Titled the Infinities Commission, it is intended to to honor artists “working in highly inventive ways, freely crossing a variety of disciplines to create speculative, disruptive, or immersive projects that sit outside conventional artistic categories,” as Catherine Wood, director of programs at Tate Modern, said in a statement. “The Infinities Commission will give that kind of innovative work a home at Tate Modern and allow a broader public to experience it.”

Tate Modern already facilitates another major commission series that sees sizable works debut in its Turbine Hall. The Turbine Hall commissions are closely watched, and the Infinities Commissions are likely to be as well.

The prize will be granted to an artist by a panel of experts. The selected artist will create a new monumental work that will premiere in the Tanks—the museum’s dedicated performance, film, and installation spaces—the following spring. Additionally, three other artists will be selected by the panel to receive £10,000 (roughly $12,215) for the research and development of their work. All recipients will then discuss their practice at a public event.

The inaugural selection panel includes musician and artist Brian Eno, critic and curator Oulimata Gueye, artist Anne Imhof, artistic director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst Andrea Lissoni, and executive director and chief curator of New York’s the Kitchen Legacy Russell.

An Isa Genzken sculpture was withdrawn from a Sotheby’s auction after a strange series of events that involved an appearance on a German equivalent to Antiques Roadshow, scrutiny over the piece’s seller, and a request from the artist’s lawyer.

The Genzken sculpture, a 2011 piece called Weltempfänger (World Receiver), is a concrete block with two antennae sticking out of it. The piece had been given the coveted Lot 1 placement in an online sale held by Sotheby’s Cologne office. The sale had listed the work as coming from “an important private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia,” and placed the estimate at 50,000 euros.

“Sotheby’s has withdrawn the work in agreement with the consignor, and [provides] no further detail at this stage,” a representative for the house said in a statement, adding that the work was “not withdrawn on authenticity grounds.”

Weltempfänger was to be sold as her current survey at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin continues to receive acclaim. (That exhibition even features other “Weltempfänger” sculptures.) But the work never made it to auction as the German and Austrian press speculated over how it came to sale in the first place.

Earlier this month, the German art publication Monopol noted that the sculpture was being sold at Sotheby’s not long after it had appeared on Bares für Rares, a popular TV series aired by ZDF in which participants bring with them an object they believe to be rare and valuable, then are given the opportunity to sell it to experts. The episode with the Genzken sculpture was broadcast on September 6; the Sotheby’s sale began on September 14 and closed bidding on September 21.

The Wolfgang Hahn Prize, one of the world’s biggest art awards, has this year gone to Anna Boghiguian, an artist whose work has been seen widely on the biennial circuit. She will now take home 100,000 euros (about $106,000) and will see her work acquired by Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, which facilitates the award.

Boghiguian, who was born in Egypt and is of Armenian origins, is well-known for work that mines various historical happenings for political meaning, taking up subjects such as the salt trade and Virginia Woolf’s writing. Her work frequently takes the form of vast installations composed of painted figures that are arranged to fill rooms.

In recent years, Boghiguian has risen to international fame thanks to her appearance in many notable biennials. After showing at the 2012 edition of Documenta, she won the Golden Lion for her Armenian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a jury member for the prize who curated Boghiguian’s work into her editions of Documenta and the Istanbul Biennial, said in a statement, “Her work’s poetry and uniqueness as well as her directness and expressivity fit ideally into the Museum Ludwig’s collection with its strong expressionist positions. Anna Boghiguian has been widely recognized internationally only recently, over the last ten years, so that this award is for a highly topical artist, rather than for a lifetime achievement. She is totally contemporary in her themes and in the connections she draws through her readings, travels and internet searches, between historical stories and political and aesthetic discussions of our present world.”

Next month, Boghiguian will be the subject of a solo show at the Power Plant in Toronto, where she is set to show recent works dealing with the concept of democracy as well as older books made while she lived in cities in Canada.

House Republicans really don’t want to hear from Rudy Giuliani.

Though their impeachment crusade grew out of the former New York City mayor’s anti-Biden machinations, the GOP-led House Oversight Committee spent much of Thursday’s impeachment inquiry hearing voting down repeated efforts by Democrats to subpoena Giuliani and Lev Parnas, his former sidekick.

But Republican attempts to limit what they hear about Giuliani’s activities apparently go further than a few committee votes, according to an FBI whistleblower. In a memo obtained by Mother Jones, Johnathan Buma—an FBI agent who says he conducted foreign influence investigations— alleges that investigators working for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told him in June that they were not interested in what he knew about Giuliani potentially being “compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.

The memo suggests that Republican investigators privately imposed the same fact-finding limitations Democrats highlighted on Thursday: GOP lawmakers say they want to investigate allegations about Joe Biden, but they appear reluctant to scrutinize the origin of their own probe or turn up details that undermine their preferred narrative. Judiciary Committee staff dispute Buma’s allegations, telling Mother Jones that his account of his interactions with House investigators isn’t accurate. (The Judiciary and Ways and Means Committees are working on the Biden investigation with the House Oversight Committee, which held Thursday’s hearing.)

As Insider, the New Yorker and others have previously reported, Buma—who originally filed a whistleblower complaint with the FBI last year—submitted a statement to the House Judiciary Committee in April 2023. He sent another statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. (Here is Buma’s full statement to the House committee, which recently became public.) 

In mid-September, I was standing in Times Square, the Disney Store on one side of me and a Sephora on the other, watching a collaborative performance by the noise artists Dis Fig and SOUR VISION. At first, the scene was surreal. But, as it went on, it began to make more sense. What neighborhood is more overwhelming than Times Square? What music is more abrasive than noise?

The juxtaposition was exciting; it was two opposite, yet equally extreme, poles of New York City culture coming together. The performance was was part of PUNK SHOW, a free one-day festival organized by Times Square Arts and NEW INC, a creative incubator founded in 2014 by the New Museum.

For Salome Asega, the director of NEW INC and a Las Vegas native, the pairing felt natural. “It’s a little taste of home, for sure,” she said early in the night about the sensory overload of Times Square. “It’s also just a dynamic part of the city where worlds collide.”

Helping worlds collide is at the heart of NEW INC, whose mission is to support creative practitioners working across a wide variety of mediums, from art and design to technology, science, and architecture. Now in its tenth year, the cultural incubator was the first of its kind when it was founded.

“I like to say it’s a home for the misfits, for the people who don’t neatly fit into any one discipline,” Asega said.

In an office-building lobby in San Francisco, there is a wall where about one hundred lava lamps simultaneously flow. They are not just decorating the wall; they are helping to encrypt the internet. 

The lava wall is owned by a software company called Cloudflare. A camera photographs the lava lamps, whose patterns are constantly shifting. Each image is then digitized and stored as a series of numbers. This analog process produces sequences that, in their organic variance, are more unpredictable than anything a computer could generate on its own. With the help of its lava lamps, Cloudflare encrypts at least 10 percent of global web traffic.

As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.

Bereft, I went on the internet, where I quickly learned that we were in the midst of a lava lamp shortage. It was 2022 and Schylling, the leading U.S. manufacturer of lava lamps, had temporarily shut down the LAVA® online store, citing supply chain issues. I turned to eBay, where price gouging meant that most of the available lava lamps were going for hundreds of dollars. In a panic, I made lowball offers on the only three listed for under thirty. I didn’t expect to, but I won them all. 

Dianne Feinstein, the five-time senator from California, has died, according to multiple reports. She was 90.

A towering figure in both California and US politics, Feinstein was the longest-serving female senator in US history. Our 2017 feature on the trailblazing Democrat:

People who know Feinstein say the [2016] election has been transformative for her. “Trump injects an entirely new level of outrage,” Orville Schell, director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society and a longtime Feinstein friend, told me. With the president going after institutions that Feinstein has historically been aligned with—chief among them the intelligence establishment—Schell believes she will find a middle-of-the-road position increasingly untenable.

“Dianne is like the canary in the mine shaft,” he says. “The last bastion of bridge building in the Senate may be giving up.”

But burning a few bridges may also be the only way for Feinstein to survive politically. Nearly a quarter century into her Senate career, she has remained popular with voters, who reelected her in 2012 with a 62.5 percent majority. But progressive Democrats have been frustrated with her old-school style and steadfast defense of the security state. 

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Marcus, Vish, Andy and Jim look ahead to the Premier League weekend, featuring the clash of the dads…

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

By the time superintendent David Smith decided to close Joshua Tree national park on January 7, 2019, the list of problems was already long. Tire tracks wove through the wilderness mapping a path of destruction where rare plants had been crushed and trees toppled. Charred remains of illegal campfires dotted the desert, and historic cultural artifacts had been plundered. Trash piles were growing, vault toilets were overflowing and park security workers were being pushed to their limits.

It was week three in what would become the longest shutdown of the US government, and the famed California park was feeling the consequences of operating without key staff, services and resources. To protect the park and its workers, it would have to close, Smith thought.

“It is difficult for the parks service to do their jobs when Congress doesn’t give them the resources they need.”

But the Trump administration, which demanded national parks remain accessible throughout the shutdown, wasn’t willing to change course. In a controversial move, David Bernhardt, who had only recently been appointed acting secretary of the interior, called Smith and ordered him to keep the gates open.

By the end of the 35-day shutdown, irreversible damage had been inflicted on Joshua Tree’s ecosystems, its wild, remote landscapes thrust into the political turmoil unfolding thousands of miles away.