Art Photos mixed

Doha Bay, known as the Art Mill, into a vast new gallery for Qatar Museums. The Santiago-based company beat off eight other finalists to design the new space, which is located east of the Museum of Islamic Art.According to the competition brief announced by Malcolm Reading Consultants, the Art Mill will measure up to 80,000 sq. metres and "predominantly" comprise gallery and exhibition space. To put the Doha flour mill into perspective, London's Tate Modern, which is housed in a former power station, measures around 55,000 sq. metres of internal space.
The project also includes a conservation centre and museum storage "to match the diversity of the collection" as well as education, conference and event spaces. A spokeswoman for Qatar Museums declined to comment on the purpose of the new venue, and whether it will house Qatar's Modern and contemporary art collection or host international loan exhibitions.

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The Tehran-based artist Atena Farghadani, who was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for her satirical cartoons depicting members of the Iranian government as monkeys and goats, says she is planning an exhibition of her protest art. Speaking one year after her release from Evin prison, Farghadani says gallery owners in Tehran are too scared to mount such a show, but that she remains undeterred, posting critical works to Facebook and Instagram.



“I don’t intend to stop protesting or making political art,” Farghadani says in a podcast produced by Amnesty International. “My family is always checking up on me to see what drawings and cartoons I am producing. As I don't want to leave Iran, they get worried about me. But art is like a part of me and I can’t give up on political or protest art.”

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Matt Hancock, the UK minister for digital and culture, has promised that the government’s Brexit negotiators will support the interests of the creative industries. Speaking at a pre-election meeting organised by the Creative Industries Federation, he said only the Conservatives could deliver “the best possible Brexit deal”.

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Conservators from the Manchester Museum painstakingly removed a century of grime from around 25 objects used as life science teaching aids ahead of an exhibition opening this month that presents them as works of art. The treated pieces, many of which have never been on display before, are from the University of Manchester’s collection.

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The art world is skewered in The Square, the Swedish film that has scooped the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival. According to the UK newspaper The Telegraph, the movie, directed by Ruben Ostlund, is a “blackly comic send-up of the art world’s pretensions and neuroses”.

It centres on the director of a contemporary art gallery who makes a splash with a new performance art space called The Square. Peter Bradshaw reports in The Guardian that the most excruciating part is a formal dinner for patrons who encounter performance artist Oleg dressed as an ape.

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After a mediation held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Wednesday, an agreement has been reached that will see Sam Durants Scaffold sculpture dismantled and burned, in a ceremony overseen by Dakota elders. The work, which references US state-sanctioned hangings, raised an outcry among Native American groups when it was installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden because of its recreation of a historic gallows used in 1862 to hang 38 Dakota men executed by the US Army in Mankato, Minnesota.

The agreement is the first step for the Walker in a long process to rebuild trust with the Dakota and Native communities throughout Minnesota, the museums director, Olga Viso, said at a press conference. Were grateful to the traditional Dakota leaders for their wisdom and patience in this process.

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Nearly a decade ago, a Seattle-based collector visiting New Haven, Connecticut, asked to see three works from the 1920s and 1930s by the artist Thomas Wilfred in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. The objects, two strangely resembling flatscreen televisions and one a lamp on a table, had remained deep in storage for decades. When the collector asked the accompanying curator and conservators to plug in and switch on the works, they were understandably hesitant. “One of us grabbed a fire extinguisher, just in case,” says Keely Orgeman, Yale’s assistant curator of American painting and sculpture, who has organised the gallery’s current survey of Wilfred’s light works. “But when we plugged the first one in, the ceiling was instantly filled with this multicoloured, swirling vortex.”

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Digital giant Google has partnered with 180 institutions, schools and archives around the world for a new online project focusing on the history of fashion.

We Wear Culture, which launched on the Google Arts & Culture website and mobile apps looks at “how fashion is stitched into the fabric of our societies”, according to a press release. "We live in a world were there's a divide between high culture and popular culture and we believe there really is no division," said Amit Sood, the director of Google's Cultural Institute, at a launch of the project at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on Thursday. He explained that the fashion platform developed through Google's work with museums digitising their collections and discovering there were connections to be drawn between arts and culture. The We Wear Culture platform, which Sood describes as "a rabbit hole", follows these relationships through different routes. "You don't have to have one pathway to experience culture, you can have many."

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Pierre Huyghe, After Alife Ahead (2017)
Former ice rink, Steinfurterstrasse 113-115



If you are expecting to see site-specific works at Sculpture Projects Münster (Skulptur Projekte Münster), which opened this weekend, you will not be disappointed. Nicole Eisenman’s jolly fountain on the Promenade (a public path on the site of the former city walls) and Nairy Baghramian’s bronze sculpture in front of the Baroque Erbdrostenhof, a popular site chosen by artists in the past, are both large-scale works that deal directly with their surroundings.

But the curators of this year’s edition - Kasper König, Britta Peters and Marianne Wagner - are deliberately pushing the boundaries of what can be called public sculpture. Performances and digital works abound, while videos are screened in nightclubs and others can only be viewed on your smartphone. Created in 1977 in response to the uproar that followed a proposal to install an inoffensive sculpture by the US Minimalist artist George Rickey, the sculpture show, which takes place every ten years, has become one of the art world’s most anticipated events. For the first time, Sculpture Projects Münster*extends to the industrial city of Marl this year. Here are five unmissable works that you can see until 1 October.


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