the same as it has for centuries. Uzbekistan is modernising fast but the plov, the bread, the skewers of lamb (and horse meat) ensures the traditions stay alive and national identity of preserved.
Read more: https://www.boisdale.co.uk/magazine/uzbekistan-food
Bit of an odd photo show but one with some striking images.
Read more: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/richard-holledge-dark-tales-the-photo-exhibition-that-celebrates-british-weirdness/
I noticed Ukrainian cartoonist Oleksiy Kustovsky’s work on Facebook. Really quite something. He didn’t want to be interviewed but took questions by email. But the imagery does the talking
Richard Dadd spent most of his life in an asylum for murdering his father. But was he really a ‘lunatic’? Times have changed but his work survives.
I met the Uzbekistani artist Vyacheslav Akhunov in his suitably shabby studio in a Soviet era block in the the country’s capital Tashkent. What a story he has to tell, from the days when any kind of conceptual or dissident art was banned to today when the work is on display at the Venice Biennale.
Read more: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/richard-holledge-the-artist-who-hid-his-best-work-under-a-desk/
In the studio, alongside a well worn military jacket
Here’s a piece I wrote for the London restaurant to the stars and over-refreshed hacks, Boisdale
Some years ago I was in Colombia, writing about the art scene, meetings artists and gallerists. The one artist they all referred to with respect and love was Beatriz Gonzalez. I was lucky enough to have the time to visit her great work Auras Anónimas in Bogota’s main cemetery. She lined the wall of a crumbling columbarium, where urns are placed in niches, with 8,956 silhouettes in silk-screen prints of the cargueros, the porters, who carried the dead to their rest. It was moving to see the people who had lost the ones they love visiting the cemetery.
The new photo museum in Rotterdam is warehouse of visual treats. Just how do you pick the best images out of many millions?
Lorenzo Tugnoli spent years photographing the wars in Afghanistan but he felt his work never really reflected the reality of the peoples’ lives. Until now:
Deep in the mining region of Brazil’s Minas Gerais, the heart of the old gold mines, is a man-made tropical jungle replete with galleries and works of art. And a snake.
A moving exhibition at the small P21 gallery in London avoided direct political messages, did not show the worst of the destruction and despair. But did produce images as works of art, and as images of resilience and some hope.
Read more: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/richard-holledge-dance-against-oblivion/
Splendid read about the young men and women who thought they had found the answer to the world’s ills in Soviet Russia and fought fascism with art
A small, thoughtful exhibition at the Wellcome Gallery looks at the history of water use and misuse and has salutary warnings about what might come next - will come next - if the world doesn’t react.
The photographs of Paz Erraruziz are a painful reminder that fascists from left or right have no truck with individual liberties. She braved the terror of Augusto Pinochet’s regime to record images of the dispossessed, the lonely and the disenfranchised
Read more: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/richard-holledge-eyes-from-the-shadows/
Photographer Zed Nelson exposes the commodification of nature in this, his latest collection. He exposes a world in which nothing is quite what it seems. Actually, not at all what it seems.
I met the late Barry Fantoni a few years ago. Splendidly his own man
Private Eye’s Barry Fantoni is in magnanimous mood. “Cartoonists in this country are very good,” he says. “They are as good as they get.”
But then, in a seamless volte face worthy of Eye heroine Glenda Slagg herself, he goes off: “Martin Rowson is rubbish; Peter Brookes? Rubbish; Nick Garland; he’s rubbish - the only joke he’s got is that ‘with apologies to....’ formula.”
So that’s the cartoonists for The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph dispensed with.
Donthca just love him. Fantoni joined Private Eye in 1963, almost at the birth of the magazine and the satire era. His cartoon the spiky Scenes You Seldom See still decorates the letters page and as EJ Thribb he pens Poetry Corner, the unpoetic tribute to the departed which starts ‘So. Farewell Then....’
“I don’t feel comfortable unless I am having a rage at something,” he says. “I still write letters to newspapers. I just can’t stop.”
Now he is putting himself up for scrutiny - maybe even a rubbishing - by holding a show of his cartoons as well as his landscapes and portraits.
“The show is a reaction to the fact that my mum died last year. She paid for me to go to Camberwell Art College when I was 14 so I thought I would put on an exhibition to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday.”
Fantoni produced a pocket cartoon for The Times during the Eighties and another for the now-defunct The Listener for 21 years.
“It all started for me when I held an exhibition on New Year’s Eve, 1962,” says the 69-year-old. “The art critic of the Daily Express came for a drink and a story. He had seen in the catalogue a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh in his underwear surrounded by cut out outfits such as a boy scout’s uniform and a kilt.
“These days it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow but by lunch time it was on the front page of the Evening Standard. Shock! What have they done to the Duke of Edinburgh?
“Richard Ingrams, who was editor of Private Eye, saw it and asked me to work there and it’s been virtually the same four or five of us who were there at the start who do the pages of jokes in the middle.
“Private Eye seems to be at its strongest when it attacks the way the media reports stories rather than attacking the institutions themselves. What I find obscene is that the writing is so obviously bogus.
“Most papers are like a weather vane. They don’t have a view, just register where the wind is blowing. Columnists are like Glenda Slagg, incapable of understanding anything much more than PR handouts. They are being paid to write even though they have no opinions at all.”
Do any cartoonists make the grade?
“I think Vicky of The Mirror in the Fifties and Sixties got it right all the time and so did David Low of the Standard. They could draw properly.
“Look at the Osbert Lancaster’s cartoons - they are still relevant, they could have been drawn yesterday. Look at the work of Leslie Illingworth who was at his best in his Punch days. He produced full pages of political comment which, artistically, were as good as it gets. Beautiful.
“The two funniest cartoonists of my generation were Bill Tidy, who did The Cloggies and Larry, who studied painting and drawing and knew you had to make people look funny in cartoons. I like John Husband’s work and I think Michael Heath is exceptionally good. He is observant, he is current and you know exactly who you are looking at when you look at one of his figures.”
But just in case it sounds as if he’s mellowing in his old age he even has a swipe at Private Eye itself.
“The cartoons are funny but I don’t think the drawings are very good. Some are just like hand writing aren’t they? I think you could draw better than that.”
Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye Thomas Williams, Old Bond Street 22 April – 22 May 2009
This is a piece I wrote for the New European. The work of these young Ukrainian photographers is mightily impressive.
There is little to lift Ukrainian photographer Rehina Bukvuch from her mood of bleak pessimism.
“We believe Russia is preparing for another offensive. There is no sense of a ceasefire, on the contrary Russia is bombing us more than ever. We are anxious about Trump and his policies but in reality we have no other choice.
“So for us, if the Russia comes all of this will end. We will either have to leave our country or be sent to a gulag - there will be no life for us. We know Russia’s policies and if they occupy us they will try to completely erase us so that Ukraine never resists again.”
The ‘all’ she refers to is, counter-intuitively, an art scene ‘thriving like never before’ with new galleries and exhibition openings as well as a growing focus on Ukrainian authors.
It is a scene she has contributed to as part of an imaginative scheme to inspire artists who have been compelled to swap camera or paintbrush for guns and drones by connecting them with artists who can work in safety far from the conflict.
The driving force behind the project, cultural activist Alona Karavai, says: “We wondered how we could help artists who were on the front. We thought, okay, we can help keep alive their sensibility by connecting them using emails, drawings, letters and photographs and encouraging them to work in tandem to create works, however small, however simple.
“The important thing is that the voice of the artists on the front line can still be heard.”
Rehina Bukvuch compiled a photo album for artist-turned-soldier Yevhen Korshunov, a friend from the youthful art scene they shared in Kyiv before the war
When he returns from the action, he will find the album - only three inches by 1.5 - filled with pictures of old friends and warm messages such as ‘Zhenya, warm hugs and a little kiss for you’ sealed with an extravagant smacker. He will be reminded of his peripatetic life on the front line where he is being moved from billet to shabby billet by quirky photographs which he took himself and sent to Bukvuch.
The album speaks of loneliness and dislocation, but it is a reminder of a time neither will forget and a small but eloquent gesture of defiance against the ever present threat of defeat and destruction.
The results of these ‘tandem’ works have been shown in an exhibition at an art centre, Asortymentna Kimnata in the small town of Ivano-Frankivsk, deep in the Carpathian mountains about 350 miles west of Kyiv. The place is also temporary home to 40 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) who have the opportunity to join other artists in a fever of creativity, including a display of deceptively colourful paintings by women, most of them amateurs. Deceptive because they are all grieving someone lost in the war.
The album is one of the more low key contributions to the show which is called Do Toads Sing in the Walls? after an artist wrote a song about toads which had settled in the buildings where his unit was stationed. Others are more disturbing.
While recovering from a wound in hospital, Klementyna Kvindt, a drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, complemented her recordings of birdsong with documents, photos, and poems which were collated in a book made of zinc by Olha Babak. Words set against stormy landscapes, or simply on the grey of the metal create a mood which is both eerie and forbidding.
The poems of Yulia Bondar are cries of anguish delivered in a monotone: I bury spring in the black soil / of my barren heart / How many springs lie buried / in this black land? and her words are matched with animated drawings by Mashyka Vyshedska. Hands reach up to bring succour to a woman, only to fade away, flowers briefly bloom and die. A serpent curls around a female torso, leaving behind bloody scars.
The very fact that the works have overcome the constraints of geography and the challenges of communication is in itself a triumph, yet as Karavai, herself an IDP having been forced to flee Donetsk in 2014 when the Russians invaded, acknowledges this kind of grass roots activity will be targeted by the enemy.
“Putin wants to destroy our traditions, our free cultural expression,” she says, but insists that the venture is not merely about promoting national pride.
“It is not about nationalism,” she says. “But more about preserving a culture which is free and democratic. For me, art is a way of existence, of people being together, being fair to each other, and this for me, in a way, is the civilisation which Ukraine is fighting for against Russia. It's not about the Ukrainian nation against the Russian nation, but about one way of living, and art for me, is a part of this way of living. The civilisation we are protecting, is outside the notion of nation.”
That explains why the contributions are more reflective than the ugly images of death and destruction which are horribly routine in newspapers, social media and TV.
It’s a shift recognised by Kateryna Radchenko, curator of the Odesa Photo Days festival, who says: “On February 24, 2022 - literally overnight - every photographer, visual artist, and ordinary citizen with a camera became a documentarian of the war, often without training or proper gear.
“They became witnesses, transforming their cameras into tools to collect evidence of this unjust war, the destruction of cities, architectural heritage, and infrastructure; the bodies of killed civilians; torture and interrogation chambers. They took massive numbers of selfies, firstly to share with their families to show that they were alive and but also to prove to themselves that they were still alive. This focus is a kind of self protection.
“Now it has changed because we have had three years of adaptation, three years of living under the attacks, and artists stopped being afraid and hiding in shelters and started to think more and reflect more by using associations or symbols to describe their feelings and their thoughts rather than direct images.”
Testimony to that change can be seen with the results of a mentoring programme for young people she has helped establish.
“Thousands of kids suffered from the occupation in Mariupol, in Kherson and the attacks on Kharkiv,” she says. “We decided to help them use photography to work through this traumatic experience and also to provide them with the skills to earn money as photographers.”
One of those is Ivan Samoilov who has lived all his 20 years in Kharkiv. After the 2022 invasion he spent two months taking pictures of his hometown. ‘Only rescuers, old people, volunteers and homeless animals maintained some kind of life in the ruined city,’ he says.
His photographs include a lad flexing his muscles on a playground apparatus framed by the ruins of a block of flats behind him, in another, the eye is drawn to a bold flower bed of marigolds before taking in the devastated building behind. Two men on a pedestrian crossing a deserted street, the golden spires of a church catch the sun. As with all the images, the ruined buildings seem almost incidental. Life, after a fashion, goes on.
An essay on volunteers by Artem Baidala, 21, from Dnipro, shows a man concentrating fiercely as he crunches through the rubble carrying materials for construction work on homes hit by missiles, a dachshund trots along before him. Young men take a break with a game of football in a yard. It all looks so normal.
Odesa, with its beaches and noble architecture, has been ravaged by Russian missiles. Tim Melnikov, a 19-year-old student, chronicled the effects of the war on the city with its taped off beaches and piles of sandbags which is now ‘deserted and gloomy, but not broken.’
Radchenko has witnessed a growth in conceptual work, cleverly expressed by Olia Koval, 21, in Memory. A shabby room, sparely furnished with a table, a chair, pictures on the wall, clothes hanging from hooks is transformed in eight frames from rich dark shades to one in which the colour is almost entirely bleached out.
‘Time seems to have sped up after 24 February,’ she writes. ‘Large amounts of information carry you away from where you are. It’s hard to remember what exactly surrounded you.’
And few contributions are as conceptually dauntless as that of Sofia Konovalova, 19, from Kharkiv, who poses nude in a cupboard with a suitcase. In The Place where I Live she captures the oppression that has afflicted her since the invasion. Nevertheless in that claustrophobic confine, life goes on, cleaning teeth, brushing hair, reading a book perched on the suitcase which is packed and waiting to return home, just like her.
Whether it’s a workaday selfie or the ambitious dialogues between artists hundreds of miles apart, the creativity of Ukraine’s young artists is undiminished despite Radchenko’s belief that the world is ‘bored with Ukraine’ - a pessimism she has felt long before Trump and his cohorts abused the ‘dictator’ Zelensky in the White House.
To stir the world from that boredom she has organised a project with Magnum Photos, Beyond the Silence, presented the endeavours of an international array of talent in Lviv.
“The show will help to prove that we are still alive and that we are a different country with a different identity, with our own culture and our own voice, which we want to share, and to make it, like, really loud.”
It’s always a joy to find an exhibition as far removed from the blockbuster or the overwhelmingly impersonal galleries, think Prado, Louvre, Tate Modern, as this in the wonderful Charleston Museum.
Trying to get inside the mind of Max Ernst, the artist who enforced his own madness on the world. A marvellous exhibition at the Circulo de Bellas-Artes in Madrid. Great bar as well!
Read more: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/richard-holledge-max-ernsts-marvellous-madness/
