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11/10/2026

Two historic Chinese ceramics damaged in the British Museum. Once again, questions about the museum’s ability to protect the world’s cultural heritage are being raised.

The museum has confirmed that two Qing-dynasty ceramics in Room 95 were damaged on 4 October. A Kangxi-period blue-and-white bowl, catalogued as B629, reportedly fell from its display support and struck another piece, catalogued as 634. Both objects are now with the museum’s conservation team for restoration.

The incident echoes a far more notorious chapter in the museum’s history: the damaging treatment of the Parthenon Marbles in 1937–38, when workers used metal tools and abrasives to clean the sculptures, irreversibly removing parts of their original surfaces.

These are different incidents, separated by decades, but they raise a common question: Who holds museums accountable when the very objects entrusted to their care are damaged under their stewardship?

The British Museum presents itself as a guardian of global heritage. Yet safeguarding priceless artefacts requires more than expertise and prestige. It demands rigorous conservation, secure displays and transparency when things go wrong.

If museums argue that they are the best places to preserve humanity’s shared heritage, they must be judged by how well they actually protect it.


10/10/2026

In 'Knife in the Heart', Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li’s music becomes a visual story of resistance. A lone man moves through a windswept city, struggling against powerful gusts that seem determined to carry him away. With every step, he fights to regain his balance — until he finally finds his footing and refuses to be moved.

Directed by Theo Lindquist and produced by Anorak Films, the performance turns wind into a force of both physical and emotional pressure. The city becomes a metaphor for a world that can leave us feeling powerless, while the man’s struggle becomes an act of quiet defiance.

Sometimes resistance begins with something simple: refusing to be blown away.


09/10/2026

In 'Hard Water', Dutch artist Zeger Reyers transforms hundreds of white plates and saucers into a cascading installation, accompanied by the unmistakable clatter of crockery.
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Part of 'As Necessary as Bread. From Land, to Kitchen, to Table', the work turns our attention to something we rarely think about: the labour that follows every meal. Clearing, washing, drying and stacking are repetitive tasks that keep everyday life running, yet the people who do them often remain invisible.
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Reyers makes this overlooked work impossible to ignore, transforming ordinary tableware into a striking sculptural landscape.
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Curated by Rawad Baaklini, the exhibition opens at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam on 10 October.


07/10/2026

Dutch artist Zeger Reyers turned the familiar into chaos with his 2009 installation 'Rotating Kitchen', a fully equipped kitchen that slowly rotates around its own axis.

As the structure turns, pots, pans, food, utensils and appliances begin sliding across the surfaces, colliding and mixing together. What begins as an orderly domestic environment gradually becomes an absurd, chaotic landscape.

The work was commissioned for "Eating the Universe: Food in Art" at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, an exhibition exploring the relationship between food, art, consumption and society. The exhibition later travelled to Innsbruck and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

Reyers has long been fascinated by processes of growth, decay and transformation. His installations have incorporated mushrooms, water, porcelain and other materials that challenge our ideas of control and permanence.

The kitchen is supposed to be one of the most controlled spaces in the home.
Reyers simply lets it fall apart.


06/10/2026

Brazilian artist and tattooer Cris D. creates remarkably detailed drawings by tracing photographic images with a continuous, minimalist line.

Based in Belo Horizonte, Cris has worked with tattooing since 2008 and has developed an increasingly distinctive visual language around line, movement and empty space. Before focusing on tattooing, he studied for three years at the Guignard School of Art at UEMG.

His single-line drawings transform photographs into elegant, almost skeletal versions of themselves. Faces, musicians, objects and figures emerge from a single flowing gesture, while the untouched paper becomes an essential part of the image.

The process is particularly hypnotic to watch: instead of building an image through countless separate marks, Cris follows the photograph with one continuous visual journey.

It is drawing reduced to its most fundamental element - a lime.


05/10/2026

French artist Marie Paccou merges drawing and motion with her invention, the 'Umbrellotrope'—a hand-drawn animation created on a spinning paper parasol.
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When rotated in front of a smartphone, the images come to life like a contemporary zoetrope.
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Filmed in Billom, the work bridges traditional craft and digital viewing, turning a simple object into a moving image device.
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Paccou’s practice, shown across animation and media art festivals, reimagines how we experience hand-drawn storytelling today.


04/10/2026

A plastic bag. Water. Elastic bands. And an extraordinary amount of tension. Colombian artist Carlos Villabón transforms one of the most ordinary objects from his childhood into remarkably detailed paintings.

In rural Colombia, plastic bags filled with water have traditionally been hung to keep flies and insects away. Villabón began recreating these familiar objects in paint, turning a simple domestic superstition into a recurring subject for exploring light, transparency, reflection and perception.

In works such as "Tensión #3" (2026), the bags are held and compressed by elastic bands, creating a precarious balance between containment and rupture. What looks fragile suddenly becomes monumental.

Villabón has exhibited internationally, including in Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, France, Spain and the United States, with presentations at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, Estampa in Madrid and Art Miami.

His paintings ask us to look again at something we might normally overlook.

How can something so ordinary become so strangely beautiful?


03/10/2026

Swiss media artist Michel Winterberg explores the invisible systems shaping our everyday lives — algorithms, technology, power structures and unstable visions of the future.

His exhibition "Drifting Futures" invites visitors to move through fragile fragments of a reality where bodies become digital, codes become political, the climate becomes unstable and the future increasingly difficult to predict.

Working with interactive video and sound installations, mixed media, generative systems and animatronic elements, Winterberg makes complex technological systems tangible. Yet his work isn't simply dystopian. A subtle sense of humour runs through many of his pieces, creating moments of absurdity within an otherwise unsettling technological landscape.

Born in Basel in 1972, Winterberg has exhibited widely across Europe, including at ZKM in Karlsruhe, HeK in Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, Ars Electronica in Linz, FRAC Alsace and Kunstverein Freiburg.

"Drifting Futures" was presented at the Galerie für Gegenwartskunst at E-WERK Freiburg from May to July 2026.

The future may already be being programmed around us. The question is whether we can still see the code.


02/10/2026

Every year, on 1 October, the sun performs a tiny architectural ritual in Nicosia. At Eleftheria Square, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, a carefully positioned opening in the bridge allows a beam of sunlight to pass through at around 1pm on Cyprus Independence Day.

For just a moment, the light falls onto 999 glass spheres embedded within the square, creating a striking connection between architecture, sunlight and the history of the Republic of Cyprus.

Completed in 2021, Eleftheria Square transforms the historic moat beside Nicosia’s Venetian Walls into a vast public space, linking the old city with the modern centre. The project was conceived not only as a civic square, but as part of a wider vision for reconnecting Nicosia, a city divided by the Green Line after the 1974 Turkish invasion and occupation of the country's north.

The detail is easy to miss for most of the year. But every 1st of October, the building, the sun and the calendar align.

Architecture becomes a clock, a monument and a celebration — for exactly one minute.


01/10/2026

In 'The Welcome Rain Falling from the Sky' (1997), Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yu Tsui places a person in a seemingly absurd but increasingly dangerous situation. Flowerpots, televisions, motorcycles and other objects fall from above while he desperately moves back and forth, trying to avoid them.

Born in Taipei in 1974, Tsui is known for action videos and performances that use humour, physical endurance and absurd situations to examine how humans adapt to the systems and dangers surrounding them.

The work becomes a strange measurement of survival: how quickly can the body adapt when the rules suddenly change?

Tsui has exhibited internationally at the La Biennale di Venezia, Liverpool Biennial, Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Chelsea Art Museum in New York.

'The Welcome Rain Falling from the Sky' was also presented by Chi-Wen Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2016.


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