When a Landscape Is Felt Physically

23 Aug 2026 Clock Maria Taniguchi’s

Painting Time Without Painting a Clock

Maria Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” are made from thousands of hand-drawn rectangular cells, each individually filled. She began the ongoing body of work in 2008, and individual canvases can require days, weeks or months of repetitive labour. At Singapore Art Museum’s 2026 exhibition Afterimage, these paintings appear alongside sculpture and video, making repetition, material and duration visible across several media. Taniguchi considers the paintings less as isolated objects than as parts of one continuing artwork.

I find that idea more interesting than the apparent grid itself. From a distance the paintings can look systematic, even machine-like. Close attention reveals slight changes created by a human hand repeating a task for an extraordinary amount of time. Nothing in the image represents time directly, yet time is everywhere in it. The surface is almost an accumulation of hours. Instead of depicting duration, Taniguchi makes duration become material.

https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/en/art-events/exhibitions/maria-taniguchi-afterimage

#MariaTaniguchi #PhilippineArt #ContemporaryPainting #SingaporeArt

Painting Time Without Painting a Clock singaporeartmuseum.sg Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage | Singapore Art Museum Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singaporean institution.

23 Aug 2026 Afrobeat

Afrobeat Was Built as a System

Fela Kuti did not arrive at Afrobeat as a fixed genre waiting to be named. His musical path moved through jazz, highlife and soul, with musicians from West African and Caribbean backgrounds entering his early groups. His official archive places an important turning point in 1968, when he began publicly using the term “Afro Beat” as his music absorbed stronger soul influences. By the early 1970s, long grooves, horns, percussion, call-and-response vocals and political lyrics had become part of a musical language inseparable from his confrontation with Nigerian military power.

What fascinates me is that Afrobeat is difficult to reduce to one signature sound. It works more like a system. Bass, drums, guitars and horns repeat patterns for long periods, allowing tiny changes to become significant. The groove can feel almost immovable while the music remains intensely alive. Political force and dance are not competing functions here. The body is part of how the message travels.

https://felakuti.com/about

#FelaKuti #Afrobeat #NigerianMusic #MusicHistory

Afrobeat Was Built as a System Fela Kuti About - Fela Kuti The official website for Fela Kuti: his legacy, catalog, and shop.

23 Aug 2026 Colour

Colour Escapes the Canvas

Estonian painter Kristi Kongi’s Chromatic Drift at Kumu Art Museum refuses to keep colour neatly inside rectangular paintings. Created partly for the museum’s large exhibition hall, the project extends motifs and colour onto floors, walls, windows and outdoor space. Kumu describes colour as central to Kongi’s way of mapping and preserving memories and states of mind. The 2026 exhibition is also significant institutionally: it is the first solo exhibition by an Estonian woman artist in Kumu’s Great Hall.

What interests me is what happens when painting begins treating architecture as part of its surface. A canvas normally ends at its edge. Once colour crosses that boundary, the viewer enters the composition rather than simply standing in front of it. Colour stops behaving like decoration applied to objects and starts organising distance, movement and atmosphere. Perhaps painting becomes spatial not when it imitates three dimensions, but when it changes how we physically move through a room.

https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/kristi-kongi-chromatic-drift/

#KristiKongi #EstonianArt #Painting #Colour

Colour Escapes the Canvas Kumu kunstimuuseum Kristi Kongi: Chromatic Drift - Kumu kunstimuuseum The large-scale solo exhibition of the painter Kristi Kongi (1985) offers an immersive spatial experience. In the new works created for this exhibition, colour emerges as the central element, with its fields of meaning unfolding in physical, emotional, and semantic ways.

23 Aug 2026 Contemporary Art

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing

The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political timeline. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 after periods of British, German and Australian colonial rule. The exhibition placed contemporary works beside cultural forms and showed how artists have addressed independence, ancestral knowledge, Christianity, technology and rapid social change. Figures such as Mathias Kauage and Timothy Akis helped shape a modern visual language that could absorb new materials without abandoning local cultural references.

Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. That makes the idea of a single national image complicated from the beginning. What interests me is how artists can participate in creating national identity without making everyone look the same. Art can connect different histories while allowing their differences to remain visible. Perhaps a nation becomes more convincing when its image is allowed to stay unfinished.

https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/bilong-papua-new-guinea/

#PapuaNewGuineaArt #PacificArt #ContemporaryArt #CulturalIdentity

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political…

23 Aug 2026 ARAVARA

Time Is Not Neutral

ARAVARA at the National Gallery of Jamaica is an audiovisual exhibition built around a deceptively difficult subject: time. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and developed with KADIST, it brings together ten works by ten artists and is being presented through several Caribbean locations. The exhibition considers recurrence, repetition and historical layering, asking how promises of progress made in earlier periods continue to shape present realities. At the Kingston presentation, moving image and sound become ways of looking at history without assuming that time simply moves forward in a clean line.

I like that idea because museums themselves often organise history chronologically. One year follows another, giving the impression that the past has been completed. But political ideas, social structures and unfinished promises can return in altered forms. Perhaps history behaves less like a timeline and more like an image repeatedly edited without ever deleting all the previous layers.

National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026

#ARAVARA #CaribbeanArt #VideoArt #JamaicaArt

Time Is Not Neutral National Gallery of Jamaica National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026 The National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ), in collaboration with KADIST, is pleased to present ARAVARA, an audiovisual exhibition curated by Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel. The exhibition opens …

23 Aug 2026 Addis Ababa

When a Landscape Is Felt Physically

Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele uses grass, flowers, leaves and seasonal change as more than landscape subjects. In Moments of Change, shown at Addis Fine Art in Addis Ababa in early 2026, repeated dots and layered lines produced surfaces that could resemble landscapes, aerial maps or constellations. The works were made with acrylic on canvas and textiles, with fabric connecting the paintings to ideas of bodily vulnerability, effort and care. Bekele grew up in Addis Ababa, studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design and later taught there.

What stays with me is the decision to connect changes in nature with the way time is experienced by a body. We normally measure a season with dates, yet we recognise it through temperature, colour, smell, growth and disappearance. A landscape painting can therefore record much more than a place. It can describe what change feels like before we have found words for it.

https://addisfineart.com/exhibitions/136-moments-of-change-tesfaye-bekele/

#TesfayeBekele #EthiopianArt #Painting #AddisAbaba

When a Landscape Is Felt Physically Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele uses grass, flowers, leaves and seasonal change as more than landscape subjects. In Moments of Change, shown at Addis Fine…

23 Aug 2026 City Music Born Between

A City Music Born Between Worlds

Rebetiko emerged in the urban centres and port cities of Greece during the early twentieth century, initially among working-class and marginalised communities. Its musical language did not grow from a single source. UNESCO describes a tradition shaped through exchanges among Greeks from Asia Minor and the Aegean and the Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Balkan and Levantine communities of the former Ottoman world. Songs were originally transmitted mainly by listening, playing and learning directly from older musicians. Recordings, cinema, conservatories and universities later created additional ways of passing the repertoire on.

What interests me is how easily a music that begins on society’s margins can later become part of a country’s cultural identity. Rebetiko did not become valuable because somebody preserved it unchanged. It kept absorbing new surroundings, performers and technologies. Its history suggests that tradition may be strongest when it is flexible enough to travel without forgetting where it came from.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/rebetiko-01291

#Rebetiko #GreekMusic #UrbanFolkMusic #MusicHistory

A City Music Born Between Worlds ich.unesco.org Rebetiko - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Rebetiko is a musical and cultural expression directly linked to song and dance that initially spread among the urban lower and working-class populations in the early twentieth century. Rebetiko songs are now a standardized repertoire in almost every social occasion involving music and dance. The element is performed in public and performers encourage audience participation. The practice is open t...

22 Aug 2026 City Photographed Before

A City Photographed Before It Disappears

Memoria y relato. Fotografía en Puebla looks at photographs made in Puebla from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1940s, drawing from public and private collections and including professional photographers, amateurs, visitors and anonymous makers. Museo Amparo deliberately avoids presenting a complete history of photography. Instead, the exhibition follows smaller visual stories through which ideas of the city and its inhabitants were constructed. That approach becomes even more interesting because the museum has invited people in 2026 to add contemporary photographs of Puebla to a “living archive.” Historical photographs can easily acquire an authority they never possessed when they were made. They seem to tell us what a place was. But every photograph is also a choice about what deserved to enter the frame. Placing old images beside contemporary contributions reminds us that a city is never finished being photographed, and its visual history is never complete.

https://museoamparo.com/exhibitions/pieces/313/memory-and-tale-photography-in-puebla

#Photography #Puebla #MexicanPhotography #VisualHistory

A City Photographed Before It Disappears museoamparo.com Memoria y relato. Fotografía en Puebla | Exposiciones | exposiciones actuales | Museo Amparo, Puebla Organizada en el marco del 35 aniversario del Museo Amparo, esta exposición indaga en el vasto universo de fotografías producidas en Puebla desde me ...

22 Aug 2026 Abstract Art

Painting for a Temple That Never Existed

Hilma af Klint began The Paintings for the Temple in 1906, creating a vast cycle of works filled with spirals, circles, botanical forms, letters and vivid colour long before abstraction became established in European modernism. The current Grand Palais exhibition in Paris brings this cycle to France for the first time, including the monumental The Ten Largest. What interests me is that these paintings were not originally conceived for the art world as we know it. Af Klint imagined them for a spiritual temple that was never built, while her public career remained largely figurative. She also stipulated that much of this work should not be shown until years after her death. That changes how I look at the paintings. They were not attempts to anticipate an art movement or win a place in modernist history. Geometry, colour, science and spiritualism became tools for trying to picture something she believed existed beyond ordinary sight.

https://www.grandpalais.fr/en/program/hilma-af-klint-paintings-temple-1906-1915

#HilmaAfKlint #AbstractArt #ModernArt #ParisArt

Painting for a Temple That Never Existed Grand Palais Hilma af Klint, paintings for the Temple (1906-1915) Her work upended the chronology of modern art. For the first time in France, discover the visionary world of Hilma af Klint (1862?1944), a pioneer of abstraction long kept in the shadows. From her large-scale compositions to her secret avant-garde works, her art blends color, form, and symbolism with captivating audacity.

22 Aug 2026 Auckland Art

Machines Performing Belief

Twenty-one years after representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale, et al.’s the fundamental practice is being shown in its entirety in Aotearoa for the first time. Five moving autonomous systems, computer-generated voices and sound form what feels like a dystopian orchestra. What interests me is how easily machines can borrow the language of authority. A synthetic voice does not need to understand an idea to repeat it convincingly. The work turns technology into a strange theatre of belief, obedience and doubt.

https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/connect/news-and-media/new-zealands-2005-venice-biennale-presentation-to-be-shown-in-aotearoa-for-the-first-time

#NewZealandArt #MediaArt #InstallationArt #AucklandArt

Machines Performing Belief Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T?maki New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presentation to be shown in Aotearoa for the first time | Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T?maki New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presentation to be shown in Aotearoa for the first time.

22 Aug 2026 Fabienne Hess

The People Behind the Museum

Fabienne Hess’s Lo invisible y sus tramas at Museo Amparo turns attention toward museum staff whose work normally disappears behind the exhibition. Images printed on silk move through the space while rarely shown collection pieces sit beside familiar works. I like this reversal of attention. Museums teach us what to look at, but they can also make the labour supporting that act of looking almost invisible. An exhibition does not simply appear on a wall. It is built from hundreds of decisions, gestures and forms of care that usually remain outside the frame.

https://museoamparo.com/exposiciones/piezas/315/lo-invisible-y-sus-tramas

#FabienneHess #MuseoAmparo #MexicanArtScene #InstallationArt

The People Behind the Museum museoamparo.com Fabienne Hess. Lo invisible y sus tramas | Exposiciones | exposiciones actuales | Museo Amparo, Puebla El trabajo del personal del Museo Amparo, que habitualmente es invisible en las galerías, ahora está en los muros. Las jerarquías se alteran: obras ...