World leaders descend on Davos this week—but the wider region has much more to offer than the World Economic Forum

A reporter for The Art Newspaper has been on the scene with the Heritage Crime Task Force (HCTF), tracking, identifying and repatriating a wide variety of art and antiquities lost to crime and conflict

BIG adds final touches to Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art
 
The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) emerges on the banks of Jinji Lake. Designed in collaboration with ARTS Group and Front Inc., and commissioned by Suzhou Harmony Development Group, the 60,000-square-meter complex (find designboom’s previous coverage here) is envisioned as a contemporary reinterpretation of Suzhou’s historic gardens.
 
The structure unfolds as a village of twelve interconnected pavilions unified beneath a flowing, ribbon-like roof whose gentle undulations echo tiled eaves. Materialism, a material-led inaugural exhibition curated by the studio, is on view through March 8th, 2026, before the...

OBRO Transforms Leather Waste into Transparent PVC Composite
 
OBRO is a material development project by OKUNOTE Tokyo Studio that combines leather production waste with PVC to create a new composite material positioned between leather and plastic. By integrating finely ground leather edge powder into semi-transparent PVC, the project explores alternative approaches to material reuse while examining visual depth, translucency, and surface texture.
 
The project emerged from the collaboration between a PVC processing manufacturer established in 1947 and a leather goods factory specializing in high-quality bags. During leather manufacturing, offcuts and edge remnants are generated through cutting and finishing...

Gallerist Lyndsey Ingram is working with the Lee Miller Archive to support the conservation of the photographer’s works and Sussex home

Arash Nassiri’s film installation at London’s Chisenhale Gallery uses an abandoned “Persian Palace” to reflect on the lives of Iranians who have settled in LA and elsewhere in the West

The work is being sold from the collection of the Dukes of Bedford to help fund the refurbishment of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire

"When there's so much to get right, unsurprisingly a lot can and, as we all know, does go wrong."

Good morning. Like the freedoms we often take for granted, Martin Luther King Jr. Day was hard-won. The designation of the third Monday in January as an official holiday commemorating the legacy of this momentous civil rights leader came after a 15-year battle waged by activists and grassroots groups who, despite pushback from Congress, refused to back down. They knew that there was something powerful about coming together to reflect on the lessons Dr. King left us, and that inscribing a dedicated day in the federal calendar was a way of agreeing, collectively, that he cannot be forgotten.Today, Hyperallergic celebrates Dr. King's outsized contributions as well as the labor and perseverance of those who...

asymmetrical volumes shape café by KQI Architect in vietnam
 
On a prominent corner lot along one of the busiest streets of Bà Rịa Ward, Ho Chi Minh City, KQI Architect completes The 1999’s Coffee, a 210-square-meter café led by architect Kiến Quân. The project is conceived as an architectural gesture that mediates between the speed of the city and the slower rhythms of everyday pause. 
 
Taking advantage of its corner condition, the design opens toward multiple directions, allowing the café to receive natural light throughout the day. A long, westward-extending sloped roof acts as a continuous sun-shading device, shaping the silhouette of the building while protecting interior spaces from harsh...

Architecture as Integrated Energy and Water Infrastructure
 
Developed by MASK Architects, the Dual-Axis Concave Mirror Living System proposes an architectural model in which buildings function as integrated energy, water, and environmental infrastructure. Rather than treating architecture and utilities as separate systems, the project positions the building itself as a responsive interface that produces resources while shaping inhabitable space. The design centers on a dual-axis concave parabolic mirror mounted at the crown of each module, which tracks the sun in real time to concentrate solar energy while simultaneously supporting shading, ventilation, and microclimate regulation for the spaces...

Photography, like memory, is always partial. Female. Focus. Photo Archives., opening at Fotostiftung Schweiz this February, makes this truth tangible. For over a century, Swiss photography has been narrated through male eyes while the achievements of women remain largely invisible. Of approximately 160 archives held by Fotostiftung Schweiz, only 26 belong to women, a stark reminder of systemic bias and selective preservation. The exhibition examines seven archives from 1900 to 1970, exploring how gender, social expectation and circumstance shaped practice, recognition and visibility. It interrogates who was allowed to photograph and whose images were deemed worthy of remembrance. Anny Wild-Siber (1865–1942)...

 
The Shutter Hub Pop-Up Photobook Library features a curated selection of over 100 photobooks, zines, and independent publications created by photographers and publishers from around the world, highlighting and championing a broad selection of photobooks ranging across as many photography genres and themes as possible.
Running alongside the Shutter Hub OPEN 2026 at Cambridge University from 19 January to 02 April 2026, it’s tenure will also include two weeks as part of the famous Cambridge Festival.
The Photobook Library is open to everyone and fully accessible to the public to come in and view the books any time they like (as long as the building is open!). It will also be accessible during the Shutter...

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Digital by Nature: The Art of Miguel Chevalier
 
Digital by Nature: The Art of Miguel Chevalier at Kunsthalle München presents the artist’s largest solo exhibition in Europe to date, curated by Franziska Stöhr. The exhibition surveys Miguel Chevalier’s practice from the early 1980s to the present, tracing his sustained engagement with digital technologies as both tools and subjects of artistic inquiry.
 
Born in 1959 in Mexico City and based in Paris, Chevalier has worked with computers as a creative medium for more than four decades. The exhibition brings together approximately 120 works that reflect the evolution of his approach, from early experiments with pixels, binary code, and algorithmic...

Manifest Destiny refers to the commonly held 19th century belief that the USA was meant to expand westward across North America. The pursuit of this ideal saw wagon trains of settlers move towards the West Coast, often battling harsh conditions as they crossed the Rockies in search of a promised “land of milk and honey.” It also meant that thousands of Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their land through brutal legislation that prioritised white communities. Artists of that era often engaged with this philosophy through romanticising expansion and conquest, depicting the West as a vast and “empty” landscape filled with promise. Such images concealed the realities of dispossession and...

What Miguel Ripoll does is highly unusual. At 57, they've been developing for over 25 years a practice based on technology and traditional materials and techniques. They're working with AI-generated fragments from public domain archives, transforming them through hand-crafted digital collage, and then spending hours hand-drawing with ink and pencil on them. The friction between machine logic and human gesture never gets old. It's not about age for them, but about patience.  In 1999, when they...

Esa-Pekka Salonen and The Los Angeles Philharmonic serve a feast for all five senses.

Two recent Paminas feature in concerts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

I can't say 2025 was my best operagoing year; apart from a superb Fille du régiment, most of my good nights at the opera were decidedly mixed affairs.

Il video, la pellicola e la fotografia condividono la facoltà di catturare e portare con sé le immagini; lo sguardo le rende tangibili e pone fine a un presunto rapporto di neutralità dell’occhio con ciò che vede. Forse insito nella pratica stessa della videoarte è l’intento di mettere in discussione il modo usuale di guardare le immagini in movimento, a partire dal peccato originale di non essere cinema. Ciononostante, è una consuetudine stabilire un certo tipo di dialogo con la settima arte, che dall’essere una sorella maggiore può essere schernita fino a diventare un fanciullo in lacrime o un’anziana signora. Questa dolce polemica nasce spesso però da una passione dell’artista per le...

The oddball pairing of Bernie Williams and Jonathan Tetelman doesn't quite knock it out of the park at Carnegie Hall.

Employees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on January 16 announced that they have officially unionized under the auspices of Local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers, forming one of the largest bargaining units at a US cultural organization. Staffers voted 542 to 172 in favor of joining the Met Union, which will represent workers in fifty departments, […]

Sometimes you wake up to news headlines that don't make any sense. Take this one, for example: South Africa Axes Venice Biennale Proposal Centering Gaza Victims. You ask yourself: Wait a second, isn't South Africa the same country that accused Israel of genocide at the International Court of Justice? Yes, it is, but it happens to have a right-wing arts and culture minister who found artist Gabrielle Goliath’s performance piece “highly divisive in nature.” He later came up with the bizarre, unfounded claim that a “foreign power” was involved in the artwork. Writer and scholar Christina Sharpe and University of Buffalo professor Rinaldo Walcott saw this and felt an immediate urge to...

Before photography became a global language of instant circulation, it was a slower act of attention, rooted in patience and presence. Graciela Iturbide has spent more than five decades working within this slower register, allowing images to form through proximity rather than pursuit. Her photographs do not seek to explain the world but to dwell within it, attentive to gesture, ritual and the quiet intelligence of everyday life. Birds hover, shadows stretch, and bodies occupy space with a sense of myth that never drifts into fantasy. It is this balance between intimacy and symbolism that gives her work its lasting force. At C/O Berlin, Eyes to Fly With offers a rare opportunity to encounter that vision in...

Today, we spotlight five artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize who use photography to blur the line between reality and fiction. Through carefully staged images, dreamlike narratives and intricately constructed worlds, these practitioners push the medium beyond documentation, transforming it into a site of psychological and emotional exploration. Drawing on personal histories, collective memory and inner states, their works question how identity is formed, remembered and reimagined. Michelle Watt Staging conceptual narratives with a whimsical flair, Michelle Watt often addresses themes of freedom and restriction within the realms of cultural identity. Her work engenders stories about the female minority...

I was on my way to one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibitions when something unexpected stopped me: John Wilson’s “Self-Portrait" (2002). This haunting, abraded pastel and paint work is part of the revelatory exhibition Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson.A longtime resident of Boston, a city that never developed an artistic identity as strong as New York’s or some other major US cities, Wilson was a painter, public sculptor, printmaker, teacher, children’s book illustrator, and activist. He was known and respected among fellow Black artists, yet practically invisible in the mainstream, White art world to the extent that his work is seldom included in surveys of modern...

Updated January 18, 2026 Artist, designer, architect, and Olympian skateboarder Alexis Sablone has been inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. The SHoF announced its Class of 2026 inductees on its website and on social media on January 15. The group includes 18 figures who according to the SHoF “have shaped the culture, progression, and global impact of skateboarding.” The induction ceremony will be held at the Vans Headquarters in Costa Mesa, California, on May 15.   Sablone is perhaps best known to the art-viewing public for skateboarding down the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s spiral ramp in 2023. The stunt was publicity for the drop of Sablone’s first skateboard sneaker design—the AS-1...

Fifteen years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, following a massive public campaign helmed by Coretta Scott King and Stevie Wonder, then-President Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed a bill commemorating the racial justice legacy of the civil rights leader. The 2026 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday unfolds in a year already punctuated by public outrage as the Trump administration defends Immigration and Customs Enforcement violence and seeks to erase the nation's racist history. At the Kennedy Center, which Trump retained control over last year after criticizing "woke" programming, an annual concert celebrating King, Let Freedom Ring, has opted to play elsewhere.Cultural institutions...

Joseph Atsus, a 51-year-old Pennsylvania man, was sentenced on Tuesday to 48 months in prison, a term of supervised release, and $1 million in restitution for several charges related to his participation in a notorious museum theft ring, the Department of Justice announced earlier this week. Atsus was part of a eight-person ring that stole millions in art and memorabilia between 1999 and 2019 from 20 museums, institutions, and stores across six states and Washington, D.C. Among the most valuable pieces stolen were Andy Warhol’s silkscreen work Le Grande Passion (1984) and Jackson Pollock’s oil painting Springs Winter (1949) from the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2005. In addition, the...

Washington, DC — Last month, DC-based artist Nia Keturah Calhoun waited in line inside the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in the city’s downtown. She stared up at the 56-by-7-foot-tall mural by Don Miller. Calhoun, best known for her mural of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on 14th and S Streets NW, admired the piece while others passed by without a glance. “Murals can be markers of time and significance,” Calhoun told Hyperallergic. “People live their lives by it and associate with their surroundings. I think everyday reminders of sacrifice and triumph are important. Painting political figures puts them in the place of people's minds and physical space.”This Martin...

Artes Mundi, a UK-based art organization, has given the 11th Artes Mundi Award to Peruvian artist Antonio Paucar. He will receive £40,000 towards his performance, sculpture, and video practice, which draws on Andean culture and his Peruvian heritage. The ceremony was held at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum in Cardiff on January 15. In an interview with the Art Newspaper, Paucar said he intends to use the funds to convert his family’s home in the central highlands of Peru into a combined museum and art school. “Over the last few years, I began restoring the abandoned adobe house of my grandparents. It is important to me to safeguard the house and workshop of my ancestors,” he said, adding, “It seems...

A French court ordered the high-profile Galerie Kraemer in Paris to return €2.8 million (around $3.25 million) to collector Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani over questions about a Chinese vase. The decision follows eight years of legal wrangling over the date attributed to the piece. As reported by the Art Newspaper, the Paris court of appeal sided with the collector, a cousin of the Emir of Qatar, “because of ‘serious doubts’ about the 18th-century dating of the gilded bronze mounts of the porcelain vase.” The vase sold for €815 ($945) in Brazil 20 years ago, according to investigators cited by TAN, and then passed through a Paris flea market and three antique dealers before being purchased by...

Artists and other creative people (not to mention, ahem, journalists) have been deeply concerned about the way that their work has been hoovered up by tech companies to fuel artificial intelligence–powered image and text generators. In 2023, several digital artists filed a class action lawsuit targeted at Stability AI, Midjourney, and the image-sharing platform DeviantArt, and others filed a suit against online retailer Shein for stealing their designs. Such suits scored a small win in court in 2024, yes, but many have felt powerless to stop the endless theft of their output.  One University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate apparently has found a way no one else seems to have thought of to fight back...

Casey Weldon's work is like the house of mirrors at a carnival. Instead of stretching and distorting the human patrons that stumble into the labyrinthine funhouse, though, Weldon's work entraps American culture itself... Read the full article by clicking above!
The post Something In The Air: The Paintings of Casey Weldon first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.

When I retire, I plan to read every morning and bake bread from scratch. I’d like to resume Spanish classes and finally become fluent. And I plan to see movies mid-afternoon, take long, leisurely walks leading nowhere in particular, and travel as much as possible. Does this sound familiar? Dreaming of retirement is one coping mechanism many of us tap into, including director John Kelly. Along with his co-writer Tara Lawall, Kelly created a charming animated “Retirement Plan” detailing all the things he’d finally like to do as an older person no longer tethered to the office. He intends to play a single song impeccably on the piano, finally organize the pantry, and take a hike—or better yet,...

ANTEQUERA, SPAIN—According to a Phys.org report, Marina Silva of the University of Huddersfield and her colleagues examined two medieval burials in the Menga dolmen, a 5,000-year-old monument in southern Spain. The structure, which features a long chamber and an access corridor covered with an earthen mound, was used as a burial site during the Neolithic period. Pottery and human remains found at the site indicate that burials at the Menga dolmen continued periodically, however. Silva and her colleagues studied two separate burials, one dated to the eighth century and the other dated to the eleventh century A.D. At this time, this area of southern Iberia was under Islamic rule, but Christian, Jewish, and...

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT—An international team of scientists has determined that two pieces of medieval blue-green glazed ceramic recovered in 2016 from seasonal herding camp sites in southeastern Mongolia were imported from the Persian Empire, according to a Phys.org report. The camps were discovered in the Gobi Desert during a study of nomadic communities dating back to the Early Bronze Age. These two small pieces of turquoise pottery, recovered from two nomad camps, were analyzed with electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry and portable X-ray fluorescence at Yale University. The results of these tests were then compared with the composition of medieval pottery from Persia and China....

Planks of medieval shipwreck on the seafloor off the coast of Copenhagen, Denmark Painted wooden dish COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—According to an IFL Science report, a medieval shipwreck has been discovered in the strait between Denmark and Sweden by a team of marine archaeologists led by Otto Uldum of Copenhagen’s Viking Ship Museum. The shipwreck is located in the waterway connecting the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean—an important medieval trade route. The wreckage has been identified as a cog, a cargo ship featuring a single mast and a single square sail, measuring about 90 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 20 feet tall. “It is the largest cog we know of, and it gives us a unique opportunity to understand both...

From cheese wedges and leafy greens to loaves of bread and freshly picked zucchini, Eléonore Joulin has a tendency for playing with her food. In the Brussels-based artist’s work, a loaf of challah transforms into a vase, while a melting round of Raclette—a cheese originating in Switzerland that’s scraped right off the wheel onto baguettes or potatoes—transforms into a lighting fixture. Joulin is known for her lighthearted lamps and vessels resembling vegetables, sausages, and other foods. She enjoys experimenting with glazes, handcrafting her own in order to find finishes and hues that create a trompe-l’œil effect—as if, for example, cabbage leaves were simply folded into the shape of shoes. The...

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Kingston Poplar’s Website
Kingston Poplar on Instagram

Al Museo Novecento la prima retrospettiva italiana dedicata a Helen Chadwick (Croydon, 1953 – Londra, 1996), Life Pleasures propone una visione complessa e stratificata del corpo e del femminile. Curata da Sergio Risaliti, Stefania Rispoli e Laura Smith, la mostra percorre la produzione dell’artista, evidenziandone l’equilibrio tra sperimentazione e concetto. Già all’ingresso, le volte decorate da composizioni floreali rivelano l’anima avanguardista di una donna del XX secolo, capace di ritrarre le identità come eventi. Il contributo di Kunsthaus Graz, Victoria and Albert Museum e della galleria The Hepworth Wakefield rende la materia corporea e culturale esposta un’esperienza intensa. Lampadine,...

Roland Augustine, who alongside Lawrence Luhring cofounded influential New York gallery Luhring Augustine forty-one years ago, is leaving the business to engage in philanthropic pursuits and work as an independent adviser. Luhring will continue to lead the gallery, with the assistance of longtime directors Lauren Wittels and Donald Johnson Montenegro. Wittels, who has been with the gallery off and […]

Chicago-based nonprofit United States Artists on January 14 announced the fifty recipients of its 2026 fellowships. Each will receive an unrestricted cash award of $50,000 as well as access to professional development resources. The honorees, who represent nineteen states and Washington, DC, work across nine disciplines: architecture and design, craft, dance, media, music, theater and performance, traditional arts, […]

When a 65-year-old tree succumbed to a fungus known as oak wilt, Steve Parker wanted to pay tribute. The wooded habitat had previously loomed above Parker’s front yard and provided refuge to migratory birds. Rather than turn its limbs and trunk into mulch, though, Parker did as he often does with a material that’s no longer primed for its original purpose: he created a sound sculpture. Recently on view at Ivester Contemporary in Austin, “Funeral for a Tree” is a sprawling and poetic ode to the oak. Parker cut slices from the trunk that he then carved like vinyl, encoding bird song into the grain. When placed on a Victrola-style turntable, the records play the avian soundscapes. To accompany these...

A painter documents a vandalized memorial to a victim of anti-Black violence

Before he was a titan of Renaissance art history, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a 12-year-old, although his childhood looked quite a bit different from what we associate with that age today. Already deeply invested in drawing and painting, he studied others’ work, such as an engraving titled “Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons,” created by 15th-century German artist Martin Schongauer. Unlike most tweens, though, when he set out to recreate the scene in tempera paint on a wood panel, he worked with a particular style that strongly hinted at the young boy’s preternatural talent. This is the very first known painting by Michelangelo, titled “The Torment of Saint Anthony,” which was...

STONY BROOK, NEW YORK—Live Science reports that researchers have completed their analysis of two-million-year-old Homo habilis fossils discovered in 2012 on the shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The fossils, dubbed KNM-ER 64061, include a complete set of lower teeth; collarbones; pieces of shoulder blades; all of the upper and lower arm bones; and fragments of a vertebra, a rib, an upper leg bone, and the pelvis. “There are only three other very fragmentary and incomplete partial skeletons known for this important species,” said Fred Grine of Stony Brook University. Grine and his colleagues suggest that this individual was a young adult who stood about five feet, three inches tall, and weighed...

Nik Usmar (left) and Dr. Michael Hein (right) carry out sediment coring to locate a medieval plague mass grave near Erfurt, Germany. ERFURT, GERMANY—A possible mass grave containing the remains of victims of the Black Death has been found near the site of the medieval village of Neuses in central Germany, according to a statement released by Leipzig University. Historic records from the nearby city of Erfurt indicate that in 1350, when the Black Plague struck the region, some 12,000 people were buried in 11 large pits outside the city. Using resistivity mapping and sediment coring, the team members, led by Michael Hein of Leipzig University, identified a large, underground structure holding mixed sediments...

“Sea routes and waterways” are the central themes of the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award 2024-2026 Exhibition. The latest recipients of the prize are Oh Haji and Umeda Tetsuya, whose exhibition, running 25 December – 29 March, is titled Wetland. It takes its name from the area between sea and land that provides a habitat for a multitude of species, and the works on view speak to experiences of place, space and migration. The prize was established in 2018 as a platform for mid-career artists based in Japan. Winners receive several years of continuous support, including funding for overseas activities, the opportunity to show their work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the publication of a...

Two decades ago, a man named Rick Canty lost his mother and was shortly thereafter evicted from their home in Barry, Wales, due to bankruptcy charges he vehemently claimed were fraudulent. In protest against being forced to move, he climbed on top of the house and settled into a new routine on the rooftop, not just for a few days or weeks but for more than two years. Practically overnight, he became a local legend, and he inspired a unique sense of neighborly support that people still talk about in Barry. Welsh filmmaker Isaac Atkin-Mayne, who grew up in Barry and heard much about Canty over the years, was inspired to tell a story of community, camaraderie, and the extraordinary things that ordinary people are...

Esiste una dimensione della pittura dove il tempo si stratifica fino a diventare materia, solidificandosi con lentezza in visioni dense, capaci di condensare in spazi minimi un intero universo interiore evocandolo per frammenti in tutta la sua complessità. La poetica di Bu Shi (Yunnan, 1993), a cui CAR Gallery dedica a Bologna una seconda personale a distanza di tre anni dalla mostra d’esordio, si colloca in questa dimensione temporale dilatata abitando una soglia ambigua tra controllo maniacale della forma e follia visionaria del contenuto, in aperta controtendenza rispetto alla frenesia produttiva oggi imperante nell’arte contemporanea. Il titolo Brace in bocca, ispirato ai Preta della cosmologia...

 
Eric Fong is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. After working as a GP in Canada for many years, he retrained in fine art and gained an MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His practice is driven by a keen interest in the juncture between art, science, and medicine, informed by his experience as a former doctor. His process involves in-depth research and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Victorian Asylums is a project that began as an artist residency at Kings College London, in collaboration with Alana Harris, Professor of Gender and Modern Religious History.
The project focuses on the lives of pauper patients in five mental asylums in Epsom, Surrey – the ‘Epsom Cluster’. During...

Kosovan artist Brilant Milazimi has been selected to represent the Republic of Kosovo at the Sixty-First Venice Biennale, to take place May 9–November 22. José Esparza Chong Cuy will curate the country’s pavilion, which is commissioned by Hana Halilaj, curator at the National Gallery of Kosovo, and supported by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of the Republic of Kosovo. Milazimi […]

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Matthew Ludak’s Website
Matthew Ludak on Instagram

South Africa’s cancellation of its Venice Pavilion underscores the ongoing struggle between artistic independence and government interference, highlighting concerns about cultural autonomy and political control. Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy – Noluvo Swelindawo, 2017. ICA Live Art […]