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Celebrate US Independence Day this 4th July with some quiet contemplation of recently restored fireworks books. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in a blogpost last week that they have conserved 19 books in their Department of Drawings and Prints on firework displays. The books cover more than four centuries of pyrotechnics, and include spotty 19th-century Japanese depictions reminiscent of colour-blindness tests; a 17th-century British engraving of how to make a fire-breathing dragon; and an 1818 German hand-coloured etching of an exploding chrysanthemum with a smiling face in the centre. Some of the books are straightforward manuals on how to make the actual explosive devices, while others provide more fanciful, and permanent, renditions of the colourful sky-splashes that last mere seconds.

The leading Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli was unable to attend a talk yesterday (3 July) at the British Museum in London after his passport was confiscated by the Iranian authorities. The lecture, which focused on the book European Women in Persian Houses, went ahead without Tanavoli, its author, who was left in the dark about why he was not allowed to travel.

The veteran artists sculptures are included in the Tate Moderns rehang alongside paintings by Warhol and Lichtenstein in a room called Beyond Pop. They were also featured in Tate Moderns exhibition The World Goes Pop last year.

Tanavoli was told by border officials on 2 July at Tehrans Imam Khomeini International Airport that he could not leave for London. The artist, who divides his time between Tehran and Vancouver, told us in an email: I am still pending and I still have no idea why I am kept here. They tell me soon my case will be sorted out. What case? When is soon? I have no idea.  Officials at the Iranian embassy in London declined to comment.

His new book, published by IB Tauris, examines why wealthy households in Iran at the turn of the 20th century collected and incorporated prints of glamorous, unveiled European women into the architecture of houses and residences.

Tanavoli was also due to speak at Asia House in London today (4 July) on the role of the lion in Persian art and culture. The talk pre-empts an exhibition due to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran next March entitled The Lion in Iran and the Art of Parviz Tanavoli.

Tanavoli is known for pioneering a new form of Pop art in Iran in the 1960s. Like Basquiat making art at another time and in another place, he roamed the streets of south Tehran in the 1960s, finding discarded objects, says Shiva Balaghi, a visiting scholar at Brown University in Rhode Island, who co-organised a retrospective of Tanavolis work last year at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

The Saqqakhaneh school, which also included the artist Hossein Zenderoudi, flowered in Tanavolis Atelier Kaboud workplace in south Tehran. This new school fused avant-garde theory with Iranian folk culture motifs, producing a Middle Eastern strain of 1960s modernism rooted in popular culture.

This classic film follows a mysterious woman loved by four different men: an actor, a criminal, a count and a mime.

French with English subtitles. 163 min duration.

Free and open to the public. No booking required.

With the fireplaces officially lit, indulge in our month of designer winter afternoon tea experiences in stylish Palm Court.

Enjoy the following:
• Dine beside our fire, white marble fireplace lit daily in Palm Court.
• Christmas in July-themed menu featuring a modern twist on Christmas classics, including gateaux, macarons and savoury delights by Lead Patissier, Chef Miguel Jocson.
• A choice of our signature hot chocolate, barista coffee or exclusive tea range served with each sitting.
• All items served on our beautiful Langham Rose Wedgwood chinaware.
• Exclusive event for the month of July.

Join us for Sydney’s most exclusive winter dining experience this July.

There’s something on for children of all ages this month, with free YouthSpark workshops that teach kids how to create their own games and apps, and experiment with robotics in a fun and supportive environment.

Please see below for a full line up of in-store activities and workshops running . There are limited spaces available so parents are advised to register in advance via the website. All children need to be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

YouthSpark: Be an inventor with littleBits
Inspire your kids to invent and create in this maker camp that offers kids aged 8 to 11 an introduction to electronics and robotics in a fun, interactive environment.

Timings: Four hours per day, from 1pm to 5pm, and participants must attend the days consecutively.
• Tue 5th – Wed 6th July
• Thu 7th – Fri 8th July
• Mon 11th – Tue 12th July
• Wed 13th – Thu 14th July

YouthSpark: Learn to Code Your Very Own Game
Get acquainted with coding and game development, as we show you the essentials to programming a game where it’s eat or be eaten! These free, two-day interactive and intermediate-level workshops will help children aged 12 and above build their own Flatverse game for mobile devices.

Timings: Four hours per day, from 1pm to 5pm, and participants must attend the days consecutively.
• Sat 2nd – Sun 3rd July
• Sat 9th – Sun 10th July
• Sat 16th – Sun 17th July

Hour of Code
Explore a vibrant digital universe and embark on a coding adventure, through free 90-minute workshops where children can learn how creativity and problem solving come together to solve challenges with code.

Timings: The 90-minute workshops from 9.30am to 11am on the following days.
• Sat 2nd July
• Mon 4th July
• Sat 9th July
• Sat 16th July

A new initiative at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow aims to make the institution more hospitable to disabled visitors (Co-thinkers, 7 June-9 September). The programme is uncharted territory for Russia, where disabled people have historically lacked equal access to cultural institutions and disabled children have been shut out of mainstream schools, according to Human Rights Watch.

Despite new laws that went into effect in January banning discrimination against the disabled, we have this legacy of the Soviet period, when people with disabilities were largely segregated, says Maria Sarycheva, the coordinator of Garages department of inclusive programmes. (Although some Russian institutions, including the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, offer disability services, most do not facilitate full access to galleries for all disabled visitors.)

For the general Russian audience, there is a lack of information on contemporary art, says Garages curator Anastasia Mityushina. For blind, deaf or otherwise disabled visitors, the amount of easily accessible information is like 1% of that, she says.

Garage hopes the Co-thinkers exhibitionthe first in a series of annual projects co-produced with four collaborators with different disabilitieswill help change that. The show brings together 18 works by 17 contemporary artists including Maurizio Cattelan, Robert Rauschenberg and James Turrell, among others, that in some way examine or alter perception. All of the works are on loan from Moscow-based private collectors.  

The show also includes 3D models of each object that all visitors can touch. To fully experience the exhibition, you do not need to come to reception and announce your disabilityyou just come and explore, Mityushina says.

In September, Garage plans to host around 50 curators, education and other museum professionals from across the country for its second annual training session on inclusion and disability services. This years programme will focus on increasing access for deaf visitors.

Conservators at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York have done the seemingly impossible: they have brought Bruce Conners CHILD (1959-60), a haunting sculpture of a gas chamber execution, back from the dead ahead of a major travelling exhibition.

Conner (1933-2008) made the work, a black-wax figure of a boyits head thrown back and mouth open as if screamingcovered with nylon webbing and strapped to a high-chair, in response to the planned execution of career criminal Caryl Chessman. In 1948, Chessman was sentenced to die in the gas chamber for kidnappinga crime punishable by death in California at the time. Although the severity of his sentence for a non-lethal crime divided public opinion, he was eventually executed in 1960 after several widely publicised attempts to overturn his conviction.   

The US artist originally wanted to cast the work in bronze (and encase it in glass so it would look like a gas chamber) but eventually settled on sculpting it from casting wax on which he poured hot wax. It sits in a childs chair once owned by the Abstract Expressionist Sonia Gechtoff, who was horrified when she learned it was used in this piece, says Roger Griffith, MoMAs associate sculpture conservator. The figure is covered in nylon webbing, in keeping with the artists interest in the macabre early in his career. He wanted objects to look old and to create a sense of revulsion and pain, says Laura Hoptman, the museums painting and sculpture curator. She has co-curated a major survey of Conners work with colleagues from MoMA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art--the organiser of the show. It will travel to San Francisco after its New York debut in July. 

Whitney no-show
When it entered MoMAs collection in 1970, CHILD was in a deteriorated state and so has never been exhibited there. In fact, the piece has not been on public display since 1995, when it was pulled from a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at Conners request. The slouched figure that confronted the artist at the Whitney more than two decades ago was a far cry from Conners original creation. Among other things, its head had collapsed onto its chesta change that drastically altered the meaning of the piece. CHILD was intended to show pain at the moment of execution and, over the years, its head had slumped so it looked dead, Hoptman says.

Following CHILDs return to MoMA in 1995, conservators made several attempts to restore the piece, and sought Conners advice on its original appearance and the materials used in its creation. Unfortunately, these attempts failed. It was brought out of storage again in 2014, six years after the artists death, when conservators, curators and representatives from the Conner Family Trust came together to discuss the work. It was decided that CHILD deserved another shot at life.


Nylons not pantyhose
The only way to treat CHILD was to take it apart. A key part of the process involved constructing an internal armature, which the figure lacked and led to its head falling on its collapsed chest. Before Conner died, he accepted that certain additions were needed to restore the piece to its 1960 appearance. The support is made out of sheets of polycaprolactone, a thermoplastic polyester resin once used in the medical industry and now embraced by artists such as Matthew Barney, who uses a different form of it to create his pour pieces. This is MoMAs first experience with the material and conservation fellow Megan Randall says its benefits include being endlessly reheatable so it can be bent over and over to adjust the shape as needed.

Reassembling the figure into the correct position in its chair was one of the biggest challenges. We didnt know how far he had shifted until we began to reassemble it, Griffith says. But, Randall says, the margins of error are very small because he only fits in the chair a certain way. The wax itself was in good condition. Its an incredibly durable material, says MoMAs chief conservator James Coddington, noting that it was used by ancient Egyptian artisans. It had not lost its substance, just its shape.

Over the years, many of the works original nylons had been removed so vintage onesnot pantyhose, as Conner was very specific about his choice of hosierywere sourced from what has become many conservators go-to retail source: eBay. We often find were bidding against colleagues, Coddington says. But the nylons that had remained were in remarkably good condition. Theyre more robust than we had thought, he says, adding that he wouldnt have a problem with CHILD being on view for extended periods.

In the end, Griffith estimates that, aside from the internal armature, the restored piece only contains between 1% and 2% of non-original materials. We were confident it could be [successfully treated] because the material was all there, Griffith says. Coddington was more sceptical. History had come to ask if this object existed any more, he says. Megan and Roger were confident; I was the counter voice.

Rarely in your career as a conservator do you get a chance to bring a work back to life, Griffith says. Im pleased the curators had the confidence in us to let us do it.

Bruce Conner: Its All True, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 3 July-2 October; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 29 October-22 January 2017

The public appeal to save the famed Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I is gathering momentum. The Art Fund charity is driving the campaign to raise 10m so that the historic painting, which is being sold by the descendants of Sir Francis Drake, can be saved for the nation. The #SaveArmada appeal was launched on 23 May with 1.4m in contributions from Art Fund and Royal Museums Greenwich, towards the 10m needed. The appeal total now stands at 2.7m with further approaches to major funders underway, says an Art Fund statement (7,000 public donations plus match funding and grants from charitable trusts have powered the funding initiative). The allegorical portrait shows Elizabeth I surrounded by symbols of imperial power, with two background scenes depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The queens fingers cover the Americas, indicating her plans to expand into the New World. If the appeal succeeds (and people dig deep), the painting will hang in the National Maritime Museum's Queens House, built on the site of Greenwich Palace, the birthplace of Elizabeth I in 1533.

First World War soldiers appeared in public places across the UK yesterday (1 July), marking the centenary of the bloody Battle of the Somme that claimed the lives of more than 19,000 British troops on the first day of the Anglo-French offensive across the fields of northern France a hundred years ago. The men, who congregated in shopping centres, high streets and at railway stations, were volunteers in a human memorial devised by the artist Jeremy Deller, who is known for his re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave in 2001. 

The UK-wide event, entitled Were here because were here, was commissioned by 14-18 Now, the official cultural programme for the centenary commemoration. Deller devised the piece in collaboration with 27 organisations including the National Theatre in London, the National Theatre of Scotland and Manchester Royal Exchange. 

The men, drawn from more than 1,400 volunteers, remained silent when approached, handing out cards with the names and ages of the battle casualties. At points, the participants sang the song Were here because were here to the tune of Auld Lang Syne, a popular song in the trenches during the First World War. 

Deller says in a statement: I wanted to make a contemporary memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, one that moved around the UK with an unpredictability in which the participants took the work directly to the public.

Claire Doherty, the founding director of the public art organisation Situations, said on twitter that the work is a reminder of the potential for public art to cut through the everyday and startle us awake. Jennifer Higgie, the co-editor of Frieze magazine, also called the work amazing on social media. 

The project was backed by Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Creative Scotland, the funding and development agency for the arts.

The Cass Sculpture Foundation in West Sussex in the south of England has commissioned 16 Chinese artists to participate in the most extensive installation ever undertaken on its 26-acre site, says the curatorial director Claire Shea. A Beautiful Disorderthe foundations first major show of commissions by international artistsis the result of almost two years of research and production overseen by Shea and her co-curators, Wenny Teo from the Courtauld Institute, London, and Ella Liao from the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai.

The title comes from a 1743 letter by the French Jesuit missionary and court painter to the Chinese emperor, Jean-Denis Attiret, who gave an enthusiastic account of the imperial gardens irregular design. The quote takes on a political edge in the exhibition, which includes Zheng Bos yellow, red and green flowerbed spelling out the 1950s propaganda slogan Socialism is good and Song Tas Why Do They Never Take Colour Photos? (2016), a fibreglass copy of a sculpture of a young Chairman Mao. The exhibition is sponsored by the foundation.

A Beautiful Disorder, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex, 3 July-6 November

Twenty-first century museums have moved beyond their traditional core functions of conserving and promoting their collections, says Alberto Garlandini, the president of the Italian organising committee of Icom Milano 2016, the triennial conference of the International Council of Museums (Icom) being held in Milan until 9 July. They have new social goals and larger territorial responsibilities than in past times, he says, adding that museums should promote the landscapes they are part of as well as their collections.

The relationship between museums and cultural landscapes is the theme for the 24th general conference, where museum professionals will come together to discuss the changing responsibilities of todays museums and what role these institutions can play in interpreting their local cultural heritage and preserving the cultural landscape, which Unescos assistant director-general for culture, Francesco Bandarin, says embodies centuries of traditional knowledge, experiences and practices. He sees museums role of conserving, interpreting and preserving these landscapes as necessary actions to learn from their past and transmit their richness to the future.   

The Italian architect Michele de Lucchi, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and museum founder Orhan Pamuk and the artist Christo are among the keynote speakers. The hot topics of the illicit trafficking of artefacts and destruction of cultural sites will be addressed in a panel discussion that includes Egypts antiquities minister Khaled El-Enany and Markus Hilgert, the director of Berlins Pergamon Museum, and in the screening of the new documentary film The Destruction of Memory.

Installation and case manufacturer Goppion Museum Lab and the banking group Intesa San Paolo are the main sponsors of the conference.

 

Art lovers can access buildings and sites in central London this weekend that are usually off-limits thanks to a new initiative called Art Night. From 5pm until late today (2 July), visitors can sample an installation by Turner prizewinner Laure Prouvost at Admiralty Arch on the Mall, take in a new video series by Argentine artist Cecilia Bengolea in the East Piazza of Covent Garden and savour a new work by the choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis at Two Temple Place on the Thames. The UK premiere of the performance Reanimation by the veteran artist Joan Jonas, and jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, will be held in Southwark Cathedral.The new festival, devised by Unlimited Productions, is co-curated by the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Kathy Noble. Phillips auction house is backing the project.

A Bacon exhibition opening in Monte Carlo on Saturday 2 July reveals the close links between the artists obsessive gambling and his paintings. Both depended on chance. As Rebecca Daniels, a contributor to the Grimaldi Forum catalogue explains, so inextricably linked were gaming and art that Bacon regarded his losses on the roulette table as an expense related to painting. He once used this as an argument for his dealer to advance more money.

Francis Bacon loved the French Riviera, but what made Monaco particularly attractive was its gambling opportunities. He moved to the independent principality in 1946 and spent most of the next five years there, returning often up until his death in 1992.

Bacons haunt was the Casino. He recalled: I spent whole days there... you could go in at ten oclock and neednt come out until about four oclock the following morning. Bacon would quickly dispense any winnings on champagne and the finest food for friends. It was his symbol of living in the present.

Among the paintings in the Grimaldi Forum show is Study for a Figure (1950), which includes a vaguely outlined circular object. This picture was assumed to have been lost, but in 2006 it was rediscovered on the reverse of a canvas. Lucian Freud then recalled having seen it in 1950, describing the circular object as a roulette wheel.
    
Bacon even owned his own roulette wheel, with which he would play with friends back in England. This relic of the artists tortured life has recently gone to Monaco, when it was purchased by Majid Boustany for his Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation.


Taking risks
Daniels believes that Bacon approached gambling and art with the same spirit, displaying a determination to take risks and allow chance to intervene. Bacon wrote that the vice of gambling... is for me intimately linked with painting. Clive Barker, a sculptor and a friend, recalled that Bacon would talk endlessly about how chance affected his paintings, with success or failure being likened to the spin of a roulette wheel.  

Bacon would persevere with a painting until it either became a masterpiece or a complete failure. When the gamble went wrong, he would simply destroy the work. The Grimaldi Forum exhibition presents 62 of Bacons paintings that relate to his visits to Monaco and France, showing his deep interest in French culture. These essentially represent the successes, but the artist also destroyed hundreds of pictures where his gamble had failed.

A failure of a different kind in Bacons early career was the idea to sell his work to the Casino. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland: I always feel with a little clever manipulation the Casino would buy our pictures. They never did, and instead its magnificent Belle Epoque rooms are decorated with paintings of languorous females, who still today sooth the disappointments of the unlucky as they lose their chips.

Just for this summer, Bacons work has returned to Monaco, at the Grimaldi Forum, a modern conference and exhibition centre a few minutes walk from the Casino. For anyone going to see the show, do go on to the Casino for its magnificent interiors and to imbibe the theatrical atmosphere of the gaming. To see Bacons roulette wheel, take a guided tour of the Francis Bacon MB Foundation with its artworks and memorabilia (advance booking required).


Francis Bacon: Monaco and French Culture, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, 2 July-4 September.

After the death of the British painter Christopher Wood (1901-30) at the age of 29, he was quickly overshadowed by his great friend Ben Nicholson, who became a figurehead of British Modernism. A show at the Pallant House Gallery, which often casts a spotlight on overlooked Modern British artists, aims to redress the balance. Although Woods work is sometimes viewed within the context of his friendship with Ben and Winifred Nicholson (as at a show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2014), this overview focuses solely on the work of this conflicted young man. The exhibition includes 80 works from Woods entire career, from his early years in Paris to his last days in England. The show focuses on his search for purity in both his life and art, says its curator, Katy Norris. The exhibitions chief sponsor is the Italian appliance manufacturer DeLonghi.


Christopher Wood: Sophisticated Primitive, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2 July-2 October

Eighty-two portraits of friends and acquaintances, all in the same format with blue or turquoise backgrounds, comprise the majority of David Hockneys latest exhibition at Londons Royal Academy of Arts (RA), which opens in July.

The acrylic-on-canvas paintings, which will be hung chronologically, will allow visitors to see how the series developed from 2014 until this spring, when it was completed. Among those depicted are art world figures such as John Baldessari, Larry Gagosian, Benedikt Taschen, Frank Gehry and Norman Rosenthal, who were each painted in Los Angeles over a three-day period. Hockney regards the 83 paintings (one still life is included) as a complete work of art and does not intend to split them up. Like Hockneys 2012 exhibition at the RA, which drew more than 600,000 visitors, this show is expected to attract massive crowds. For the first time ever, the RA will require visitors to book their tickets in advance.

The exhibition is sponsored by Cazenove Capital Management.


David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2 July-2 October

The "Meet Vincent van Gogh Experience", a lavish multimedia presentation about the Dutch expressionists life, launched in Beijing earlier this month at the Golden Resources Shopping Mall (until 16 September). The showcreated in partnership between Hollands Van Gogh Museum, the exhibition development firm Artcomm and the Wai Chun Culture companyis expected to attract more than 2,000 visitors daily (a five-year, 30-city tour of Greater China, taking in Shanghai in November is also on the cards). However, Axel Rger, the director of the Van Gogh Museum, says that the Experience does not rely on the original artworks in our collection, many of which are now too fragile to travel. This is, he adds, a complete experience, an intimate journey through Van Goghs life, mixing projections, reproductions, films, and sets, so visitors are transported back to key locations in Vincents life. And visitors will get new insights into an under-the-radar topic, mental health, which remains taboo in China. His illness is integral to this story and therefore plays a major part, Rger says.

The Belgian collector Guy Ullens yesterday announced plans to sell his Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing to a new benefactor and owner. Ullens also plans to sell the remainder of his collection of Chinese contemporary art, which is held separately from the gallery.

We are looking to make an agreement with the right buyer to secure the future of UCCA for the years to come, a spokesman for Ullens and his centre tells The Art Newspaper. "UCCA will continue to function, presenting exhibitions. he added. The decision to sell aims to secure the long-term future of the organisation with a new patron taking over Guy Ullens role as benefactor and owner, he said. One option would be to create a UCCA Foundation to provide long-term financing, our sister publication The Art Newspaper China reports. 

UCCA is one of the oldest and most respected private museums in China. Its founding in 2007 in Beijings 798 art zone foreshadowed Chinas private museum boom; its exhibitions have facilitated the internationalisation of the countrys contemporary art scene and attracted some four million visitors. The UCCA directors Philip Tinari and the US-based Rauschenberg Foundation have co-organised the current show, Rauschenberg in China (until August 21). The current management team will remain in place, and they will be continuing to organise some of the best exhibitions in China, Ullens and the UCCA spokesman said.

The chief executive of the UCCA, May Xue, released last year the gallerys annual operating costs of around Rmb41m ($6m), 25% from Ullens, 25% from corporate sponsorship, 20% from their charity auction, 10% from individual donors, and 20% generated by the centre.

News of the sale was first broken on Thursday (30 June) by the anonymous art blogger Route 66. The post sent the Chinese art world into a frenzy of speculation on social media, with laments that the institution might lose its integrity or might shut down entirely. UCCA is not closing, the spokesman stressed.

The first Matisse exhibition on the African continent is opening in Johannesburg, South Africa, at Standard Bank Gallery in July. Titled Rhythm and Meaning, the exhibition has been organised with the Muse Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrsis in northern France which has loaned most of the works. The idea came from the French Institute in Johannesburg and the French embassy.

Federico Freschi, the dean of the faculty of art, design and architecture at the University of Johannesburg, has curated the show with Patrice Deparpe, the director of the Muse Matisse du Cateau-Cambrsis, which was founded by Matisse in his birth town.

Regarding the choice of Standard Bank Gallery as the venue, Deparpe says, When the Embassy of France contacted me to arrange a Matisse exhibition, I visited all the possible places. It turns out that the 'traditional' museums absolutely don't answer to the minimum criteria of security and conservation for this kind of exhibition. He adds that Standard Bank Gallery has already worked with the Muse Rodin in Paris and the Muse des beaux-arts de Lyon.

The running thread through the exhibition is freedom. Featured are around 70 works, including paintings, drawings, collages and prints covering the dominant themes in Matisse's work. A central exhibit is the suite of 20 impressions for the prints in Matisse's book Jazz (1947), which indicate how he was inspired by Kuba cloths from the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). His correspondence indicates that he would hang these cloths on the walls of his studio and look at them for long periods, waiting for inspiration, informs Freschi, adding that these abstract forms also influenced Matisse's paper cut-outs in the 1940s and 1950s.

The fact that Matisse collected carved African figurines and masks, as well as Inuit masks and objects from Oceania, is being emphasized. Of particular interest to South African audiences is the inspiration he took from African and other non-Western art forms during the early 1900s while struggling to find a new visual language to express the particular experience of the new, modern age, says Freschi.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a bus is being transformed into a workshop so that school children in Soweto township can work on Matisse's paper cut-outs.

Henri Matisse: Rhythm and Meaning, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 13 July-17 September 2016

Let sleeping (with) dogs lie: crazy Animaladies exhibition celebrates interspecies collaborations in contemporary art.

‘Are we crazy to love and care for other species, at times more than other humans?’ asks co-curator Madeleine Boyd. ‘Other species often love us back in ways that are fulfilling and productive yet free from the conflicts of human experiences’.

Some of the works in the Animaladies exhibition celebrate relationships between humans and animals, while others provoke.

‘Interlude Gallery will be a feast for the senses’, says Boyd, ‘as 24 artists working in diverse media – installation, painting, printmaking, relational art and photomedia engage with the theme of crazy animal love’.

The exhibition accompanies an animal studies symposium, Animaladies, to be held 11–12 July at the University of Sydney which will focus on the role of madness reframed in terms of species, race and gender as ‘animaladies’.

‘The artworks in this exhibition are wonderful examples of the vibrancy of the field, and the contribution the arts make in animal studies scholarship,’ said co-curator Yvette Watt who lectures at the Tasmanian College of the Arts.

A feature of the exhibition is the Postcard Project. Co-curator Melissa Boyde, senior research fellow at the University of Wollongong and editor of the Animal Studies Journal, comments: ‘We wanted to include accessible, affordable and portable works in Animaladies and artists from across Australia have responded with beautiful, small scale works’.

Limited editions of the Animaladies postcards will be available for sale in packs of 10.

Animaladies opens at 5.30pm on Monday, July 11 at Interlude Gallery in Glebe. On July 16, an Interlude Gallery tradition of a feast and artist talks will take place.

Opening event. All welcome, free event.
Sponsored by Poor Tom’s Gin
Monday, 11 July, 2016, 5.30pm-7pm

Artist talks and vegan feast. All welcome, free event.
Saturday, 16 July, 2016 3pm-5pm

Urmila is a woman surviving in a man’s world. Amidst the civil unrest in Sri Lanka, she has been convinced to choose a path mapped out by treachery and deception.

Written by Visakesa Chandrasekaram (Gratiaen Prize 1999)
Directed by Neil Khare
Cast: Belinda Maree, Dimitri Armatas
Sound: Levi Jackson
Make up: Tanya Khare
Photography: Rob Watt. Brad Yee