Key players in the country’s art history feature in a hefty new tome that covers everything from royal-carvers to bronze-smiths to work inspired by a horrific video smuggled out of a torture chamber

One Sunday last year, the Cameroonian-Guadeloupean-French artist Roxane Mbanga was relaxing in bed when she received a message that made her sit up. It was about working on an art history project.

Growing up in Paris, she had been a regular at Maasai Mara, the now defunct restaurant owned by her father, where Africans in the diaspora, including the artists whom he helped organise exhibitions, convened to eat and chat. Thus the concept of a book, attempting for the first time to comprehensively compile and document key players in Cameroon’s vast visual art history, made obvious sense to her.

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© Photograph: (c) Studio Vanssay

© Photograph: (c) Studio Vanssay

© Photograph: (c) Studio Vanssay

Little-known photographer John Baer captured everyday life before putting down his camera in 1954. His son discovered the images decades later after his death, and John Baer: The Extraordinary Ordinary / A Memoir in Photographs, 1945–1954 marks their first public release

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© Photograph: Photograph by John Baer

© Photograph: Photograph by John Baer

© Photograph: Photograph by John Baer

Inspired by a gothic cathedral partly built using human bones, this gleaming monument to recycling boasts 82,000 bricks derived from construction waste – following a two-day brick-making festival

Museums often try to reflect the world around them, but rarely are they made so literally of their surroundings as the new design museum in Ghent. Rising above the Belgian city’s medieval tiled rooftops like an angular white watchtower, the new building has vacuumed up the city’s condemned concrete frames, windows, car windscreens, sinks and old toilets, and transformed them, phoenix-like, into a gleaming monument to recycling.

“There’s nothing new about reuse,” says Andy Groarke, co-founder of Carmody Groarke, the London-based architects who designed the €20m (£17m) project with local firms Atama and Re-st. “We’ve just forgotten how to do it.”

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© Photograph: Behangmotief for Design Museum Gent

© Photograph: Behangmotief for Design Museum Gent

© Photograph: Behangmotief for Design Museum Gent

Sanlé Sory is said to have taken a million photographs over six decades, documenting rapid change in his home country. A new exhibition looks at the moment he embraced colour

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© Photograph: © Sanlé Sory, 2026. Courtesy of Tezeta

© Photograph: © Sanlé Sory, 2026. Courtesy of Tezeta

© Photograph: © Sanlé Sory, 2026. Courtesy of Tezeta

Tate Modern, London
From a Singapore construction worker to a loincloth-wearing Sri Lankan, this awe-inspiring and truly global exhibition finds epic beauty in the everyday

I don’t remember the last time I saw such a well-researched and truly globally representative exhibition that doesn’t patronise but quietly makes its case unapologetically, fearlessly and through sheer quality. Apart from being the first retelling of the international, pluralistic pictorialism movement, Tate’s new show allows for some refreshing encounters with unknown works for British audiences – around half of the works included here have never been shown in the UK. The effect is to radically deepen and widen our understanding not only of art history but the human impulses that drive us to make images in the first place.

We move seamlessly from the sudden shock of colour in three-colour carbon prints of flowers in a London garden in the 1920s to works born of the photographic salons, circles and clubs of Sydney, Hong Kong and Brazil. Historical moments collide; the epic emerges from the everyday. A man rows home across the Norfolk Broads, another works on a construction site in Singapore. None of it feels out of place. It all belongs. It is all extremely, almost ecclesiastically, beautiful.

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© Photograph: Yip Cheong Fun, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. © Andrew Yip Weng Kee.

© Photograph: Yip Cheong Fun, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. © Andrew Yip Weng Kee.

© Photograph: Yip Cheong Fun, Collection of National Gallery Singapore. © Andrew Yip Weng Kee.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
With its helpless rowers, naked river-crossers and snowbound tea-drinkers, this magnificent series is a warning to put your faith in the essential and enduring

The giant wave’s foaming white summit spreads high over the heads of the helpless souls huddled in their long thin boats, crackling into what look like many sharp claws. It is a monster, hungry to swallow human flesh. But beyond it, over the wild water, soothing the terror of those in peril on the sea, is Mount Fuji – a solid cone of hope and solace. The mountain, not the wave, is the hero of this masterpiece, as it is the hero of all the prints in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s stunning exhibition – the first in Britain – of the complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

When you look closely here at three different, superb impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa – widely known today as the Great Wave – your mental picture of this icon is shattered by the violent onrush of water. In reproductions the wave just seems beautiful, an elegant curl of blue and white. But here, to paraphrase Tennyson, it is nature, blue in tooth and claw. The wretched people are the emotional heart of the picture, their imminent risk of drowning its whole point.

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© Photograph: Courtesy the Iuchi Collection, on deposit at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Photo by Norihiro Ueno

© Photograph: Courtesy the Iuchi Collection, on deposit at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Photo by Norihiro Ueno

© Photograph: Courtesy the Iuchi Collection, on deposit at The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo. Photo by Norihiro Ueno

The potter and presenter on a tricky childhood, his religious calling for clay, and cross-dressing as Adele

Born in London in 1965, Keith Brymer Jones is a potter, ceramic designer and TV judge. After a stint as lead singer of the punk band the Wigs, he became an apprentice at Harefield Pottery in London. He went on to set up his own company, and created pots and homewares for retailers including Conran, Habitat and Laura Ashley, before developing his signature Word range. He has been a judge on The Great Pottery Throw Down since it started in 2015. His new book, Firing Earth: An Unexpected History of Pots and Potters, is published on 22 October.

This photo was taken in our family home in Finchley. Socks, shorts and a T-shirt was my usual outfit for scabbing around in the garden aged 11. I was a complete and utter square.

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© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

© Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian

A new Washington DC exhibition examines how Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and more used the Bard’s work to help tell their own stories

“William Shakespeare was a black woman.” In 1985, Maya Angelou spoke these words as part of a keynote speech at a convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

There, she spoke of the role poetry played in her transition from muteness as a child and how she fantasized herself triumphantly delivering Portia’s speech from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in front of her entire community at church. Though she never got the chance to perform that rendition, Angelou acknowledged her desire to deliver that rendition as part of a lifelong kinship with Shakespeare, a connection she continued to seek out throughout her life whenever she needed heartening or solace. In her eyes, Shakespeare wrote his emotionally desolate Sonnet 29 “for” her; how else could he have so aptly described the harsh realities of the Black feminine condition?

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© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

© Photograph: Kennedi Carter/Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY

MYB Textiles Ltd is the last mill in the world weaving patterned Nottingham lace on traditional looms. Once there were 20 lace mills in the Irvine Valley towns of Newmilns and Darvel alone. The lace industry became the largest employer in the area for a time and flourished until the late 1970s when competition emerged from other European countries and Asia. Now the majority of their trade comes from the film, theatre, TV and entertainment industry

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Creativity and influence of Morris & Co designer Kate Faulkner to be detailed in Cambridge exhibition

For more than a century, she has been little more than a footnote in William Morris’s story, her work mistaken for his, her contribution to British decorative art largely overlooked.

Yet, in her lifetime, Kate Faulkner was a pioneer: the first person after Morris to design wallpapers and fabrics for Morris & Co, and one of only four designers he ever trusted to do so. Several of the patterns she designed under her name for the company in the 1870s and 1880s are still sold today.

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© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

© Photograph: Bridgeman Images

The photographer was holidaying with his family when two shadows became a plaything for his young son

Gellért Gombai, his wife and two children spend much of the year at their home in Budapest, Hungary, but most of their summers in Alsóörs. “It’s a small holiday village on Lake Balaton, the largest in central Europe, so it’s often referred to as the Hungarian sea,” Gombai, a freelance photographer, says. “We go to the playground and beach most days, swim, and eat beach food, but even when I’m enjoying my holiday, I’m looking out for interesting moments to capture.”

On this particular day, the family had eaten hotdogs for lunch, before Gombai had taken the kids, Lóci and Janka, to the playground. “Lóci, who was five at the time, was jumping between two shadows – one from a changing room, and the other from a building’s roof,” he says. “I asked him to stay still for a few minutes while I got the shot, and he lay like this on the ground. He’s a big-hearted little clown; I’m so glad he’s my son.” When he showed the children, “Janka immediately asked me to take the same shot of her, which often happens. Lóci said it looked like he was among mountains, or as though a monster was about to eat him.”

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© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

© Photograph: Gellert Gombai

From a body-building Arnie to a weeping Frenchman, these 39 groundbreaking images have upended assumptions about how men behave, dress and project power. Introduction by Luke Kennard

I have an image of myself in 2011, pushing my newborn son in a big red buggy because he would only nap when in motion. As I traversed the streets of suburban Birmingham, I felt observed, glanced at, commented on in a manner that ranged from pity to reproach to disproportionate admiration. Daft that it should be a remarkable sight, I thought, but there we go. Probably I’d have felt less self-conscious if I’d followed David Bowie’s example and – as in one of the images showcased here – worn what looks like a dress.

On depictions of men and women in art history, John Berger famously stated that “men act, women appear”. Men were portrayed demonstrating their physical power and readiness for action; to assert their dominance. Just turning that gaze around and using the lens to capture masculinity feels subversive, maybe even a little undermining.

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© Photograph: Historical/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Historical/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Historical/Corbis/Getty Images

A social media star comes a cropper in timely horror, and the Spice Girls ledge takes her disco- and indie-tinged bops out on a short tour

The Influencer Project
Out now
When your career involves constantly posting footage of everything you do to social media, it makes things a cakewalk for stalkers. And lo, the influencer-in-peril horror subgenre was born. British social media star Chiara King plays herself in this chilling iteration, set in Copenhagen.

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© Composite: -

© Composite: -

© Composite: -

Settler attacks in the West Bank, Russian strikes on Kyiv, protests in New Delhi and the northern lights in Northumberland – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing

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© Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

© Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

© Photograph: Ammar Awad/Reuters

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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© Composite: Shutterstock

© Composite: Shutterstock

© Composite: Shutterstock

There’s plenty that stands out at Regent’s Park this year, from antidepressant pens and an ibuprofen-dolling robotic arm to Miriam Cahn’s 26 years’ worth of self-portraiture and a 150m-year-old dinosaur skull – still with embedded tooth

• Frieze review – you’ll see more avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent

The raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies. It’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts, interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on. It’s a greasy, gross, uncomfortable exploration of sex work on an industrial scale.

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© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

In 1983, David Nash dug up a section of Kensington Gardens and swapped it with Welsh grassland. Four decades later, Mike Perry’s reverse swap revealed a striking reversal in the fortunes of urban and rural nature

In 1983, an open-topped truck unloaded an unusual cargo in Kensington Gardens: 83 hunks of turf cut from Cae’n y Coed, a wooded hillside in the Ffestiniog valley. The ring of turf measuring eight metres in diameter that was removed from the park beside the Serpentine Gallery in west London to make space for the Welsh sods was then trucked from London to north Wales.

So began Sod Swap, a piece of sculptural defiance by David Nash, which has had an unexpected and epic afterlife. More than 40 years later, photographic artist Mike Perry restaged the work as Reverse Sod Swap, exchanging exactly the same amount of turf between Springfield Park in Hackney, east London, and pastureland in Pembrokeshire, with strikingly different results. With twin works acquiring new relevance in a time of extinction and climate crises, the sod swapping is now the subject of a new book.

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© Photograph: © Mike Perry

© Photograph: © Mike Perry

© Photograph: © Mike Perry

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

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© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

© Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

How architects worked with harsh environment to create sustainable building in location where fossils were found

Viewed from afar, the silver-hued Hami Pterosaur Museum almost looks like a space base on Mars. Viewed from above, it resembles a collection of dinosaur eggs in the sand. Nestled in the Gobi desert, in north-west China, the new tourist attraction showcases hundreds of impressive fossils of pterosaurs, ancient flying reptiles related to dinosaurs. But far from reflecting its prehistoric exhibits, the building itself is a modern-day architectural specimen.

Designed with underground exhibition halls, giant light funnels and sprawling solar farms, the museum is able to operate sustainably while withstanding an extremely harsh environment.

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© Photograph: Turenscape

© Photograph: Turenscape

© Photograph: Turenscape

Venues across Birmingham
As Britain’s longest-running live art festival returns, get ready for late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool and Faye Driscoll’s incredible rotating disintegration

The phrase “two things can be true” is a frequent refrain in popular psychology and it’s also a frequent response, I find, to witnessing the farther reaches of live art. Hmm, is this performance confusingly self-indulgent or utterly profound? Sometimes it can be both. In fact, it’s not just two things that can be true, it’s as many things as there are people in the audience, since this is all about the live subjective experience, in the moment; presence and connection.

Launched in 1998, Fierce is Britain’s longest-running live art festival. For one week it takes over Birmingham’s conventional theatres alongside unconventional spaces, especially in ex-industrial Digbeth, which is fast becoming a creative hub. Also on the bill this year: late-night artist dinners, a show in a swimming pool, and a six-hour performance jam at a grand gothic hall that was apparently the inspiration for Cluedo.

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© Photograph: Kevin Monko

© Photograph: Kevin Monko

© Photograph: Kevin Monko

Nearly 50 years ago in inner-city Birmingham, photographers Derek Bishton, Brian Homer and John Reardon set up an impromptu studio in the street and invited their neighbours along. With no camera phones in 1979, long cable releases gave participants the power to decide how they wished to be seen and represented. The project’s original aim was to counter negative media images of Handsworth and its people. Now, in collaboration with Dewi Lewis Publishing, a Kickstarter fund has been set up to bring them together in book form

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© Composite: Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon

© Composite: Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon

© Composite: Derek Bishton, Brian Homer & John Reardon

Rising from bluebell woodlands and framed by rolling hills, this cluster of pink and brown brick towers in Croydon is a bittersweet winner of the prestigious RIBA Stirling prize

If Andy Burnham is looking for inspiration for his great “council housebuilding comeback”, he would do well to visit Croydon. There, nestled into a steeply sloping site, sheltered by a canopy of mature trees, stands a cluster of crystalline pink and brown brick towers, where generous flats look on to a landscape of allotments, playgrounds and to the rolling hills of south London beyond. Designed by Mary Duggan Architects, with Ruff Architects, it is a model of council-led housebuilding – so much so that it has also been named this year’s best building in the UK, confounding the bookies’ outsider odds.

Only once before has the RIBA Stirling prize ever been awarded to a council housing project, when Goldsmith Street in Norwich scooped the gong in 2019, for its rows of low-energy brick terraces, designed by Mikhail Riches Architects and Cathy Hawley. This year’s winner, Lion Green Road in Coulsdon, is an entirely different animal, and it puts a welcome spotlight back on housing design at a time when the government plans to pump £39bn into the sector. It is also a bittersweet vindication of Croydon council’s erstwhile housebuilding company, Brick by Brick, a bold and sadly brief experiment by the previous Labour administration, which was halted in 2020 when the council went bankrupt, seeing numerous projects cancelled.

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© Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

© Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

© Photograph: Oliver Wainwright

North London's Arsenal F.C. has a new logotype, named after beloved player David Carlyle "Rocky" Rocastle, who died young at age 33 in 2001. Here is an interview from It's Nice That with the designer of the logotype/wordmark and bespoke blackletter typeface named after Rocky.

Regents Park, London
This year’s art fair is a jumble sale of mediocre paintings for the super-rich, while its Masters sibling hawks dinosaur skulls and sleazy 19th-century nudes. Welcome to the art market as its most grotesque

Naked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming, while someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of contemporary art at Frieze London. It’s a painting by a 16th-century follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is on view at Frieze Masters, the posher tent on the other side of Regent’s Park.

I’m sorry to say I was bored rigid in Frieze London. Many people attend, I imagine, hoping to be informed and excited by the newest, coolest art, but you’ll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent. There are endless paintings, none of which are much good, interspersed with photographs which tend to be a little better. The first thing here that held me at all was a two-metre-tall, inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans called Paul, nude, golf ball in which the naked Paul has his elbows on the floor and his close-cropped head bowed between them in apparent despair, while the white ball beside him eerily mirrors the pale flesh of his bony back. But it’s not new – it dates from 1994.

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/Linda Nylind. Courtesy Frieze

The author offers intriguing insights into the way this Dutch artist worked, including fresh perspectives on The Girl With the Pearl Earring

In the decades after the death of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1675, few knew his name or work. He was so unknown that his paintings were sold with the forged signatures of more popular artists attached. All that changed in the mid-19th century, when his art was reassessed by French critics. Today Vermeer is one of the most admired painters in the world, although, says art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, he has “proved stubbornly resistant to interpretation”.

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Graham-Dixon’s biography which was six years in the writing, endeavours to answer some unresolved questions, among them: what was Vermeer’s life like? Why did he paint the way he did? What was the intent behind his paintings, of which only 36 exist? Unlike the Dutch genre painters of his time, the Delft-born Vermeer painted solemn yet luminous works featuring women in domestic settings and engaged in activities such as reading, writing, playing music or pouring milk. His ability to render light, and its softening effect on rooms and people, was unparalleled.

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© Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA

© Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA

© Photograph: Jiji Press/EPA

Modern Art, London
The late American took on liberal presumptions and the commercialism of Black culture, even dressing in white bunny ears and underpants

Seven squares are pinned to the wall, each one painted in the high style of American minimalism: pure, austere variations on a theme. At the centre of each is printed the phrase “negro idea” followed by an apparently random number (51, 37, 666). What is Pope.L, the late, great trickster of contemporary American art, getting at?

Perhaps it is a critique of how minimalism, with its ethos of art-for-art’s sake, excluded politics from art? Or a comment on how racial categories are as constructed (and as subject to fashion) as the theories underpinning contemporary art? Or is it a riff on how the edifice of western modernism is built on stolen ideas? Then again, maybe the deployment of an outmoded racial category is simply designed to discomfort the liberal pieties of those people likely to visit this art gallery just off Piccadilly.

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© Photograph: Courtesy The Estate of Pope.L and Modern Art © The Estate of Pope.L

© Photograph: Courtesy The Estate of Pope.L and Modern Art © The Estate of Pope.L

© Photograph: Courtesy The Estate of Pope.L and Modern Art © The Estate of Pope.L

The Back to Black singer’s books, shoes and jigsaw puzzles have gone on display. Elsewhere, a leaky Barbican and some gloriously gloopy sculptures can be viewed in London galleries this week

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© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

© Photograph: Eva Herzog/Courtesy the artist and the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation

Brandon Thomas created Artcraft in response to frustration at the lock-in terms associated with Adobe subscriptions. He claims to have used Claude to vibe-code "cleanroom" versions of their entire suite of products which he has been available as open source. A side by side review and a consideration of the legal implications from Louis Rossman.

This year’s London photography festival takes you from the colourful streets of Kolkata to the grim isolation units of Guantánamo Bay

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© Photograph: Ravi Madan

© Photograph: Ravi Madan

© Photograph: Ravi Madan

The late Christoph Schlingensief was one of German art’s great provocateurs. Can his B-Movie horror aesthetics still shock us into thinking anew about media power, colonialism, and the far right?

Christoph Schlingensief certainly knew how to provoke. “Fury at German play that shows Queen as a Nazi,” read the Sunday Express’s headline after Kaprow City first premiered at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in 2006. Drawing on the happenings of US performance artist Allan Kaprow, the play turned its attention to Diana, Princess of Wales’s death. In one scene, the then queen performs a Hitler salute. Another re-enacts the paparazzi chase that led to Diana’s fatal crash. Diana appears in bed beside two men with Down’s syndrome; and Camilla is pelted with animal blood. Schlingensief insisted the work was not meant as provocation but as an investigation into how Diana turned into a modern icon. But his art thrived on outrage, exposing the absurdity of societies that glorify their idols while consuming their lives as entertainment.

Kaprow City is at the heart of a new Berlin show – It’s Not My Problem Anymore, Deal With Your Own Shit – that revisits the artist’s legacy. In the Gropius Bau’s grand neo-Renaissance atrium, visitors encounter remnants of the carousel-like rotating stage he called the “animatograph”. Looking at this installation today feels like a glimpse into Schlingensief’s mind: a messy collage of childhood memories, violent fantasies and royal glamour.

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© Photograph: © Estate of Christoph Schlingensief

© Photograph: © Estate of Christoph Schlingensief

© Photograph: © Estate of Christoph Schlingensief

A protein is a chain of amino acids held together by what are called peptide bonds. On their own, those bonds are extremely stable; they're estimated to have a half-life of several hundred years. But in Earth's environment, most proteins don't last nearly that long. That's because organisms have evolved a handful of ways to catalyze the break-up of peptide bonds, which have diversified into countless specialized protein-digesting enzymes. Proteases are everywhere and generally make short work of any proteins that find their way into the environment.

Now, researchers have basically short-circuited the diversification process, using AI-based protein design tools to take the catalytic core of two types of protease and replace the entire rest of the protein. The resulting enzymes could be tuned to cut specific proteins in half, and the researchers demonstrated their effectiveness by using them to cut proteins associated with neurological diseases.

Cutting proteins

The basic peptide bond isn't especially interesting-looking—it's what you get when you link an amino group to an acid, releasing a water molecule in the process. As their name implies, amino acids have both an amino and an acid group, allowing them to form peptide bonds on two sides of the amino acid. This is critical for building up the long chains found in proteins. (The amino acids also have side chains with distinctive chemistry, which gives a backbone specific properties.)

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© Basic

Prolific first-person shooter level designer Richard "Levelord" Gray died Monday at the age of 68, based on reports shared on social media by Apogee Entertainment yesterday. He had "dealt with cancer on and off for a while now," according to former colleague Joe Siegler.

After studying computer engineering in the '80s and tinkering on some early games in COBOL, Gray broke into the industry at the age of 35 in 1994 with the launch of GrayDoom, a set of four maps for the then-new Doom that were widely shared on CompuServe and beyond. The work attracted the attention of Q Studios' Nick Newhard, who contracted Gray to work on level design for the late '90s cult classic Blood.

Gray was subsequently hired by 3D Realms, where he said he was given free rein in designing "half the levels" for Duke Nukem 3D. There, he was also responsible for the famous, signed "You're Not Supposed to Be Here" easter egg, which players could find only by using cheats to explore outside of the usual confines of the map.

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© Apogee Entertainment

Amid economic sanctions and ongoing conflict, a new initiative is returning Iran’s artists to the international spotlight

When the call came early one morning, Tehran resident Elham Issari knew it must be urgent. The voice on the line was offering something precious. “Miss Elham,” he said excitedly, “I have a single tube of white paint! It’s overpriced and I know it’s overpriced but, if you want it, you have to buy it right now because there’s this other guy in this other city who wants it and you have to tell me within the next five minutes.”

The tube of white paint would have cost Issari 5m tomans (about $36), she recalls. “I was like, I don’t think so, because that’s overpriced, and the next thing you know is it’s 4am and I’m on YouTube watching how to make lead white in your backyard without getting lead poisoning.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Continuum: Artist Relief for Iran, presented by Duran Art Projects. © Aryan Dabbagh, 2021.

© Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Continuum: Artist Relief for Iran, presented by Duran Art Projects. © Aryan Dabbagh, 2021.

© Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Continuum: Artist Relief for Iran, presented by Duran Art Projects. © Aryan Dabbagh, 2021.

‘Karen is a Japanese dominatrix and “rope artist” who ties up her clients in a way that echoes how samurai bound their prisoners. Clients are mostly men with high-pressure jobs’

Ten years ago, my dad called to say he had found these amazing images hidden under piles of maps and stuff in an attic in our family home in Piemonte, northern Italy. He had come across a leather-bound album of 53 black and white photographs: portraits of Japanese “native types”, reflecting the 19th-century colonial way of representing people, cultures and views of Japan.

It turned out we had a treasure in our hands: it was an album of photographs by Felice Beato, the first foreign photographer to arrive in Japan in 1863 at the end of the Edo period and on the eve of the Meiji era.

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© Photograph: Giada Ripa

© Photograph: Giada Ripa

© Photograph: Giada Ripa

As a new exhibition looks at how the pioneering photographer sparked a colour revolution, his son, William Eggleston III, explains his father’s unique approach

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© Photograph: Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

© Photograph: Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

© Photograph: Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

Lightroom, London
From Shaun’s barn to Gromit’s box, these immersive behind-the-scenes renderings of the wide-grinned, cheeky characters are joyful, enormous – and a bit hard to follow

Nothing is safe from the scourge of immersification. They’ve turned Gustav Klimt and Vincent Van Gogh into vast, projection-mapped digital environments; they’ve told the stories of the moon landings and the dinosaurs and David Bowie as floor-to-ceiling electronic spectacles; and now they’ve come for Aardman. For Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, our national treasures. Is nothing sacred?

The latest immersive cinematic experience at Lightroom is a big, eye-popping celebration of Aardman Animations, the company behind the world’s favourite claymation films and TV shows. It moves between documentary storytelling, behind-the-scenes insight and dazzling immersive renderings of all your wide-grinned, cheeky northern favourites.

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© Photograph: Justin Sutcliffe/Justin Sutcliffe for LIghtroom KX

© Photograph: Justin Sutcliffe/Justin Sutcliffe for LIghtroom KX

© Photograph: Justin Sutcliffe/Justin Sutcliffe for LIghtroom KX

Conference to explore legacy of Naseem Khan’s seminal 1976 report about exclusion of minority ethnic artists

It is 50 years since cultural historian Naseem Khan’s challenge to the British arts establishment was first published, and the question of who and what counts as British continues to be contested.

The Arts Britain Ignores – Khan’s groundbreaking 1976 report, commissioned by organisations including the then Arts Council of Great Britain, presented a vision of a pluralistic national culture, in which the creativity of Britons of diverse ethnic backgrounds – from bhangra music, to black painters and Ukrainian dance – should be recognised, supported and respected.

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© Photograph: Leesha Williams

© Photograph: Leesha Williams

© Photograph: Leesha Williams

Autograph, London
The three-person headline show looking at South American feminism is displayed alongside Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth, an intimate study of Indian trans communities

In the 1990s, the late Chicana artist Laura Aguilar was living with depression. A friend took her on a road trip to New Mexico, where Aguilar made some nude self-portraits in the mystical landscapes. Those photographs evolved into a pivotal series shot in desert environments across the American south-west, Aguilar’s notable 1996 Nature Self-Portrait – considered an early work of intersectional feminist art, before the word had entered academic discourse.

London gallery Autograph first worked on an exhibition of Aguilar’s in 1997, the year after she made Nature Self-Portrait, so this is something of a homecoming, a generation on. Aguilar’s contours, folds, and crevices sometimes disappear into the barren desert landscapes, assimilating the shapes of boulders or trees; at other times, her body is incongruous, soft flesh that can’t be held by the harsh, barren conditions. These images capture the paradox of a body that is both hypervisible and ignored.

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© Photograph: © Laura Aguilar

© Photograph: © Laura Aguilar

© Photograph: © Laura Aguilar

Thaddaeus Ropac, London
The artist captures horror, disgust and guilt over Germany’s Nazi past. The colossal results are so scathingly ironic it’s like being spat at

When the German painter Georg Baselitz died this year a chunk of Europe’s rapidly diminishing historical memory went with him. Baselitz was born in 1938, experienced Hitler’s Germany and the second world war as a young child, then found himself growing up in communist East Germany before escaping to the west and becoming an artist. His acidic, honest perceptions of the history he’d lived through will no longer be those of the living person I was lucky enough to encounter. But he has left us a gift: an exhibition in London he helped plan of his most astonishing history paintings, The Heroes.

It’s a savage, merciless vision of modern history with feelings of horror, disgust and irreparable guilt hanging heavy in the poisoned air. But there’s a terrible joy too, the thrill of speaking the truth. You sense the liberation Baselitz must have felt when he set brush to canvas to start these paintings in 1965. Comparing the explosive rage and nihilism of his art to punk may be inadequate but the title of this series of colossal imaginary portraits is so scathingly ironic it’s like being spat at.

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© Photograph: © Georg Baselitz 2026. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London

© Photograph: © Georg Baselitz 2026. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London

© Photograph: © Georg Baselitz 2026. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London

His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deserves

In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.

The name was a dig at Finland, which the architectural maestro believed had taken him for granted. Other nations, he moaned, recognised his talent more than his own. Today, arriving in Helsinki, I find that Finland doesn’t just love Aalto, he’s a national treasure.

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© Photograph: Foundation for the Finnish Museum of Architecture and Design

© Photograph: Foundation for the Finnish Museum of Architecture and Design

© Photograph: Foundation for the Finnish Museum of Architecture and Design

French photographer Jean-Pierre Laffont spent two decades capturing demos, clashes and countercultural gatherings in America. ‘They dreamed of living in a better world,’ he says

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© Photograph: JP Laffont

© Photograph: JP Laffont

© Photograph: JP Laffont

Tate Modern, London
The Lebanese artist has turned trumpets, drums, cones and voices into an ingenious, interconnected sonic beast with funny, sad and mystical results. Prepare to feel the earth move!

On the floor of the Turbine Hall, there are wide water basins and huge flattish rough-hewn rocks you might see on moorland or in a desert. You can sit or stand or climb on them. But if you look up, you won’t be able to stop looking up – because it’s raining musical instruments. Immense elongated brass trumpets and giant glowing drums seem to float in the air, suspended from the girders of the former power station’s roof.

If Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui had just left it at that, it would be an impressive, intriguing installation, but this is Tate Modern, honey, and Atoui hasn’t been asked to occupy its grandest space with mere physical objects. Instead, his sculptural creations and found stuff resonate and echo with an ever-changing, invisible art of noises. An earth-shaking bass note throbs from a hanging trumpet – or is it from that translucent cone rising out of the ground like an ethereal minaret? Then a drumbeat booms through the space and a woman’s plangent, achingly lovely voice sings notes of infinite nostalgia and melancholy.

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© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

© Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
There’s an atmosphere of sickly discomfort throughout this weird, intense mid-career survey for this brilliant artist

Prem Sahib turns the city inside out, twists it around and rips it apart. His show at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, a sort of mid-career survey for the 44-year-old English artist, is full of private spaces and urban nightmares that have been gutted and left on display. It’s minimal, claustrophobic, intense stuff.

A sodium street lamp hangs upside down from the ceiling, casting its sickly pale orange glow across the gallery. You feel like you’ve stumbled into some urban back alley where physics has been flipped, it has all the threat of an underpass, but surreal and inverted. Nearby, three puffer jackets have been squeezed between sheets of glass – are these the blokes who were waiting for you in the underpass? Or are they three strangers who you’ve caught mid-embrace?

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© Photograph: Ben Westoby/courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

© Photograph: Ben Westoby/courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

© Photograph: Ben Westoby/courtesy the artist and Phillida Reid, London

Ibraaz, London
Too controversial for the Venice Biennale, this haunting video and audio work commemorates murders and genocides with an angry act of mourning

The sound of mourning spills out into the streets. A single, endless wailing note echoes out of the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural centre in London’s Fitzrovia. This is Gabrielle Goliath’s heart-wrenching Elegy, each of its three films featuring a woman singing just one note until their lungs falter and another woman steps up to fill in for her. Just as a note is about to die, it is sustained. It’s a haunting, shocking act of mourning for murder, injustice and genocide.

And it almost never made it.

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© Photograph: Ollie Hammick

© Photograph: Ollie Hammick

© Photograph: Ollie Hammick

Descendant of 19-century artist demands removal of Marc Chagall’s 1960s canvasses that cover original fresco

In 1962, the then French culture minister, André Malraux, reportedly bored by the ballet he was watching at Paris’s opera house, raised his eyes to the classical ceiling and decided it needed a makeover.

In his ennui, Malraux thought his friend and artist Marc Chagall, sitting next to him at the Palais Garnier at the time, was the man for the job and commissioned him to make a new ceiling.

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© Photograph: Amis de Lenepveu J Moatti

© Photograph: Amis de Lenepveu J Moatti

© Photograph: Amis de Lenepveu J Moatti

For several years, Chloe Kerleroux has been photographing African American cowboy communities in the southern US. Her work has mainly focused on trail rides: large gatherings where horses, music, dancing, family and community life come together. This year, she explored rodeo culture including at the Bill Pickett invitational in Atlanta

The image of the cowboy widely portrayed in westerns and popular culture has long been almost exclusively white. Yet Black cowboys hold an important place in the history of the American west. After the civil war and the abolition of slavery, many African Americans found work on ranches and on the great cattle drives westward. By the late 19th century, historians estimate about one in four cowboys were Black.

Among the Black figures who shaped this history was Bill Pickett. Born in Texas in 1870, he became one of the most celebrated Black cowboys and rodeo performers of his time, known in particular for popularising bulldogging, which would eventually give rise to modern steer wrestling.

After the national anthem, Josh, a member of the Outlaws Most Wanted, rides around the arena to a pounding hip-hop track as his teammates cheer him on at the Bill Pickett invitational rodeo in Conyers, near Atlanta, Georgia, on 2 August 2026

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© Photograph: Chloe Kerleroux

© Photograph: Chloe Kerleroux

© Photograph: Chloe Kerleroux

As the sprawling art jamboree hits London, eight of the most exciting exhibiting artists share what their work means to them – and who they hope will buy it

First held in 2003, the Frieze art fair is a giant art supermarket that descends on Regent’s Park, London, every October. Some detest it for its blatant commercialism, others relish it as the opportunity to see a mind-boggling amount of contemporary art in one enormous tent. Here, eight British-based artists of the moment talk through what they’re showing.

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

The Portuguese artist is famous for her monumental ceramic wedding cakes and gigantic chandeliers made of tampons. So why is a new show in Lisbon pairing her with Valentino’s size-zero catwalk dresses?

To interview the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos is to jump on to a moving train. She is telling me why she uses needlework to make huge things: 15-metre doilies, say, or a tree 13.5 metres tall rustling with 150,000 hand-sewn leaves. “One day, I said to myself,” she says, “why not bring domestic detail into monumental sculpture? What do we know of works like this? OK, there’s Louise Bourgeois. But it wasn’t enormous. She worked in detail but on small things. There’s the beauty of Niki de Saint Phalle. But it’s always papier mache – a technique that’s very simple, very practical, but not chic.”

It takes a certain something to compare yourself to these two French giantesses of art. It takes something else to castigate Bourgeois and de Saint Phalle for not being big, bold and beautiful enough. But if there’s one female contemporary artist who can do it without coming across as delusional, it’s Vasconcelos. Born in Paris in 1971 into an artistic Portuguese family, Vasconcelos has established herself as one of her country’s leading contemporary artists – and one of the world’s most ambitious.

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© Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images

© Photograph: Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images

Photojournalist whose arresting images captured human disaster from Vietnam to Aberfan, and most notably in apartheid South Africa

On 21 March 1960, a crowd gathered outside a police station in a Transvaal township, part of a nationwide protest against apartheid pass laws used to control where black South Africans could live, work and travel. A young British photojournalist pushed his way to the front and took a few pictures of police across the fence who were standing atop their armoured personnel carriers. With nothing much happening, he turned back and headed for his car. Then – without warning – there was the sound of heavy gunfire.

The photographer, Ian Berry, who has died aged 92, captured images of the carnage, which soon became known around the world as the Sharpeville massacre. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured in what turned out to be a turning point in the country’s history.

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© Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos

© Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos

© Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos