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.

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.