In the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I got into an argument with an Israeli woman who was tearing down Art Not Genocide Alliance signs from around Vera Tamari’s work, part of the exhibition In Minor Keys curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition assistant had already told her that the artist wanted the posters to be there, but the woman insisted that Tamari was Israeli, that she had looked her up. She was so adamant that I might have doubted myself if I didn’t know members of Tamari’s family.
It’s unusual for a defeated candidate in an Irish parliamentary by-election to make headlines outside the country. But Gerry Hutch, whose second bid to represent Dublin Central ended in failure last weekend, is best known for his suspected involvement in two of the country’s biggest armed robberies (although he has never been tried or convicted for those alleged offences, committed in the 1980s and 1990s). Hutch was also embroiled in Ireland’s most notorious criminal feud over the last decade. Though he didn’t make it over the line on election day, he outpolled the candidates of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, Ireland’s traditional parties of government.
‘Dawn’ by Ivan Lytovchenko, made for the wall of a bakery on Lenin Avenue in Pripyat in 1979, photographed in October 2021 (Erik Peterson / Alamy)
Towards the end of April, a bus with fifteen foreign journalists headed north from Kyiv to Chornobyl (the transliteration of the Ukrainian place name, Чорнобиль, rather than the Russian Чернобыль, was adopted by the UN General Assembly in a resolution last December). For some reporters, this was their third or fourth trip to the abandoned city of Pripyat, a few kilometres from Reactor No. 4 in the thousand-square-mile exclusion zone. Access has been even more restricted since Ukrainian forces recaptured the area from Russia in April 2022.
A stone to commemorate the start of construction at Akon City, Mbodiene, Senegal, 30 August 2021 (John Wessels/AFP/Getty)
Last summer, the singer Akon announced that Akon City – the ‘real-life Wakanda’ that he planned to build on the Senegalese coast – was being abandoned. When ground broke on the project in August 2020, he seemed confident that it would transform 136 acres of mangroves and low scrub into a gleaming metropolis. ‘I plan to retire in that city,’ he told the BBC. ‘I don’t like to use the word the king of the city. But that’s what it will turn out to be.’ When I visited a few months ago, the only part of it that had been half-built was the welcome centre.
Unfortunately for Mexicans, Mexico has moved to the top of the US foreign policy agenda. After Trump kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, he threatened Mexico with ground operations against ‘cartels’ that the DOJ designated terrorist organisations.
Before the war, Muhammad had been the most energetic of us. He wasn’t tall, but he never saw that as an obstacle. He was always the first to arrive at the volleyball court and the last to leave. He jumped with exaggerated enthusiasm, laughed loudly and insisted he would one day be a professional volleyball player, no matter what. Now, as he stood there, leaning on his crutches, I didn’t know where to look. At the place where his leg used to be? At his face? Should I pretend nothing had changed?
Max Richter’s Sleep, made up of 204 continuous movements, plays for nearly eight and a half hours. This is not as long as Erik Satie’s Vexations, Wagner’s Ring cycle, or John Cage’s Organ 2/As Slow As Possible, which started playing at St Burchardi church in Halberstadt in 2001 and is due to finish in the year 2640, but Sleep is still one of the longest pieces of classical music to have been continuously recorded and performed. Its premiere at the Wellcome Collection in 2015 was broadcast live and uninterrupted on Radio 3; it has since been performed at Sydney Opera House, Los Angeles Grand Park and the Great Wall of China.