Opinions about life and culture, A world view of a Woman Artist travelling from The Middle-east to Europe in the 80's, 90's and 2000/2019 ..... Autobiographycal Stories which have been published in the book "A Time For dreamers" (Austin Macauley Publishers) and some self published Stories on Kindle ( "Paris 2015" / "I Believe in You")
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From the Guardian; What an urban spaceman tells us about the human condition
What an urban spaceman tells us about the human condition
An unusual astronaut is at the centre of a new exhibition of art and
scientific artefacts designed to make us think about everything from our
personal lives to the fate of humanity itself
Laura Potier
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Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut, the centrepiece of the Wellcome Foundation’s forthcoming Being Human exhibition.
Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer
“It’s
hard to think of a greater challenge to our future health than
environmental breakdown,” says Clare Barlow, project curator of Wellcome
Collection’s newest gallery. Opening on Thursday 5 September, Being Human
is a new permanent exhibit that explores trust, hope and fear, identity
and health in the 21st century through four sections: genetics, minds
and bodies, infection and environmental breakdown.
The space, which for 12 years housed Medicine Now, has been
redesigned with reclaimed wood panelling and warm colours by the Turner
prize-winning arts and architecture collective Assemble.
The exhibition “explores our relationship with ourselves, with each
other and with the world around us”, Barlow says. Each of the four
sections asks a different question. “With minds and bodies the question
is, why do we sometimes act like we value some lives more than others?
With environmental breakdown, we ask why it’s so hard for us to act on
climate change, when its effects are already here. And with that, the
question of how we’re reacting to what’s being lost and how we see
ourselves living in the future.”
Being Human displays imposing works of art alongside other artefacts,
which include seeds withdrawn from the Svalbard global seed vault, a
storage facility created by the Norwegian government in 2008 to protect
vital crops such as wheat against global disasters, war or disease, and a
commercially available gene-editing kit, items intended to ground the
conceptual nature of the artworks in a scientific context. These are
contrasted with pieces by established artists such as Deborah Kelly’sNo Human Being Is Illegal (in All Our Glory), Kia LaBeija’s Eleven, a self-portrait of the black artist, who is living with HIV, and Superflex’s short film Flooded McDonald’s, which questions with whom responsibility for environmental breakdown lies: the customer or the corporation?
Visitors move from the genetics section, a “distillation of what
makes us us” to an exploration of our relationships with our bodies and
minds, then to our relationship with others and, finally, to our
relationship with the planet and our grief for what has already been
lost. They will be “progressing from things that feel deeply personal,
and really allow them to scrutinise questions of identity, to reflecting
on the global impact of environmental breakdown”.
An image from Superflex’s short film Flooded McDonald’s.
At the centre of the exhibit is Refugee Astronaut, by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.
The traveller, wearing a spacesuit of Dutch wax fabric and moon boots,
carries a net of possessions on his back containing a telescope, an old
camera and a star map, as well as evocatively titled books The Last
Migration and The Quest for the Perfect Place. Barlow says these items
are jumping-off points from which visitors can create their own idea of
where the astronaut is heading.
Is the astronaut a refugee from Earth or is the artwork grounded in
the current refugee crisis? “It can be read both ways,” says Barlow.
“There’s a strong antithesis going on. Astronauts are cosmic explorers
and then the word ‘refugee’ ties it to a very specific context. It pulls
together so many different ideas, opening up questions around
colonialism and the environment.”
Shonibare’s commission is the third in the Refugee Astronaut
series, which began as criticism of colonialism and exploitation and
its historical annexation, explains the artist. Each sculpture’s
spacesuit has a different pattern, the latest of which is of green lines
and clouds “to signify an ebbing relationship with nature, due to
climate change”.
It is with good reason that this work serves as the exhibition’s keystone. “Refugee Astronaut
is a metaphor for a post-apocalyptic figure, with his worldly
possessions on his back, seeking conflict-free and environmentally
clean, greener pastures,” says Shonibare. The work can be read either as
“dystopian, or a note of caution” against “catastrophic climate events
that will increasingly lead to migration and a scramble for scarce
resources, leading to global conflict”.
The astronaut can be glimpsed from any point in the gallery, a
constant reminder of the end point, the “ultimate progression”. “Maybe
in this future, leaving Earth will be the only answer,” Barlow muses.
“It’s a question mark on the end of the collection’s progression.” Being Human opens on 5 September at the Wellcome Collection, London NW
America's super rich: six things to know Our new series, Big Money , is investigating the social and political clout of the super-rich. Natalie Jones and Alastair Gee in San Francisco, California I s America an oligarchy? That was the conclusion of a 2014 study by two prominent US political scientists , who argued that the influence of economic elites and big business far outstrips that of ordinary citizens. In their view, America is less a bastion of representative democracy than a nation trammeled by the desires of the hyper-wealthy. Others have suggested that their vision is too bleak. But the outsize economic, social and political clout of the super-wealthy in America is beyond debate - and ripe for scrutiny. That’s why we’ve launched our newest series, Big Money. Radical inequality The three richest people in the US - Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet - own more than the bottom half of the country combined. ...
Comment: I once found a bag near a shopping Mall in Paris .... It looked like a girl owned it because it was full of makeup bits and pieces and there were a lot of cards in it , one of which belonged to a buisness school and this had her name on it. The student was from Madagascar and i was sighing to myself when i called the school and the receptionist wasnt helpful in finding the person i was looking for. I went to the consolate or Embassy one morning , spending money on a Taxi in order to give the bag to a safe person working there. The consolate reminded me of consolates or embassies representing very poor countries ... .... where is all the money and wealth going ? SAMBAVA, Madagascar — Bright moonlight reflected off broad banana leaves, but it was still hard to see the blue twine laced through the undergrowth, a tripwire meant to send the unwary tumbling to the ground. “This is the way the thieves come,” sai...
Immigration and The Everyman editions (starting in 1906) was one of the first books i remember in my parents library; it reminds me of "Everywoman" and Every hu"man"i have ever known. I was born from my mother who was an amazingly beautiful woman who had married for "attraction", to my father who was her first cousin. They had grown up in the same community in South India. My mother was the main personality of our family mainly because she was energetic and ambitious and rather aggressive. My father (even tho full of testosterone looks and behavior) was dominated by my mother who was probably much more energetic than him. They did have traumatizing arguments about money partly because he was living by the philosophy that each man or woman should act according to his or her talents (and not roles). She made more money and didn't want to spend it. While he loved to stay at home after o...
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