in Culture Digest | 26 OCT 18

Weekend Reading List: How Artists Can Challenge Fossil Fuel Corporations in the Gallery

The Saudi soft power push, German pavilion at Venice and Halloween costumes: what to read this weekend

in Culture Digest | 26 OCT 18

Liberate Tate, Human Cost, 2011, performance documentation. Photograph: Amy Scaife

After years of environmental protests, Shell has ended its sponsorship deal with the National Gallery, London. In a piece from last year, Mel Evans discusses her work with anti-oil art collective Liberate Tate, and why we can't be satisfied with art about the political, rather art must change it.

Following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and the subsequent reconsideration of Saudi funding by leading arts institutions and professionals, we look back at Rahel Aima’s piece on how powerful Saudi Arabia’s soft power push really has been.

This week it was announced that the 2019 German pavilion at the Venice Biennale will be a collaboration between curator Franciska Zólyom and ‘Natascha Süder Happelmann’, a newly-adopted pseudonym of Natascha Sadr Haghighian. Read Martin Herbert's 2013 feature on the artist whose work deals with identity and authorship, social institutions and structures of power.

Looking for shows to see this weekend? Hilma af Klint’s retrospective at the Guggenheim, New York  is garnering rave reviews. Read Ronald Jones and Liz Stoltz’s feature on the mystic painter, from 2010. In London, Anni Albers’s solo show continues at Tate Modern. Read Alice Twemlow on the women of the Bauhaus, published in Frieze Masters magazine earlier this year, and Hettie Judah’s account of her visit to the Bauhaus Dessau.

In film news, the Freddie Mercury biopic was released this week. We look back to Anwyn Crawford’s 2010 piece on the evolution of the male falsetto.

Plus, prepping a Halloween costume? Revisit Charlie Fox’s feature on masks in art, as well as this 2009 piece on the waning influence of ghosts in popular culture, and Fernanda Eberstadt’s take on Hieronymus Bosch’s Gothic dreamscapes.

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