MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Another side to Orientalism
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends an exhibition on the profound and sometimes revelatory interactions between Islamic and Western art
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art
British Museum, London
IN A refreshingly subversive pose, Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh reimagines the reclining woman from 19th-century male fantasies of the harem. In her work, on show in Inspired by the East, she dresses in copies of the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, turning what was once an erotic Western obsession into a confrontational witness to today’s turbulent Middle Eastern politics.
By so doing, she sabotages both the patriarchy that defined the so-called Orientalist painters who shaped appetites for the exotic as the West expanded its colonial reach and appropriates their genre to make her own statement.
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GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a strangely reassuring book, grounded in exploring our alienation and the creative possibilities inherent in embracing cognitive diversity
Six years on from the Bangladeshi factory collapse, survivors help British activists launch a radical new brand that redefines ‘ethical fashion,’ writes GAVIN O’TOOLE
