Editor-at-large at ArtReview, contributing to Guardian, Telegraph, The National, BBC Radio 4, Times Literary Supplement, Private Eye, Calvert Journal, Spike Art Quarterly
A cultural history of the disease that became a mythology, a symbol and an identity | Leprosy and isolation in Romania
Carnival in Brazil is one of the world's biggest, brashest parties. But under Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, there has been increase in police raids in poor neighbourhoods adding, Oliver Basciano finds, a tinge of bitterness to the party spirit.
Oliver Basciano finds out about living with leprosy in a quiet corner of Romania
What is like to be an artist in a country led by a far-right president? Brazilian artists and thinkers explore the cultural life of their country in the era of Bolsonaro.
In Duhigó's Nepũ Arquepũ, a 2019 acrylic-on-wood painting, a woman starts a month of postpartum recovery in a hammock strung across the beams of a straw-roofed, mud-floored maloca. The naked young mother cradles her newborn as the local shaman of the Tukano tribe, an indigenous people of the Northwest Amazon, sits close by, administering blessings and medicine.
Stacked on a table in Edmund de Waal's studio in south London is today's post - a dozen or so packages from various book shops. They will be unwrapped and added to the artist's Library of Exile, a collection of more than 2,000 titles written by people forced to leave their countries of origin for political reasons, from the Roman poet Ovid to children's author Judith Kerr.
At 89, Claudia Andujar still has her work cut out. For five decades she has photographed the Yanomami indigenous people, an Amer-Indian tribe who number 33,000 and live in 192,000 square kilometres of rainforest that straddle the borders of Brazil and Venezuela.
As Trevor Paglen's exhibition on AI bias opens, the Barbican Centre won planning consent to install 56 new high-definition CCTV cameras, some with facial recognition.
Manal AlDowayan is on her way from the desert regions in the north of Saudi Arabia to Jeddah when we speak. She's splitting her time between two new major commissions, both ambitious in scale and concept. Not bad for someone for whom art was not a first career.
When the storm came after lunch at Vivian Suter's home in Panajachel, I assumed that, though heavy, it was standard for the dog days of Guatemala's rainy season. Perhaps the deluge would stop in an hour: a short, sharp downpour, leaving the air refreshed.
"When I see art by all these different communities, you can recognise they were made within similar political situations."
In 1962, when Beverly Pepper was invited to take part in an artist residency at a metalworking factory in the Italian town of Piombino, they asked if she could weld. "Of course," she lied, quickly seeking out a local handyman to teach her the basics.
John Baldessari was a towering figure in conceptual art. I mean, literally he was a towering figure: 6ft 7in to be precise. He was also incredibly important. His own work spread across painting, photography, film, video, artists' books, billboards and public sculpture.
Last week, the four artists shortlisted for the Turner prize turned themselves into a four-strong collective in order to win as a group - a move that caused controversy in the press, consternation over social media and a bust-up on Radio 4 between the Guardian's art critic Adrian Searle and his Sunday Times counterpart, Waldemar Januszczak.
Imagined Communities, the 21st edition of Videobrasil, takes its title from a 1983 book by Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson that describes nationality, 'nation-ness' and nationalism as 'cultural artefacts of a particular kind'. For the curators of this film-festival-turned-art-biennial, with its admirable and longstanding focus on artists from the 'global south', they are artefacts long-past their sell-by date.
'What do telephones, poetry and the Museum of Modern Art have in common?" read a press release issued by the New York institution on 21 July 1970. A question to which they might have added gay liberation, Aids activism, the aesthetics of advertising, Tibetan Buddhism and sleeping for Andy Warhol, and still received the answer of John Giorno.
In 1957 the artist Ed Clark, who has died aged 93, was in his New York studio making a painting for a forthcoming show when he decided to introduce an element of collage, a stretch of paper that hung over the side of the canvas.
In 2009, Saba Innab joined the reconstruction team of the Nahr Al Bared refugee camp. Home to more than 27,000 displaced Palestinians in northern Lebanon, 95 per cent of the settlement was destroyed during fierce fighting between the Lebanese army and militants two years prior.
In February 1955 the Greek artist Takis stood bored on the platform at Calais train station. He was travelling back to Paris from London, where he had had his first solo exhibition, but his train was delayed. His eyes fell on a trackside signal, a metal upright pole with flashing lights at the top.
Karsten Schubert, who has died of cancer aged 57, was a London-based art dealer whose eponymous gallery was central to the nascent Young British Art scene in the late 1980s. S
Marisa Merz, who has died aged 93, was the only female artist associated with arte povera, the late-1960s Italian movement that favoured everyday, throwaway materials over traditional media such as oil paint and marble.
Carlos Cruz-Diez, who has died aged 95, harboured a seven-decade obsession that the common understanding of colour was wrong. "Colour," the Venezuelan-born artist believed, "evolves continuously in time and space." "I want people to realise that colour is not a certainty, but a circumstance," he said in 2014. "Red is maybe red.
Mr Viera is not worried about the new, more modern, tuna factory that has arrived on São Miguel. Sociedade Corretora, of which he is the manager, has been canning tuna since the Second World War.
'Queer people have been afraid since the president was elected," says Paulx Castello. "He has been demonising us from the start - but this was different. Here we were personally under attack."
The Iraqi-American couldn't stand showing at a museum that has an arms dealer on its board; Oliver Basciano spoke to the artist on the Whitney problem, Leonard Cohen and Palestine, and buying Saddam Hussein's dinner plates.
On the work of Don McCullin, Roger Fenton and Susan Meiselas
Three-day event makes late move to secret location in wake of row between LGBT and feminist groups
His psychedelic paintings linked the Bauhaus to Islamic art - and brought the radicalism of the late 60s to Morocco. Now, at 82, the world is set to rediscover his vibrant visions
The curator, who has died aged 55, was the only person to curate both the Venice Biennale and Documenta, helped redefine what African art could be and provided a platform for the likes of Steve McQueen
American artist known for his white paintings who was regarded as the link between abstract expressionism and minimalism
Conceptual artist who explored alternative belief systems and cosmologies
Artist whose collaboration with young New Yorkers the Kids of Survival pioneered socially engaged conceptual art
Bruguera and two others were planning protests over Decree 349, a 'dystopian' new law that will forbid artists to practise without a government licence
Some have employed security guards. Others have fled. With Jair Bolsonaro about to take power, many artists in Brazil fear the censorship and intimidation they now endure will only get worse
Artist described as 'a radical in the vein of Blake and Turner' who was commissioned to draw every cathedral in England
In Cape Town, Oliver Basciano discovers the importance of archaeology in the South African artist’s work
Oliver Basciano reports on the stricken state of Brazilian politics as the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo opens
Pupil of Krishnamurti who became a world-leading printmaker and art teacher
Painter hailed as the best of his generation, who won the inaugural Turner prize
Danish artist whose paintings oscillate between abstraction and landscape
From police ‘kettling’ tactics to hashtags, Oliver Basciano traces the way revolt has changed
Enrico Castellani, who has died aged 87, was a quiet man who made quiet art. Yet he was regarded not only as one of the great Italian artists of the 20th century, but the "father of minimalism". It was the American artist Donald Judd who dubbed him thus, but Castellani's art was rooted in the avant-garde milieu of mid-20th century Europe.
I’m sat, wrapped up, outside a café in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. Spread out amongst the cups and saucers are the only four issues of Svep, a visual poetry magazine founded by the late Vesselin Sariev in 1990, which I am leafing through with the poet’s widow, Katrin, and daughter Vesselina
Virginia Surtees, who has died aged 100, was a fervent champion of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement and the leading scholar of one of its key protagonists, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her research into figures such as John Ruskin, George Price Boyce and Ford Madox Brown occurred while such artists were deemed deeply unfashionable.
Reviewing Gideon Rachman's new take on East-West relations.
In March 2015 I walked through the lanes of Büyükada, an island that lies an hour's slow ferry ride from Istanbul, eventually coming to the track that leads down to the ruins of the villa in which Leon Trotsky lived between 1929 and 33.
German artist whose primitive-style imagery, recalling cave art, reflected the harsh realities of the cold war
"It was like an American robot had landed." It is dusk in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and Pravdoliub Ivanov is pointing out the site of the city's first Coke machine, installed in 1989 as the country transitioned from communism to capitalism.
Dana Schutz’s depiction of the mutilated body of a 14-year-old African American boy has been accused of using black death as racialized ‘spectacle’
Incorporating his academic background as a geographer, and the skills of an investigative reporter, Trevor Paglen is an American artist whose work has sought to expose the often hidden physical apparatus and architecture that governments and, increasingly, private companies employ to monitor and control the public.
Oliver Basciano records the Palestinian artist's adventures on the Sinai Peninsula
The Argentinian-Swedish artist as nineteenth-century Romantic
The emotional, sensual experience of encountering a work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster work is hard to describe. I remember feeling a shiver in the Brazilian summer heat amid the gardens of Inhotim...
How those on the margins fought back
To walk around the 'old town' of Warsaw results in a disconcerting feeling.
The Tehran-born, Toronto-based artist memorialises the impact of geopolitics and urbanisation on the natural world
When the gallery gets infected by the world outside
Hans Ulrich Obrist occupaies the Modernist villa architect Lina Bo Bardi built for herself.
Reviews of Looking Under the Skin at the South London Gallery; Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception at Tate Modern; Design Research Unit: 1942-72 at Cubitt; The Slice: Cutting to See at the Architectural Association; Public Reading Rooms at the Architectural Association; Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy; The Natural Order of Things: Marcelo Cidade and Andre Komatsu at Max Wigram Gallery; Chelsea Flower Show 2011; and Laura Oldfield Ford: documenting the urban flux