Ben Luke

6 days ago | theartnewspaper.com | Ben Luke |David Clack |Alexander Morrison |Philippa Kelly

We visit major museum projects unveiled this week in London and New York: Ben Luke takes a tour of V&A East Storehouse in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which offers unprecedented access to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

1 week ago | theartnewspaper.com | Ben Luke |David Clack |Alexander Morrison |Philippa Kelly

A host of exhibitions and events this month and next celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, one of the godfathers of kinetic and auto-destructive art. Ben Luke speaks to Roland Wetzel, the director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel about the artist’s life and work, and the events marking the centenary. In Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Fenix, a museum about migration, has just opened, featuring a dramatic stainless steel tornado form on its roof.

1 week ago | theartnewspaper.com | Ben Luke

If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be? I’d say René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929), because it is one of the first artworks I fell in love with and one that made me understand that art could be a portal to reflect on and to interpret the world. It highlights the inherent gap between image and reality, and the limitations of language to fully capture it. Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?

2 weeks ago | theartnewspaper.com | Ben Luke

Museum labels are not progressive enough. They do not tackle political realities, colonial histories and systemic oppression with sufficient rigour. This is my heartfelt view. It is also one that contradicts many of my fellow critics. I wrote in January about a backlash against art and exhibition-making, which held that visitors were turning away from museums with more political content. I argued that much of that critique was based on evidence-free subjectivity and naked agenda-bolstering.

2 weeks ago | theartnewspaper.com | Ben Luke |David Clack |Julia Michalska |Alexander Morrison

Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroon-born curator who was director of Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town and had been invited to curate next year’s Venice Biennale died on 10 May. There has been an outpouring of moving tributes to Kouoh from artists, curators and gallerists across the world, and Ben Luke speaks to Nolan Oswald Dennis, the Johannesburg-based artist who has a current show at Zeitz, and Liza Essers, the owner and director of Goodman Gallery, about her life and work.