Tania Bruguera, Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading “The Origins of Totalitarianism”), Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 7-11 February.
© Estudio Bruguera / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Jacopo La Forgia
This week, as she stages a non-stop reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism for five days at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Tania Bruguera reflects on growing concerns about the censorship of artists in Germany in relation to the Israel-Hamas war. She also discusses the comments made by Ai Weiwei this week in which he said that censorship in the West is now “exactly the same” as in Mao’s China.
Frank Auerbach, Head of Helen Gillespie II (1962)
© the artist, courtesy of Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London
The Courtauld in London this week opened an exhibition of the monumental charcoal drawings made by Frank Auerbach in the 1950s and early 1960s, and we take a tour of the exhibition with the show’s curator Barnaby Wright.
Basawan and Jagan, “Mihrdukht Aims her Arrow at the Ring”, folio from the Hamzanama (The Adventures of Hamza)
Howard Hodgkin Collection, Purchase, The Mossavar-Rahmani Fund for Iranian Art, 2022
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Mihrdukht Aims Her Arrow at the Ring, a folio from the Hamzanāma (Story of Hamza). Made in India in around 1570, during the Mughal period, it is one of the works acquired by the British painter Howard Hodgkin in a lifetime of collecting Indian art. The collection is the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which opened this week. Navina Najat Haidar, one of the co-curators of the show, tells us more.