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      Raphael’s School of Athens review – rewarding study of Renaissance fresco

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    During the latest in Howard Burton’s Masterpiece series, the art historian turns his low-tech but scholarly attention to Raphael’s interior decoration in the Vatican palace

    Here is the latest in the series of high-minded, low-tech studies of Renaissance art history from Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist turned art historian, who has launched a series of films called, with admirable Ronseal-ness, Renaissance Masterpieces. Having already looked over Botticelli’s Primavera , Burton now turns to Raphael’s wall fresco in the Vatican palace, arguably the high point of the artist’s prodigious output and a work to rival Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel decorations.

    Burton has already tackled The School of Athens as part of his mammoth survey of Raphael’s entire oeuvre, Raphael: A Portrait , but here he gets to drill down in considerable detail for the film’s 81-minute running time. Admittedly, the visuals are as rudimentary as Burton’s previous offerings – it looks like a glorified PowerPoint, with Burton’s sonorous commentary overlaid in unpunctuated voiceover – but as before, the tone works: Burton is scholarly without being dull, and clear without being obvious.

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      ‘I like pushing boundaries’: Yinka Shonibare on his landmark art show in Madagascar

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    The British-Nigerian artist explores colonialism and connection in his first major solo exhibition in Africa. Plus, a grime MC goes oyster farming

    Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. Earlier this month I was in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where I checked out the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo exhibition in Africa. For this week’s newsletter I caught up with him about the landmark show, and learned a lot about the growing Malagasy art scene.

    Madagascar is not a country that figures prominently in media – western or otherwise (beyond the children’s film ) – and as such it was difficult to know what to expect. I hadn’t imagined an opportunity to visit, and so Fondation H’s invitation to the capital to explore the art scene felt once in a lifetime. It was certainly a long way to travel for an exhibition: from London, with a stopover in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the journey topped 15 hours, though as soon as I landed in Madagascar I was instantly taken by its lush, grassy plains and mountainous topography.

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      Former child actor Sophie Nyweide dies aged 24

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    Nyweide began her career aged just six in Bella and went on to work on films including And Then Came Love, Margot at the Wedding and Noah

    The actor Sophie Nyweide has died at the age of 24, her family has announced.

    An online obituary gives no cause of death, but says Nyweide died on 14 April.

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      Conclave viewership rose 283% on day of Pope Francis’s death

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    Ralph Fiennes was Oscar-nominated for his role in the thriller which follows cardinals wrangling to replace a fictional pontiff after his death

    The death of Pope Francis on 21 April led to an abrupt uptick in viewership of Conclave, Edward Berger’s thriller which depicts the events following the death of a fictional pope, and the cardinals wrangling to replace him.

    The film, which won best picture at the Baftas earlier this year and was nominated for eight Oscars, is available on assorted streaming platforms worldwide. According to Luminate, which tracks streaming viewership, Conclave was viewed for about 1.8m minutes on 20 April, and 6.9m minutes the next day – an increase of 283%.

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      ‘Nepo babies should be doing stuff like this’: are rich people ruining or reviving club culture?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025 • 1 minute

    London’s underground dance scene is increasingly funded by inherited wealth. From Mike Ashley’s son to a Tetra Pak heir, monied promoters explain their motivations

    Nestled between Millwall FC stadium and an intersection of south London railway lines, the 350-capacity Venue MOT – once an actual MOT garage – is a cornerstone of the city’s underground music scene. But every Tuesday, owner Jan Mohammed gathers his staff at the bar and tells them how much money it has lost since the weekend.

    Mohammed, a sculptor, started renting a nearby space to use as a studio more than a decade ago. With no residential neighbours and relatively low costs, he opened Venue MOT in 2018 based on simple intuition: “I thought music could thrive here,” he says. Despite the losses and Mohammed calling his operation a “comedy of errors”, it does. Time Out recently labelled Venue MOT the best nightclub in London and Jamie xx called it “one of the last places in London that feels genuinely free and DIY” after his 10-night residency last year with guests including Charli xcx and Daphni. Mohammed describes the club’s atmosphere as “DDS” – deep, dark and sweaty. Indomitable characters like him are the lifeblood of a financially unstable scene that must constantly adapt to licensing rules and urban redevelopment.

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      Videotape sculptures and wartime paintings among Turner prize shortlist

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić and Zadie Xa have been nominated for £25,000 prize

    An artist who creates swirling sculptures out of fabric and old videocassette tape, and another who installed huge paintings evoking wartime trauma in the genteel rooms of Blenheim Palace, have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize.

    Nnena Kalu , a Scottish-born, London-based artist, and Mohammed Sami , who fled his native Iraq as a refugee, have been chosen alongside Rene Matić and Zadie Xa to compete for the contemporary art prize.

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      ‘Where is the adult?’: how Leonardo Van Dijl filmed the story of a child tennis star’s abuse

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025 • 1 minute

    Julie Keeps Quiet casts real-life tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck as a teenage player facing peril ignored by adults. The director explains how telling the story well required a care the sport itself neglects

    Leonardo Van Dijl smiles: “If you told me a year ago that I’d be speaking to the Guardian, I’d have asked: ‘What about?’” Last May, the 34-year-old from Belgium took his debut film Julie Keeps Quiet to Cannes. (Where, he says, everyone was much friendlier after a four-star review in the Guardian.) Ever since, he has been living out of a suitcase, grabbing five or six hours’ sleep. It’s not just media interviews and Q&As keeping him busy: “We are a small movie. I’m the in-house graphic designer. I do the social media …” He stops, looks down at my phone, recording. “But I don’t really want to talk about that. I’m grateful, and it’s not that interesting.”

    What Van Dijl really does want to talk about is the urgent issue his film raises about safe spaces for children. Julie Keeps Quiet is a tense psychological drama about a talented 15-year-old tennis player called Julie, played by real-life tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck in her first acting role. When Julie’s male coach at her tennis academy is suspended after the suicide of a teenage girl he trained, pressure falls on Julie to speak up. After all, she’s his new favourite.

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      Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman review – why you quit your job to make the world a better place

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    A bracingly hopeful call for high-flyers to ditch corporate drudgery in favour of something far more ambitious

    This is not a self-help book,” the author tells us, firmly. Appearances might suggest otherwise: it is written and presented almost entirely in the familiar style of that genre, with largish print, short sentences, snappy maxims in italics and lots of lists and charts (“six signs you may be on the wrong side of history”). Its proposals are delivered with all the annoyingly hectic bounciness of the genre.

    But it is worth taking Bregman (a thirtysomething historian and author labelled “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers” by the Ted network) at his word. He begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

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      Gillian Anderson announces ‘even more daring’ follow-up to bestselling book of sexual fantasies

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 23 April, 2025

    Sex Education star calls on women to send in their anonymous submissions for a second volume of her 2024 title Want

    Gillian Anderson has announced a follow-up to her bestselling anthology of female sexual fantasies, Want , with the hope that it will be “more international, and even more daring”.

    The original book “gave thousands of women the freedom to talk about sex without shame or judgment; to see themselves in the words of strangers, and reflect on their own desires – some for the very first time,” Anderson said. “But Want unlocked so much more for so many and felt like just the beginning of a deeper conversation.”

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