A stands for Art

If you missed the exhibition A Century of Olympic Posters when it was shown in the Museum of Childhood in 2008 (CLICK) then here’s your second chance. Today it opened in the Europa Gallery of the London Borough of Sutton’s Central Library and continues until 31 October. It’s a travelling exhibition from the V&A which has also been shown in Beijing. There is Olympic memorabilia too, including the Olympic torch from the 1948 Olympiad in London. Admission is free. Click the title link for more information.

An exhibition of 75 artworks from Kazakhstan opens today at Christie’s in London and continues until 8 September. It covers an era of about 80 years. The works have never been seen outside central Asia before. Judging by the brief slide show posted by BBC News (title link) the works are so primitive that they were hardly worth sending all the way from the Kasteev Museum in the Kazakh city of Almaty. Where? Don’t ask. Still, the artworks have novelty value if nothing else. Art historians might find them worth viewing.

I picked up a free copy of the Open House London 2010 Programme in my local library this evening. It costs £6.50 including p&p when ordered directly from Open City or you can download a pdf Digital Edition for £3.50. Open House London runs from 18 to 19 September. Well worth seeing what’s open.

The Daegu International Body Painting Festival (DIBF) took place in South Korea from 27 to 29 August. LIFE has posted a gallery of photographs (title link). Search the Internet to find many more beautiful images from this event.

The London Design Festival – “a nine-day celebration of design in the world’s creative capital” – returns to the Victoria and Albert Museum from 18 to 26 September. There will be a varied programme of specially commissioned design installations, displays and events. Admission is free. Click the title link for the V&A. CLICK for London Design Festival.

BBC News prides itself on having a correspondent in every port, but it still hasn’t published today’s hottest news story. France’s First Lady Carla Bruni has been branded a “prostitute” by Iranian newspaper Kayhan, a propaganda sheet for the medieval Islamic throwbacks running the country. Iranian state TV has also accused her of “immorality”. And all this vituperation because she called for the release of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery. Avaaz gathered many signatures in an online petition to save Sakineh from stoning (I signed it; CLICK for the follow-up). Iran gave in to international pressure and cancelled the stoning. Then, allegedly after two days of torture, the victim appeared on state TV confessing to murdering her husband (CLICK). She is now due to be hanged. Even the Hindustan Times online has beaten BBC News to today’s story (CLICK). Fatcat BBC wake up! World news doesn’t stop for English bank holidays.

Sunday was Children’s Day at the Notting Hill Carnival. BBC London News has begun posting photographs of the event. Here you see one of the girls parading for Kennington Oval’s South Connections, which celebrated its 25th year at Carnival. I hope the kids all escaped the deluge which hit London in the middle of the afternoon. Click the title link to view more of the costumes and characters. There is also a BBC News video, if you want to hear some of the noise as well as see fragments of the parade: CLICK.

The inaugural MONIKER International Art Fair of urban artworks, featuring artists such as Banksy, Steve “ESPO” Powers, Herakut, Ben Eine and Shepard Fairey, will be held at Village Underground, Shoreditch, London, in October to coincide with the overpriced Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park (14–17 October: CLICK). Shown above is Shepard Fairey’s Power & Equality, a ruby lithograph.

Valentine Notebook is a concept created by designers from CreativeDNAaustria. The prototype of this luxury notebook is elegant compact typewriter Vilentine invented and designed by Ettore Sottsass and Perry King in 1969. Notebook looks exactly like the legendary typewriter and instead of paper sheet there is a flexible display. Interesting and elegant concept!

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Architectural bureau Parabol Studio has presented a proposal called Perceptual Twist for a new art gallery in the Slovenian city of Maribor. The building Perceptual Twist is composed of four continuous loops, merging into a one space. Each loop is a full-fledged exhibition center with its own artistic program: the Children’s Museum, the Architecture Museum, the Creative Industrial Museum, and the Digital Arts Museum. The total area of art galleries is nearly 15,000 square meters. The concept of an arts gallery, which brings together different kinds of creativity and at the same time recognizes the value of each of them, symbolically embodied in endless motion "loops" of the building, like a Mebius strip.

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