Sydney
Sydney Writers’ Festival
The Sydney Writers’ Festival, Sydney’s annual gathering of local and international literary talent, opens on May 18. Based at the Sydney Theatre at Walsh Bay, the festival features readings and talks by some of the biggest names in contemporary letters: The Rest is Noise author Alex Ross discusses 20th century music (May 21); Kazuo Ishiguro illuminates his Nocturnes story cycle via video link (May 22); Cees Nooteboom headlines an international group reading (May 23); and Monica Ali and Richard Flanagan mark the 20th anniversary of the fatwa calling for the the death of Salman Rushdie with a discussion (May 23) of the author’s right to free speech. Runs until May 24.
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| Diana Vishneva performs in the Stars of the White Nights festival in St Petersburg |
Stars of the White Nights
The star performers of the Mariinsky Theatre’s ballet, opera and symphonic corps are on show in the 17th running of the Stars of the White Nights Festival, one of the world’s biggest celebrations of classical music and dance. Curated by musical director and conductor Valery Gergiev, the proceedings open on May 21 with choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s staging of The Little Humpbacked Horse and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra’s rendition of Mahler’s grandiose Eighth Symphony. Other notable performances include prima ballerina Diana Vishneva’s Beauty in Motion and recitals by pianist Lang Lang and bass-baritone Bryn Terfel; dozens more solo and ensemble performances run at the Mariinsky Theatre until the closing gala on July 19.
New York
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, the first major New York show of the Irish-English artist’s work in 20 years, opens at the Metropolitan Museum on May 20. Bacon’s large, often unprimed canvases feature distorted nudes and faceless portrait sitters, slabs of meat, cages and fathomless voids; his visual record of the grimness of human existence assured his status as one of last century’s most important – and most ghoulish – painters. This exhibition, which has made stops at London’s Tate Britain and Madrid’s Museo del Prado, features 65 iconic pieces, including Bacon’s studies based on Velázquez’s portraits of Pope Innocent X, his tour de force “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944), and “Triptych” (1991). Runs until August 16.
London
Tate Modern Long Weekend
Tate Modern celebrates the opening of its new galleries of Arte Povera works with its Long Weekend programme, a four-day series of art and music performances. Galvanised by the Italian critic Germano Celant in 1967, Arte Povera practitioners such as Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto mixed a humanist, anti-cool stance with a highly experimental technical approach in order to comment on social fragmentation and reignite critical debate about the meaning of art. Over the Long Weekend, Pistoletto will perform his Newspaper Sphere, rolling a ball of newspapers across the Millennium Bridge (which links Tate Modern with St Paul’s Cathedral); the cellist Neil Heyde will play the Bach score transcribed on to Kounellis’s painting Untitled (1971); and the interactive sculptures of Robert Morris’s Bodyspacemotionthings (pictured), first exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1971, will get an updated reinstallation. Runs from May 22 to May 25.
San Francisco
San Francisco International Arts Festival
The sixth running of the SFIAF opens on May 20. Attractions this year include German dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests, making their only American stop this year to perform Waltz’s perversely titled 1993 piece Travelogue I – Twenty to eight (May 27-28), where five roommates act out their frustrations in their kitchen; Beyond the Mirror, a dramatisation of Afghan geopolitics produced by New York’s Bond St Theatre Company and Afghanistan’s Exile Theatre of Kabul; and Bali’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya music and dance group (May 22-24). A series of ballet-themed films rounds out the programme. Events run until May 31.
Osaka
Tadao Ando
The Ando-designed Suntory Museum, fittingly located at Osaka’s harbour, will host City of Water, opening on May 23. Ando, the Japanese winner of the Pritzker Prize in 1995, is renowned for the use of open water in his ethereal, minimalist works; landmarks such as the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Water Temple on Japan’s Awaji Island and the Pulitzer Foundation in St Louis are masterclasses in how water can heighten the elegance of architecture it reflects. Featuring more than 30 maquettes, drawings and videos, the exhibition links Ando’s recent waterfront revitalisation project in Osaka, his native city, to his high-profile renovation of François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum in Venice. Runs until July 12.
Limerick
EV+A
This week is the last chance to see the 33rd annual EV+A show, Ireland’s biggest annual show of contemporary art. This year’s theme, “Reading the City”, addresses artistic conceptions of urban space; 36 artists from 15 countries, including a strong Irish contingent, contributed to the show, the bulk of which is on view at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. Canadian An Te Liu’s witty “Cloud” (2008), a giant assemblage of air purifiers and humidifiers, hangs from the ceiling, and Willie Doherty’s meditative film Three Potential Endings (2008), a study of a Dublin businessman’s relationship with the architecture that surrounds him, is on view. At venues throughout the city until May 24.
