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The Nigerian artist has her first solo show in London. She talks food, family and the forest that her father, the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, gave his life to protect

There’s a small piece of orange text on the wall of Zina Saro-Wiwa’s first UK solo show. It’s a recipe for bread and butter pudding with paw-paw custard, which is also an account of watching her father eat. “When I was younger I found the act of eating sad and solemn. Tragically human,” she writes. “Watching him eat made me think of him as vulnerable and in need of protection.”

And so it was to prove. Her father was Ken Saro-Wiwa, one of nine environmental activists executed by the Nigerian government on 10 November 1995 for opposing the oil industry’s exploitation of their ancestral lands. In a five-screen video installation that runs the length of London’s Tiwani Contemporary gallery, Saro-Wiwa sends a drone over those lands to photograph apparently endless vistas of lush green forest.

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National Maritime Museum discovers concealed note in Edward Barlow’s diary

A 17th-century sailor’s confession about a rape, of which he became so ashamed that he sought to cover it up for ever, has been exposed by conservation workers who discovered the note hidden under a rewritten version in his journal.

The confession went unseen for more than 300 years because the sailor pasted his second account so neatly over the top of the original that scholars missed it.

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Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion entrepreneur, and several artists would follow a looping path around the moon aboard a new rocket. When the flight might occur is uncertain.

Elon Musk shared a stage at a SpaceX factory on Monday night with Yusaku Maezawa, who will make a significant investment in the company’s next-generation rocket.

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Press

Guardian photographer Christian Sinibaldi tours the world’s last Polaroid film factory, in the Netherlands, the only remaining factory still making film for the much-loved instant cameras

The Polaroid Corporation was launched in 1937 becoming a touchstone for American innovation and engineering prowess. It was the brainchild of scientist and inventor Edwin Land and his Harvard tutor George Wheelwright and at first made the plastic for polarising sunglasses. In time, it was to create and popularise instant photography, launching a seriesof pioneering cameras and film formats. These inspired generations of artists, including Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Maripol, Keith Haring and Guy Bourdin. They helped to raise Polaroid to the status of cultural icon.

This month, Polaroid Originals, launched the OneStep+ instant analogue camera which brings analogue instant photography up to date, as it can be connected to a smartphone app, enabling a range of effects.

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Press release

Here is our guide to the best exhibitions coming to the East Coast, including a blockbuster Eugène Delacroix retrospective coming to the Met Museum.

Art Newspaper

When she’s not throwing molten wax on chandeliers, the sculptor and photographer Petah Coyne is readying the story of the Guerrilla Girls.

Artnews

Daphne Chu at the 12th Gwangju Bienniale

From school shootings to #MeToo and outrage at Trump, Jenny Holzer has spent her life battling injustice. As the Tate focuses on eight pivotal moments, the artist looks back at an eventful career

‘I hope my crummy old phone doesn’t make you crazy,” says Jenny Holzer as we begin our conversation. Not exactly what I’m expecting from the artist renowned for her pioneering use of technology. Holzer rose to prominence in 1982 when she reprogrammed an LED advertising billboard in Times Square with her own acerbic and sometimes conflicting messages (what she calls Truisms), such as: “Protect me from what I want” and “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.”

Over the course of her 40-year career Holzer has consistently employed some of the most advanced media and digital technologies in the production of her work, including: virtual reality, drones, projections, net art and, in her 2017 project at Blenheim Palace, robotic assemblies and an augmented reality mobile app.

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Artforum/the Art Newspaper

Artwork addressing mistrust in the government from the late 60s to the modern day is celebrated in a collection that ‘can inform the present in interesting ways’

In 1974, Black Panthers artist Emory Douglas created a portrait of Gerald Ford, America’s 38th president, being pulled by puppet strings held by giant corporations. A speech bubble had Ford saying: “I Gerald Ford am the 38th puppet of the United States.”

Even 44 years later, this collage – made on a New York stock exchange newspaper page – feels relevant as ever. Douglas, who has always been known to unveil ugly truths about racism and corruption, has been at it long before Black Lives Matter.

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The award-winning Guardian photojournalist covered assignments across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, China, India, the Soviet Union, the US and Japan during his 23-year career based at the paper’s Manchester office. He received many press awards for his picture essays and news photography, and there have also been several books and exhibitions of his work.

An exhibition of his work is at the Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery from 15 September

• We are offering Guardian readers a chance to own exclusive limited edition prints of his work

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National Gallery, London
Samuel Courtauld’s lifelong collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces spark off each other in an enthralling collaboration

The National Gallery is evolving: a museum in vivid transition. This autumn it will offer not one but four special exhibitions, spanning more than half a millennium, from Mantegna and Bellini in the 1400s to the satirical nightmares of contemporary film-maker Rachel Maclean. The permanent collection is being ingeniously rearranged in dialogue with these shows, which include Britain’s first survey of that most enigmatic and piercing of portraitists, Lorenzo Lotto. The season opens this week with the enthralling Courtauld Impressionists.

The Sunflowers, The Bathers, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: all were set before the British public by the textile magnate Samuel Courtauld (1876-1947). It is no understatement to say that our experience of art would not be so rich without him. Courtauld began buying impressionist paintings in the early 1920s – Cézanne’s apples, Monet’s waterlilies, a late self-portrait by Van Gogh, alone and wintry with his poor bandaged ear. The private collection he amassed was mostly given to the institute that bears his name, but Courtauld also established a fund for the purchase of paintings by the National and Tate Galleries.

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Today’s house-proud animals are joining the luxury property market

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For the past two years, Ian Wood has been capturing his home town of Berkeley, California, through its array of garages. The project began during Wood’s dog walks, eventually becoming a way of documenting the city. “Garages embody the colourful, messy, free spirit of Berkeley’s history,” he says. “You don’t see many homes with murals on them, but it’s apparently OK on garages: kids have their forts, adults have garages.” Many involve street art – “one of the most important aspects of any city”, he says. Wood’s hobby has led to some strange encounters with garage owners, but, he admits, “having my toy-sized Yorkshire terrier makes me look less suspicious”.

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You cannot fault the ambition that underpins the V&A’s striking new northern outpost, but behind the powerful exterior not all is sweetness and light

In the Oak Room, a 1907 interior by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a gallery balustrade is decorated with thin strips of timber that overlay and intersect like weaving. They effect transitions from firmer pillars below and plainer panels around them into delicate multiple uprights that reach to the ceiling. The gridded pattern of the wood is echoed in metal lampshades whose coloured glass enriches the shadows of alcoves beneath the gallery. The whole is a beautiful ensemble of light, structure and ornament, a feat of unified diversity made possible by the expressive range of the main material, oak.

The room was part of the Ingram Street Tearooms in Glasgow, rescued from the demolition of its host building in 1971 and kept in storage and in pieces until now. Its reconstruction is one of the triumphs of the new Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, where exhibits from the V&A’s collections are combined with loans from elsewhere. A temporary exhibition space, built to the same large dimensions as Amanda Levete Architects’ recent Sainsbury Gallery at the V&A mothership in London, enables blockbuster shows to travel between one and the other. The museum opens with the V&A’s splendid Ocean Liners: Speed and Style exhibition.

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From New Haven to Senegal and Shanghai, female architects — many running their own firms — are invigorating the design of buildings and cities.

The US conceptual artist on protest movements of the moment, inequality in the art world, and where she finds hope

Born in Iowa in 1941, artist Mary Kelly has been creating works from a feminist and postmodern perspective for the past 50 years, often using compressed lint from her tumble dryer. She has lived in Florence, Beirut and London, and now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the University of Southern California. Her installation Post-Partum Document, an exploration of the relationship between mother and child, caused furore for displaying stained nappies at the ICA in the mid-70s. Kelly’s latest exhibition, Face-to-Face, is at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, from Thursday to 3 November.

Tell us about your forthcoming exhibition Face-to-Face…
This show is a little unusual for me: it’s a survey of works I’ve done related to war and violence since 1966, a 50-year period. I feel that the subject has become more intensely central to how I think at the moment. The title draws on Emmanuel Levinas, who talks about the face as the site of your ethical decision-making: it’s the point where you recognise “the other” and their vulnerability, and is also the moment where it is impossible to kill someone.

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From superstars to people in the street, the photographer captures black bodies in all their strength and vulnerability

Photography is in Deana Lawson’s blood. She grew up in Rochester, a working-class city in New York state, where her grandmother cleaned the house of the founder of Kodak. Her mother was an administrator at the company, and a keen organiser of family photo albums; her dad was a photographer.

“We had tons of family pictures, at social events, cookouts, barbecues,” Lawson tells me. “My father was also a videographer. Looking at those albums and videos over the years implanted a certain aesthetic.” The 39-year-old is drawn to domestic details in her own work: rugs, carpets, net curtains, faux flowers. “I’m very much inspired by my family home, dress, attire.”

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Daily life in Pyongyang, Hurricane Florence, protests in Gaza and Serena Williams at the US Open in New York – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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“Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how black artists were galvanized during a time of social and political unrest.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Mary Halvorson

The artist’s caretaker and others testified in a probate hearing as the estate took stock of Mr. Indiana’s assets and whether they have been well cared for.

Guardian

Experts say new tax arrangements in the United States — and ever-higher auction guarantees — make it more difficult to make money from art.

Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Science smashes into art in this staggeringly ambitious attempt to map out reason itself

I can’t remember the last time an artist explained a body of work to me by referring to Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Come to think of it they never have before. According to Kuhn, the history of science progresses not through evolution but sudden “paradigm shifts”. One line of thought is developed until it hits the buffers and slips sideways into a new way of thinking. Or as Conrad Shawcross put it while we looked at his latest abstract sculptures: interlocking tetrahedrons are stacked up as high as they go until they reach the point of overbalancing.

According to Shawcross, who talks intensely and eloquently about his own work, he is modelling scientific thought, reason itself. Interesting stuff – but what does it add up to artistically? I dismiss the artist so I can look properly at his art.

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Nan Goldin/MK/Artnet

Manet, Seurat and Gauguin hit the National, Urs Fischer melts mere mortals and the Science Gallery gets hooked on addiction – all in our weekly dispatch

Courtauld Impressionists
This scintillating remix of two of the world’s greatest collections of French 19th-century art – London’s Courtauld and the National itself – is full of drop-dead gorgeous masterpieces by Manet, Seurat, Gauguin and other artists.
• National Gallery, London, 17 September to 20 January.

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The popular BBC drama put a London brutalist estate front and centre. Here are eight others around the UK

The British public has been busy admiring Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes in the BBC’s Bodyguard, the most successful new drama for a decade. But the most recent episode had much to swoon over for lovers of Brutalist architecture in particular.

Keen fans of modernist housing estates (there are lots of us, actually) will have recognised the home of Madden’s character, David Budd, as the Whittington in London. Also known as the Highgate New Estate, the six-terraced estate was designed by the Hungarian architect Peter Tabori in the 1970s and is now highly sought after, with one-bedroom flats going for £450,000.

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For the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial, Refik Anadol, a data artist, is using the past to project the concert hall into the future.

The British caricaturist, known as ‘the father of the political cartoon’, continues to inspire cartoonists today

The 30-year-old George, “Prince of Whales”is a greedy, ill-mannered slob in this merciless 1792 satirical print by one of the original masters of the form, James Gillray. Recovering from a meal, the future George IV picks his teeth as his belly is about to pop out from his waistcoat. Plenty of the jokes cross classes and centuries, such as a knife-and-fork coat of arms on the wall.

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The conflict between ancient and modern is seen more clearly in Athens than elsewhere because one moment of its history is celebrated over any other

Take a seat at the cafe Mouses at the corner of Adrianou and Agiou Filippou streets in central Athens and, looking one way, you have a fantastic view of the towering Acropolis, crowned by the Parthenon, glowing amber in the evening light. Look the other way and, through a mix of plastic sheeting, wire fencing and green construction tarpaulin, you catch sight of a deep hole in the ground, with bits of ancient ruins visible five metres or so below modern ground level, butting up on every side against modern buildings that teeter perilously on the edge of the excavated abyss.

Central modern Athens is a battleground of an ancient versus a modern world, every building standing a victor

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The car pioneered in Nazi Germany and immortalised in Hollywood will cease production in 2019

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A glorious retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduces a precocious prophet of the modern age.

The Art Newspaper

The photographs will appear at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York in November as a part of the first complete presentation of Arbus’s “Untitled” series.