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The internally displaced camp in Bunia, Ituri province is a temporary home for victims of Congo’s latest ethnic war between Hema herders and Lendu farmers

Warning: contains graphic descriptions of extreme violence

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Up above the Arctic Circle, 40 hours by train from Moscow, sits the Russian city of Vorkuta. It was built by gulag inmates but was given purpose by the coal industry that used to be the region’s lifeblood. Now mining has disappeared, leaving many of its outposts abandoned. Tomeu Coll’s 2009 photo essay Nevermind Sovietland hauntingly records the lives of those who still live there

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Record auction prices, pottery classes bursting at the seams, Instagram superstars and innovative young artists … what’s behind the boom in all things clay?

Its elegant shape was inspired by ancient Aegean figures and its pleasingly mottled surface made it feel like it had just been dug up from the ground. Yet when it was first sold in the 1970s, this understated vase by the late British potter Hans Coper changed hands for just £250. An unloved present, the creation was then kept in an old shoebox by its recipient, who finally decided to offload it last month – and was stunned to see its price soar to £381,000 at auction, a figure you might expect for certain Ming dynasty or Picasso vessels.

The world of ceramics was stunned too, but not as much as it might once have been. While it’s true that Coper is a key figure in British studio pottery, with works in London’s V&A and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, what this whopping sum – more than double the previous record for a Coper – really reflects is the fact that ceramic art is currently experiencing something of a boom.

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Royal Institute of British Architects seeks total ban on the use of combustible cladding

Architects have raised fears that a government review of building regulations will stop short of proposing a ban on flammable cladding on apartment towers in the wake of the Grenfell fire.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), whose members include Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, has expressed fears that neither sprinkler systems nor extra escape staircases would be required, either. It has written to the housing secretary, Sajid Javid, to “raise significant concerns that key changes … seem to have been overlooked”.

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John Arthur Peetz on Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Autoreconstrucción

Raised to be sauteed in garlic butter but freed by French vegetarian art anarchists, meet the unlikely stars of a mindful music performance

Only minutes after meeting Elizabeth Saint-Jalmes and Cyril Leclerc at their Paris apartment, I’m invited into their darkened boudoir. Several snails are crawling on the floor next to the bed. Each has a little light-emitting diode attached to its shell that activates sensors on a nearby speaker designed by Elizabeth that is pumping out soothingly drone-like music composed by Cyril.

What I’m witnessing is a teaser for a six-hour, 176-snail ballet called Slow Pixel that the two artists are bringing to London later this month for its UK premiere as part of Cryptic’s Sonica festival. For only £4.50, you can watch illuminated snails crawl around a darkened room to challenging music. Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.

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“Power to the People” at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt focuses on the universal subject of politics in art, rather than on the political issues themselves.

The Art Newspaper

Artnews

The actress Carly Chaikin, known for playing Darlene on the USA Network drama, has her own artwork at home, along with some other treasured pieces.

Art Asia Pacific

Harmony Hammond talks about her show at Alexander Gray Associates in New York

press

Tate Collective aims to make big-name shows more accessible for 16-25-year-olds

A £5 ticket scheme has been launched by Tate to increase the number of young people going to ticketed exhibitions.

It can cost up to £22 to see a blockbuster exhibition at Britain’s national galleries, which means the vast majority of visitors are from older age groups.

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Post-pop, Beyond the Commonplace features more than 200 works made in Britain and Portugal between 1965 and 1975. It includes paintings and collages by Allen Jones, Jeremy Moon and Bernard Cohen, to showcase the strong presence of British art in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The exhibition runs from 20 April to 10 September

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pulitzer site

Press Release

Kate Sutton on the twelfth editions of Art Dubai and the Global Art Forum

The antiquities branch of the Getty Museum goes beyond J. Paul Getty’s original collecting focus.

Max Hollein’s financial knowhow suggests he’s a smart choice but some are disappointed at an apparent missed opportunity

The art world has greeted the hiring of the new director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a mixture of intrigue and disappointment.

Max Hollein – the son of postmodern architect Hans Hollein – is an Austrian art historian known for his star power, having been spotted in the European art scene with Yoko Ono, and in fashion circles, having married Austrian fashion designer Nina Hollein.

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Press Release

The so-called regeneration exercises by London boroughs are not only causing social cleansing, they are shrinking homes, writes Kate Macintosh. Plus Paul Nicolson says MP landlords should withdraw from debates and votes on housing and land

Your editorial (Britons will live in shoe boxes unless we resurrect housing standards, 11 April) is timely. That we have the lowest space standards in Europe was identified in an RIBA report, “Making Space”, published four years ago.

This was not always the case. The 1961 Parker Morris Report, “Home for Today and Tomorrow” published under a Conservative government, set what were then minimum space standards which were voluntarily adopted by all the London boroughs, when the main responsibility for the provision of public housing was transferred to them from the LCC in 1964 before the standards became mandatory. They were abolished by Thatcher in 1983, since when the big shrink set in.

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baltimore sun

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London
The German artist may have lied about being shot down in a stuka in world war two – but he took his mythology seriously

He always wore a hat. Like everything else he touched, it became a totem drenched in personal meaning, the symbolic headgear of a self-appointed shaman. In reality, according to those who knew him, the hat covered scars from a Stuka crash, in which rear gunner Beuys was seriously wounded, on the eastern front in 1944.

That much is true. Probably. Yet the story Beuys later made up about his wartime experience has been discredited since his death in 1986 by people who bothered to check the Third Reich documents. Beuys claimed he was rescued, barely alive, from the burning Stuka by Tatar nomads and swathed in fat and felt to resurrect him. It was a tale that explained not just his survival but his rebirth as a radical visionary out of the ashes of his youth in the Nazi era. The trouble was, it was a lie. Does that matter? Is it still a useful fable, part of his crazy vision, or should we suspect that his entire artistic output is similarly dishonest, or even that it is tainted by a past he never truly rejected or explained?

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The new National Memorial Hall for fallen soldiers seeks consensus in a divided society by paring down commemoration to its bare essentials.

Press Release

My father, Roy Spence, who has died aged 93, made a remarkable journey from miner’s son to senior civil servant.

Most of his distinguished career was spent with the Ministry of Transport: his proudest achievement was a series of urban transportation studies, whose products included the Newcastle Metro rail network and the Liverpool loop tunnel constructed beneath the city centre in the 1970s.

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The New York Times

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The Los Angeles Times

Artnews

Press Release

Phillip K Smith III’s artworks reflect the beauty of nature in remarkable ways. Now he’s bringing one to urban Milan

During this month’s Milan Furniture Fair the California-based artist Phillip K Smith III, known for his light and mirror-based land artworks, is teaming up with the fashion brand Cos to create a site-specific, immersive installation called Open Sky. The horseshoe-shaped sculpture, a formidable 11.5ft high and 45ft in diameter, will be displayed in the courtyard of the 16th-century Palazzo Isimbardi, its mirror-polished steel facade reflecting the surrounding building and the sky. This is Smith’s first urban project and his first in Europe.

Cos creative director Karin Gustafsson, who launched the Milan project seven years ago, is known for offering artists creative carte blanche. “It’s about sharing a creator that we believe in, someone exciting for others to know about,” she says. “Phillip is someone we’ve been watching who always has an interesting dialogue with his surroundings.”

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Designed to disappear into the landscape​, Britain’s vast super-warehouses​ also​ reflect a world in which we expect online purchases to arrive as if by magic

When you click on a product, something, somewhere, moves. The item is shifted off its shelf by human or robot and on to a chain of delivery mechanisms that takes it to your door. That item, and millions others like it, plus the machinery that handles them, needs space. The more we shop online, the more such space is needed.

You’ll know all this, I expect, but you may only be dimly aware of the physical consequences: very big boxes, getting bigger and more numerous. Higher, too, as robotic distribution systems allow goods to be piled further from the ground than before.

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Neil Libbert visited the encampment of the disenfranchised near London’s Waterloo station on numerous occasions, capturing the despair of the homeless.

Meanwhile, beneath the bridge, there are other architectural fantasies. To the east, you look at a spider’s web of steel and glass; down below, you find a city of cardboard inhabited by those whose risks no one thinks it worthwhile to insure. The urine-perfumed alleys and stairwells under the South Bank concert halls house people who have fallen through society’s floor.

Their impromptu shelters seem to imitate the whimsies of Richard Rogers, whose building can afford to joke about its own flimsiness. But on the embankment the joke is sourer. Last summer a family lived behind a barricade of cartons below some stairs leading down from the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The space was dry, but cramped: they could only crouch inside, or – literally – squat, since their box had a roof of looming concrete. For their outer wall they had chosen a square of cardboard with a wine glass stamped on it, next to the cautionary word “fragile”.

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Léonard Foujita was the toast of the art world but vanished from view in the 1930s. A new show returns him to the public gaze

Fifty years ago, while French youth were simmering with anger and dreaming big, one of the greatest artists of Montparnasse discreetly passed away. The painter, who died as a French Catholic named Léonard Foujita, had been born 81 years earlier as Tsuguharu Foujita, the son of a general in Japan’s imperial army.

This year, celebrations marking the anniversary of his death, organised in Paris, Reims, Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto, hope to bring him back from obscurity. For Foujita was one of the most successful artists of the 1920s, worshipped by the critics and art lovers who paid a fortune for his drawings, watercolours and oil paintings. As Paris’s shining art star, he was more successful than Picasso and more acclaimed than Matisse. Now he is the subject of a major exhibition at the Maillol Museum which focuses on the artist’s most prolific period, between 1913 and 1931.

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Victoria Miro Mayfair and Wharf Road, London
This magnificent, century-spanning survey of abstract painting, all of it by women, many of whom are unknown, is as poignant as it is momentous

There are certain shows that change one’s sense of art. Surface Work is one of them. Spread across two sites, it is nothing less than an anthology of abstract painting spanning an entire century, from early constructivism to post-digital sampling, in which every work holds its own and every work is by a woman. This is a rare and historic event.

It is also clear proof, if more were needed, of the institutional bias of the art world. So many of these women’s names are unfamiliar, so many have been stinted, forgotten or ignored, that it is quite possible to walk through rooms full of magnificent works without having heard of their makers. Abstract painting, roughly as represented in British museums, tends to run from Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian to Pollock, Rothko and Barnett Newman, through to Richard Diebenkorn, Cy Twombly and – if you’re very lucky – Joan Mitchell, an artist easily as great as Twombly yet appallingly neglected in this country. Bridget Riley and the ever-visible Yayoi Kusama are eminent exceptions too, and last year’s Russian Revolution shows brought us the amazons of the avant garde as never before. But still this show is guaranteed to surprise with its surge of artistic revelations.

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Half of altarpiece panel was painted by master as an apprentice, say researchers

A small Renaissance painting owned by an American museum and not on public view for most of the past two decades has been identified as partly the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

A Miracle of Saint Donato of Arezzo, an altarpiece panel in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, had long been attributed to the lesser Florentine artist, Lorenzo di Credi. But according Laurence Kanter, chief curator of the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, aspects of the painting, commissioned in 1475, bear the unmistakable stamp of Leonardo.

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An old typewriter, a wooden chair, a worn cuddly toy… The things we surround ourselves with loom large in our lives. Here, eight people reveal why they love the design of their prized possession

The Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter This is widely regarded as the greatest typewriter of all time. It’s the best ergonomically; it has a light action on the keyboard, but it still has a rhythm. It has an amazing set of features for a tiny machine. It has a half space insertion so you can delete a five-letter word with Tippex and then type it in again; if it’s one letter longer you can do a half space and squeeze up words. It’s also got much more sophisticated tabulation

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The racial divide in 1960s America is captured in a rediscovered image by Italian photographer Mario Carnicelli

When Mario Carnicelli landed in New York in 1966 and saw the city’s skyline, it brought to mind “Edward Hopper, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, the notes of Gershwin – it seemed as if Humphrey Bogart would appear at any moment from a side street,” he remembers. He had won a photography competition in Italy at the age of 29 and the prize was a trip to America. “It was a dream.”

Once there, however, reality intruded on this fantasy: the restaurants all produced the same nauseating smell and there was a sense of loneliness. “As a European, you imagined all this enormous wealth, but walking around there was also a lot of poverty.” Influenced by the humanist approach of New Deal photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Carnicelli focused his lens not on the skyscrapers but on what was happening at street level: on commuters, builders, shopkeepers, passersby.

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Between the late 19th century and 1980, Kotisaari Island was a meeting point for the lumberjacks of Rovaniemi in Lapland, Finland. Now a tourist attraction, it can be reached by a daily boat and one of the lumberjack buildings has been turned into a tavern. In 2015, local nature photographer Jani Ylinampa took an aerial photograph of the island using a drone, and when the photo went viral on social media he decided to document the island’s changing seasons. “The seasonal changes in Lapland are drastic and this little island is the perfect way to display them,” says Ylinampa, who also works as a tourist guide. Just four miles south of the Arctic Circle, the island ranges from an average temperature of -8.2C in January to 19.7C in July, presenting a challenge for the photographer. “Especially in winter, I need the weather to be dry so the propellers don’t freeze.”

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Celebrities and designers also turn their hand to producing pooch palaces for event

For devoted owners of pampered pups seeking the next level of doggy luxury, help is at hand. A jewel-encrusted canine castle, a velvet-lined golden egg and a floating doghouse complete with diving board are just some of the elaborate kennel designs concocted by dog-loving architects and designers to be auctioned off this month in aid of the pet charity Blue Cross and the US-based Outdoor Arts Foundation.

Zaha Hadid Design has turned its expertise in streamlined space-age forms to the humble dog basket, producing a curvaceous cocoon, machine-milled from plywood with the retro-futuristic air of something from the Jetsons.

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Protests in Gaza, World Press Photo award winners, Mark Zuckerberg in his congressional testimony and the Commonwealth Games in Australia – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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Leo Goldsmith on the fortieth edition of “Cinéma du Réel” at the Centre Pompidou