Source: ForeignAffairs4
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jane Wright, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Culture, The Conversation
I do love a good, proper horror film that puts a bony, creepy hand of unease on your shoulder. With a strange mystery and growing sense of distrust at its heart, Weapons appears to be just that – and going by the trailer, it will scare the bejasus out of us too.
Critics are claiming director Zach Creggers is paying homage to Stephen King with his latest horror. It certainly feels very Stephen King-y. An ordinary teacher (the brilliant Julia Garner) comes to school one day to find her classroom completely empty and her pupils vanished. The distressed parents and assorted angry townsfolk immediately get all suspicious – why just her class? But the truth is altogether more strange and terrifying as we find out what happened to these children.
Psychology researcher Edward White describes the film as a psychological nightmare that serves a twisted exploration of human behaviour. White points to the concept of Social Identity Theory that posits the human brain is wired to divide the world into “us” (good people) and “them” (threats), and things tend to escalate when humans are afraid.
Perhaps real horror lies in the way ordinary people can turn to cruelty when fear is weaponised – while believing they are solidly in the right. But to say more would be to give things away, and we want you to enjoy Weapons without prejudice. The trailer alone will let you know how high you will jump.
Weapons is in cinemas now
Virtual Beauty, the big summer show at Somerset House features a fascinating collection of visual work by artists examining the connection between technology and beauty. The works focus on the way access to digital technology has literally reshaped the human face and form.
Who can forget the first smartphones that allowed us to flip the camera’s focus to ourselves, or the apps that followed, enabling us to reimagine ourselves as fairies, pets or even just drop-dead gorgeous. To me, it feels like a collective experience that has increasingly warped the way we look at each other and configure who we are, caught up in the whims of viral trends. If you’re in London, take this chance to see these thought-provoking show.
Virtual Beauty is on at Somerset House, London, until September 28 2025
Decolonising perspective, telling different stories
Reaching back more than two millennia, the British Museum’s Ancient India Living Traditions exhibition unites the sacred art of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, exploring how the devotional art of these traditions spread to other parts of the Asian subcontinent. Revealing a rippling out along the Silk Road to east Asia and across the Indian ocean to south-east Asia, the exhibition showcases 180 objects (from its own collection and international loans) including sculptures, paintings, drawings and manuscripts – but crucially seeks to highlight their provenance.
Religious philosophy expert Ram Prasad explains that the complex history of India’s ancient multi-spiritual traditions requires skilled narration, and finds the museum is at least starting to acknowledge and respond to the post-colonial cultural reckoning that institutions can no longer ignore.
Ancient India Living Traditions is on at the British Museum, London, until October 19, 2025_
Y Wladfa in Patagonia is home to the famous Welsh community created almost two centuries ago in an effort to preserve Welsh language and culture. But in doing so, a small country that had been itself colonised became a coloniser, and the local Indigenous people that helped the incoming population adjust and adapt have since been marginalised and forgotten.
Now, a new digital exhibition commemorating 160 years since the first settlers arrived restores some balance in perspective. Problematising History: Indigenous perspectives on Welsh settlement in Patagonia presents the experience of the Indigenous Tehuelche people, challenging notions that the largely peaceful co-existence of the two populations was down to the benevolence of the Welsh.
Problematising History can be found on the National Library of Wales website here
By the mid 19th-century, as slavery was being abolished, romanticism had spread across Europe. Affecting every aspect of culture from art and literature and music to philosophy, science and politics, an idealised notion of human freedom lay at its centre. But rarely is this romantic freedom considered in the context of the slavery question.
Now The Trembling Hand, a new book by comparative literature expert Mathelinda Nabugodi is addressing that omission. Nabugodi explores how the proceeds of slavery underpinned literary works, and how received ideas about slavery permeated European culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, shaping public understanding.
But chiefly her book seeks to make the presence and contribution of black people visible in this history. Responding to calls to decolonise and diversify the curriculum, a new canon of black romantic writing is beginning to be taught. But, says Nabugodi, it is crucial that we examine the ideas of race and slavery that were baked into the traditional literary canon.
The Trembling Hand is out now
– ref. Horror, beauty and reframing colonial histories – what to watch, see and read this week – https://theconversation.com/horror-beauty-and-reframing-colonial-histories-what-to-watch-see-and-read-this-week-262672