Arts news

• My mother’s double first at medical school | Brief letters

  11-02-2024 19:30
  
  Medical students giving birth | A quiet breakfast | Rishi Sunak’s manners | Clued up on hockey history | Unidentified icicleOne baby when studying medicine 50 years ago (Letters, 9 February)? That’s nothing. In 1947 St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School took in female students for the first time. My mother, Ann Dally, was one of the three women admitted. By the time she qualified in 1953, she had two children. She found work in a non-teaching hospital, where the hours were less d
  
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• ‘Living in Brixton allowed me not to be judged non-stop’: Zineb Sedira, the artist who makes people feel at home

  11-02-2024 12:00
  
  The child of Algerian parents who grew up in France and found artistic freedom in London on family, ideas of belonging and how she and close friend Sonia Boyce came to be the toast of 2022’s Venice BiennaleIn the late 1960s, in a poor suburb north of Paris, Abdelrahman Sedira was in the habit of taking his little girl Zineb to the local cinema on his day off. Abdelrahman Sedira worked as a cleaner in a factory. He was illiterate in both French and his native Arabic having hardly been to sc
  
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• The chilling soulless cruelty of Rishi Sunak is the stuff of nightmares | Stewart Lee

  11-02-2024 11:00
  
  Another week, another personal nadir for the PM. And now his smirking face has spilled over into my dreamsOn Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before I lurched into a fitful sleep had been a foul thing – that Rishi Sunak and Piers Morgan summit – and the day had begun in the Welsh Marches, where I encountered a haunting vision of doom. But wait, old friend. I am getting ahead of
  
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• In 1999, I said Yoko Ono’s art would never make it big. I was so wrong | Vanessa Thorpe

  11-02-2024 10:30
  
  This week Tate Modern is presenting the largest ever exhibition of work by the woman I wrote off after interviewing herTwenty-five years ago, I predicted a low-key future for the world-famous person I had just excitedly interviewed; a woman once at the centre of the avant garde, but still regularly pilloried in popular culture.Well, as it is fashionable to admit a failure of judgment, I can now say I was quite wrong about what lay ahead for Yoko Ono. “Today,” I pronounced in 199
  
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• When Forms Come Alive; Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-70 review – a restless triumph and a badly lit jumble sale

  11-02-2024 10:00
  
  Hayward Gallery, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate
  Rising, falling, like entrails, clouds, tentacles… sculpture spanning 60 years breaks free in the Hayward’s tremendous group show. In Margate, another sculpture-heavy show squanders two decades of abstract art by womenA riot, a trip, an ever-changing adventure: the new spring show at the Hayward Gallery is a blast from first to last. Superbly curated by Ralph Rugoff, gallery director, its theme is sculpture from the past 60 years
  
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