Arts news

• Are electric car sales really flatlining? | Brief letters

  19-03-2025 19:08
  
  Motoring figures | The power of music | Art appreciation | Friends’ joint accounts | Drummer jokes“Fresh incentives to boost a flatlining electric car market are urgently needed, according to the UK automotive industry,” you report (13 March). According to figures compiled by the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders, electric vehicle sales rose 18% on the previous year in 2023, a further 21% in 2024, and are up 42% in the first two months of 2025 on the same period
  
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• Florida mayor drops threat to evict cinema over No Other Land screening

  19-03-2025 18:24
  
  The Oscar-winning film, about a Palestinian community resisting displacement and violence from Israeli forces, has become the latest focus of a culture war in the stateAfter a week of controversy, the mayor of Miami Beach decided to withdraw his initial proposal to cancel the lease and block a small cinema’s funding due to its screening of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.Residents packed city hall to make public comments, and regardless of their backgrounds and opinions, the ma
  
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• Arpita Singh: Remembering review – beautiful chaos reigns in India’s tumultuous past

  19-03-2025 17:27
  
  Serpentine North gallery, London
  Hugely complex and infinitely layered figurative paintings dominate in a show that feels part-comic book, part Chagall dreamscape, part folk-artEvery painting in Arpita Singh’s debut UK exhibition feels like a desperate attempt to make sense of a tumultuous past, to memorialise the endless turbulence of life, politics and history. Singh, born in 1937, matured as an artist at a time of huge social upheaval in India. Amid states of national emergency, rising
  
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• ‘He threw body piercing parties and lay on a bed of nails’: the wild life of body modification guru Fakir Musafar

  19-03-2025 10:58
  
  A new documentary explores how the pioneer of the ‘modern primitive’ subculture used painful BDSM practices to access new spiritual planes – outraging conventional societyIn the opening moments of A Body to Live in, a documentary by American film-maker Angelo Madsen, we are confronted with two black-and-white photographs. Taken in 1944 by the teenage Roland Loomis, they show him stripped to his underwear, his waist heavily restricted by a leather belt, a rope wrapped several ti
  
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• ‘The colour of my skin didn’t matter’: exhibition shines light on black artists in postwar Paris

  19-03-2025 06:00
  Pompidou Centre show featuring 150 artists of African heritage is the last before the gallery shuts for five yearsFor many black artists and intellectuals, postwar Paris was a cosmopolitan hub. While colonisation, racism and segregation cast a shadow over their countries of origin, the City of Light appeared then a more liberated place where they were free to mix, study, work and create.Now, a new exhibition – the last major event at Paris’s Pompidou Centre before it closes for a fiv
  
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