A new exhibition Slaves of Fashion: New Works by The Singh Twins, highlights current debates around ethical trade and consumerism through an exploration of the history of trade in Indian textiles as a global story of Empire, conflict, enslavement and luxury lifestyle that has modern day parallels. This latest body of 20 works by Contemporary British artists The Singh Twins, which was featured recently on the BBC’s Civilisations stories: The Empire, represents a fascinating new direction in the artists’ creative practice – combining the traditional hand-painted techniques for which they are known with digitally created imagery. Eleven of these, featuring life-sized portraits of historical figures on backgrounds packed with symbolic detail, are digital fabric artworks displayed on lightboxes. Each one highlights a different theme relating to the global story of trade in Indian textiles. Collectively they reveal not onl

ARTIST ROOMS: Jenny Holzer, the latest in the series of annual free displays, will open to the public on 23 July and run until summer 2019. It brings together key works from across Holzer’s four-decade career, including rarely seen works from the artist’s archives and installations exhibited in the UK for the first time, in Tate Modern’s dedicated ARTIST ROOMS gallery. American artist Jenny Holzer (b.1950) is renowned for thought-provoking, text-based installations that incorporate diverse media and a pioneering use of electronic technologies. The artist draws on content from a wide range of sources, often incorporating incongruous viewpoints to examine the nature of communication and human interaction. Tate’s ARTIST ROOMS display will feature works from Holzer’s major texts, including Truisms, Living, Survival and Laments, in addition to writing by others. Installations include three large-scale paintings cr

A landmark show opens at the National Gallery of Canada: the first and only presentation in North America of paintings from the world-renowned Ordrupgaard collection. Impressionist Treasures: The Ordrupgaard Collection, on view until September 9, 2018, offers a survey of leading artistic movements in French painting from the beginning of the nineteenth century through to Impressionism and Post-impressionism, as well as works from the Danish Golden Age. In one compelling presentation, the luminous landscapes of Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, are displayed alongside the realist landscapes and hunting scenes of Gustave Courbet, the still-lifes of Édouard Manet and Henri Matisse, the intimate portraits of Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin’s sensual paintings, as well as the unparalleled works from the Danish Golden Age, including those by C. W. Ecke

Neanderthal man knew how to make a fire by striking stone to create sparks, researchers said Thursday after analysing several tools found at sites in France dating from 50,000 years ago. It was already known that Neanderthals used fire but it was mostly thought to have occurred by natural causes such as lightning or volcanic eruptions, although perhaps they did know techniques for creating a flame. The latter is what scientists of a study published in Scientific Reports have claimed. “We present here the first direct artefactual evidence for regular, systematic fire production by Neanderthals,” they wrote in the study. “We found the lighters that Neanderthal man used to make a fire,” Marie Soressi, professor of prehistory at Leiden University in the Netherlands and co-author of the study, told AFP. The researchers fo

Eyes popping in astonishment, his mouth hanging mutely open, seven-year-old Joel approaches the four-metre-high monster and stands nose-to-nose with one of the deadliest killing machines the world has ever known. The full-scale Tyrannosaurus rex is just one of the prehistoric highlights on display at Portugal’s self-proclaimed “dinosaur capital”, a new theme park in one of the most fossil-rich regions in Europe. “We have 120 large-scale reproductions of 70 different species, spread over 10 hectares (24.7 acres),” Simao Mateus, Dino Park’s scientific director told AFP. Although only recently opened, the park sits in a part of Portugal long famous among palaeontologists for its extraordinary array of fossilised remains. The nearby town of Lourinha, an hour’s drive north of Lisbon, has been dinosaur-mad ever since the remains of a dozen of the creatures were discovered in the late 19th century. It already has a dino