Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

Donatello in Florence, the Biennale of Sydney and Eduardo Navarro’s seed installation.

This week, as the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence present a survey of Donatello, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance masters, we talk to Arturo Galansino, the Strozzi’s Director General, and Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello museum, about the show. The Biennale of Sydney in Australia has just opened, with the theme of rīvus, meaning stream in Latin. José Roca, the Biennale’s artistic director, and Alessandro Pelizzon, co-founder of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, discuss the Biennale’s concept, bringing rivers and other “aqueous beings”, as Roca and his curatorial colleagues call them, into dialogue with artists, architects, designers, scientists, and communities. What does it mean if you grant rivers and other natural forms rights? And this episode’s Work of the Week also explores nature, ecology and the relationship between humans and natural phenomena. We speak to curator Bárbara Rodriguez Muñoz about The Photosynthetics, an installation by Eduardo Navarro in Rooted Beings, the latest exhibition at London’s Wellcome Collection.

Donatello: The Renaissance, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, 19 March-31 July. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 2 September-8 January 2023. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will stage its variation of the exhibition in 2023

The Biennale of Sydney: Rīvus continues until 13 June. And José and Alessandro will take part in a panel discussion on 10 May titled Reclaiming Rivers’ Rights. Find out more at biennaleofsydney.art

Rooted Beings, Wellcome Collection, London, 24 March-29 August

Morning News: Ukraine Invasion, Republican’s & Trump’s Russia Problem

The latest on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Plus: a look at how the war has become a sticking point within the Republican Party, a flick through today’s papers and executive producer Audrey Morrisey on the American Song Contest.

Cover Preview: Nature Magazine – March 17, 2022

Volume 603 Issue 7901, 17 March 2022

Volume 603 Issue 7901

For more than 50 years, scientists have been trying to understand the relationship between DNA sequence, gene-expression phenotype and fitness to decipher principles of gene regulatory evolution. In this week’s issue, Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, Carl de Boer, Aviv Regev and their colleagues present a framework for understanding and engineering regulatory DNA sequences that takes a step towards this goal. The researchers built this framework around an ‘oracle’ they developed using a deep neural network model that predicts gene expression given a promoter DNA sequence. The neural network was trained using the expression measurements for tens of millions of promoter sequences. The result was an AI oracle that predicts expression from sequence well enough to study the evolutionary history and future evolvability of regulatory DNA sequences, as well as to design regulatory DNA sequences for synthetic biology applications. The cover offers a visual representation of the evolutionary properties of sequences at the extremes of the evolvability spectrum. 

BBC Earth: The Movement To Protect Pangolins

In China, Maria joins forces with Angelababy, one of the country’s biggest megastars. She is taking a bold approach to addressing the demand for pangolin products.

Pangolins, sometimes known as scaly anteaters, are mammals of the order Pholidota. The one extant family, the Manidae, has three genera: Manis, Phataginus, and Smutsia. Manis comprises the four species found in Asia, while Phataginus and Smutsia include two species each, all found in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Previews: The Economist Magazine – March 19, 2022

Walking Tour: Margate In Southeast England (4K)

Margate is a town on England’s southeast coast. It’s known for its sandy beach. Near the Harbour Arm stone pier, the modern Turner Contemporary art gallery has rotating exhibitions. Dreamland Margate is an amusement park with vintage rides. Millions of seashells decorate the Shell Grotto’s underground passages. In a former police station in the old town, the Margate Museum has local history displays.

Ecosystems: Plastic Nets On The Ganges River, India

Follow a local fisherman as he navigates his community’s dependency of plastic nets and the effects this has on the river. The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funded the Sea to Source: Ganges expedition.

News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious