Rhiannon Giddens first made her name with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who played string-band music, heavily relying on the banjo and fiddle. The band formed after the first Black Banjo Gathering in North Carolina in 2005 and helped to reclaim a lost tradition of African-American country music. Their music reached its peak in 2010 with the joyful sounds of “Genuine Negro Jig.”
A Moving Image is an innovative account of the gentrification of Brixton. The film is a fictionalised account making use of documentary footage, photography and performance art. It begins with Nina, who is returning to the area after living in Shoreditch, east London.
The opening scenes feature the character Big Ben on a megaphone, a nod to the many political activists and religious evangelists who make the streets of Brixton so unique.
The Paris Commune is one of the most exciting and enlightening periods of working class history. The Parisian working class took the city from the ruling elites and ran things for themselves for 72 days. All social questions were dealt with by the Commune, including justice, food and housing.
Tate Britain’s first ever LGBT+-related exhibition explores connections between art and a diverse range of sexualities and gender identities. It covers the period between the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861 and the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 which partially decriminalised consensual sex between men over 21 (both legal changes affected England and Wales only). This is a historic exhibition then, inventive, fascinating, surprising and affecting. Nevertheless there are some interesting contradictions at play.
People Power: Fighting for Peace
Imperial War Museum, London, 23 March to 28 August
This exhibition displays over 300 objects, including posters, placards, badges, artworks and banners, from anti-war movements over the past century. From First World War conscientious objectors to the Stop the War Coalition via the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Greenham Common women’s camp, the IWM examines the passions and motivation of the millions who have taken up the struggle against war.
This album expresses beautifully the longing of Tuareg nomads in exile whose Saharan homeland has been the site of successive wars. The Islamist militias who took over Northern Mali in late 2012 denounced Tinariwen’s music and even kidnapped one of their members. Several of the band participated in previous Tuareg rebellions, meeting for the first time in a military training camp before they swapped their machine guns for guitars.
The dark, last supper-esque cover art of Stormzy’s debut album, coupled with the reference to gangs in its title, instantly had commentators decrying yet another grime artist “glamorising” street crime and gang life in London. But one listen through would be enough to reveal this album as being far from that.
Our protagonist, Katherine, is trapped. In an arranged marriage to a weak and bitter man twice her age; in an isolated house out on the moors, where she is repeatedly advised to stay indoors; in the corseted dresses which her maid, Anna, straps her into each morning. Katherine, luminously played by Florence Pugh (who also lit up Carol Morley’s The Falling), is bored.
Director Pablo Larraín’s acclaimed recent film Jackie starred Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy following the assassination of her husband, US president JFK. With Neruda it seems that Larraín — who also directed 2012’s powerful anti-Pinochet drama No — is on more familiar territory, focusing this time on quite a different political figure: the Chilean Nobel prize-winning poet and Communist senator Pablo Neruda.
There is a delicious irony here in that the infamous Section 28 of 1988’s Local Government Act specifically prohibited “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” and this exhibition, named after the campaign to repeal the act, is overwhelmingly family friendly.
The exhibition marks 50 years since the passing of another piece of legislation — the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967.