This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics… enjoy.
Amazing collection of photographs from Hong Kong by Alex Ogle, AFP. http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/Hong-Kong-squared%3A-Instagramming-a-region
His Instagram page is here: http://instagram.com/alex_ogleOne
Ogle's photographs document one of the most diverse cities in the world. And diversity is best measured by language differences, the only metric that is relatively free from the problem of identification. Here's an interesting study mapping lexicological distances between European languages:
http://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/
Sadly, the mapping is incomplete, including some relatively large (by the visual taxonomy) languages, such as Friulan (300,000+ users).
A promising exhibition coming to Project Arts Centre: http://projectartscentre.ie/event/eva-kotatkova/ February-April 2014 featuring joint collaboration between Eva Kotátková and Dominik Lang. The exhibition is preceded by a solo show at the Cube by Eva Kotátková starting from January 23rd.
Here's an example of Kotátková's conceptualism at work:
And here's an example of Dominik Lang's work: Sleeping City, 2011 installation from Czech and Slovak Republic Pavillion, 54th Venice Biennale
Recent North American Big Freeze storm has generated loads of hoax photographs and mis-labeled and mis-dated reprints of past photographs. But some real images are truly stunning. Here are some examples, from Chicago: http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-140108-otherworldly-cold-weather-chicago-pictures/
Taking us from stunning…
… to ugly…
… to outright frightening…
While on the theme of cold and winter, interesting photography - both techniques used and compositional approaches - from Maroesjka Lavigne
http://www.maroesjkalavigne.be/fotografie/island/
Cold is hardly a descriptor for the series of Picasso's linocuts, representing all plate stages, acquired by by the British Museum. The set covers both finished prints and artist's proofs for his "Still Life under the Lamp" (image next) and "Jacqueline Reading", with both linocuts created in 1962 when Picasso was 80. The real value of the set is that is shows all stages of linocuts evolution from the first state - an occasion so rare that no other museum in world currently has in its collection a complete set. There are nine progressive sets of states for the "Still Life under the Lamp" alone and four proofs of "Jacqueline Reading".
Both sets are on the show in Room 90 at The British Museum through 6 May 2014. More information here: http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_and_press/press_releases/2014/picasso_linocuts.aspx
