Opinion

Public debate around Confederate insignia has little to do with historical fact, and everything to do with collective memory

What Luc Besson’s Valerian and a number of recent artists’ 3D films are getting right about our current reality

The removal of the Confederate monuments in Baltimore shows decisiveness after years of inaction – already they stand as sites of counter-memory

From a tribute to Straub/Huillet to Valerie Massadian’s portrait of teenage motherhood, the turn to real situations and people for fiction films

Japan’s growing number of art festivals tread a precarious path between state-sponsored leisure-culture and soft-power machinery

SoundCloud has been invaluable to the new music community for both documentation and discovery – now the audio-sharing platform is in peril

At a time of instantaneous information and fetishized immersivity, artists are evoking scent as an alchemical, bodily response

20 years after Hong Kong’s handover to China, a new generation of artists dive into the city-state’s unknown futures and landscapes of possibility

‘Klassensprachen’ engaged artists, writers and publishers in soul-searching around the interlinking of class, language and political change

From being citizens to lovers, the most important things in life can’t be professionalized. Is it time for some politically-directed amateurism?

The City of London’s annual sculpture park reveals the complex interplay between global corporations, urban space and ‘the public’

The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art inaugurates its biennial artists’ award with a show marked by the idea of transference

With our increasingly porous objects, ubiquitous networks and ambivalent organisms, why artists are drawing inspiration from extra-human agencies

Does an automaton-filled future spell the end of work, of life? A report from the future-focused Vienna Biennale 2017

Reconsidering the ethics and efficacy of ‘strategic essentialism’ via Adrian Piper, ‘We Wanted a Revolution’ and Juliana Huxtable

In Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch’s bone-dry humour rises to the surface, and his lush visuals float free above narrative strictures

What the Pride flag says about the gentrification of queer politics 

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, a show juxtaposing contemporary Ukrainian art with that of the country’s avant-garde 

The third edition of the London performance festival makes the case for collective action in an age of political frustration

The third of our editors’ impressions from Kassel, Amy Sherlock on the works housed in the exhibition’s ‘off-sites’