Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism

The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.

The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.

Afshar’s experiences as a young woman in Iran have shaped her artistic career in Australia, focusing her eye on the humanity within inhumane systems

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When Hoda Afshar was a teenager, coming of age in theocratic and authoritarian Iran in the 1990s, she and her friends were repeatedly arrested and physically punished by the “morality police”, for wearing their hijabs incorrectly in public and for attending underground parties. “They used to put a few of us in small solitary confinement cells together for a night or two, it was very common for my generation to experience that,” she says.

“We are part of the nasl-e sukhteh, or ‘burned generation’; the generation born after the 1979 revolution, who had to pay the price for many of the transformations and changes that happened.”

With a footprint of less than 40 sq metres, the Melbourne project required careful planning – and some spatial trickery

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Last week on a balmy spring evening, Ronnen Goren and his partner had dinner in a small pavilion on their terrace for the first time. Inside, an Aga stove was keeping their home warm. They could have retired to their sunken lounge room and cocktail bar for a nightcap, had the mood struck.

This domestic scene took place in a semi-subterranean former laundry in inner Melbourne – a space of less than 40 sq metres that was renovated at the end of 2024. On 29 October, the “exuberant” reimagining of the damp basement space in Toorak, on the grounds of the heritage-listed Quamby apartment complex, received the Emil Sodersten award for interior architecture at Australia’s National Architecture awards.

As the prestigious award marks its 30th anniversary, this year’s nominees consider hidden human labour, life in war-torn Ukraine and the Buddhist concept of rebirth

Once coveted for its clean lines and timeless design, the functional furniture is no longer seen as cool. Anyone for cottagecore and chrome?

“I definitely don’t think it is cringe,” says Laura Budds, a vintage furniture dealer based in Norfolk. “But I do think we have reached the peak, and we’re on the descent.” Budds is talking about mid-century modern furniture, which has recently come under fire from younger generations for being – like so many things, including trainer socks and high-waisted jeans – a deeply millennial aesthetic. As the Wall Street Journal declared: “Midcentury modern design has met the fate of pumpkin spice lattes, cocktails in mason jars, no-show socks, leggings and other aspects of millennial culture: it has become cringey.”

Budds, 44, is resigned to the fact that she is a “mid-century millennial”. She’s even made a career out of it: she sells furniture and vintage clothes at Williams & Parfitt, a modern antiques centre in Wymondham, Norfolk. But she says she has had to diversify in recent years to cater to changing tastes among younger customers, who are moving away from the “wall-to-wall mid-century” look beloved by the generation above them. She says of gen Z: “I don’t think they are so bound by the eras or designers – they just buy what they like. They aren’t afraid of older antiques and will have a bit of whimsy or taxidermy.”

The National Gallery of Victoria presents the first major Australian solo exhibition of the Melbourne artist, whose work references African studio photography, family archives, Catholic imagery and science fiction, while paying tribute to the myths and traditions of Dinka Bor culture in South Sudan.

Passage: The Art of Atong Atem will run from Friday until 14 June at the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square. Entry is free

• Keeping it real: the vivid photography of Atong Atem – in pictures

‘Les didn’t wear gloves as he needed to be able to feel the bees so he didn’t crush them. “Should I put them on my face?” he said. “Sure!” I replied’

The jumping-off point for my Bare Handed series was a bird becoming trapped in the netting around the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It made me think of the problem humans have interacting with the natural world. How do we navigate obtaining food and the other things we need while still being good stewards of the land? I’d seen work by photographers demonstrating how Big Agriculture was destroying the environment. I wanted to find people who took a respectful approach, tried to work in tandem with it, but who might be in a fearful or dangerous situation.

I approached Les, the man in this picture, after speaking to the director of an exhibition space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had hired him to remove a feral beehive from his tree. I’d already tried to photograph another beekeeper who wore a full protective suit, but he might as well have been an astronaut. With Les, I was able to stay nearby and work with him over three days. The first couple involved straightforward documentary pictures of him tending his hives. Then, on the third day, his apprentice Amber showed up to help.

A new exhibition has trawled the Martin Parr Foundation’s archive to find these haunted images – revealing the UK as a place of fear and fascination

Many Muslims saw their places of worship destroyed or abandoned during the sectarian violence of India’s partition in 1947. Now villagers of many faiths are coming together to revive them

Gajju Khan is smiling as he sits in an unfinished building in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late afternoon. The 87-year-old is hopeful that before he dies he will hear the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer, echo across his village once again when the mosque is completed.

The last time he heard it here was when he was eight years old, living with his parents in Tira Maloya, a village in Chandigarh, not far from where he lives now.

Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a Sikh, donated family land to build a mosque in her village. ‘There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,’ she says

A striking transformation takes place along the coast of Qinqdao in autumn, when a native seepweed turns a brilliant shade of red.

The ‘red beach’ phenemon can be seen in the salt marshes and wetlands on the coast of China’s Shandong province, where the Suaeda glauca plant matures and absorbs water, changing it from green to crimson between September and November