Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered
As far as markontour was concerned, board games started in about 1976 with an animal-based memory card game. But, having been educated by the Museum of…
Eugene Skeef and the Abantu Ensemble
Eugene Skeef and the Abantu Ensemble started an extraordinary performance at the British Museum last night with the sound of bird song. Not sampled sparrows, but…
West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song
The British Library’s ‘West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song’ is an engrossing and rewarding introduction to this vast region of 340 million people, 1,000 languages and 17 nations. Despite loving the music of Fela Kuti, Toumani Diabate, and Ali Fark Toure, markontour had hitherto failed to understand the regional and cultural connections between these great artists. This exhibition shows how their West African homelands share a love of story-telling, of which these great artists are simply modern expressions.
Celts: art and identity
It turns out that the ancient Greeks coined the label Keltoi to categorise non-Mediterranean Europeans. Plato and his intellectual mates regarded the Keltoi as war-mad alcoholics with a penchant for fancy jewellery. But as the British Museum’s exhibition shows, the Celts were far from shallow. The Greeks might have corneed the early market in naturalistic art, but the Celts were already well into abstractionism 2,500 years ago.
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