Desert bloom: How the AlUla Arts Festival blends history with the here and now - Monocle

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured some remarkable phenomena in space, from the Horsehead Nebula to the unbelievable “Pillars of Creation.” Things just got a little bit wilder with brilliant images of the Lion Nebula (NGC 2392) captured by the telescope’s NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument). The shape is formed by the remains of a dying star now at a phase known as a white dwarf, when a very dense stellar core remains as it sheds its outer layers. On NGC 2392, the bright center looks like a little nose. “The central dying star is so hot that its radiation is ‘cooking’ everything from the inside and producing a bubble of ionized hydrogen gas as it does,” NASA says. “The gas bubble, which is the lion’s ‘face,’ features cavernous shells and rings with tendrils that are expanding and destroying dust upon encounter.” The lion’s “mane” is actually the inside of one of these shells, illuminated by the star’s core.

I don’t remember the last time I saw such a well-researched and truly globally representative exhibition that doesn’t patronise but quietly makes its case unapologetically, fearlessly and through sheer quality. Apart from being the first retelling of the international, pluralistic pictorialism movement, Tate’s new show allows for some refreshing encounters with unknown works for British audiences – around half of the works included here have never been shown in the UK. The effect is to radically deepen and widen our understanding not only of art history but the human impulses that drive us to make images in the first place. We move seamlessly from the sudden shock of colour in three-colour carbon prints of flowers in a London garden in the 1920s to works born of the photographic salons, circles and clubs of Sydney, Hong Kong and Brazil. Historical moments collide; the epic emerges from the everyday. A man rows home across the Norfolk Broads, another works on a construction site in Singapore. None of it feels out of place. It all belongs. It is all extremely, almost ecclesiastically, beautiful. More than a few times, I stopped in my tracks.

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