Oliver Basciano

You might be forgiven for thinking that a charity sale of particularly kitschy furniture has been set up just past the entrance of the Barbican Art Gallery. There’s a chunky brown dressing table, an ornate table several decades out of fashion and a trio of bedside tables. They are piled haphazardly and on each is a garishly painted picture, invariably a pastiche of a historical painting or a Biblical scene. Raphael’s 1512 ‘Madonna and Child with St John’ rendered slightly sloppily where the mirror of the bureau once was; ‘The Last Supper’ on the table top; three popes in profile staring impassively from the tops of the nightstands.

The recent announcement that the National Portrait Gallery has purchased two works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke for its collection came as something of a shock. The surprise? The art was actually good. Boyce’s quarterised collage ‘From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis’ (1987), reminiscent of an enlarged and doodled upon set of passport photographs is a complex work of art made better the more attention you give it; Locke’s maximalist approach with the bust ‘Souvenir 17 (Albert Edward, Prince of Wales)’ (2024) may not be to everyone’s taste, but his sculpture is full of humour and pathos.

As she recalls a decade of infamy, Maria Alyokhina wanders one of the many anonymous apartments she has lived in since escaping Russia six months ago. ‘We didn’t expect a criminal case, we didn’t expect imprisonment, we didn’t expect international attention. We didn’t expect how many people would support Pussy Riot, would go to the street in balaclavas. We could never have predicted that.’ Alyokhina and Pussy Riot, a loose feminist collective who perform in brightly coloured balaclavas, came to international attention in February 2012 with their ‘punk prayer’, a guerilla music performance in Moscow’s orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

The one thing everyone agrees is that the Southbank Centre is in deep trouble. In May, the institution made an unusually public plea for government help. Management predicted the best-case scenario was ending the financial year with a £5 million loss, having exhausted all reserves, used the £4 million received from the furlough scheme and having gobbled up the remainder of its Arts Council grant. All the while, with the exception of the Hayward Gallery, the 21-acre site on London’s Thameside, incorporating both the Royal Festival Hall and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, remains closed. It was pitiful news, but there was worse to come. With no concerts, performances, talks or readings, drastic staff cuts are in the offing.