In Arab culture, the term ‘tiger’s eye’ refers to a woman’s defiant and rebellious gaze – a woman who does not conform or abide by the rules set out by society. In her mixed-media photo-based project of the same name, Egyptian-born artist Heba Khalifa reclaims the term, and the female gaze, to empower and to heal from childhood trauma. In the project, which unfolds in different techniques such as photomontage, Khalifa revisits her childhood home through the family photo album, reconstructing and constructing painful and difficult memories from her past. Through the project, Khalifa also begins to heal from this trauma, accepting it as part of her and rebuilding her image. The evocative, moving collage image Wild belongs to this latter phase, where the artist begins to see herself again – a symbolic act of acceptance and reparation. The beautiful Tiger’s Eye is deeply personal and private journey but one that speaks widely to domestic violence and abuse suffered by women all over the world, and art’s potential role in healing. Khalifa is one of seven artists selected for the 2025 Louis Roederer Foundation Discovery Award 2025, presented in an exhibition at Espace Monoprix curated by César González-Aguirre until October, 2025.

The late French-Moroccan artist and photographer Leila Alaoui was celebrated for her portraits of people whose lives were impacted gravely by conflict and unrest across the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle Eastern regions. Alaoui regularly collaborated with NGOs, and used her social documentary photography to bring attention and awareness to urgent humanitarian issues. A graduate of City University, New York, by 2009, Alaoui had exhibited her work internationally including the Institut du Monde Arabe and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Konsthall of Malmoe in Sweden, the national palace of the citadel of Cascais in Portugal, and Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, Canada. Her photographic missions for NGOs included the Danish Refugee Council, Search for Common Ground and HCR. In January 2016, while working on an Amnesty International commission about women’s rights in Burkina Faso, Leila Alaoui was seriously injured in the terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou. Tragically, she did not recover, and died three days later on 18 January 2016 of a heart attack, aged 33. The Fondation Leila Alaoui was later established in her memory, working as an estate for her work, and a way to continue to inspire and support artists advocating for human rights and human dignity.

No Pasara was Alaoui’s first major body of work, and constitutes a significant part of her legacy as an artist. Commissioned by the EU, No Pasara (meaning Entry Denied), followed a group of young Moroccans awaiting the journey to Europe from the port cities of Nador and Tangier. As a French-Moroccan, this story was particularly close to Alaoui’s heart and the portraits with their subtle touches of beauty and the sublime carve out a space for hope and optimism in a grim reality for these young people. In this picture, the composition, with the figure of the young man in the corner of the frame against an illusory painted backdrop of a mountainous landscape, fills the image with desire, and a dream. It exemplifies the captivating, stirring and empathetic kind of storytelling Alaoui quickly became known for in her short but inspiring career.

This month marks an important moment for the Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu as she becomes the first living artist to present a solo exhibition at the opulent Galleria Borghese, Rome taking over the entire 17th century villa and gardens with a solo exhibition titled Black Soil Poems, supported by FENDI. The gallery’s famous collection of art and its architecture have been transformed into a platform for Mutu’s site-specific sculptures, installations and moving image works, suspended to inhabit the space in ethereal and phantasmagical ways. Mutu is celebrated for her sculptures and installations exploring race, gender, colonialism and environmental issues and this show is equally charged with those themes and tensions. The title of the show evokes the duality of Mutu’s work, rooted in ancient ideas but utterly connected to the current social and material context. Black soil refers to the rich matter found in many places, including the Secret Gardens of Galleria Borghese. The show extends to the American Academy in Rome, where this work can be found: Shavasana I. The reclining bronze figure, covered by a woven straw mat, takes its name from the yoga pose “shavasana” (corpse pose) and is inspired by a real-life incident. Situated in the Academy’s beautiful atrium, surrounded by ancient Roman funerary inscriptions, it evokes universal themes of death and surrender. The exhibition runs in Rome to 14 September, 2025.

The late Cecil Beaton started his now legendary career as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue. However, his decade working for Vogue came to an end in 1938, after he inserted an anti-semitic word into a photograph for a story on New York society. He was fired from Vogue, and returned to England. He spent the next years attempting to rebuild his reputation, working as a war photographer, and later took many portraits of the Royal family, including the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the birth of King Charles III.

Beaton today is also known for the portraits and fashion photographs he made in the 1960s and 1970s – many of them taken at, or using floral designs he created from his gardens at Ashcombe House and Reddish House – the 18th century manor Beaton transformed in the village of Broad Chalke, Wiltshire. A new exhibition at the Garden Museum explores Beaton’s ongoing fascination with horticulture in his life and work. The display includes this spectacular black and white portrait of Bianca Jagger taken in Beaton’s gardens at Reddish in 1978, wearing a sumptuous Zandra Rhodes lace dress. Jagger appears in several portraits by Beaton, a shoot that would become one of his most iconic, capturing the mood of an era while creating an image of timeless elegance and beauty that endures to today.

In this sumptuous, beautiful mixed media work by artist Spandita Malik, a portrait is printed purposefully on khadi, with local zardozi and gota-patti embroidery, beadwork, mirror work techniques. Arifa Bano is part of the series Jāḷī - Meshes of Resistance, a collaborative project with rural women's communities in the artist’s home country of India. Against a backdrop of violence against women, Malik works with the women to capture intimate, self-directed portraits. The local cloth is chosen to deliberately echo Ghandi's khadi, and India’s fight for independence. The images are then returned to the women who add the intricate embroidery on top, further deciding how their image will be read or seen. Malik has said that together the women are “enmeshing themselves in a stronger fabric of resistance, one stitch at a time.” Malik one of the winners of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography. This year, the Foundation invited photographers and artists to respond concept of 'unity', encouraging images that explore how communities, individuals, and even nature have come together to heal, reconcile, and find peaceful resolution. The Prize is produced in partnership with Peckham 24, London’s annual, three-day photography festival. An exhibition of the winners’ works, (selected by a jury including Gillian Wearing) is on view until 25 May at Copeland Gallery.

The much anticipated unveiling of the revamped Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery takes place this week, and Mud Sun is sure to be one of the highlights. The new commission by Sir Richard Long is a dazzling five-metre long flat circular sculpture, made on site by the acclaimed land artist by hand, using tidal mud from the River Avon, close to Long’s home in Bristol. It occupies a dramatic position at the top of the grand staircase in the transformed Sainsbury Wing, housing the most ambitious rehang of the National Gallery’s collection of early 13th century to High Renaissance paintings to date. Long is the only artist to have been nominated for the Turner Prize four times (he won in 1989) and is one of the country’s most celebrated sculptors, producing pioneering land art works with earth, rock, stone and mud. Mud Sun is typifies Long’s approach to art and the landscape, through simple physical actions, evoked in the work’s swirls and undulating patterns, reminders of human gestures and movements in nature.

As Digital Art Week returns to London (citywide, 21- 25 April), we are looking to the oeuvre Krista Kim, the trailblazing contemporary artist and pioneer of the Techism movement. A highlight of the 2024 Digital Art Week programme was a screening at Outernet of Kim’s Continuum, a mind-blowing visual meditation presented at an awe-inspiring scale (covering Outernet’s four-storey LED screen). Continuum is designed to uplift and bring serenity to the digital realm, where so often the dark sides of humanity prevail, or information can feel overwhelming. As Kim puts it: "Continuum" was born out of a profound desire to bridge this digital-human gap and to restore a sense of balance and connectedness. It was not just an artwork but a mission, an attempt to reintroduce Zen principles into our increasingly digitized existence.” Using an archive of LED light photography, Kim crafted digital compositions, prismatic, compelling colourscapes – nodding to the likes of Rothko and James Turrell – that invite introspective and sooth the senses. The project was originally conceived as a collaboration with Spanish digital artist, Efren Mur, with healing, high frequency music by Ligovskoï, and is inspired by the artist’s time living in Japan and her encounters with the principles of zen. Continuum has been presented in different locations, including Time Square and Fort York National Historic Site, and is a testament to Kim’s unique place in the digital art field, revealing the transformative potential of digital technology and its positive effects on people.

Over the past fifteen years, British artist Ed Atkins has become one of the UK’s most influential artists, through computer-generated videos and animations that repurpose technology in revealing and revelatory ways. Borrowing from a plethora of sources, Atkins work explores the contemporary state of being, and the collisions between reality and fantasy. This ink and gouache painting on board is one of a series of similar works, realistic depictions of pillows, bearing the traces of the absent human body. “My life and my work are inextricable. How do I convey the life-ness that made these works – my life-ness – through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations. I want it so the more you see, the richer, more complex, less authored, less gettable things become” Atkins has said. The work reveals a persistent concern in Atkins work, to explore his own body, anxiety and the threatened human body. The work is included in Atkins’ largest ever exhibition to date, currently on view at Tate Britain, running to August 25th, 2025.

As Mothering Sunday approaches in the UK, we look to the groundbreaking paintings of Scottish artist Caroline Walker, paying tribute to the everyday, unseen moments of care in early motherhood, rarely depicted with nuance in art. In her lustrous oil paintings of quiet domestic scenes, observed from a voyeuristic distance, her subjects seem unaware of being looked at as they labour. Night Feed I is an intimate scale oil on board depicts a new mother breastfeeding her baby at night in the soft glow of the street light. The mother’s gesture is both tender and evokes the intense physical fatigue of round-the-clock nursing a newborn. Walker often works from her own photographs, and her subjects are sometimes members of her own family – her sister-in-law features in this painting. There is a feeling of closeness and comfort, but also the isolation of the domestic space, another important element of Walker’s works. The painter has explained: “The subject of my paintings in its broadest sense is women’s experience, whether that is the imagined interior life of a glimpsed shop worker, a closely observed portrayal of my mother working in the family home, or women I’ve had the privilege of spending time with, in their place of work. From the anonymous to the highly personal, what links all these subjects is an investigation of an experience which is specifically female.” Walker opens a major exhibition, Mothering, at Hepworth Wakefield in May, exploring themes of motherhood and early years care.