Norwegian Film Instute announces Eskil Vogt has received a film grant based in artistic evaluation. See other films of merrit and details below.

New Eskil Vogt feature receives NOK 10 million production grant Untitled.  Production grant: NOK 10,000,000.  Production company: Mer Film AS.  Producers: Maria Ekerhovd, Lars Thomas Skare.  Director and screenwriter: Eskil Vogt.  Total budget: NOK 109 733 652. The production grant is awarded based on artistic evaluation.   Eskil Vogt has previously written and directed the feature films Blind (2014) and The Innocents (2021), and has twice been nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar, as co-author of The Worst Person in the World (2021) and Sentimental Value (2025). Sentimental Value won the Best International Feature at this year's Academy Awards.  Untitled is a psychological thriller about art, power and the blurred boundaries between memory and truth. Eskil Vogt has written the screenplay and will be directing.  "Untitled is an ambitious project that builds on Eskil Vogt’s distinctive artistic vision. Eskil Vogt is a filmmaker with a strong artistic voice and a significant international profile, and with his third feature as a director, he continues to develop and challenge himself artistically. Supporting filmmakers in developing their artistic practice over time is a key priority in our new strategy, where strengthening creators and their careers is one of our main commitments", says Kjersti Mo, CEO of the Norwegian Film Institute.  Untitled is produced by Mer Films AS, internationally renowned production company headed by Maria Ekerhovd. Recent production credits include Sentimental Value - Academy Award-, BAFTA-, Golden Globe-, Cannes- and European Film Award-winner; Academy Award-nominee The Ugly Stepsister (2025), and upcoming Renate Reinsve feature Butterfly (2026), which premiered at this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival.     Untitled has previously received a total of NOK 700,000 in development grants from the Norwegian Film Institute. www.norwegianfilms.no The Norwegian Film Institute is a public institution operating under the authority of the Ministry of Culture. We support and promote films, series and games. Read more here. Read more about the Norwegian Film Institute's Privacy statement here.  #norwegianflilminstitute#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com #sunstormfineartmagazine.com#artfunculture#artfunnew#artfunnow#artfunnorwegian#artfunfilm

Smith College of Art Announces Emma Chubb is appointed Director of Curatorial Affairs

 

Smith College Museum of Art Announces Emma Chubb as Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs photo credit: Patrick Montero

NORTHAMPTON, MA — The Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) has appointed Emma Chubb as Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs. Chubb, who is the Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art, will continue in this capacity while also leading the museum's curatorial division. Overseeing exhibitions, acquisitions, collections research, and strategic curatorial initiatives will be among Chubb’s responsibilities in her new role.  “Emma brings to this role exceptional scholarly depth, a thoughtful and ambitious curatorial vision, and a genuine talent for fostering collaboration across the museum and the college. As Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, she will be instrumental in shaping the future of SCMA’s curatorial program and furthering the museum’s longstanding commitment to excellence in teaching, research, and meaningful public engagement,” said Jessica Nicoll, Director and Louise Ines Doyle ’34 Chief Curator of the Smith College Museum of Art. Emma Chubb is the inaugural Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art at SCMA and a scholar specializing in contemporary art from Morocco. Her initiatives include Amanda Williams: An Imposing Number of Times (2020–22), Younes Rahmoun: Here, Now (2024–25)—the first retrospective dedicated to one of North Africa's most significant contemporary artists—and the establishment of SCMA's Artist-in-Residence Program. She is also the organizing curator for Don't mind if I do (2026) and Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2026–27). Her academic credentials include a PhD in art history, with a certificate in Middle East and North African Studies from Northwestern University, and a BA in Art History and French from Haverford College. This appointment follows the nearly decade-long tenure of Aprile Gallant, who is stepping down from the Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs position. Gallant will remain at SCMA as the Mary Walcott Keyes 1931 Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, dedicating her efforts to scholarship and major research projects. Gallant’s leadership expanded the museum's curatorial expertise by appointing curators of Asian and Contemporary Art and overseeing a dynamic program of exhibitions, acquisitions, and collection initiatives. Her work has established a strong foundation for the department’s continued growth. With Chubb’s appointment, SCMA continues a series of leadership transitions that have strengthened its senior team, underscoring the museum’s ongoing commitment to organizational excellence in support of its mission as a teaching museum for Smith College.  About the Smith College Museum of Art As a teaching museum at Smith College, SCMA is dedicated to connecting people to art, ideas, and each other by engaging people with firsthand experiences of art, artists and museum practice; collecting, researching, presenting and preserving an expansive collection of art in the service of learning, teaching, and critical dialogue; and by fostering an inclusive and accessible environment that welcomes diverse perspectives and inspires imagination. Except for select holidays, SCMA and the SCMA Shop are open to the public year-round, Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. The museum is located at 20 Elm Street at Bedford Terrace, Northampton, MA. In SCMA’s galleries and classrooms, visitors experience a world-class collection of art spanning ancient times to the present and encompassing the arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The Cunningham Center for the Study of Prints, Drawings and Photographs houses and hosts the study of a comprehensive collection of works on paper.  SCMA’s commitment to broad public access is supported by the Art Bridges Foundation’s “Access for All” grant initiative, alongside a generous gift from Smith College alumnae Jan Fullgraf Golann ’71 and Jane Timken ’64, which has enabled the museum to eliminate all admission fees and expand community programming. An accredited member of the American Alliance of Museums and a founding member of Museums10, a regional cultural collaboration, SCMA is also a member of the College Art Association and the New England Museum Association. #smithcollegemuseum#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com #sunstormfineartmagazine.com#artfunchange#artfunnow#artfunhistory#artfunculture

The New Museum Exhibition covers 400 years of history ~The Bowery : Devil's Mile~ opens September 24, 2026

 

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New Museum Exhibition Traces 400 Years of Cultural History on the Bowery  The Bowery: Devil’s Mile Opens September 24, 2026 The Bowery: Devil’s Mile is the first exhibition to trace the rich cultural history of New York’s oldest thoroughfare, illuminating the Bowery—now home to the New Museum—as one of the most infamous yet astonishingly underexplored streets in the world.   Known in the twentieth century as a notorious skid row, the Bowery has had many incarnations: a Lenape footpath; a home to farms and cattle drives; the site of racetracks and pleasure gardens; a center of popular entertainment with theaters, concert halls, tattoo parlors, and dime museums; and most recently, the spine of a thriving artist community. This exhibition is an introduction to the richness and complexity of the Bowery and its generative power and concentrated energy as a street, a neighborhood, and a state of mind. For centuries, the Bowery has been a place of transformation and invention, a gateway for immigrants, a refuge for drifters and dreamers. Described as “a democratic vortex” by Jacob Riis and “the great highway of humanity” by Theodore Roosevelt, the Bowery has been a place of openness and experimentation, vice and deviance, that was also once known as “Devil’s Mile.” On view from September 24, 2026, through January 31, 2027, the exhibition brings together artifacts and artworks stretching back centuries, from an 1830s hand pump fire engine to a nineteenth century dime museum attraction called the “Feejee Mermaid,” to Jacob Riis’s revolutionary images How the Other Half Lives revealing previously hidden interior views through newly invented flash photography. Underscoring the Bowery as a site of perpetual reinvention, the exhibition will reveal the Bowery’s rich evolution through archival materials, historical artifacts, and through the works of successive waves of artists of all stripes who have lived or worked there, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop, Beats to punks, street artists, and beyond, featuring works by Lynda Benglis, John Giorno, Nan Goldin, Adolph Gottlieb, Keith Haring, Eva Hesse, Robert Indiana, Brad Kahlhamer, June Leaf, Reginald Marsh, Martha Rosler, Bill Sullivan, Cy Twombly, and Tom Wesselman, among others. The Bowery: Devil’s Mile builds on twenty years of research including the New Museum’s own archive and oral history project: The Bowery Artists Tribute and the associated exhibition Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989. The Bowery: Devil’s Mile is curated by Lisa Phillips, Director Emeritus, with Thalia Stefaniuk, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog co-published by the New Museum and Delmonico Press with essays by Lisa Phillips and Thalia Stefaniuk, and reflections by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Sara Driver, Debbie Harry, Bob Holman, and Richard Price.     Sarah Morris, Director of Marketing and Communications, New Museum    press@newmuseum.org    212-219-1222 x 217 SUPPORT Major support is provided by the International Leadership Council of the New Museum, Donald Capoccia and Tommie Pegues, and an anonymous donor. Generous support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.   ABOUT NEW MUSEUM The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street, to the inauguration of its SANAA-designed flagship building in 2007, to the OMA-designed expansion of its home on the Bowery in 2026, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.    Image: Weegee, The Foreman Of The Devils Was Peeved... because the assistant devils were not in costume, 1945. © Weegee / International Center of Photography #newmuseum#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com#sunstormfineartmagazine.com#artfunnew#artfunculture #artfunhistory#artfunnow#artfunnyc

See the Highlights of the 2026 Sichuan Ganzi Mountain Cultural & Tourism Festival in Daouf County.

 

2026 Sichuan Ganzi Mountain Culture & Tourism Festival Takes Place in Daofu County 28 July 2026 - On July 24, the 2026 Sichuan Ganzi Mountain Culture & Tourism Festival opened at Yuke Grassland in Daofu County, Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China. Opening Ceremony of the 2026 Sichuan Ganzi Mountain Culture & Tourism Festival Featuring a diverse range of activities, including nomadic culture performances, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) exhibitions, and folk customs experiences, this year's festival showcases the region's unique nomadic culture with modern cultural tourism development. The event has attracted numerous visitors eager to experience the charm of grassland culture. The opening ceremony transformed Yuke Grassland into a natural stage. Local herders drove cattle across the vast grasslands, carrying black yak-hair tents traditionally used by Kham pastoralists and holding urdah—traditional stone-throwing ropes used by Tibetan herders for livestock management. The scenes vividly recreated the millennia-old nomadic lifestyle of Kham communities, who have long followed seasonal migration routes in search of water and pasture. Behind them came a grand procession of heavy cavalry and the legendary Gesar riders. Riders in traditional attire galloped across the grassland, valiant and heroic in bearing. A vibrant parade of ethnic costumes then took the stage, showcasing pulu—a traditional Tibetan handwoven wool textile—alongside modern tailoring designs, highlighting the blending of ancient culture and modern fashion. Riders Galloped at Full Speed on the Racecourse "As the scenes of nomadic migration gradually unfolded before my eyes, a long-lost yearning for a simpler pastoral life suddenly welled up within me," said Mr. Zhang, a visitor who traveled from Beijing especially for the event. "My whole family loves the grassland lifestyle in Daofu. It is something you cannot experience in the city." The Sichuan Ganzi Mountain Culture & Tourism Festival has been successfully held for seven editions to date. Running through July 26, this year's festival features eight major events, including the opening ceremony, the Ganzi 1,000-person ICH livestream showcase, and the fashion-inspired Guozhuang gala. Moreover, a range of grassland market activities—including ICH workshops, local produce exhibitions, local food tasting, and music-themed leisure gatherings—are being held in parallel, offering visitors an immersive cultural experience. Daofu County, where this event took place, is situated in northwestern Sichuan Province, with an average summer temperature of around 24°C. The county boasts a remarkable blend of natural landscapes—including Yala Snow Mountain, Stone Forest Park, Yuke Grassland, alpine meadows, and Tianlong Lake—and cultural heritage, such as Kham traditions and the Highland Silk Road. From July 2021 to June 2026, Daofu County received a cumulative total of 10.4123 million tourists, generating nearly 11.454 billion yuan in tourism revenue. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. Hashtags: #SichuanGanziMountainCultureTourismFestival #DaofuCounty #NomadicCulture #sichuanganzifestival#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com  #sunstormfineartmagazine.com#artfunfestival#artfunculture#artfunnow#artfunhappy,

This is worth the read: Tencent unites AI and Games to Preserve & Share Cultural Heritage.

In conjunction with UNESCO Tencent as an innovative business is connecting virtual moeling to share/preserve culture. 

Tencent Brings Together AI and Games to Help Preserve and Share Cultural Heritage

 of New UNESCO Site in Jingdezhen

• Tencent applies AI and games to protect, reconstruct, and promote one of the world's oldest porcelain traditions at newly inscribed UNESCO site
• Digital initiatives create a new model for technology-driven heritage preservation globally using a multimodal AI dataset, AI-assisted artifact restoration, and interactive virtual experiences

-- Tencent (00700.HK) today announced the launch of Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure, an AI-powered cultural heritage game that enables users to explore Jingdezhen's porcelain-making traditions and experience traditional craft techniques through interactive play. The launch coincides with the inscription of the Jingdezhen Handicraft Porcelain Industry Sites on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List.

Digital Jingdezhen is part of a broader cultural innovation initiative that applies Tencent's AI and game technologies. Guided by Tencent's vision of "Tech for Good", the initiative leverages digital preservation to keep Jingdezhen's thousand-year-old porcelain culture alive and relevant today, creating a living heritage with sustainable value and broad public engagement, and building a model that could be carried to heritage sites around the world.

Digital Preservation: Restoring and Unlocking Heritage with AI

Jingdezhen has a thousand years of living heritage; centuries of tradition are still active in its kilns today. To preserve this legacy, a cornerstone of the project was the Jingdezhen Porcelain Cultural Heritage Multimodal AI Dataset.

Over decades, historical records, heritage information, and craft specifications have accumulated into a massive volume of data. Tencent applied Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and knowledge graph technologies to transform these dispersed materials into structured digital resources that can be analyzed, extracted, verified, and traced back to their original sources.

The dataset contains more than 30,000 documentary records, over 5,000 ceramic gene specimens, and data on nearly 1,000 representative ceramic artifacts in collections worldwide. It provides a digital foundation for cultural research, exhibition development, public interpretation and AI-powered heritage applications.

Building on this foundation, Tencent has developed a range of industry- and public-facing applications, including the Jingdezhen Ancient Ceramics Gene Database, the World Ceramics Interactive Map, and the Digital Jingdezhen AI Companion, providing researchers, heritage professionals, and the public with innovative AI-powered tools to explore and understand porcelain heritage.

Digital Activation: Bringing Jingdezhen's Porcelain Heritage to Life Through AI and Games

To bring the public closer to Jingdezhen and its porcelain-making traditions, Digital Jingdezhen: Porcelain Craft Adventure utilizes AI-assisted Procedural Content Generation (PCG) to create the first large-scale digital recreation of the city's five major porcelain heritage sites and historical production scenes. By rapidly mapping out town layouts and automatically generating architectural structures, decorative elements, and pedestrians, the technology brings Jingdezhen's historic townscape back to life in the digital world.

The game also features high-quality AI digital humans built on large language models and the Jingdezhen Porcelain Cultural Heritage Multimodal AI Dataset. Through AI voice-driven facial expressions and Tencent Games' proprietary animation technology, it creates warm, human-centered interactive experiences that make historical knowledge tangible and relatable. At the same time, AI-powered 3D generation allows users to quickly transform an uploaded image into a 3D porcelain form, lowering the barrier to participation and enabling anyone to turn creative inspiration into tangible ceramic forms in the digital space.

Continuing Heritage: Mobilizing the Community

Ensuring the longevity of Jingdezhen's legacy requires active public participation. Tencent developed the Digital Heritage Guardian (Jingdezhen), a volunteer program built within the Weixin ecosystem. The program enables the public to support the upkeep and stewardship of physical heritage sites, creating a practical channel for community involvement in heritage protection.

"Our work in Jingdezhen is a testament to how 'AI for Good' can breathe new life into ancient traditions," said Zhan Shu, Head of Digital Culture Lab, Tencent. "Working alongside dedicated heritage experts, we have contributed our capabilities in AI and digital technologies to unlock decades of dormant archives for this incredible new UNESCO site. We are proud to help bridge the gap between the thousand-year porcelain heritage and the digital era, creating new ways for the global public to connect with Jingdezhen's living history, and a model for heritage sites worldwide."

For media queries, please contact: gc@tencent.com

About Tencent

Tencent is a global technology and entertainment company focused on creating connections and experiences that matter. Founded in 1998, Tencent is driven by its mission to create "Value for Users" and apply "Tech for Good."

Tencent's communication and social services connect more than one billion people around the world, helping them to keep in touch with friends and family, access transportation, pay for daily necessities, and even be entertained. Tencent also develops and publishes some of the world's most popular video games and other high-quality digital content, delivering rich and immersive interactive entertainment experiences. Tencent also offers a range of services such as cloud computing and other enterprise services to support our clients' digital transformation and business growth. Headquartered in Shenzhen, Tencent has been listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since June 2004. 

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