A displaced Pakistani girl collects recyclable goods from a garbage to earn living for her family in Islamabad, Pakistan, Tuesday, January 19, 2016. (Photo by B.K. Bangash/AP Photo)
South African artist Tyla performs onstage during the MTV EMAs 2024 held at Co-op Live on November 10, 2024 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
Behind the scenes at Rock it Out, a circus show fusing live music and death-defying stunts in West Thurrock, Essex on April 10, 2025. They will attempt a British first: a double somersault on a rotating wheel. (Photo by Jeff Moore)
South African singer Tyla performs at the 2024 MTV Europe Music Awards at Manchester Co-op Live in Manchester, Britain, on November 10, 2024. (Photo by Phil Noble/Reuters)
Vardzia is a cave monastery site in southern Georgia, excavated from the slopes of the Erusheti Mountain on the left bank of the Mtkvari River, thirty kilometres from Aspindza. The main period of construction was the second half of the twelfth century. The caves stretch along the cliff for some five hundred metres and in up to nineteen tiers. The Church of the Dormition, dating to the 1180s during the golden age of Tamar and Rustaveli, has an important series of wall paintings. The site was largely abandoned after the Ottoman takeover in the sixteenth century. Now part of a state heritage reserve, the extended area of Vardzia-Khertvisi has been submitted for future inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde is interested in the ephemeral -- impermanent states of being which he documents through photographs. For Nimbus II, he used a smoke machine, combined with moisture and dramatic lighting to create a hovering indoor cloud in the empty setting of a sixteenth-century chapel in Hoorn, a small town in Holland. “I imagined walking into a museum hall with just empty walls. The place even looked deserted. On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall.”
Dutch artist Suzan Drummen‘s large-scale floor installations are mesmerizing and complex circular patterns made out of mirrors and brightly colored glass. The fractal-like arrangements feature ornate and elaborate circles growing exponentially out of each other and vibrant rings of spiraling colors winding into the surface of the floor. They are composed of crystals, chromed metal, precious stones, mirrors and optical glass. A sensory experience, and visually stimulating, the glittering installations play with the architecture of the space — climbing up walls and sweeping across the surfaces — examining the idea of illusion and optical effects.
A visitor views the work of artists Gonzalo Duran and Cheri Pann at their Mosaic Tile House in Venice, California U.S., August 26, 2016. With an array of thrift store china, humorous souvenirs and handmade tile adorning its walls and floors, the Mosaic Tile House in Venice stands as a monument to two decades of artistic collaboration between Cheri Pann and husband Gonzalo Duran. (Photo by Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)