From mind-boggling murder investigations to decade-long scams, there’s no shortage of documentaries about real-life awfulness. We list the most incredible Since the true-crime explosion a decade ago – kickstarted by Netflix’s Making a Murderer – audiences have been fed a steady small-screen diet of cold-case killings, catfishing scams and creepy cults. And, after years of varying results, Netflix’s latest show, A Toxic Love Story – which recounts how a California couple framed an innocent woman for stalking, intimidation and recruiting men from Craigslist to rape her ex’s new wife – is being billed as a return to true-crime form. But when it comes to similar shows worth your viewing time, what else is up there? Here’s a selection of the genre’s 25 standout shows and where to watch them – which, let’s face it, is mainly Netflix. Let the boggle-eyed bingeing begin. Continue reading...
Projects like London’s Backyard Biennial East are collective endeavours aiming to reach people who feel excluded by art galleries In 2018, on the outside wall surrounding the entrance of the National Theatre of Bangladesh, I first encountered a work by the artist Reetu Sattar. A group of musicians were perched on construction scaffolding, all dressed in white and playing a single note on the harmonium – an instrument used in Bengali classical music. Together, they produced a low hum that seemed to vibrate through everything around me. The work was called Lost Tune. I came across the work at a time when I desperately wanted to learn a musical instrument, but music was not allowed in my house. A growing sentiment in many Bangladeshi Muslim households held that music was prohibited in Islam, despite our long histories of musical traditions. It felt as though everything we knew of the past had been locked away inside the Jadu Ghor, the “magic house” (the Bangla words for museum), quietly collecting dust. Continue reading...