'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...

The paintings of Ellen Altfest are ethereal in their detail. Fields of minutiae come together as pulsating images; small brushstrokes of oil paint accumulate over a series of months to single out seemingly innocuous subjects, such as a hand resting atop patterned fabric (The Hand, 2011) or a deep green cactus reaching upwards from beneath a bed of...

On the rooftop of the former Rio Hotel complex in Colombo, it was hard to ignore the high-rise buildings, still under construction, blocking all but a sliver of what used to be an open view over Slave Island, once an island on Beira Lake that housed slaves in the 19th century, and now a downtown suburb. The hotel was set alight during the...

Margaret Salmon (born 1975, Suffern, NY) studied photography at the Schoolof Visual Arts, New York and the Royal College of Art, London. Margaret Salmon creates film portraits that weave together poetry and ethnography. Often focusing on individuals in their everyday environments, her films capture the minutiae of daily life and infuse them with gentle grandeur, emotional intensity and formal abstraction. Adapting techniques drawn from various cinematic movements, such as Free Cinema, the European Avant Garde and Italian Neo-Realism, Salmon's orchestrations of sound and image introduce formal lyricism and abstraction into the tradition of realist film.

Margaret Salmon won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and was features in individual exhibitions at Witte de With, Rotterdam and Whitechapel Gallery, London among many others. She lives and works in Glasgow.