Nature Hub

  From - BBC World News  By -  Armen Nersessian  Edited by - Amal Udawatta Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images The collection includes Jackson Pollock's Mural On Indian Red Ground It has been dubbed one of the world's rarest treasure troves of art but few people outside its host country know about it. For decades, masterpieces by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock have been kept in the basement of a museum in Iran's capital Tehran, shrouded in mystery. According to estimates in 2018, the collection is worth  as much as $3bn . Only a small portion of the work has been exhibited since the 1979 Iranian Revolution but in recent years, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has been showcasing some of its most captivating pieces. The Eye to Eye exhibition at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in October 2024, was extended twice due to overwhelming public demand, running until January 2025. The display was widely regard...

  From BBC News   By-  David McKenna   Edited by- Amal Udawatta    Hulton Archive/Getty Images Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher "really lends herself to operatic treatment", according to producers Margaret Thatcher's time as prime minister might not seem like the most obvious inspiration for an opera, but for some she is a diva. The Rest is History podcast co-host and historian Dominic Sandbrook is working with composer Joseph Phibbs to produce a two-act show entitled Mrs T. As well as covering her time in Downing Street, the opera aims to explore the Iron Lady's character and personality away from the public gaze. "I feel she really lends herself to operatic treatment. She was a very theatrical character, in many ways," Phibbs told the BBC. The opera has been described as "an intimate exploration of one of the most polarising and influential figures in British politics". PA Media Historian Dominic Sandbrook said the opera was not a politica...

    From BBC World News By -  Deborah Nicholls-Lee Edited by - Amal Udawatta      Munchmuseet/ Halvor Bjorngard Winter isn't all bad – these "sublime" landscapes of the frozen North from the turn of the 20th Century offer us a way into resilience – and an "acceptance of the seasonality of life". With its bare trees, long nights and icy temperatures, it's perhaps unsurprising that, culturally in the Northern Hemisphere, we seem so conditioned to complain about winter. Yet, as the author Katherine May points out in her 2020 book Wintering, winter is also a valuable time for rest and retreat. "Winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit," she writes. Its "starkness", she argues, re-sensitises us, and "can reveal colours that we would otherwise miss". Finnish National Gallery/ Alteneum Art Museum View from Pyynikki Ridge (1900) by Helmi Biese, depicts a bird's-eye view of the Finnish boreal forest (Credit: Finnish National Galler...