An upcoming collaboration between the French contemporary art museum Palais de Tokyo and Qatar’s state-run museum of modern art has sparked controversy due to Qatar’s ban on homosexuality. The exhibition “Notre monde brûle” (“Our world is burning”) will open in Paris on February 21st, and offers a “fully political view of international contemporary creation seen from the Gulf,” according to the museum’s website. The show is guest-curated by Mathaf, or Qatar’s Arab Museum of Modern Art, but it primarily features artists from outside Qatar, like Michael Rakowitz, John Akomfrah, and Danh Vō.

Qatar criminalizes homosexuality, and LGBTQ+ individuals face discrimination under Qatari law and in society, according to a 2014 U.S. State Department report. Many artists and critics have expressed concern over the collaboration between a museum prided as being an LGBTQ+-friendly space and a country that has anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Protests are expected surrounding the exhibition’s opening.

“The gay community shall fight for the cancellation of the exhibition,” Paris-based Azerbaijani artist Babi Badalov told The Art Newspaper.

The show is part of the Qatar-France Year of Culture, which celebrates relationships between the two countries through cultural partnerships. Other events include an opening concert by the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, and a show of emerging Qatari artists at Paris’s Maison & Objet home decor fair.

A museum spokeswoman told TAN: “The Qatari government has never made donations to the Palais, all the production costs of the show being shared between the Palais and the Arab Museum.”

The Palais de Tokyo has collaborated with anti-LGBTQ+ countries in the past: In 2018, the museum hosted Saudi Cultural Days, a three-day event focusing on the Saudi arts scene. Same-sex activity is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.

The assets and bank accounts of Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman, and her husband, Congolese art collector Sindika Dokolo, have been frozen by Angolan authorities. Dos Santos, whose personal fortune is estimated at $2.2 billion according to Forbes, is the daughter of Angola’s former president. Dokolo has become known for his efforts to repatriate African art and artifacts from Western collections.

Angolan president Joao Lourenço alleges that Dos Santos borrowed and failed to repay $1 billion from the state while her father was in office. In an interview with the Financial Times, Dos Santos said the charges against her were an attempt to dismantle her business empire and “erase the legacy” of her father, José Eduardo dos Santos, who was president for 38 years. She also said the freeze put thousands of jobs at stake, due to her involvement in Angola’s largest private bank, the country’s biggest telecoms company, and a supermarket, among other holdings. Dos Santos said she left Angola 18 months ago out of fear for her safety and is currently in an undisclosed African country.

Dos Santos’s husband Dokolo owns around 3,000 works of art, including works by major contemporary African artists like William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, and Yinka Shonibare. In addition to working to bring back looted African artifacts to the continent—he and his team have recovered 15 so far—he often loans works from his collection to Western museums for shows, provided the institution agrees to stage a similar show in Africa. According to The Art Newspaper, it is not known whether Dokolo’s art collection is also subject to seizure by the Angolan government. His collection is based in the Angolan capital of Luanda.

The National Gallery of Australia closed on Sunday amid worsening air conditions in the capital, Canberra, caused by the enormous wildfires. The environmental disaster has led to more than 20 deaths and consumed more than 15 million acres of land—an area larger than Switzerland. Fires are burning across the country, where it is currently summer, but a major concentration of blazes is located in eastern Victoria and the southeastern corner of New South Wales, near the Australian Capital Territory (where Canberra is located).

In a statement posted on Twitter Sunday, the museum stated:

After U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to target important cultural sites in Iran should the country retaliate against the U.S. killing of General Qasem Soleimani, the Pentagon has ruled out attacking such cultural sites. U.S. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said that targeting any site of cultural importance with no military value would be a war crime. According to the New York Times, an administration official said that the 52 sites Trump threatened to target in Iran included no cultural sites.

Iran is home to 22 cultural UNESCO world heritage sites, including the ancient city of Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire, the ruins of the holy city of the Kingdom of Elam, the ornate Masjed-e Jāmé mosque in Isfahan, and the medieval Mausoleum of Oljaytu. Many critics of Trump’s comments compared his threats against Iran to the cultural destruction wrought by ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014 and 2015.

Prominent art world leaders responded in full force. Daniel H. Weiss, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the museum’s director Max Hollein issued a joint statement on Twitter, writing:

After launching a drone strike that killed Iran’s top military commander, U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to target Iranian cultural sites if the country retaliates against the U.S. attack. General Qasem Soleimani was killed at Baghdad airport on Friday, setting off international outrage and rising tensions in the Middle East. Trump has said he ordered the strike to prevent imminent attacks from the general against the United States, a claim that has been met with skepticism by some lawmakers.

On Saturday, Trump posted on Twitter that the United States would target 52 Iranian sites, including important cultural sites, should Iran retaliate against the killing of Soleimani. The 52 sites, he said, represent the 52 U.S. hostages held in Iran for 444 days from 1979 to 1981.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trump said:

A group of computer scientists may have solved the mystery behind the glass orb in Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500). Many experts have questioned why the orb in Christ’s left hand does not appear to magnify and invert the material behind it, as it should if it was a solid glass ball. The team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine, claims that this lack of distortion is caused by the fact that the glass orb depicted is hollow, not solid as previously thought.

Art historians have proposed several explanations as to why the orb Leonardo painted does not display the characteristics of a solid glass ball. Walter Isaacson argued that Leonardo deliberately depicted the orb inaccurately, though he also speculated the orb was hollow. Martin Kemp attributed the anomaly to small cavities found in some types of rock crystal and calcite, according to the UC Irvine team’s paper.

UC Irvine scientists Marco Liang, Michael T. Goodrich, and Shuang Zhao used imaging software to produce a digital, three-dimensional copy of Salvator Mundi, then studied how light would pass through various orb types. They hypothesized that the sphere Leonardo used as a model would have had a radius of 2.16 inches and a thickness of 0.05 inches. They also examined Leonardo’s research on light refraction.

“Our experiments show that an optically accurate rendering qualitatively matching that of the painting is indeed possible using materials, light sources, and scientific knowledge available to Leonardo da Vinci circa 1500,” the team wrote in its paper.

In the painting, five lines created by Christ’s folded robes pass behind the orb. Four of the lines converge at the center of the ball, showing no discontinuity or magnification, while the fifth fold is blurred, showing that the artist understood how a hollow sphere distorts straight lines.

Salvator Mundi became the most expensive artwork ever auctioned when it sold for $450 million at Christie’s in New York in 2017. The buyer was revealed to be Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, though ownership was ultimately transferred to the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. The work’s current location remains unknown. It was excluded from the Louvre’s current blockbuster Leonardo show, and its unveiling at the Louvre Abu Dhabi has been postponed indefinitely.