London, Ontario’s celebration of global cultures, has grown into one of Canada’s signature summer festivals. With free admission and a roster of top world music artists from all over the planet, the event now attracts over 220,000 annual visitors—in a city of around 330,000.

The 2013 edition features Africa’s reggae icon Alpha Blondy, Malian vocalist and rising star Fatoumata Diawara, and Romania’s hottest Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia —rub shoulders with intriguing new voices from across the Americas. Innovators channeling Southern Italy’s furiously rhythmic musical cure for tarantula bites (Canzionere Grecanico Salentino) and Chilean cumbia hotshots (the stadium-packing party champions Chico Trujillo) will cross paths with Trinidadian legend Calypso Rose, whose sassy, gritty voice changed the (male) face of Caribbean music.

This summer’s edition also features a mini-festival within Sunfest dedicated to the world’s burgeoning Afrofunk and soul scenes (Headliners include UK/Trinidadian visionaries Anthony Joseph & the Spasm Band; Canadian nu-jazz pioneers Sekoya Revisited and Toronto’s popular The Heavyweights Brass Band). All in spacious, green Victoria Park, amid one of the most eclectic food, handicrafts, and art markets anywhere.

Other artists include Los Vega, the family son jarocho group from Mexico who will be making their Canadian debut this year, or Algeria’s Hasna El Becharia, the poetess who unites Gnawan and Berber sounds with an Afropop vibe). The festival also attracts a bevy of premier jazz artists with a global sensibility, be they a New York City pianist originally from Azerbaijan (Amina Figarova, who’s touring with her sextet of European musicians), or multinational bands based in The Netherlands (Traeben, and Van Merwijks’ Music Machine, which this year is collaborating with renowned Cuban pianist Ramon Valle).

Tate Modern presents the UK’s first major exhibition of Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi (b.1930). Bringing together 100 works from across more than five decades of his international career, this retrospective highlights one of the most significant figures in African and Arab Modernism, and reveal his place in the context of a broader, global art history.

The exhibition traces the artist’s personal journey, beginning in Sudan in the 1950s where the artist originally trained and practiced as an art teacher, as well as his time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Events in the artist’s own life, as well as wider political history, are reflected in his work from the 1970s and 80s. While employed as the Undersecretary at the Sudanese Ministry of Culture and Information, El-Salahi was wrongfully imprisoned by the government. The art he made as a result of this incarceration was often stark and sombre, reflecting the trauma of isolation. This phase would culminate in years of self-imposed exile and expatriation in Qatar and the UK, where he created such works as The Inevitable 1984-1985, a monumental and chaotic response to the continued turmoil and civil war taking place in Sudan.

The exhibition also showcases the gloriously colourful paintings and drawings that El-Salahi has produced since the 1990s, after his return to England. These include his Tree Series, inspired by the Haraz tree that grows on the banks of the Nile, and One day I Happened to See a Ruler 2008, a major three-panel painting commissioned by the Museum for African Art in New York. These recent works reflect his joy for life, his deep spiritual faith, and a profound recognition of his place in the world.

Ibrahim El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan in 1930 and now lives and works in Oxford, England. His work has been shown at such venues as PS1, New York; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. He is represented in numerous private and public collections including the MoMA, New York; New National Gallery, Berlin; and Tate, London. He received the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; the Order of Knowledge, Arts and Letters, Sudan; and the Honorary Award, Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development.

Ellen Gallagher’s art explores issues of race, identity and transformation. Renowned for her reworking of popular black imagery, Gallagher draws on postwar magazines and advertising, as well as film and music culture. She makes repeated reference to the traditions of minstrelsy, as well as to specific performers such as vaudeville star Bert Williams and jazz musician Sun Ra. Pages from mid-century black photomagazines such as Ebony, Our World and Sepia - all dominated by advertisements for Afro hairstyles, wigs and skin products aimed at African-American women - are often cited in her investigation of the anxieties and tensions surrounding black identity in the age of consumerism. Historically specific cultural references are merged with Gallagher’s own personal biography as a black Irish American woman.

This survey exhibition takes an overview of Gallagher’s practice, exploring the themes which have emerged and recurred from her seminal early canvases, to her ‘wigmap’ grid collages, through to recent film installations and new bodies of work. The exhibition will include such key works as Bird in Hand 2006, a complex relief built up in layers of printed matter, plasticine, crystal, paint and gold leaf. In Bird in Hand, human life and marine life converge at the bottom of the ocean in a mythical black Atlantis.

Gallagher’s mysterious vision of marine life extends beyond the canvas and into other media, such as the 16mm film installation Murmur 2003-4, created in collaboration with Edgar Cleijne, as well as the ongoing series of delicate watercolours and cut paper works entitled Watery Ecstatic. The large-scale sculptural installation Jungle Gym/Preserve 2001 will also be on display, which appears to be an abstract matrix of white poles, but on closer inspection becomes an intricate network of symbols referencing the traditions of whale-bone carving. New and recent work on display for the first time at Tate Modern, including Morphia, a series of two-sided drawings, will also show how Gallagher combines the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical and history with the present.

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965 and now lives and works in Rotterdam and New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have included those held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York andNew Museum,New York. She was awarded the Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 1997 and an American Academy Award in Art in 2000 and her work is held in many major public collections, including MoMA, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts,Boston; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The culmination of 8 years’ work, Sebastião Salgado: Genesis draws together some 200 black and white images of landscapes and wildlife, alongside depictions of human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and cultures.

Salgado says of the Genesis collection, ‘This has been one of my longest photographic adventures: eight years researching, exploring and celebrating nature’s unspoiled legacy. I have journeyed through 32 countries to rediscover the mountains, deserts and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society. It is a pictorial depiction of the lands and lives of a still pristine planet. I feel Genesis also speaks urgently to our own age by portraying the breathtaking beauty of a lost world that somehow survives. It proclaims: this is what is in peril, this is what we must save.’

Genesis is Sebastião Salgado’s third long-term examination of global issues, following his previous acclaimed collections Workers and Migrations. He has been awarded numerous major photographic prizes in recognition of his accomplishments, most recently receiving the Gold Medal Award for Photography from the National Arts Club in New York.

Born in Brazil in 1944, Salgado trained as an economist before starting work for the International Coffee Organization and travelling to Africa on missions for the World Bank. By 1973, he had abandoned his life as an economist to become a photographer, working on news assignments before steering more towards documentary and reportage work. Salgado is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and is also an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the USA.

After the London premiere, the exhibition will travel to Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Rome and Paris and is supported by Vale.

Ths show brings together over 250 objects, both recent discoveries and celebrated finds from earlier excavations. Many of these objects have never before been seen outside Italy.

Pompeii and Herculaneum, two cities on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, were buried by a catastrophic volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in just 24 hours in AD 79. This event ended the life of the cities but at the same time preserved them until rediscovery by archaeologists nearly 1700 years later. The excavation of these cities has given us unparallelled insight into Roman life.

Owing to their different locations Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried in different ways and this has affected the preservation of materials at each site. Herculaneum was a small seaside town whereas Pompeii was the industrial hub of the region. Work continues at both sites and recent excavations at Herculaneum have uncovered beautiful and fascinating artefacts.

The exhibition includes casts from in and around Pompeii of some of the victims of the eruption. A family of two adults and their two children are huddled together, just as in their last moments under the stairs of their villa. The most famous of the casts on display is of a dog, fixed forever at the moment of its death as the volcano submerged the cities.

Developed over a three-year period, Geoffrey Farmer’s The Surgeon and the Photographer will be shown for the first time in its completed form for its UK premiere.

The work consists of hundreds of puppet-like figures, composed of images cut from old books and magazines mounted onto fabric forms, and is accompanied by a new film commission. His work blends the collage and assemblage traditions of Hannah Höch and Robert Rauschenberg, the element of chance employed by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and an animist perspective from Pacific Northwest Coast cultures.

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet

Landfall: Scenes From My New Novel is a collection of works composed on hyper violin and adapted to the string quartet. Like a series of short stories, the pieces are linked by passages inspired by weather - roaring, all enveloping and atmospheric.

For this piece Laurie Anderson has designed software that brings the harmonics and overtones up off the noises floor creating an instrument that breathes in a completely new way. Kronos Quartet has adapted and built on this musical language so that electronics and traditional strings sing together.

8:00 pm

J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Schmann

Till Fellner is an Austrian pianist (born, 1972) whose interpretations of baroque and classical literature are notable for their intellectual poise and artistic integrity. Rather than vulgar showmanship or mind-numbing virtuosity, he offers a rare glimpse into the art and style of classical Viennese performance practice. Mr. Fellner took a sabbatical from public performance in 2012 to study new repertoire.

Among connoisseurs of the Viennese musical tradition and the art of the piano, ticket sales will be brisk.

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
London
UK

With over 22 million albums sold worldwide, multiple awards (including 6 Juno Awards, 5 Canadian Smooth Jazz Awards and a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album), three #1 hits including Home, Everything and Lost and 145 sold out shows to date, Michael Bublé is  one of the most popular artists of this decade. 

Rock’n’raï icon Rachid Taha made a much-awaited  Mick Jones of The Clash, Agnès B and Eric Cantona. 

Singer-songwriter Souad Massi has been hailed as Maghreb's answer to Tracy Chapman. Capable of fusing everything from chaâbi to American folk rock and Portuguese fado, while mixing electric and acoustic instruments with her haunting vocals, Souad’s melancholic ballads bear the imprint of Algeria's troubled recent past.

Maxim Gorky: The Children of the Sun 
Directed by Howard Davies

Maxim Gorky’s darkly comic play is set in Russia as the country rolls towards revolution. It depicts the new middle-class, foolish yet likable, as they flounder about, philosophising and flirting, blind to their impending annihilation.

Cast:

Geoffrey Streatfeild (Protasov ), Lucy Black, Matthew Flynn, Paul Higgins, Gerald Kyd, Emma Lowndes, Maggie McCarthy, Justine Mitchell, Steven Blake, Florence Hall, Jonathan Harden, Lucas Hare, Matthew Hickey, Paul Hickey, Gemma Lawrence, Gerard Monaco, Anna O’Grady, Rhiannon Oliver, Stephen Wilson, Karren Winchester

Design: Bunny Christie
Lighting: Neil Austin

Thea Sharrock's production of new musical The Bodyguard is based on Lawrence Kasdan's 1992 Oscar nominated Warner Bros. film, The Bodyguard, with book by Alex Dinelaris.

This version of the smash hit film which starred Kevin Costner and the late Whitney Houston, is now playing in London's West End starring  Heather Headley & Lloyd Owen.

Joining Headley and Owen are Debbie Kurup (Nicki Maron), Mark Letheren (The Stalker), Ray Shell (Bill Devaney), Nicolas Colicos (Tony Scibelli), Mark McKerracher (Herb Farmer), Sean Chapman (Sy Spector), David Page (Rory Fryman) and Oliver Le Sueur (Ray Court).

Former Secret Service agent turned bodyguard, Frank Farmer, is hired to protect superstar Rachel Marron from an unknown stalker. Each expects to be in charge – what they don't expect is to fall in love.