Anne Zahalka has won the 2023 William and Winifred Bowness photography prize for her work Kunstkammer, which references the trompe l’oeil (trick of the eye) painting technique to replicate the artists’s studio. Here is a selection of works from other finalists in the Museum of Australian Photography ’s prestigious annual survey

Designs for the commemoration to ‘unborn children aborted during the era of Roe v Wade’ must be turned in by Saturday

Arkansas is building a “monument to unborn children” on the grounds of its state capitol, and Saturday marks the last day for its would-be artists to submit prospective designs for it.

The monument is planned to commemorate the “unborn children aborted during the era of Roe v Wade”, the 1973 US supreme court decision that legalized abortion nationwide until it was overturned last year. It will be funded by private individuals and organizations, rather than the state, while its construction will be overseen by the capitol arts and grounds commission, a state agency – with the help of some Arkansas anti-abortion groups.

Courtauld Gallery, London
The artist brilliantly questions depictions of non-white figures by such revered painters as Gauguin and Picasso – but there’s a quiet power to her new work that leaves theory behind

In Claudette Johnson’s large drawings of Black women and men, faces and bodies hold you, frozen in poses that seem more significant than words can say, as if each spontaneous expression or gesture were at the same time a studied symbolic act. Reclining Figure, which is around two and a half metres long, depicts a woman lying down, her face supported by her arms, brooding melancholically or perhaps just daydreaming. Her entire body is swathed in white, against patches of blue and red. The drawing insists on the privacy of her selfhood, and defies you to exploit or possess her with your eyes.

You literally cannot. She slips away from the gaze. In case you miss what Johnson is kicking against in this haunting work, Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting Nevermore, a treasure of the Courtauld collection, hangs just outside her exhibition. Painted in Tahiti, it gives the eye everything that Johnson’s Reclining Figure refuses. Gauguin depicts a young Tahitian woman lying nude, lost in her own thoughts just like Johnson’s subject – but as she ponders, Gauguin relishes her hips and breasts.

A new book celebrates half a century of work by the landmark English photographer, who has captured everything from factories to shrines in stunning black-and-white images

“I’m getting old,” cackles Michael Kenna, when I ask how it feels to look back on 50 years in the photography business. “Much wiser,” he says, before cackling again. “I wish.” I’m talking to the English photographer over video from his office in Seattle, Washington, where he is surrounded by filing cabinets and binders stuffed with some of the 175,000 negatives that are his life’s work. Over the past half-century, Kenna has marked himself as one of the world’s most distinctive and influential landscape photographers, known for minimalist compositions often featuring otherworldly light.

This year marks half a century since he started working as a professional photographer, and he’s ringing in the occasion with a book, Michael Kenna: Photographs & Stories. It features 51 images, one for each year of his career. “We were going to call it Michael Kenna (1973-2023): Photographs & Stories,” he explains. “But I’m not dead yet, and including dates gives a different idea.”

Towner Eastbourne

The art of Ghislaine Leung, Jesse Darling, Barbara Walker and Rory Pilgrim will make you laugh, cry and possibly yawn as they confront the dystopian crisis we’re in

What a dreadful fix we are in, socially, environmentally, politically. You name it. What now seems worth doing or making as an artist – to respond or not to our dystopian crisis, is the big question. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This year’s Turner prize show, at the Towner Eastbourne, does both.

The biggest piece in Ghislaine Leung ’s show is the repurposed ventilation system that was removed from the Netwerk Aalst bar in Belgium in 2017, following the introduction of a public smoking ban. Leung acquired all the redundant metal piping and ducting and as much of it that fits has now been slotted and bolted together to climb around the doorway and run across the floor at the Towner. Originally slung from the ceiling in the bar, Leung dictates that it now be attached to the floor. She calls her plain descriptions of her works, and their instructions, “scores”, and the relation between her ideas and their physical manifestation is similar to the relationship between a musical score and its performance. Other works riff off a similar rulebook, or score sheet, and Leung’s art has a ridiculous sort of rigour. Hers is an “exciting rethinking of art production and practice”, the exhibition booklet tells us. One might take issue with the “exciting” part.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
From nuns to nobles, the Flemish artist loved painting unclothed women. But, as this staggering exhibition reveals, there’s so much more to him than frolicking nudes

Maria Serra Pallavicino is a queen. Technically she’s a Marchesa. But no one could look more monarchical here, in the painting by Peter Paul Rubens. She looks down imperiously from the throne where she sits swathed in silver, with an impossibly huge ruff collar of floating filigree lace tinged with gold. But it’s her intense face and dark eyes that hold you. Amid her finery, she’s engaging and mysterious, her personality more precious than her pearls.

Rubens is a painter’s painter. No great artist communicates the sheer fun of holding a paintbrush like he does. He’s an ebullient chef, laying on thick sauces of glinting, creamy colour. And women were his favourite ingredients. He lavished his attentions on them clothed and naked, at prayer and in bed. The intimacy and warmth of the results make Dulwich Picture Gallery’s show Rubens & Women a riotous feast.

National Gallery, London
Comprehensive collection of the 17th-century painter’s work aims to place him alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, but his technically brilliant paintings are weirdly soulless

The National Gallery has put together what must be the most comprehensive array of the portraits of the 17th-century painter Frans Hals ever assembled, filling eight rooms on the museum’s main floor with a subtly lit splendour of black silk, white ruffs and orange flags. I was bored rigid.

Right from the start, something is off. In the first room, an unknown man and woman hang side by side. He’s holding a skull and looks grave. She’s inscrutable. Encountering these people I felt nothing, and it only got worse. I found myself walking back and forth increasingly adrift and unhappy, past one technically brilliant painting of a flushed face after another.

Readers on the colouring book that cartoonists created for refugees

I was heartened to read Harriet Sherwood’s article on the production of a colouring book by the Professional Cartoonists Organisation ( Cartoonists create colouring book for refugees in rebuff to UK government, 22 September ). This is a counter to the mean-spirited actions of Robert Jenrick, who had a mural of cartoon characters at a migrants’ reception centre painted over as he considered it too welcoming for children. I share the outrage of the cartoonist Guy Venables, but took some small comfort in the fact that I thought it was impossible for the actions of a government minister to sink any lower. How wrong I was. Diane Taylor’s article on the same day (Fear of X-ray age tests in UK ‘may force child asylum seekers to flee’, 22 September ) describes Ministry of Justice and Home Office proposals to carry out medical tests involving X-rays and MRI scans to determine the ages of young asylum seekers.

It is no exaggeration to say that these proposals plumb new depths of abhorrence, even for the most depraved members of this government. The notion of using any medical tests for non-medical purposes is unethical at the very least, and violates the human rights of any children who refuse to be subjected to such tests. In addition, the use of such medical equipment restricts their use for medical purposes and requires medically trained staff to operate them. I fervently hope that all medical staff will refuse to do so.
Alan Beamish
Thirlby, North Yorkshire

As the irascible New Yorker unveils his new velvet paintings, he talks about global disasters, sending Trump a resignation speech via Ivanka – and why what happened to Depp was a tragedy

Julian Schnabel is agitated. The artist and director has just walked into his new exhibition at the Pace gallery in Manhattan and is fixated on the folding table I’m standing behind. “What’s that?” he asks the PR person. “It’s … a table,” she replies. “I thought you could sit at it for the interview?” Schnabel looks appalled at the very idea. The table, he explains, is blocking the paintings. It’s upset the equilibrium of the room. It needs to be moved immediately.

Schnabel – who shot to fame with his smashed plate paintings in the early 80s then found success as a director with films such as Basquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, does this sort of thing a lot. The Brooklyn-born 71-year-old is constantly rearranging the environment around him, making sure it is just so. Ingrid Sischy, a friend of his, once wrote in Vanity Fair about how they’d shared a hotel room in Florence. By the time she’d checked in he’d moved the furniture and taken down the hotel art, replacing it with drawings that Cy Twombly had given him the day before; he’d scotch-taped them to the walls. The staff were horrified. “He wasn’t being cute,” Sischy wrote. “It was just something he needed to do.” And, indeed, it does seem to be some sort of compulsion; the man is a director even when he’s not on a film set.