Russia's return to the Venice Biennale has prompted another comeback - from performance art protesters Pussy Riot.

The country last participated in the event in 2022 but organizers confirmed its attendance earlier this week with a show called The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky involving at least 38 artists and musicians.

Russia has never been formally banned from Venice but has been absent since the invasion of Ukraine when the two artists scheduled to appear withdrew in protest. In 2024 it lent its pavilion to Bolivia.

Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founder member of Pussy Riot who left Russia after serving a prison sentence for a protest against Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral, announced the protest.

She told independent Russian media group Sota News: "Pussy Riot is going to the Biennale with an alternative, protest statement so as not to burn with shame: we want to express unconditional support for Ukraine, the victims of Russian war crimes, Russian political prisoners, and Ukrainian captives."

The biennale, which runs from May 9 to November 22, will also feature a Ukrainian pavilion with work including Zhanna Kadyrova’s sculpture Origami Deer which was removed from its site in the city of Pokrovsk as Russian troops advanced on it.

The number of people who commented to the National Capital Planning Commission's review of President Trump's plans to build a $400 million ballroom at the White House in Washington D.C. Its chair postponed a vote on the plans citing the "large amount of public input” submitted, saying it needed "time to deliberate".

South African photographer Zanele Muholi has won this year's Hasselblad Prize.

The $216,432 prize also comes with an exhibition at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, Sweden, a concert with the city's symphony orchestra and a talk at Stockholm's Moderna Museet.

Muholi said her win was "recognition" that black LGBTQIA+ "lives are worth seeing – not as statistics, not as shadows, but as full human beings".

She added: "For many years, my work has been about visibility and resistance. It has been about creating an archive so that no one can say, ‘We didn’t know.’"

The award is given out annually to "a photographer recognized for major achievements" as stated in the last will and testament of Erna and Victor Hasselblad whose Swedish camera firm made the family fortune.

1 - The deputy director and chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Julian Cox, is leaving after eight years in the job. A former curator at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, he will leave the Toronto gallery next month.

2 - Former Apple designer Jony Ive, who worked on products including the iPhone and the iPad, has designed a new rostrum for Christie's auction house. The new design was unveiled in London yesterday and updates the original which was designed in the 1700s for James Christie by furniture maker Thomas Chippendale.

3 - One of the earliest known drawings of California's Yosemite Valley has been acquired by the Library of Congress. The drawing and an accompanying lithograph were created in 1855 by artist Thomas Almond Ayres when the area's monumental landscape was unknown to many Americans.

4 - An erotic mosaic returned to Pompeii last year with great fanfare did not actually come from the city which was buried under ash after Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Researchers now believe the work, which was returned by the heirs of its German owner after it was taken during World War II, came from a Roman villa in the Marche region several hundred miles away.