The variety of media that Dutch artist Han Hoogerbrugge employs displays a coherent exploration of the contemporary human condition, its neuroses and obssessions. His monochromatic alter ego that appears in his ‘Internet art’ has been caught up in a series of bizarre situations, and these days the character is joined by the likes of David Lynch in the absurdist daily online comic ‘Prostress 2.0’.

Whether it is wrapped around the facades of buildings, on the streets or in the gallery spaces of the Berardo Museum in Lisbon or Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Brazilian twins OtaÅLvio and Gustavo Pandolfo are artists in search of a canvas. Overflowing with colour, details, and flavours of imagination, in the world of OSGEMEOS dreams of happiness have a melancholy edge.

It would be criminal over simplification to say that New York’s Museum of Arts and Design is making a case for Africa as a powerful creative force in one of its ongoing exhibitions. If anything, the broad focus of The Global Africa Project dislodges a central mythological stumbling block that there is such a thing as ‘Africa’ at all.

Aside from the facial hair, designer & architect Michele De Lucchi and his twin, chemist & painter, Ottorino, have spent a lifetime thinking that despite appearances they are very different. However, as their exhibition ‘Same & Different’ at Bordeaux’s Museé des Arts Décoratifs shows, their shared drive for research reveals similarities that are far from skin deep.

Currently on show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, artist Katrin Sigurdardottir’s double work ‘Boiseries’ addresses the way we look at architecture and the history of interior design. Yet these meticulous imitations based on period rooms elsewhere in the Met also provide an opportunity to reflect on the museum’s impossible task of putting time on ice.

One of the Eindhoven Academy’s graduates to catch the eye at last year’s Dutch Design Week (DDW), Tal Erez’s MA thesis ‘Socialism: Looking Forward, Design for a New Consumer’, examines the role of design and designers as a new active consumer converges with the potential of a home factory, in a 3D-printer shaped revolution that is driven by the social effects of the Internet.

Fashion is dragging its heels on issues of sustainability, with trend-frenzied audiences over-feeding landfills on a diet of barely-worn clothes. What is needed is a huge shift at every level of the industry, one that addresses not only alternative business models and integrated sustainable practices but also encourages consumers to rethink the ‘identity for sale’ clothes on the high street.

With a prize fund totalling US$500,000, the triennial Aga Khan Architecture Award constitutes the most cash-heavy accolade for the architecture world. Established over 30 years ago, the world has changed dramatically since its founding principles. Winners announced at the end of 2010 include a textile factory in Turkey and a village school in China.

The latest edition of the nomadic pan-European Biennial for Contemporary Art set up home in the Spanish cities of Murcia and Cartagena. Inherently pinpointing the weak spots in the traditional biennial format and with potentially rich symbolic locations that offered a rich conceptual framework, did the politically engaged art manage to make its dialogues more than a series of short-lived flirtations?

Is all culture trickery? In a setting that somewhat resembles a Escher drawing, the exhibition ‘Tricksters Tricked – (un)covering identity’ at the Van Abbemuseum in the Dutch city of Eindhoven brings together art, design, visual research and live participatory interventions to focus on the dualities of the design act – an inevitably and simultaneous tale of communication and manipulation.

As protests and strikes against public spending cuts manifest themselves across Europe, the impact these measures will have on artists, designers and other creative individuals and institutions is not a simple calculation. Designer, curator, and initiator of The Hague Design and Government project, Ed Annink gives a Dutch-tinged worldview.