Journalist and activist Mona Eltahawy has dedicated herself to fighting what she calls the most dangerous ideology in the world: patriarchy. “The quickest way for these men in power to show their power, to flex their muscles, is over the bodies of women … History is not linear. Just because we achieve progress in something, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to continue progressing.”

With the climate emergency displacing more and more people around the globe, Professor Jane McAdam’s research at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law grows increasingly urgent.

While father and daughter Hans and Nora Heysen both became renowned Australian artists – he for bush landscapes, she for portraits and still lifes – their work had become, until recently, somewhat overlooked.

During the ’90s there was barely a glossy magazine that didn’t feature Karl Lagerfeld draped in supermodels. His death this week offers a chance to reflect on the fashion powerhouse’s influence on design, style and feminine sophistication.

Bursting with colour, overwrought with emotion and rich in symbolism – the grandiloquent works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood leave the Tate to enliven the walls of the NGA in an exhibition powerful enough to convert even a non-fan.

Diverging from the usual blockbuster formula, Masters of modern art from the Hermitage excites with its rich selection from the holdings of Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.

French conceptual artist Daniel Buren continues to charm and engage with his quiet, contagious ways of seeing the world in stripes. “My biography is very simple: Daniel Buren. Born 25 March, ’38. Works and lives in situ.”

A firm believer in the importance of understanding the ‘grammar’ of visual arts, Helen Maudsley is celebrating her 90th birthday with a solo exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria. “Art is a language like literature is a language and music is a language, and you have to learn it.”

Motherhood saw artist Del Kathryn Barton wholeheartedly embrace colour, but her work’s mystical and frenetic style – on show in a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria – emerged from the troubled inner life of her own childhood. “It was a very rich part of managing my anxiety growing up, growing these deep internal creative places. It gave me a lot of fortitude.”