Latest posts
Transformation, Doppelgängers, and Hyperfixation on the Body: Two Films to See This October
Transformation, reincarnation, augmentation, rejuvenation … Are we simply entering Halloween season, or is something more sinister lurking in the shadows? Something we’ve long tried to keep at bay? This month’s feature is a Halloween special double bill, spotlighting two movies which hold up to us a concave mirror by exploring our hyperfixation with the body,…
A Local’s Guide to Street Food in Lagos
Lagos street food is vibrant and abundant: In the right neighbourhood, you can find everything from popular fried and roasted snacks like puff puff and roasted yam, to full blown meals suitable for any time of the day. In this guide, we’re focusing on Lagos mainland. Here are a few of my favourites. Ewa Agoyin…
Gallerist Duarte Sequeira’s Guide to the Portuguese City of Braga
Portuguese art dealer Duarte Sequeira established his eponymous gallery in 2019, platforming a diverse roster of artists through a cross-generational and collaboratively minded programme that unfolds across sites in Braga, London and Seoul. The sprawling Braga HQ consists of two buildings: a 900 square-metre main exhibitions space and a 140 square-metre project space, both designed…
Cooking With Affection: Apoorva Sripathi’s Steadying Tomato Dal With Stir-Fried Aubergines
Both the provenance of this aubergine recipe and the aubergine itself have something in common: they share a serpentine history of origin and lineage. Let me get the recipe out of the way first: this is a mashup of my mother’s recipe for podi kathirikkai (aubergine with a powdered spice mix) which she got from…
Interviews
“Time Spent With Good Souls Can Go a Long Way”: In the Studi...
Following recent institutional exhibitions at Spike Island, Hessel Museum and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Olu Ogunnaike’s latest presentation, Is the soil right?, opened at London gallery Rose Easton earlier this month and is on view until 26 October 2024. In the show, the artist explores the parallels between humans and trees, tracing the…
Interview: Sculptor Oren Pinhassi on Architecture, Eroticism...
New York-based artist Oren Pinhassi creates sensuous sculptures and large-scale installations that explore the politics of architectural spaces as they relate to the human body. His anthropomorphic works, often standing up to eight feet in height, examine individual vulnerability and fluidity within the built environment, probing new possibilities for coexistence. Mimicking familiar images—such as a…
Histories of Solidarity and Plastic Palm Trees: In Conversat...
Open now at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, and on view until 5 January 2025, Bneid Al Gar is the largest solo exhibition to date of the Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist, Alia Farid. Last year, Farid received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, which alongside significant financial support offers awardees a solo exhibition at the Norwegian arts…
Interview: Dominic Chambers Explores the Parallels Between Painting and Literature
American artist Dominic Chambers, hailing from St. Louis and currently based in New Haven, is best known for his vivid paintings that depict scenes of play and contemplation as a means to explore ideas of personal interiority. A writer himself, Chambers draws inspiration from diverse texts and movements, creating paintings dense with literary and historical…
Floating Geographies: Discover the Artist-Led Initiative Reenvisioning Afro-Diasporic Space
The masonn project, a transmedia and transnational artistic initiative, brings together diverse perspectives on vernacular architecture, mystical realism, and Afro-diasporic memory. How do populations, shaped by colonisation and displacement, use architecture and space-making as forms of survival and creativity? How do these communities, both distinct and connected, resist oppression through the transformation of their environments…
Interview: Vivien Zhang on “Phantom Memories” and the Element of Chance
London-based artist Vivien Zhang asks us to rethink the imperfect systems — linguistic, visual, and taxonomic — that shape our understandings of the world. Drawing from personal experiences and intensive research, she incorporates diverse motifs into her abstract compositions. Her canvases become spaces where elements from different cultures and contexts converge, breaking away from their…
Green Plums Trapped in Plastic: Photographer Caitlin Isola’s Favourite Shot
This photograph has no special story. It’s plums in a bag, a little bit of the end of summer preserved as a reminder of what’s around the corner when it’s coldest. But I remember seeing them in the bag, wondering how the flash might bounce off the folds in the plastic so I snapped it…
Guides
Destructive Love Affairs, Bougie French Anarchists and Sexy ...
It’s back-to-school, which means publishers are flooding the market with their stronger titles with an eye to Christmas and the holidays. I spared you my take on the new Sally Rooney (a book that doesn’t need any further representation), but here’s a list of a few other heavy hitters as well as some slightly more…
10 Unique Movie Theatres Around the World
With every generation comes paranoia that new cultural mediums will obliterate what came before. The arrival of wireless sets into households saw commentators grumble that people would stop reading books. When home television sets arrived, there was widespread worry that it spelled the end of radio. All that is to say that, while the way…
In Search of the Summer Truffle in Tuscany, Umbria, and Marc...
This is part two of Lorenzo Villa’s Italian summer on a Vespa. Read Part 1: Riviera Romagnola and Piadina here. Traveling 1000 km on a Vespa can lead to exciting surprises. You are quite free to change the itinerary and decide on-the-spot to continue on to an unplanned destination. This is what happened to us…
How Sri Lankan Architect Geoffrey Bawa Reimagined Modernism for the Tropics
Born in 1919 to an affluent family in Colombo, Sri Lanka — then British Ceylon — the pioneering architect Geoffrey Bawa was originally steered into a career in law by his father, a prominent barrister keen for his son to follow in his footsteps. Adhering to his parents’ wishes, a young Bawa relocated to England…
Where to Eat, Drink, and Sleep With Only 24 Hours in Seattle
The summer in Seattle is gone, the cold snap of rain back on Cherry Street. The fastest-growing city in the country according to the U.S. Census Bureau last year, the Emerald City is an ever-stranger series of contradictions. Infamous grunge iconoclasts flaming out on Pill Hill; the wealthiest capitalists in the world donning their Patagonia…
Imran Perretta Reflects on “One of the Most Contested Patches of Earth in London”
London-based multidisciplinary artist Imran Perretta works across moving-image, sound, performance and poetry, probing topics from biopower and marginality to the construction and deconstruction of cultural histories through his practice. The artist’s latest commission, A Riot in Three Acts — on view now and running until 10 November 2024 at Somerset House Studios — reflects on…
Why the Coolest Brands in the World Have Again Fallen in Love With the Serif
Fonts, like most aesthetic things, go through trend cycles. But in recent years it has seemed that serifs – the twiddly bits on the edges of letters – had become a thing of the past. The only fonts we paid any attention to were twiddly bit-free, straight-edged, or sans-serif. See the striking Futura originally taken…
From The Archive
The Studio Museum In Harlem Director & Chief Curator Th...
Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual art by artists of African descent. Golden began her career as a Studio Museum intern in 1987. The following year, she joined the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she launched her influential curatorial practice….
Interview: Ernesto Neto On Gravity, Togetherness & The ...
Since the 1990s, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has produced an inimitable body of work that is in equal parts informed by sensuality and spirituality. Inspired by the Brazilian Conceptualists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, as well as biomorphism, Minimalism and Arte Povera, Neto’s works engage all of our senses while asserting the human body as…
SC Exclusive: Notes on a Siren — a Film Essay by Justice Jam...
Director Justice Jamal Jones joins myth with modern themes of Black queerness and trans identity in their latest film, Notes on a Siren. Presented by Something Curated, and exclusively premiering on the site, the film was shot on location at Palm Heights in Grand Cayman. Jones expands on the thinking behind their mesmerising work below….