Latest posts
How the Internet’s Most Beloved Tastemakers Are Making Fashion Their Own
The first ‘merch’, as we know it today, is thought to have been made for fans of Elvis Presley. Colonel Parker, Elvis’s talent manager, signed a deal in July 1956 for a company to produce everything from T-shirts to sneakers and belts, all emblazoned with the rockn’roller. By December of the same year, the range…
Art in “the Belly of the Beast”: Why Pepón Osorio Is Showing Work in Classrooms and Hospitals
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, multidisciplinary artist Pepón Osorio moved to the South Bronx in 1975. Informed by his background in theatre and performance as well as his experiences as a child services case worker and professor, he has pioneered a type of artmaking prioritising social engagement. His richly textured sculptures and installations examine…
Five Brilliant Books to Read in October 2024
October is a very particular month in the publishing year, with the eyes and minds of every single publishing professional 99.9 percent geared toward the Frankfurt Book Fair (i.e. the biggest publishing trade fair in the world). Great new releases keep pouring in all the same, though. Here’s five to keep you reading as October…
What’s Inspiring Artist and Filmmaker Riar Rizaldi
Indonesian artist and filmmaker Riar Rizaldi’s work explores the relationship between science, fiction, and technology. Opened earlier this month and on view at Gasworks in London until 22 December 2024, Mirage is the artist’s first UK solo exhibition. Comprising the first and second chapter of an ambitious, ongoing, ten-year project, the exhibition centres on a…
Interviews
Interview: Dominic Chambers Explores the Parallels Between P...
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…
Interview: Vivien Zhang on “Phantom Memories” and the Elemen...
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…
Imran Perretta Reflects on “One of the Most Contested Patche...
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…
Interview: LYZZA on “Critical Fabulation,” LimeWire and Collaborating with Gabriel Massan
One of electronic music’s most promising new voices, Berlin-based Brazilian producer and vocalist LYZZA is pushing the genre’s boundaries through rigorous experimentation — her feet firmly set in the underground. She has just released an original soundtrack for Third World: The Bottom Dimension, a fantastical game-turned-immersive-exhibition developed by her friend and collaborator, Gabriel Massan. The…
Fado, Petiscos and Saudade. The Best Way to Experience Lisbon
There are few emotions like saudade. This Portuguese word indicates the nostalgia and melancholy of something that is no longer there but lives on in memories. But really, it is untranslatable. Yet any person has experienced it if they have walked the streets of Lisbon. In recent years, Portugal’s capital has undergone a cultural and…
The Ultimate Weekend Guide to Montreal
There’s no better city break in North America than a weekend in Montreal – a city so full of great food that 48 hours seems not only paltry but almost cruel. I always leave wanting more, and as a result I come back, and back, and back. Probably 15 times since my first visit in…
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,…
Guides
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…
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…
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…
Through ‘Polyphonic Eating’ DJ Yu Su Wants You to Listen Closer, Taste More, and Feel Deeper
When music producer and DJ Yu Su was a child in Kaifeng, China, her grandfather, a dental professor with a passion for cooking, would prepare a different breakfast for her every morning. He served hand-pulled noodles, baozi, and other wheat-based dishes made with produce from his garden, including edible flowers. More unusually for a family…
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….