Latest posts
Where to Find the Best Pizza in New York
Who could ever forget the headline: “Is New York’s Best Pizza in New Jersey?” An inflammatory rhetorical question if there ever was one, this is what crowned New York Times dining critic Pete Wells’ 2017 review of the pizzeria Razza in Jersey City – just across the Hudson from lower Manhattan. In a city full of…
Behind the Biennale: How Manal AlDowayan Is Amplifying the Voices of Saudi Women
On the occasion of the 60th Venice Biennale — open to the public from 20 April 2024 — Something Curated continues its series, Behind the Biennale. Comprising a collection of essays from the curators of select national pavilions, the series offers first-hand perspectives on some of this year’s most anticipated presentations. Following Australian curator Ellie…
Documentary Photographer Yvonne Maxwell’s Best Shot
Since welcoming my daughter into the world in early 2020, I have embarked on an introspective exploration into the theory and practice of motherhood; an unravelling of the tapestry of motherhood within the Black familial structure that birthed an ongoing project called ‘HEREDITARY’. Pondering the influence of societal labels on our perceptions of self as…
Something for the Week, Issue 8
Welcome back to Something for the Week — your weekly selection of things to look at, read, listen to, and experience across the arts. From the buzz of the 60th Venice Biennale’s inauguration to a film festival exploring queer Southeast Asian narratives, April promises to be an entertaining month. If you like what you see,…
Interviews
At Centro Botín, Shilpa Gupta Gives Voice to Those Silenced ...
Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta’s latest exhibition takes place at Centro Botín, a Renzo Piano-designed art centre situated on the Cantabrian Coast of northern Spain. Seeking to amplify stifled voices, the show takes its title from the artist’s ongoing work, I live under your sky too. Gupta has long been concerned with the idea of silence,…
Zhang Enli: “An Artist Should Be Able to Manifest and Define...
Hailing from China’s Jilin province, and presently based in Shanghai, artist Zhang Enli has interrogated the concept of portraiture for over three decades. Early in his career, during the 1990s, he created a vast series of paintings depicting the people of Shanghai. Later, themes spanning the interior and natural world found their way into his…
Interview: Artist Prem Sahib Finds Resistance in Pluralism
London-based artist Prem Sahib’s sculptures, installations, and performances evoke emotional reactions through a highly choreographed and honed language of minimalism. Often erotically charged, the artist’s works draw on personal and communal histories, eloquently dissecting the architecture of public and private spaces. Sahib is set to premiere their new work, Alleus, at Somerset House Studios’ experimental…
Two Ways With Lotus Root, My Spirit Vegetable
Lotus root is my spirit vegetable. Its little holes look like portals into eternal happiness. We all watched in awe at that episode of Chef’s Table when zen chef Jeong Kwan tinted the holy discs while in a deep meditative state, with natural hues of turmeric and beetroot, laying them out in little bowls for…
After Making History at Cannes Film Festival, Mongolian Director Zoljargal Purevdash Looks Ahead
Zoljargal Purevdash’s feature debut, If Only I Could Hibernate, tenderly depicts the experiences of a family facing adverse living conditions in Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar district. The film launched to great acclaim at Cannes Film Festival last year, making history as the first ever Mongolian film in the Official Selection. Emphasising the transformative power of education, through the lens of…
What Is Zenga?
Recent years have seen essential work being done to reframe and rearticulate narratives of art history that are more nuanced, layered, and intersectional. We have witnessed ever more vital considerations that reckon with periods of erasure and artists’ work that has previously been unheeded, even as it revises our thinking of mainstream movements including Art…
Sport and the Arts Meet at This One of a Kind Training Camp
Grand Cayman welcomes an international group of sprint and hurdle athletes united in their pursuit of peak performance for the upcoming Olympic qualifiers. Dedicated to full-time training, they balance track workouts at Cayman National Stadium with strength and flexibility sessions at Palm Heights Athletics. Under the mentorship of renowned coaches and therapists Stuart McMillan and…
Guides
Lapsed City Traders, Murderous Chefs, and the Search for Afr...
It’s become a habit among publishing professionals (or anyone with the faintest stated allegiance to literature, for that matter) to treat “true” books as an endangered species, an odd if cherished relic destined sooner or later to obsolescence. This might have less to do with any real, imminent threat (readers don’t seem to be disappearing…
The Ultimate Guide to Eating Bagels in NYC
Several years ago, a friend in London texted me a photo of what appeared to be a bulging bread roll stuffed with chocolate frosting, like some sort of mutant maritozzo. I couldn’t puzzle out what was going on, but then I read the caption: “Nutella bagel on Brick Lane.” London has its own distinct bagel…
Something for the Week, Issue 6
Welcome back to Something for the Week — your weekly selection of things to look at, read, listen to, and experience across the arts. If you like what you see, consider subscribing to the Something Curated newsletter. Pipilotti Rist’s Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon at Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York This is your…
Something for the Week, Issue 7
Welcome back to Something for the Week — your weekly selection of things to look at, read, listen to, and experience across the arts. If you like what you see, consider subscribing to the Something Curated newsletter. Richard Serra: Six Large Drawings at David Zwirner, London Dubbed the “poet of iron,” American artist Richard Serra…
10 Exceptional Dishes in 48 Hours: Eating in New York City* Right Now
This is neither a guide nor a series of restaurant reviews; instead it is a highly biased, very personal diner’s diary or a glutton’s journal chronicling the highlights of two and a bit days eating through New York and New Jersey. It takes in NYC new and old, and includes diner sandwiches, Trinidadian doubles, a Thai…
Behind the Biennale: Archie Moore Centres Aboriginal Narratives at the Australia Pavilion
Ahead of the 60th Venice Biennale — open to the public from 20 April 2024 — Something Curated continues its new series, Behind the Biennale. Comprising a collection of short essays from the curators of select national pavilions, the series offers first-hand perspectives on some of this year’s most anticipated presentations. Following Danish curator Louise…
An Expert’s Guide to Coffee in Paris
Unpacking the differences between London and Paris is by now akin to pretending to your child that the Channel Tunnel has glass walls to see the fish: boring and quite sad. The differences between London and Parisian coffee culture, however, track with the factors that make Paris’s greatest restaurants great. Its most exciting cafés, like…
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….