Modern gothic, flâneur, Stock-image-text-post
Gili Tal at Terminal Projects

"The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.” –Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006)

In 1900, French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927) began photographing the city of Paris following its rapid reshaping and modernisation, a process known as Haussmannization. The medieval topography of Paris was razed and flattened to make way for vast, leafy boulevards. “Vieux Paris” [old Paris] was hidden behind the muscle of a new industrial century. Nostalgia for a pre-revolutionary past swiftly emerged amongst artists. A longing which, though not identical, came close to an eighteenth-century British fetish for the Medieval that led to the construction of neo-catholic garden follies.

Atget, operating as an unknown at first, became a hero of the Surrealists (alongside Baudelaire, the thought of the wandering “flâneur” was an aphrodisiac). They favoured his work as it exalted ideas of looking closer. His work often captured the beauty of the purely urban object; the more dated and abject, the better. A 14th-century statue of Saint Riquier is captured with the same sentimentality as an art nouveau stairwell; these objects are lonely remnants of Parisian history, caught in the tumult of a rapidly modernising city. They are heady symbols cast aside, relit by an old man with a perchance for the inanimate.

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Eugène Atget, Saint Riquier; Somme, Before 1899. Source: MoMA

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Urbanity and its discontents form the subject of Atget’s photographs and the work of contemporary artist Gili Tal, who recently opened a billboard at Terminal Projects, London. Located on Tunnel Avenue in SE10, the project space invites artists to produce a work which covers the extent of a large billboard. Tal’s iteration, Leporello (9th February - 9th May 2025), is a photo collage of individual panels from different branded hoardings, large temporary boards constituting a fence cordoning off perimeters of construction sites. Private construction companies can use hoardings to advertise their product (developments) and to create, as City hoardings states: “powerful on-site brand awareness.” These images are presented in a “Leporello” book format that unfurls across the board.

Tal’s work frequently re-adapts corporatised urban images, whether a stock photo or an architectural render, in her appraisal of the marketability of the urban environment. Her 2022 show at Cabinet Gallery, You May See Butterflies, featured a series of heavily pixelated oil paintings of red double-decker buses, their advertisements now unreadable. Leporello can be read left to right, its form denoting the unfurling of a story. Tal positions the book so that its sections diminish in size. The digitalised structure occupies the billboard as both storybook and likeness of actual hoarding fences; blurred figures move across a post-recession restaurant interior; a girl in a red raincoat blows bubbles behind a scaffold; a bird sits overlooking a dismal landscape; a semi-abstract image of a woman on an Ikea chair; a bloody-mary; a close up image of apples; children running; a silhouetted, suited figure recedes into the distance. The genre of stock images which depict smiling, picture-perfect occupants tends to capture an acute nothingness. Corporatised ghosts rather than people, trapped within a spectacle of fantasy; construction of a faux-reality presumably only achievable through the purchase of one of these high-rise buildings typical of London’s construction boom. eporello contains photos of photos which verge on the hazy incompletion of a Google photo grid that asks you to identify a zebra crossing: “Are you human?” Tal’s work sits between Steyerll’s concept of the “poor image” and Atget’s castration of the urban object from its aura, where by means of reproduction “Even the unique is made to yield up its uniqueness.”

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Eugène Atget, Avenue des Gobelin, 1925. Source: MoMA

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Leporello uses a clever, or dadaist, framing of words that emphasises its overall principle of Détournement (situationist prank):
“Relocate”
“Rent Extraordinary”
“Connect”
“Work”
“Live”
These words accentuate the meaningless semiotics of advertisement, a spectacle which fascinated the Surrealists, too (Andre Breton became obsessed with how the descriptive words “BOIS-CHARBONS” sat alongside their referents, illustrations of wood and coal in advertisements on Parisian streets). “Connect” or “Live” are equally offbeat quotations, descriptors of goods whose sole communicatory purpose is eventual saleability. It may seem perfunctory to outline, but text over an image is having a renaissance due to its complete unseduction. The kind of apparent aesthetic genre that plants word-art text over an unrelated image has populated the imagination since Ed Ruscha.

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A stock image of Ed Ruscha’s work, 'The Final End', 1992. Source: alamy

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A heydey was reached in the era of Tumblr-platinum images and has culminated again in the “Macro” works of Penny Goring at Arcadia Missa, tik-tok nostalgists, Instagram bloggers and contemporary artists like Tasneem Sarkez, Ana Viktoria Dzinic and Dean Sameshima. Something about the stock image presents a shock of unexpected serotonin by its farcical nature; the addition of ironical or falsely poetic text is the cherry on top. In 2025, Instagram has added six new fonts to its story settings, including “Neon” and “Typewriter.”

Atget romanticised the early trappings of capitalism - so too, does Tal. Taking these images out of their context allows them to lose enough of their original function for us to take stock of their alienating principles, their guise of neoliberalism. To the knowing eye, Tal highlights a comedic irreverence that aesthetically appeals to the text post-consumer. The early 20th-century flâneur turned toward the department store for inspiration in the cityscape - today, we turn into the ironically situated capitalistic image.

This is not to say that Tal’s work resides in or performs the same function as Atgtet’s. Instead, I’d agree with Tal’s placement in the genre of Modern Gothic alongside artists Merlin Carpenter and Morag Keil, a category coined by Contemporary Art Writing Daily to describe the work of contemporary artists as “Metastasized banality…the world reflected without charm or aesthetic bandaid."

Much of Modern Gothic feels like art that pastiches capitalism: as fear for the supernatural is replaced by fear for the corporation, we become spectres of society, analogous to Atget, capturing the eerily silent and violent accelerationism of the urban setting. Leporello appeals to the flâneur, the passerby, the jaded observer who is ultimately the primary arbiter of this new word art supremacy; she sees the text posted on her feed and laughs; she sees it plastered across a hoarding and feels oppressed.

The imposed category of Modern Gothic adapts the traditional gothic tropes, alienation, unheimlich, fear, and monstrosity, into our current climate of anxiety. Like the traditional Gothic - this is done by an appeal to beauty, to the sublime. Tal achieves this sublimity - the subtle unfolding of a storybook, the poetic, Tumblr-esque inertia of the words “Live” contrasted against the threat of a brash, pink “Relocate.” What could be more anxiety-inducing than the false promise of security? A smiling face devoid of feeling? A paid actor? A machine? A kitschy font plastered across a dated image? Leporello heralds in a new gothic fashion which palpates our fear faculties by visualising, with irreverent humour, a salutary estrangement between (wo)man and his environment.

Tasneem Sarkez “White Knuckle” Rose Easton Gallery / London

Tasneem Sarkez, "White Knucke". Exhibition view at Rose Easton, London. Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards. Courtesy of Rose Easton, London.

Tasneem Sarkez’s “White Knuckle” marks the twenty-two-year-old artist’s first exhibition in the UK. Six paintings are hung amid two sculptures at Rose Easton Gallery in London. Visitors are subsumed into a painted mind palace of advertising ephemera and digitally altered images. Their commonality: Sarkez’s exploration of symbolic politics between the MENA region and the US. Her subjects range from the everyday (skin whitening soap) to the nationalistic (bald eagle), offering a layered critique of cultural semiotics.

Sarkez’s work is immediately striking for its contemporaneity. Each work is a collage, an amalgam of images sourced by the artist from “IRL” and online. These canvases simulate the internet experience of viral memes steeped in kitsch aesthetics and AI-generated images coughed up by platform algorithms. High Tea (2024) depicts a traditional Turkish ince belli (literally “slim-waisted”) glass collaged across a kitschy red rose, which in turn contains the ephemeral and heavily kohl-lined eyes of a woman. Sarkez knowingly borrows from the traditional imagery of a sixteenth-century Dutch vanitas to lend her work a visual veracity – a time when painters explored contemporary capitalistic practices through still life. See Abraham van Beyeren’s Still Life with Lobster and Fruit (c. 1650): Sarkez employs an old master technique, contrasting symbols of opulence against a black background. Crucially, the artist’s erudite use of oil paint undermines any trappings of cheapness associated with “web imagery” or the fast-paced production of memetic content. The richness of oil lends the works magnetism, blurring the line between a traditional patina and a plastic, TEMU-grade sheen. Oil paint’s knack for building thin layers approximates Photoshop’s superfine blur tool — translating moments of the digital uncanny — while lending Sarkez’s paintings historicity. Even as we admire her technicality, we can doubt the image.

In The New Citroën (1957), Roland Barthes wrote, “Cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals” – conceived by unknown artists, worshipped by all. He describes the new model (DS 19) with caressing language: its streamlining, dove-tailing, and unbroken metal surround. Looking at Sarkez’s work G-class Dancing with the Shah (2024), I’m reminded of this postmodern dissection. A pair of nine-inch platform pumps (they resemble the height of a Pleaser, a shoe characteristically worn by sex workers and dancers) are embossed with the Mercedes logo. G-Class Dancing could be painted from a stock image. It contains a pull focus of generic content: the kind you’d see on the web page of someone who loves cars and women. Mercedes-Benz G-Class is the categorical term for the G-Wagon, built on the suggestion of the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in 1979. G-Class Dancing captures the camp theatricality of driving an object whose dual purpose and connotative meaning are, for lack of better words, glam-militant. Like the DS 19, the G-wagon became a symbol of new power and money in Iran. G-Class Dancing is a visual essay that, as Barthes writes, discusses how an object becomes “totally prostituted.”

Works like First Lady (2024) perform a similar commentary on the aesthetics of prestige and power. Here Sarkez collages the image of one of Libyan general Muammar Gaddafi’s Amazonian guards in her characteristic semiotic style. The text “First Lady” references the visual format of “skin whitening” soap packaging, an item found in Middle Eastern beauty stores. An image of one of Gaddafi’s Amazonian guards, an all-female group of bodyguards who often appeared in full-glam in the background of press shots, is painted above the label. The coloring of the label imitates the khaki-green of the women’s uniform; a technique Sarkez uses in every work is to color-pick a shade and mix it throughout the painting, resulting in an effect similar to a digital filter.

“White-Knuckle” is full of transformations of the everyday into potent political symbols. In the installations Heart Notes No. 1 and Heart Notes No. 2 (both works 2024) the artist presents rows of scented oil bottles, imitating those found in her local Middle Eastern perfume shops. Their careful labels are irreverent, humorous, and highly specific to the coalescing of Middle Eastern and Western pop culture: “Zayn Malik,” “White Woman Dancing,” “Habibi,” “Hussein,” “American Dream,” and “Sexy Girl.” This sentiment is also seen in The Real Superhero Key (2024), in which a cropped image of a set of keys features the head of an American Eagle, hung adjacent to (C)OEXIST (2024), depicting a Honda motorbike emblazoned with the symbol of the Turkish flag.

The Bus Is Leaving Without Us

A flush, on-foot, rabbit-fur-coated tour around cOnDo LoNdOn 2025, an international gallery mixer where everyone seems like a twenty-something or a millionaire (or both).

As Western politics auto-destructs into a meme, grasping at attention like an upset toddler, the London art world continues to ignore it with quiet, maternal dedication. Will this weekend be any different? London’s younger galleries are fostering the work of a new generation to various degrees of novelty. Many participated in last year’s Frieze Spotlight – an event that felt like an ordinance for a scene that functions, for all its newness, with the semblance of what came before. I hoped the model of Condo – an art fair organized by Carlos/Ishikawa director Vanessa Carlos, in which small and mid-size local galleries host yet smaller galleries from abroad – could inspire a shift. Between reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair (1934), watching hyperspeed TikToks and tasteful, Lynchian AI edits on the purposely more fucked for-you-page of my private account, I walk between shows, searching for the three kinds of art I usually like: the macabre; musings on innocence; and quotations from the domestic. Five stars to any show that has all three.

At Auto Italia on Thursday night for Alex Margo Arden’s solo “Safety Curtain.” A show that looks at acts of vandalism against art across history – featuring exact reproductions of artworks after they’ve been targeted by protestors. These paintings felt mass-produced. Not in a bad way. Reading critic Hatty Nestor’s response, my suspicions were confirmed by a singular, innocuous line: “[the replicas] are handed over to a reproduction studio who create hand-painted reproductions …” Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa are venerated images that have already been cheapened beyond recognition through mass reproduction. You can acquire masterpieces via an Etsy drop-shipping page if you want. Shiny art-world globalism leads to dusty museum conservation in the next room, where Backstage Campaign (2025) features old, beaten-up art handling crates displayed in diminishing sizes. Once containing casts from the Royal Academy’s renowned collection, they now contain the remnant mechanisms of a historical institution; antique display objects, brooms, and, in the furthest crate, facing into a corner, a worker’s discarded sandwich. I slipped on artist Jenkin Van Zyl’s devil tail and nearly fell into one. Art is best when it’s disguised as theatre.

View of “Safety Curtain,” Auto Italia, London, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Auto Italia. Photos: Jack Elliot Edwards

Next, Rose Easton opens “White Knuckle” with the work of twenty-two-year-old Tasneem Sarkez. The crowd is shorter than Auto Italia’s (which was filled with Royal Academy graduates – probably just younger). The artist’s just been back to Libya for the first time since before the 2011 Civil War. We talk the high camp of Gaddafi and Americana – her painting The Real Superhero Key (2024) is named after an eagle-printed find from a Chinatown hardware store. “It’s an oxymoron – because, you know, they’re imaginary superheroes. Putting ‘real’ is unnecessarily affirmative.”

View of “White-Knuckle,” Rose Easton, London

Outside, there’s not even a murmur about Dean Kissick or his article “The Painted Protest” – because everyone here is under twenty-five and has already resigned themselves to his truths in art school. Had people brought it up, you can imagine loud sighs and bristling – an anticipation of delivering a pre-prepared speech. The night ends with a gallery dinner at Sông Quê, where no one talks about art, but someone tells me about manga artist Junji Itō and autism-masking in young women – a different kind of art.

Saturday morning. I’m with self-proclaimed internet genius and real-life genius Taylor Richardson (of recent triple-platinum internet fame for a video of him dancing to “F U 2x” by rapper Lil Baby). Usually, art should be viewed in a mire of solipsism. Today, it feels important to be accompanied by a mind with superior internet connoisseurship. “I’m the most on the internet of anyone,” says Taylor. He makes me a deep-fried edit of the day, which soothes my brain like clonazepam. See below.

We start at Project Native Informant. (I’m unsure what’s going on with PNI; they appear to have lost all their staff and the representation of artist Joseph Yaeger.) In Phung-Tien Phan’s show “doesn’t work,” the video dog (2025) shows a toy version of Tintin’s terrier Snowy, followed across Phan’s family home with an iPhone. The dog notices and attacks the camera, childlike animism and awkward angles forming a relief from overstimulating web-editing. In Volkswagen (Romeo and Juliet) (2025), a multi-layered sculptural work, a miniature dollhouse is constructed within a shelf. Above, Phan has made a home altar to Japanese filmmaker and actor Takeshi Kitano. At the pinnacle, a disused coffee machine contains flowers - one of which supports a hanging image from Gregg Araki’s film Doom Generation (1995). Phan presents her love of violent romanticism with the spirit of playtime. I’m a sucker for Yakuza films and the miniaturization of domestic space.

Phung-Tien Phan, Volkswagen (Romeo and Juliet), 2025. wood, glass, Perspex, found coffee machine, artists clothing, photograph, marble, acrylic, dolls house furniture, incense sticks, found branch, ribbon, live flowers and light, 186 x 82 x 48 cm

Next door, Mother’s Tankstation is showing Erin M. Riley in a collaborative presentation with P.P.O.W., New York. Taylor calls the weft-faced tapestry work Webcam Control (2024) “the sickest thing he’s ever seen,” only to reiterate later that “he’s seen so many fucking tapestry works.” In First Light (2023), collaged images sit on a Grand Theft Auto-esque landscape alongside pop-up windows that read “how to get child support” and “affidavit.” They crowd the picture plane like desktop viruses – a truncated, tattooed torso strides across the landscape wearing pants that say “daddy issues.” If being online has taught me how to look at images and form instantaneous categories of “cringe” or “sick,” then looking at art in real life has taught me that I’m narrow-minded, judgmental, and too easily bored.

“The Condo bus is leaving without us,” says Taylor, pointing out a big unmarked car that well-to-do-looking people are being loaded onto outside PNI. A sweet-sixteen limousine for people in camel wrap coats who don’t know how to get to Bethnal Green on public transport. We visit Maureen Paley, hosting Air de Paris, which has conceived a show of musings on xerography as a medium. Prints by Pati Hill hang opposite a singular, self-referential image by Wolfgang Tillmans of a photocopier in his studio: CLC 800, dismantled, a (2011). In Hill’s Untitled (white gloves) (1976), the flattening of the copier approximates the phantasmagoria of early silver gelatin prints, recalling an image I obsess over: a woman’s lone glove in André Breton’s novel Nadja (1928).

At Brunette Coleman, hosting New York’s Francis Irv, a friend tells me London is having a moment of “patina minimalism” as we look at new works by Rachel Fäth. Locker 5 and Locker 6 (both 2024) are shaped by the constraining spaces of storage lockers in a “community workspace.” At this juncture, I’ve lost all analytical processes. Fäth’s use of densely packed scrap metal mostly just reminds me of Pixar’s robo-romcom WALL-E (2008).

Because we could not figure out what shows were “in” Condo (because we were not on the Condo Bus), we saw Matthias Groebel’s “Skull Fuck” at Modern Art. Taylor admires the white cube space, advising that Stuart Shave should “Get a set of speakers and a turntable and then do a Boiler Room” and that “Skrillex should play.” I think how good the DJ would look against one of the exhibition’s paintings, flat canvases with paint applied by a machine to create low-resolution pointillist stills taken from the early days of the 24-hour news cycle. Virgins (2002–03) is a zoomed-in clipping of one of Groebel’s photographs of skulls with rococo masks. Oneirically entertaining, affecting but disturbing, the pieces recall Gregor Schneider’s invitation for visitors to the 49th Venice Biennale to experience the twenty-year alteration of his family home in Dead Haus u r (2001, German Pavilion). If Groebel’s decontextualized image seems to forerun Issy Wood's work, his use of DIY machines to paint seems to shield him from the epithet of zombie figuration. Groebel, I read in the press release, “doesn’t believe in the concept of content.”

Later that night, Condo parties in a private members’ club. The kind that has a parlor hang and Modigliani reproductions. My friend Clyde, another journalist from New York, tells me that the party has “more hot young people than in NYC” – but I mishear him over the noise and say, “I know, right! I don’t know who anyone is, and they are all way older.” He later texts me, “NYC would be 4% hot and cool; this room was a solid 30%.” In fact, the old person I wanted to talk to was Groebel. Seeing him repeatedly walking around alone in a thinly checked button-down, it was hard to place him as the author of “Skull Fuck.” A staff member tells us the name came from a 1971 live album by The Grateful Dead.

The party is boring – although no parties are immediately fun. Most of the partygoers are segregated by age into one room that includes friends who work at galleries (curator and artist Blue Marcus, photographer Alex Arauz, performance artist Jaya Twill) and artists with works in Condo like Sarkez and Areena Ang. Things become incrementally messier as a weed vape is passed around. You can always tell who runs galleries because their emerging-designer clothes don’t fit their twelve-thousand-pound-a-year tax declaration. The relationship between talent and their producers at an art-world party smells like control and Dover Street Market stores. When I leave at 1am, the queue outside is very long.

Sunday morning. Arcadia Missa is hosting not one but three (!) galleries: Florence’s Veda, as well as 243 Luz and Roland Ross, both from Margate. Playthings and naiveté in art usually get my phone out to take a picture. 243 Luz presents Ang’s pencil drawings, “Marionette Studies,” which depict an afflicted Pinocchio, the puppet face down and ass up – a “real boy” reframed. “I believe Collodi’s (1882) original tale is one of gender” the artist tells me. In one drawing, Pinocchio stands face-to-face with the artist’s self-portrait – the toy’s malleability a ready allegory of the indeterminate body and failed becomings. A paper collage by James Whittingham, of doll faces across three sheets of A4, was also delightful.

At Sadie Coles, hosting Jahmek Contemporary from Luanda, Angola, I think how often domesticity appears in contemporary installation work – Dorothea Tanning’s Room 202 (1970–72), Robert Gober’s 2015 retrospective at MoMA, etc. Back in the present, Sandra Poulson’s makes tableaux of found objects and Dutch domestic furniture: a bed, a chest of drawers, a swing, and a toilet, all constructed in the vernacular of Luandan building techniques. Poulson describes her father chastising her childhood messes – “This bedroom looks like a republic!” – as a starting point for her work. Objects are perverted with slogans taken from t-shirts distributed for free by political groups; an EU logo appears on the headstand of a broken bedframe.

Left to right: Blue Marcus, Lydia Eliza Traill, and Tasneem Sarkez

Speaking of disrupted domesticities: Later that evening, I visit the inaugural opening of apartment gallery/no space Chicago. held in the hallway of a severely neglected rental building that has been passed through arty twenty-somethings for years. Named after the 1990s apartment galleries of the post-1987 financial crash, the exhibition appealed to me with its title, “quarter-life crisis” (I was born in 2000). A cheaply framed photograph of a stack of Thomas Bernhard books is like an intellectual-starter-pack meme: Try to figure out what kind of girl you are through a photograph of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning Midnight (1939), Georges Bataille's Eroticism (1957), and Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (1998), collaged next to some ribbon and a cigarette. The work is titled Hatred and Affection (2024) – a pretentious but acerbic depiction of turning twenty-five.

Bathroom door at Chicago, London, 2025. Photos: the Lydia Eliza Traill

Gorin Arif, Hatred and Affection, 2024. Installation view, Chicago, London, 2025

My weekend ends on a high note in the Chicago bathroom. I realise the door’s broken glass window, crudely repaired with cardboard, is not an install – but had been kicked down by my boyfriend over a year ago. The lock is now stuffed with tissue.

Martina Cox: Bound for Pleasure

From fetishistic photography on eBay to the strange intimacy of gut-like corset interiors, Lydia Eliza Trail speaks with Martina Cox to unstitch the artist’s solo exhibition Waist Management, which examines the politics and humour of shaping the femme form.

Installation view of Martina Cox, Waist Management at Alyssa Davis Gallery, 14 November – 19 December 2024.

In her show Waist Management, New York-based artist and seamstress Martina Cox demonstrates her reverence for sartorial history with works created from obscure eBay listings for Victorian fashion artefacts. Cox previously ran a clothing business that produced work at the intersection of surrealism and fashion history, which was stocked with the inimitable Café Forgot. She is currently the organiser of the mending club Darn it! Waist Management is her first solo show with Alyssa Davis Gallery.

When I arrive at Estonian House, there is a party happening. Martina has to rescue me from the mock Tudor-bethan mahogany entry hall. She leads me upstairs to the show, which is held in another period-style imitation room adorned with Grecian trompe l’oeil and vividly painted walls I will inarticulately describe as neon blue. “I don’t know why I started collecting bustles”, Martina tells me, “I just thought they were formally hilarious.” Cox is wearing a vintage skirt that we both agree is shrimp-like—anthropomorphic and reminiscent of a time when clothing was intended to pad, shape, and constrict. We talk about her adventurous bustle search: “It took me to the Victorian re-sale internet. I was immediately attracted to the bizarreness of bustles and the way they were photographed.” Looking at her source material for Waist Management, I can only agree with her when she describes the photos as “almost fetishistic.”

Image of the artist courtesy of Jacob Holler (@jakemichaelholler).

The exhibition’s standout is Cox’s watercolour and pencil series Gut Flora I-IV, which illustrates the interiors of 19th and early 20th-century corsets and bodices. Cox uses the colloquial industry term “guts” fittingly; the images capture what is supposed to be unseemingly and messy, spread out as if by a lepidopterist. Her favourite seller on the digital Victorian market goes by the username Fiddybee, and specialises in a particularly ethereal display, capturing their garments with amateur flash photography against a blue satin backdrop. “I feel as though there was a time when I collected a lot of fetish photography from Flickr that had a sheen to it,” Cox tells me; the stylised image combined with the historical significance of a turn-of-the-century garment form one hell of a digital muse.

Screenshot of the seller Fiddybee’s eBay listing collection.

Throughout the room are small sculptures made from various bustles, also purchased from Victorian re-sale websites. The sculptures’ names are eccentric: Horse Girl I-III, Angelika, and Royal Ruth, objects that recall the feminine through proximity (these little cushions sat just above one’s buttocks). Anthropomorphising these bustles with anime eyes and beading is not just an attempt to make them kawaii. Rather, Martina’s work comments on the gendered history and shaping of the femme form; while adorable, the sculptures reference comedic illustrations of the time which often mocked women’s absurd silhouettes, with bustles causing women to resemble horses, snails, and crustaceans. Cox’s “Little Shrimp Babies” are precious mementoes to long-departed sisters, with all their intimacies and their fashion pretensions.

Martina Cox, Angelika, 2024, detail. Courtesy of the artist.

A digital layer exists between the original subject, photographed in an eBay seller’s house, and the artwork. This separation alludes to Martina’s interest in museum conservation and costume archiving—we can observe these intimate objects, but we cannot touch them. Ripped open, the bodice’s internal organs were intended to be up against the skin of a real woman. Often, their eBay descriptions indulge in LARPing—see the details of the bodice depicted in Gut Flora I, a piece whose red striped tailoring resembles human musculature: “Antiquedress.com, #3716 – c. 1890 RARE Red Heavy Linen Summer Outing Ensemble!” and then, “Add a jaunty little hat and a parasol, and she could be on her way to Coney Island.”

Martina Cox, Gut Flora I, 2023, Coloured Pencil, watercolour, all-purpose thread, 10 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Waist Management is a punk rendition of costume history. Cox marries the disjointed aesthetic of turn-of-the-century digital catalogues with a longing for an older, more meaningful craft. She talks to me about how the 1890s heralded the first fashion-orientated body modification. “The femme torso collapses in the ‘20s and becomes this androgynous femme thing,” she explains, “then you turn it back another couple of decades, and it becomes like the 1890s, and it’s super constricting booty-popping silhouettes.” There are equal parts reverence and fetishism for historical clothing in Cox’s work, something she shares with the cult clothing store and artistic project Women’s History Museum. Both Cox and the Museum take antique clothing, museum-worthy artefacts, and give them new life—see this listing for an 1880s bustle-train overskirt. A current vogue in fashion history looks at the Victorian era as the start of extremist body modification in commercial fashion—what Valerie Steele, author of Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power (1997), would describe as sartorial sexuality.

Martina Cox, Landscape with hooks, 2024, detail. Courtesy of the artist.

In Fetish, Steele captures the paradoxes of kinky garments. Tightlacing—the practice of corsetry—can be a source of domination and empowerment. While working on Waist Management, Cox had a myriad of references: the performance art of Valie Export, paintings by Christina Ramberg and El Greco, and the Victorian morbid fixation on creating scrapbooks from human hair. She also thought of Kathy Ackers’ 1993 essay Language of the Body, in which Acker describes how bodybuilding involves breaking down muscle to regrow larger, thicker, and stronger, prompting her to ask whether the equation between destruction and growth is also a formula for art. For Martina, the malleability of a woman’s waist is analogous to the bodybuilder’s quest for enlargement: “Bustles, bodices, corsets; these are all sartorial trends that treat the body as something to be morphed, padded and prodded.” There is something to be said for the control over one’s body, inch by inch, that tightlacing offers. In Spinal Top (2024), Cox threaded delicate hooks and eyes through the paper, positioning them exactly where they would appear on the actual garment. Piercing parchment by thread alludes to the actual and symbolic constriction of the corset—an artistic enactment of Michael Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power. The body is controlled through minute functioning, both politically and sartorially.

Cox repeatedly mentions Rozsika Parker’s seminal work TheSubversive Stitch (1984) to me. She sends me photos of the book from her studio with notations. One segment catches my eye, as it illustrates how the lives of forgotten women mark sartorial history: a 1624 poem In Praise of the Needle extols needlework for the fact that it renders women powerless, silent, and still: To use their tongues less, and their needles more.

Parker Ito at Rose Easton

In London, a Gesamtkunstwerk by the post-internet artist par excellence claims medieval guilds, Albrecht Dürer, and Wagnerian opera as precedents for scattering the ashes of authorship.

Was Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) the first post-internet artist? Parker Ito (*1986), casting an admiring eye over his use of print as a tool of mass dissemination, sure seems to think so: In 2016, he refigured three master engravings by “the German Leonardo” into photoshopped oil paintings, renaming them Melencolia 2, Me, Death and the Devil, and Me in my Study (all 2016). Using the stylistic trademarks of these works – density of line, non-hierarchical picture planes – Ito also interpolated his self-portrait, a character illustration of a knight with a backwards baseball cap commissioned from the comic artist Paul Pope, as though applying Dürer as a filter to his own life.

Ito’s journey into dissolving art’s temporal boundaries and hyper-contemporizing antique idioms of authorship, branding, and craft continues in “The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode.” The medievalism begins in Rose Easton’s entrance hall, where a trio of black wall paintings show death holding a winged hourglass, the blindfolding of Justice, and the daggering of a mounted knight by an armored foe. Upstairs, at the center of a room-filling multimedia installation, the artist’s self-portrait greets me as a small glass statue placed in the clam-like jaws of two Epson scanners, an imago functioning like an effigy, or the distribution of a royal’s likeness through multiplication, copying, and ultimately, de-objectification. Like a sun king, the artist’s voice, put through a MIDI reader, bellows “Why am I so beautiful” over a choir-like score, whose lilt embellishes the clerical atmosphere. As two projections flicker on, of the balcony view from Ito’s LA studio and a stretch of Cambridge Heath Road outside the gallery, the effigy goes red, shifting the mood as before a video game’s final boss battle.

View of “The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode,” Rose Easton, London, 2024

The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode (scanner sculpture) (detail), 2024, modified photo color scanner, glass, effects pedals, laptop, cables, extension cord, speakers, projector, color slides and slide projector, dimensions variable

In one corner hangs a diptych of canvases layered with vinyl and run through an Inkjet printer, their centers filled with a knight leering out with the eyes of St. Lucy and, under a swirl of carmine paint, a pre-Raphaelite angel raising a sword. In opposite corners lurk the manga mercenary Guts and El Greco’s Saint Francis in Ecstasy (c. 1580), while two plaque-like blocks at the frame edges read “The Ag0ny.” and “The3 3xst$cy.” Carefully painted, the words mirror a third projection on the far wall, of a digitalized and 3D-rendered font wistfully asking: “Why am I so beautiful?” The artist seems to delight in mimicking the high-tech look, achieving the trompe-l’œil one might find on the ceiling of an opera house or in the translucent fabric of the Virgin Mary’s robe. Such escapist, trans-historical world-building and blog-style use of images brings to mind Nicole Stenger’s read of the early internet: “In this cold cubic fortress of pixels that is cyberspace, we will be, as in dreams, everything: the Dragon, the Princess, and the Sword.”

Parker Ito, The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode, part 2, 2024, ink, acrylic, modelling, paste, water soluble pastel, ink aid, GAC 100, paper and varnish on canvas, 203.2 x 304.8 x 2.5 cm.

Completing the Gesamtkunstwerk, The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding has transformed the entire room into a camera obscura, the Renaissance’s device for achieving optical verisimilitude. Though we might view the world outside the gallery through a live digital feed, the “dark chamber” only functions with enough daylight (hard pressed to find in November London) to reverse the exterior image and project it inside. Its real function, then, seems genealogical: to invoke a seminal era of artistic imitation, one that Jean Baudrillard saw culminating in the Baroque period’s proliferation of Stucco angels, columns, cornices, and, above all, over-decorated theaters. Descending through Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus, a custom-purpose opera and theme-park grounds built for das Volk under pretenses equally revolutionary and romantic, Ito’s appeal is to dissolve the self into the collective through art. “Going to see the new Avatar movie is just as compelling as Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms,” he wrote in the show text for his “Medievl Times” (Viable Gallery, 2022) – a sentiment fulfilled in this total cybernetic drama, complete with data mining, live streaming, an operatic soundtrack, light shows, and medievalist cosplay. It is Baudrillard’s “theatre par excellence,” updated for an era of image oversaturation and rife with nostalgia for recognizable signs.

Ito grounds post-internet’s troubled (in)authenticities in a history of counterfeit, immersion, and dramatic sociality. In particular, the show iconizes a certain hyper-contemporary art, which divorces images from their origins to the point of rendering authorship moot, as an offspring of medieval craft practiced in multi-authorial settings: sculptural guilds, printing houses, and schools of painters who produced actual effigies and religious icons. Ito, who infamously claimed he could match the artistic volume of Picasso’s lifetime in five years – nay, five minutes – is simply using different means: scanners, printers, electronic as well as analog projections. As in Dürer and Wagner, in this Gesamtkunstwerk, we are proximate to greatness: a sensorial extravaganza where art, stripped of its referents, can win back its dignity.

View of “The Pilgrim’s Sticky Toffee Pudding Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Year of the Dragon, À La Mode,” Rose Easton, London, 2024

Memorial Rounds/ Gravity Bong

20th November – 1st December, 2024
175 Stoke Newington Road, N16 8BP

Memorial Rounds (2024) by Callum Hansen
Text by Lydia Eliza Traill

X Thank you guys. Thank you so much for watching.

Y tilts his head back self-consciously. Okay you’re good. He’s looking at someone off screen, like there’s another presence in the room. I’m going to film you but pretend I’m not here, in fact, X hold the camera. Yeah, like that.

Tie-Dye is tacky, right. Ironic, yeah. It’s like, I’m a hippy, I believe in kickin’ back. Mostly, I’m disenfranchised - but I’m hopeful. That’s what everyone sees when they look at the mandala. They’re referencing Woodstock 69, or maybe the grungier children of those who attended it. That person is hella spiritual, he’s in touch with the above/below/to the side.

If I flip the camera back onto my face close up and say I believe in God, he will watch it on YouTube shorts and know it to be true.

X I like having you around. You’re so fun to talk to.

Y This is Cash Money Talking.

X I literally found this guy. He was Aimless. I was telling him. Do, you need YouTube. Do you need this?

Is it painful, to sing like that? That X on your hand, those are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, in the world of post-Hardcore. It’s funny, right? You scream because you’re in pain because finally you’ve admitted that it hurts, and it still hurts but it has everyone else screaming, too. Raw inked into the skin in the shape of a cross on your hand holding the mic; the deceased’s screamo band will guide the living in remembrance. And that’s on sacrifice.

X Wait now you feel real all of a sudden.

Can’t tell smoke from bluebells. These guys shoot over-the-counter fireworks into the bluebell woods. It was Easter - I get why they burn those rockets like it’s incense.

Do you light rockets in the forest because it’s ritualistic? Because you’re religious? Did you do it because you see that parallel or because you miss church. Do you miss church?

X Can we give the driver some weed? He’s not driving.

Dead pigeon hollowed out - its wings frame its ribcage, it’s little chest. Soo fragile. So fragile. So fragile. That’s like, what Beethoven thought about when he wrote his music. Death, reincarnation, memorial.

See him over there? Hey! He’s back, it’s like he never left. He’s right here. Yo, he’s over here! We’ve been waiting, man. Where did you go? Did you see the light? Look at this pigeon.

X Are you scared?

Get in loser remember we have to go shopping.

Y I think I’m gonna be happy for like 24, 48 – maybe 60 hours.

The death of others is a rehearsal for one’s own death. And, you know, I expect to find dead pigeons in houses that are abandoned. In houses without soul. Again, that’s why you record yourself, right, because history isn’t the master anymore, so the present and its hollowed-out ritual is all we have.

Right? You’re my very own hollowed-out ritual.

X At the funeral, that funeral will be m-

Y I don’t regret anything, ever.

Moonlight Sonata. Moonlight Sonata but it’s playing in and out and out of tune. Nightmare Sonata for the girl and boy who are playing it like it’s a FrankenSonata.

We’re going through a glitch right now. We glitching. Our limbs are twitching like mad, switching between worlds, thinking about cultural capital. Whether a sonata can mean something or if it’s just a commemorative object for a time when the veneration of symbols was used as a method to remember. To look to the future. To conjure something like the smell of burning tracks on asphalt. Don’t drop the bong between the seats, that’s your totem.

X Vermont, New Hampshire.

X Hey guys, welcome back.

You should pass a book and note between each another, the book is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Yeah, no it’s fine, they love this stuff. They love when you put drugs in art like it’s real. They love when art looks like it’s real.

X OOPs…hehe

Caught you…. ☺

Juliana Huxtable: “I try to make work that, if I were on acid, I’d be lost in”

Juliana Huxtable is bored of art historical readings of her work. She meets Lydia Eliza Trail to talk Punk, fetishes and Furry fandom

Juliana Huxtable photographed by Stuart Nimmo for Plaster

Do you remember when Tumblr banned porn? Juliana Huxtable does; her entire Tumblr got taken down, and a trace of herself was lost. Starting in 2009, Huxtable started browsing Tumblr and finding “cool pornography” that she could see herself in without being reduced to a stereotype. Inside her new London exhibition at Project Native Informant, the artist, writer, musician, and performer is talking to me about the masterpieces of DeviantArt, anti-porn feminism, DJ-ing at Furry conferences and her boredom at critics trying to fit her work within an art historical canon. For Huxtable, this exhibition is about her disobedient selfhood.

“People can say that internet art is passè,” says Huxtable, who resents the simplified terminology of “digital to IRL.” “Some internet art is just replicating what’s on screen in a different context, but I’m interested in the insane, powerful and highly mechanical process involved.” Her show, Heads and Tails In The Struggle for Iconicity highlights the specificity of forms created through digital processes: the textures, the skill required, and, ultimately, the error and change that comes with the transference from iPad (the artist’s preferred method) to canvas. Looking closely at the tail of the large Iguana-human hybrid in IGGY ANARCHY, Huxtable points out that some of the animal’s markings are raised, laser-cut, vectorised vinyl stickers. It’s nearly impossible to see what is digital cursive and what was painted in situ: “I try to make work that, if I were on acid, I’d be lost in.”

Huxtable’s latest London show, Heads and Tails In The Struggle for Iconicity, is on view at Project Native Informant.

“The button press for these was gigantic.” Huxtable is talking about two oversized buttons on IGGY ANARCHY and SKINKISM which replace the heads of hybrid creatures. Leftist Punk aesthetics was something she explored back in 2019 in a show at Reena Spaulings. Infertility Industrial Complex: Snatch the Calf Back reckoned with the non-art function of sub-cultures and their fetishistic power through buttons, stickers and posters. “It’s very DIY; it is a little more unhinged.” Buttons are not aloof and immovable symbols of high art, which is why Huxtable uses them. “I love the history of band graphics, Punk aesthetics, rave flyers and how information is translated.” As Jeff Nuttall wrote on Punk buttons in Bomb Culture (1969): “They’re symmetrical, ritualistic, with a bizarre metallic brilliance and a high fetishistic power.” Punk subculture, a movement generally associated with chaos, is ultimately cohered as a meaningful whole in the uniformity of its graphics and typography. Huxtable favours these subcultural communication systems over traditional art historical references; “The regularity with which people mention Picasso or Matisse… I can’t believe they’re still meant to be the most relevant entry point into fine art.”

I look closely at the car bumper (Untitled, 2024) taken from a Bethnal Green MOT shop and covered with custom-made vinyl stickers that read things like “I brake 4 Tails” and “Potrusion – Orientated.” Huxtable describes her interest in over-signifying: “I love the bathroom stalls of nightclubs; they’re covered in stickers, places where people feel safe to express anything.” Destruction of aesthetic codes through layering underpins Huxtable’s practice: “I find comfort in the density, I have a fetish for it.” In these semi-public spaces, an individual is free to express anything – political messages, longing, meditations on nothing. Huxtable has an affection for both the aesthetic appearance of these spaces and their role as communal forums, as she writes in the foreword for the show:

“I have my distentions
am realer than real
unmovable writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.”

Huxtable's show highlights the specificity of forms created through digital processes.

The artist is also a writer, DJ, musician and performer.

Furries, or Therians, a community of people who adopt animal personas, played a big part in Heads and Tails. Huxtable explains that her relationship with Furry culture is not exploitative: “There is a fully self-aware art community coming from the Furry context.” Pointing at the arachnid body in ATHRO ANARCHY from which a self-portrait emerges, she tells me how important it was to render the spider’s textured body correctly, not wanting to neglect the standards of anatomical zoomorphic accuracy found in the work of Furry illustrators on DeviantArt.

As a community, Furries are interested in the intersection between animism, identity and play. “There is this Twitter thread where a Furry news and culture aggregate discovered my Reena show and started discussing whether this was appropriation,” says Huxtable, who has her own fursona (a name and series of characteristics with distinctive body markings; artists will typically be commissioned to produce renditions of fursonas) but is not yet attending Furry conferences, although she has been asked to perform at one. Her interest in non-human eroticism is rooted in play, seeing a fursona as a more honest way of creating sexual images of herself compared to the standards of mainstream pornography. “I think the feminists were onto something in terms of their critiques of pornographic representation.” In recent work, she’s depicted arachnid and reptilian creatures like skinks and iguanas in sexual poses, telling me, “I want to get to single-cell organisms eventually.”

Huxtable’s previous shows have explored sub-cultures and their fetishistic power through buttons, stickers and posters.

The regularity with which people mention Picasso or Matisse… I can’t believe they’re still meant to be the most relevant entry point into fine art.
— Juliana Huxtable

Anime aesthetics, and cartoons in general, have previously been adopted in contemporary art trends. They’re a subsect of what Clement Greenberg would term “kitsch.” For Huxtable, they tend to be used as a motif rather than something that is critically unpacked. “People are kind of incurious, but there’s so much to unpack in anime: cinematography, animation, orientalism, questions of psychoanalysis and cartoon representation.” Little critical theory exists on Furry culture, even in left-field academic communities. But, Huxtable explains, fursonas could be considered a portal into more subversive thinking about identity. “Trans studies are now moving into inter-species discussions.”

I’m not surprised when Huxtable tells me she participated in an intense form of debating in high school. It’s the kind of debate Ben Lerner speaks about in his book The Topeka School, in which high school kids are required to read college-level essays and then parrot the arguments in debate with their peers.

This gives an insight into how Huxtable expertly layers her works with an abundance of cultural symbolism and signifiers – her points of reference are unexpected and not fixed within the canon. Viewers are asked to look very closely, then look again, to uncover her meaning.

Juliana Huxtable, IGGY ANARCHY, 2024, acrylic, button and vinyl stickers on printed canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London

Bride of Lucifer, Satanic Feminism in Cinema Before Nosferatu (2024)

It’s Halloween; what better time to reflect on all of the sexy, bloody, vengeful women that Lucifer has successfully lured into…Feminism?

This December, Robert Egger’s remake of the canonical German Expressionist silent film by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922), is set to hit the big screen. Below, Lydia Eliza Trail guides us through a brief history of cult classics engaging with ideas of Satanic Feminism as we look forward to its release.

Film still from Bram Stoker’s Dracula

In the trailer for Nosferatu (2024), Lily Rose-Depp clings to her husband’s knees and looks up, delivering a line of ultimate cuckoldery: “For you could never please me as he could”. She looks perversely happy, eyes filled with mania. She speaks of Satan. Roger Egger’s remake of the canonical German Expressionist silent film by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922) – dubbed “The Original Vampire Film”- will premiere in December 2024. This isn’t the first time Satan has tempted a woman on screen; the 20th century has a long list of films depicting the vampire, or satan, as a liberator of women.

Eggers and Murnau before him pay homage to Bram Stoker’s epic tale of transgression and desire, Dracula (1897). Stoker’s masterpiece is a story of Victorian anxieties surrounding morality thinly disguised as a high gothic Romance. As scholar Carol A. Senf writes, Bram Stoker undermines “accepted cultural beliefs about the role women should play within society.”

Despite Stoker’s intentions, the novel has come to be celebrated in popular culture as a story of anti-Christian and anti-conservative motifs. The protagonist’s name, “Dracula,” is a diminutive form of the Romanian word for devil. Dracula’s prey, Mina Harker (in Nosferatu, Ellen Hutter), has a relationship with the count fuelled by desire that is often seen as liberating from the shackles of domesticity. To some, Dracula is the antihero of Satanic Feminism. He is Lucifer, a liberator of women.

The idea of Woman as particularly receptive to Satan’s temptation, the female body as a conduit for sin, originated in Genesis’s tale of the fall. In the 19th century, Eve’s temptation was reclaimed by gothic literature. Before Dracula, there was Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), in which a lesbian Vampire infiltrates the household of a noble family, threatening to seduce their innocent daughter. Like Dracula, Carmilla has a solid aversion to Christianity and a palpable aura of libidinality, as seen in the film adaptation, The Vampire Lovers (1970). In art, Satan’s relationship to female liberation and eroticism is seen in Felician Rop’s Les Sataniques (c.1880), where women connive in sabbaths, erotic orgies and witchcraft. In a more comic note Francisco Solano Lopez’s erotic comic series Young Witches (1993) depicts a witches sadistic boarding school. In surrealist artist Leonor Fini’s career, she combated the male surrealist trope of the femme infant. Fini loved to draw young witches learning to fly. For the inaugural issue of the feminist journal Sorcières: Les femmes vivant (1975), founded and edited by feminist critic and theorist Xavière Gauthier, Fini draws a female figure riding a broomstick with exposed breasts.

In the 21st century, the rise of the anti-hero, the rebel and the freak goes hand in hand with Vampirism. With the release of Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight (2005), the desire for the undead outsider became a topic of national fascination. Meyer’s protagonist, Bella, is less of a satanic feminist and more of a neo-conservatist vampire girlfriend. However, with Twilight came a trend in popular culture toward High gothic romance. In cinema, works like The Crow (2024), cast announcements for Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights and Robert Pattinson’s role as a brooding, emo anti-hero in The Batman (2022) signal a renewed interest in the subversive power of the Gothic. Robert Eggers has previously had satanic heroines in The Witch (2015). Before Eggers, there was a host of cinema devoted to the topic of women’s relationship to the devil and temptation: Satanic Feminist cinema.

Below is a survey of films that engage with ideas of Satanic Feminism, emerging from Stoker’s original Dracula. Their heroines are Luciferian freethinkers, as in Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971). Some are vampires themselves, in the Iranian Feminist vampire tale A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Or pregnant with Satan’s offspring, as depicted in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Women who collude with Dracula are portrayed as everything the dutiful housewife should not be, like Lucy in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) or Jennifer in Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009). Some of these films present the satanic feminine in the form of the witch, or Satan’s concubine, as the anti-mother or devourer of children, see The Witch (2015), The Love Witch (2015) and Black Sunday (1960). Finally, perhaps the ultimate satanic feminist masterpiece, Isabella Adjani in Possession (1981). These films call into question the role of the devil in female liberation; as Marguerite Duras says, “Reverse everything. Make women the point of departure in Judging, make darkness the point of departure in judging what men call light.”

When I ask the admin of @joan.of.arca about our generation's pre-occupation with her account’s namesake, she explains, “I think she's the perfect subject for these ‘online girl’ memes…she exists in our collective imagination, she is the quintessential relatable, toxic, sad-girl heroine. She’s trad-cath, she’s androgynous, she’s nineteen and she feels things more deeply than everyone else” (inquiring with @joan.of.arca about the choice of username, they replied that she “was super into the musician Arca at the time” and that the username had little to do with the actual saint but that she sometimes wanted close her eyes and channel her spirit).

Contrasting the introspective outlook of the sad-girl’s ideation of Joan, the saint did die for a cause outside of herself. Despite the largely secular fantasies in which she appears - on screens large and small - she remains a figure of action rather than complacency. Compared to the lackadaisical heroine of Ottessa Moshfegi’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she is a heroine with a capital H. As Marina Warner describes in Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) “She is a heroine of history”. The constant flux of Joan’s identity says more about our own self-mythologising tendencies than it does anything truthful about her short, tragic life. She is a blank slate onto which thousands of young woman may project their romantic vision of themselves, noble in their misery, (metaphorically) dying for a cause.

Film still from Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Directed by Roman Polanski

Based on the novel of the same name, published in 1967 by American writer Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby tells the story of a young pregnant mother who is plotted against by her elderly neighbours and husband. The story deals with themes of the occult, satanism, and witchcraft. Rosemary is raped in the night by a demonic presence summoned by the coven her husband and neighbours belong to – she eventually gives birth to the antichrist. It’s intense.

Film still from The Vampire Lovers (1970)

The Vampire Lovers (1970) Directed by Roy Ward Baker

The Vampire Lovers is a 1970 British Gothic horror film with all the camp trimmings, including blow-outs and billowing nightgowns. It is based on Sheridan Le Fanu’s novel Carmilla. Props to the costume designer for making a series of incredibly raunchy regency dresses.

Film still from Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979)

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) Directed by Werner Herzog

Isabelle Adjani features twice on this list, and for good reason. I’m not sure if Lily Rose-Depp can top her combination of highly feminine fragility and mania. F.W Murnau’s 1922 film inspired Werner Herzog’s gothic horror masterpiece. Gothicism is nothing without Herzog’s count, who has become the most iconic portrayal of Nosferatu.

Film still from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

This film is darkly comic. In the Iranian ghost-down “Bad City,” the girl (Sheila Vand) appears as a nearly immobile silhouette. She stalks men and bears her fangs. She is able to walk alone at night freely. Her first words to a boy with a skateboard are, “Are you a good boy?”. Perhaps the only convincing depiction of a contemporary female vampire, albeit one heavily influenced by Jim Jarmusch.

Film still from Possession, 1981

Possession, (1981) Directed by Andrzej Żuławski

Isabelle Adjani, queen of 80s psychological horror. She is the lover of a strange tentacled creature. As is common in Satanic Feminist films, the male protagonist is presented as a kind of insipid cuckold unable to satisfy his wife in the face of otherworldly presence.

Film still from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The costume designer for this film, Eiko Ishioka, was awarded the Oscar for Best Costume Design – and for good reason. Count Vlad’s armour in a flashback scene is a bloody sculpture; he’s a flayed man whose insides have been turned to armature in a reference to St. Bartholomew, who was martyred by being flayed.

One of many scenes of genius occurs when Keanu Reeves succumbes to Dracula’s three brides. Satan was often portrayed as a highly sexual creature in Christian mythology; potent sexuality is also, therefore, a characteristic of Satanic Feminism. In Coppola’s film, Dracula’s brides tempt Jonathan Harker in a decadent erotic display.

In the Bible, man’s fall occurs in the Garden of Eden. Scenes of temptation in art history and film are commonly depicted in a walled garden. In the movie Dracula (1992), there is a scene of lesbian fervour during a thunderstorm in the castle’s garden between Mina (Winona Ryder) and Lucy (Sadie Frost). If there is one thing that reminds me of Satanic Feminism, it is two women kissing in a walled garden of a vampire castle.

Film still from Jennifer’s Body, 2009

Jennifer’s Body (2009) Directed by Karyn Kusama

It is the story of a young girl who is mistakenly taken for a virgin and sacrificed by a struggling indie-rock band to Satan. It is a plot that, in 2024, feels increasingly plausible, except the indie-rock band would be slowcore. Jennifer, played by Megan Fox, is a succubus, a female demon or supernatural entity that seduces men in the Mid-west town of Devil’s Kettle. In more ways than one, iconic. It also includes a lesbian scene between Needy (Jennifer Seyfried) and Megan that parallels that between Mina and Lucy in Coppola’s film. Must-read is *Pieces of Jennifer’s Body: Theatrical and Mainstream Horror of the 21st Century* in Heidi Honeycutt’s book, *I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies* (Headpress, 2024).

Film still from Black Sunday, 1960

Black Sunday (1960) Directed by Mario Bava

Black Sunday is a gothic horror film starring Barbara Steele. It is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s short story *Viy* (1835). Steele plays the protagonist, Asa, accused of sorcery in 1630s Moldavia and sentenced to death. Two centuries later, she returns to possess the body of her look-alike descendant, Katia—props to the mid-century special effects and 1960s medievalism.

Film still from Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, 1971

Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971) Directed by Joël Séria

Two adolescent French girls at a Catholic boarding school, both from affluent, conservative families, are left in a chateau to wreak havoc. Torturing men, seeking vengeance, engaging in black mass, reading Charles Baudelaire’s *Les Fleur Du Mals* – It’s a tale of a misspent girlhood with Satan. Perfect.

Film still from The Witch, 2015

The Witch (2015) Directed by Robert Eggers

Calvinism, that ultra-repressed subsect of Protestantism, forms the perfect candidate for corruption. Based on the witch trials of Connecticut in the 1660s, this is a story of possession and fear. This film is a favourite due to the masterful way Eggers contrasts Thomasin’s purity with the satanic forces around her. Don’t be fooled by appearances.

Film still from The Love Witch, 2016

The Love Witch (2016) Directed by Anna Biller

A fairly light-hearted film compared to the rest of this list, Anna Biller’s *The Love Witch* finds a young witch setting up in an occult-friendly town in California. It’s a pastiche of low-budget horror films of the 1970s, like *The Vampire Lovers* (1970). Imagine a world in which witches could practice freely; hardly any of these films would exist.

If You Saw Me at Frieze Yesterday, No, You Didn’t!

Frieze is well underway. If you weren’t lucky enough to be there on day one, that’s ok. Lydia Eliza Trail’s diary will take you through the day from a balanced breakfast to a raucous after party.

8 am

I actually wake up at around 8:30. I pretend to read my copy of Walter Benjamin’s “Illuminations” before closing my eyes and manifesting for the day ahead. Next, I go to look in the mirror and say, “It’s Frieze time, it’s go time,” three times. If I could be an emoji, it would be:

9.30 am

Porridge for breakfast with some flax seeds I found in the cupboard, which makes me feel like a lifestyle nutritionist. I’m freaking out about what to wear, so I’ve asked my mum if I should go for a more demure-artsy-professional vibe or an edgy-artsy-non-professional vibe. She says just not to look too slutty. In the end, Lucila Safdie lent me a jacket, and I didn’t need to think too hard about anything. I was free to “focus on the art.”

Image author’s own

Listening to “Naked in Manhattan” on the Piccadilly line, I’m anticipatory. In my limited experience, I have found that at Frieze, people will say two things to you:

“I’m anxious.”

Or

“It’s really f*cking hot in this tent.”

Sometimes, people will tell you about what art they’ve seen. As I found this year at Frieze VIP, they will say where they last saw FKA twigs. “She’s by Rose Easton!” or “She’s next to the group of inflatable penguins swaying gently in the wind!” It’s akin to PokemonGo – but with celebrities.

11.30ish

Walking up to the park is best because you start differentiating Frieze London goers from people with places to be at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday. I nearly get run over trying to cross the road to Regent’s Park, where I see The Art Newspaper is getting people to stand and flog their merch (issues). Print isn’t dead!

My slot isn’t until 2 p.m., so I am milling around outside, filming content for the magazine before going in. It’s a peculiar concept: a vast tent containing hundreds of people and priceless art. In my mind palace, Frieze London is like the contemporary art boot camp that lays the foundation for the breathtaking opulence of Frieze Masters. Think this tent’s art, luxury, and palpable wealth are amazing? Wait till you see the other.

The other thing I noticed before going in was how many hats people wore. There must be some unwritten Frieze small-print rule where, if you are a successful, aloof art person over the age of 35, you HAVE to have a wide-brimmed hat. You’re not allowed to buy art if you don’t have a hat.

2 pm

Hatless but not without a sense of determination, I am standing before the gates to another realm (Frieze). A person wearing a floor-length neon-green cape enters before me, contributing to the overall air of irreality.

Of course, I beeline for Frieze Focus. London’s young gallery scene, of which you have to have an esoteric name to be a member, is killing it at Frieze this year. All credits to Stone Island for providing a 30% bonus from the Frieze Fee to these galleries. It’s also worth mentioning that each year the brand collaborates with an artist from the focus section, and this year, Nat Faulkner from Brunette Coleman designed the staff t-shirts at the fair.

Rose Easton presents in an overwhelmingly chic (David Lynch-esque) setting with new works by Eva Gold. She killed two birds with this booth by being both glamorous and comfortable. Somewhere in the ether there is a Getty image of Benedict Cumberbatch on said sofa.

Obviously, Michael Werner’s booth is spectacular. Highlights include two works by Raphaela Simon, Anpassung (Adjustment) and Brand (Fire), both from 2022. Nina Davies (@influential_bro) at Seventeen Gallery is also a force to be reckoned with. Her installation Error Gap includes a tracking unit, smartphone, video element, and wax cast. It’s one of those works that will make people go, “Is this art?” and for that reason, it’s really good. Also, I’m super in favor of social media allusions in installation work. It’s our everyday; why ignore it?

After this, I also saw several people not wearing shoes, which was very free-love and very hippy-ish. I presume these people were from Deutsche Bank.

Image author’s own

Image author’s own

2.30 pm

I’m at the Jikoni lunch hosted by Jefferson Hack and Eva Langret to celebrate London’s best and brightest. There are some seriously titanic figures in attendance: Bianca Jagger, Wolfgang Tillmans, Ekow Eshun, Afua Hirsch, Harris Reed, Honey Dijon, Yinka Shonibare, and Julian Knxx, to name a few.

Bianca Jagger, Yinka Shonibare and Pam Hogg. Image Courtesy: Dave Benett, Getty Images

Harris Reed. Image Courtesy: Dave Benett, Getty Images

It was a well-curated mix of young artists, dazzling creatives, industry titans, and musicians. A beautiful representation of our city. And definitely the largest number of famous people that I’ve ever seen in that amount of square feet (two tube elevators, roughly).

I also walked into the back of Dean Kissick and forgot to say sorry. Seeing Konrad Kay and Mickey Down (writers of Industry) was also a major highlight. I wanted to ask them if they like the descriptor “Tory skins” for their show and if they know anything about stocks.

James Massiah and Ekow Eshun. Image Courtesy: Dave Benett, Getty Images

I am losing my VIP lunch virginity. Lawrence Lek, Lionheart, Lady Shaka, Laurie Barron Van Jenken, and I are hiding at the back. Whenever anyone comes up, they say, “I’m here to hide,” and we say, “yes, the back is safe.” A surreal Getty image photo has been taken; see below.

Jenkin Van Zyl, Lydia Eliza Trail, and Laurie Barron. Image Courtesy: Dave Benett, Getty Images

3.45 pm

Next, Ginny on Frederick – Charlotte Edey is just so magical. Something about artists using domestic interiors just really rubs me the right way. Ask me about it anytime. Don’t even get me started on frames – there are just not enough of them! So thank you, Charlotte, for bringing back frames.

On my way to the smoking area – the best section (less hot) – my friend Theo sends me this photo*. This man’s vibe is probably a pretty accurate portrayal of your average Frieze-goer. It’s either this guy or full-body paint and Rick Owens’ geobaskets. He also looks like a Charles Ray sculpture.

People get kind of frenzied around Gail’s, so I keep a wide berth and head straight to the Illy coffee stand. I meet Belinda, the nutritionist, who has only worn white for the past five years. She doesn’t give her number away, but she makes sure I leave with a coffee and her driver’s number, whom I am to contact if I need nutritional advice.

5 pm

I’m leaving because it’s SO HOT, and I can’t feel my feet. I don’t wear anything below three inches, which means if I smile at you, I am smiling through the pain. I have seen a Jordan Wolfson piece that made me feel provoked (which I am sure was the intention); Juliana Huxtable’s zoomorphic prints at Project Native Informant, and finally, a soft sculpture by Sarah Lucas wearing pleasers. The way she’s draped over that chair is so beautiful, so sad. I’d like to get drunk with her.

7 pm

Elephant party at the Edition. I change outfits. I have consumed:

• a pint of Asahi
• a frube-like hangover-preventing substance that my friend bought me from Korea (thanks Kimi)
• some popcorn
• a spicy margarita

Author and Callum Hansen at Elephant Magazine drinks at The Edition. Photography by Saffron Liberty.

8.30 pm

At the Stone Island dinner, we listened to a beautiful speech about Frieze Focus delivered by the seminal Eva Langret and another speech about “Stoney” culture, which made me laugh. In my head, Stone Island is fondly remembered from when boys at my school would buy the patches for 50 quid. Stone Island’s support means that emerging artists can show their work next to the most established galleries in the world. It’s a special collaboration that makes me think that the boys I grew up with were onto something with their unrelenting obsession with the brand.

The lobster soup was delicious, but I was too nervous to eat it, so I spoke to Ewan Spencer about Skins instead. Did you know it was not filmed in Bristol, but in Watford?

10 pm

Ginny-Rose-something party queue. It’s so tense in the queue, and the air is electric. Mayfair says you can’t have more than 200 people in a room, so we are getting let in individually. This isn’t even the main queue; it’s the inside queue. Who would win in a fight: a seriously overwhelmed PR girl or a gallerina denied entry? My money is on the gallerina; I hear they fight dirty.

11-12.30 am

Inside, as expected, there is a smoking area, bar, and dancefloor (no one is dancing), and this weird metal cage we found outside is just a tray loader. Art people are the best kind of people when they’re drunk, and boy, were they drunk!

12.30 am

Slow-moving, bruised. I recall having a cigarette and talking about journalism loudly. I had a moment of respite in the loo where I stared at a wall and thought about how provoked I was by that Jordan Wolfson sculpture.

1 am

Frieze is over. It’s the end. I am going home. As I get an Uber home, I tell the driver my take-home for the day over the sound of Magic FM. “Maybe Frieze isn’t about networking, art, or getting Gail’s,” I say. “Maybe, maybe, it’s about the friends we made along the way.”

Words by Lydia Eliza Trail

A New Semiotics of Color: Coumba Samba at Arcadia Missa

Writer Lydia Eliza Trail writes of the role of color and the socio-political implications of ‘gas’ in Coumba Samba’s Red Gas, on view at Arcadia Missa.

Coumba Samba. Radiator, 2024. Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

The combination of wall-mounted radiators and landlord-style blue carpet at Coumba Samba’s Red Gas, on show at Arcadia Missa until October 25th, is Unheimlich. The atmosphere is one of beige familiarity. Nine works from the series Radiators (2024) line the walls in baby blue, bright red, sand, light pink, and navy. The carpet, reminiscent of spaces ranging from school hallways to doctors' waiting rooms, recalls impersonality. It has the off-putting spatial lure of a theatre set.

Coumba Samba. Radiator, 2024. Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

Over an email exchange, Samba explained to me how the mundane appearance of the radiators was purposeful: “I found some designy ones that screamed art object, but they wouldn’t have worked.” Focusing on the politics of design in all eight pieces, sourced from Gumtree and eBay, Samba picked those that were most commonly for sale. She employs ephemera that one could quickly identify with the internet’s grainy, poorly cropped, poor image, “a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances” (Hito Steyerl, 2009). Our visual association is not Duchamp’s Object D’art; it is simply the debasing “Column Radiator” listing on Gumtree: “Brand new column radiator 1600 x 544, with brackets and fixing. Purchased in Error.”

As you walk the upstairs room of Arcadia Missa, you’re provided with a bright red A6 pamphlet containing Mischa Lustin’s essay detailing the interwoven history of West Africa, Russia, and the West. Sanctions on Russian gas exports have existed since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but the West still buys through legislative loopholes (Lustin, 2024). At the same time, both superpowers scramble to mine untapped gas reserves in Western Africa. The legacy of colonialism in Africa, which Walter Rodney identified in his seminal text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), underlines the context of Russia’s anti-colonial (and anti-capitalist) stance in Africa. Through these layers of political negotiation, “the worst of capitalist reality” is exposed, and gas is sought.

Coumba Samba. Radiator, 2024. Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

It’s just gas, but it’s never just gas. Lustin writes, “The history of transnationalism is about flows, ideas, and influence, but also gas.” Samba emphasizes radiators’ objecthood because she wants us to focus on their functionality as vessels for gaseous currency. Samba engineers a “theatrical encounter” with the body turned monstrous; the radiator, our heat sources, and our domestic familiarity are perverted into weird diplomatic sentinels. The issue of colonial capitalism, which, to those in the West, is often dismissed in the face of domestic issues, has become embodied. It is not via literal anthropomorphism but in what Michael Fried identified while discussing late modernism: the looming presence of objects (Art and Objecthood, 1967). Radiators appear as actors on a stage. Our heaters are the by-product of international relationships dating back decades – their objecthood dictated by dodgy politics and imperial logic.

Samba’s process applies memory into the built environment through color. Abstracting a singular image through color-picking is a method that generates a novel relationship between object – viewer – source. This strategy was used in World as a diagram, Work as a dance, a show held at Emalin Gallery in 2023. For Stripe Blinds (2023), the colors of the wooden slats are picked from a 2005 image of the artist’s sister. Hues of the images are sampled and abstracted, and a source-specific semiotic of colour is developed. “I see colour as a material for all works I create. It has its language with the viewer,” writes Samba. For a generation spent observing the world through a screen of imagery sifted for minutiae – what does it mean to give block color so much power?

Coumba Samba. Radiator, 2024. Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

In Red Gas, the source material is again a singular image: Vladimir Putin and former president of Senegal Macky Sall (2023). Samba tells me that the blue carpet in the gallery matches that in the conference hall. Her choice of imagery in both World as a diagram, Work as dance, and Red Gas at Emalin is novel for its lack of aesthetic. One exists in an intensely private realm (a photo of the artist’s sister from a brief modeling stint) and the other a highly public one (president of Russia’s official website). Both avoid the middling sphere of “core” related imagery now rampant in the post-Tumblr vacuum of social media. Now that aesthetic categorisation dictates our consumption of online images; they are created and circulated with the pure purpose of referentiality. Once circulated, they are abstracted from their source to become an entangled footnote within capitalist self-identification or “cores.” In more unfortunate instances, this referential imagery has generated a genre of contemporary art entirely lost to a meaningless core-core. It is refreshing to see a reference that is not solely about references, as it allows for the essential political impetus of Samba’s work to stand on its own.

Meeting with President of Senegal Macky Sall, 2023, by Artem Geodakyan.

Samba’s ‘colour picking’ is not unlike the Instagram tool you use so that your text’s chromatics closely align with the image upon which it sits. An arrangement between text and image parallels the huge “Russia – Africa” text across the conference hall at the Russia-Africa Summit, colour-matching the corporate background. Block colours and modern art have a longstanding love affair. Russian constructivism, led by Rodchenko, influenced the modernists of the West. The Russian Avant-garde favoured minimalist art as a conduit for Russian Socialism; the object would be treated as a whole – “of no discernable style” (Constructivist Manifesto, 1920). These principles formed the visual language of anti-colonial propaganda produced by Russia during the Cold War. Nationalistic colour schemes were a vital part of the propaganda levied at Africa as part of forging a new Russian-African agreement that bypassed the West, as seen in images from the Wayland Rudd Archive.

For the solidarity of women of the world Poster, 1973, Courtesy of the Wayland Rudd Archive.

The joy of color picking is that it obfuscates the relationship between source and image. Samba has previously spoken of her interest in the politics of national flags, describing her 2024 show This is Money at Drei Gallery as “a study of flags, of colonialism, of color.” Modern history saw block color emerging with socialism. As criticism progressed, color became more of a hindrance to form than a dynamic component; as stated in the press release, “minimalism and the history of modern art, in general, lends from the rest and reduces it to whiteness.” Samba asks how color can be transfigured into a vessel for memory, marrying the personal with the political through domestic objects and image-to-color abstractions. I ask Samba if Red Gas is resistant to classifications of minimalism: “Definitely not, but also yes.”

Nina Vatolina, Poster, 1962, Courtesy of the Wayland Rudd Archive.

Joan of Arc: The Patron Saint of Gen Z

A teenage girl in boys' clothing; a fifteenth-century Christian martyr; Zendaya wearing Versace chain-mail at the 2018 Met Gala. An androgynous icon: Chloe Sevigny holding a Walkman on your teenage Tumblr feed, or Fiona Apple photographed by Mcnally. In 1999, she was Milla Jovovich with a fuck-ass bob and ruddy cheeks. Videos discussing her life under the hashtags “history” and “mental health” appear on TikTok. Sad girls cry while thinking about her death. Now Baz Lurhmann has announced he’s set to direct a biopic of her life, and her status as the romantic heroine of popular culture is set in stone. Resplendent in armour, wielding the sword of mutability, Joan of Arc is the patron saint of Generation - Z.

Morbidity, so often dismissed as the domain of the gothic, is at the forefront of our celebrity culture. We are obsessed with the young martyr. As Charlie Fox describes in This Young Monster, celebrities must “live fast, die young, and make a pretty corpse” to achieve immortality. Born during the hundred years' war between England and France, at thirteen, Joan of Arc began to have visions. These were interpreted as a sign from god (to quote Cecilia Lisbon: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl”). At seventeen, Joan was leading the siege of Orléans in the name of King Charles VII of France. Her contemporaries viewed her as a witch, a female prophet, a heretic, their virginal saviour. In an era where the closest thing to recognising the torment of a teenage girl was child marriage, Joan’s crusade infamously met with a violent end. In 1431, the saint was burnt at the stake for heresy. Like the Lisbon sisters, she is forever young.

On TikTok, almost-cringe testaments to the saints' purity dominate my for-you page. In one video, E-girls on Instagram wearing chain-mail costumes are contrasted with images made by nineteenth-century male pre-raphaelite painters. “Jeanne does not belong to you,” it reads. I flick to the comments below.

Anonymous user: “Idk who Joan Of Arc is, but it hurts to see people aren’t respecting her or her religion”.

@royalhistory, the video creator, responds: “She was burnt at the stake [sad face emoji]” The costumes are “sexualising a child martyr and a saint”.

Joan of Arc has become an icon to the online generation without anyone knowing who she really is. As the IT-girl costume of recent Halloween, most people understood her suit of armour through the signifiers of other interpretations presented by “Joan of Arc” Pinterest pages. As we re-assimilate the saint into a context that makes sense to us, we can ask, what makes a 21st-century saint?

Joan’s real appearance is unknown. We project our vision onto her. Vita Sackville-West initiated the formation of Joan as a feminist icon in her biography Saint Joan of Arc (1936). A “girl boy-captain” wearing the armour of a man, Joan used gender ambiguity to infiltrate a patriarchal society. Despite more traditional depictions of the saint with long flowing red hair, she was almost totally de-feminized in her disguise. Some academics have labelled her as the patron saint of gender dysphoria. Re-entering the canon of queer history in 2024, Joan of Arc is the chosen costume for singer Chapelle Roan at the VMA’s. A pop-artist saviour for our century - Roan enters the stage in a full suit of metal armour, carrying a crossbow. Roan turns her back to the audience and shoots a flaming arrow behind her, setting fire to a camp replication of a medieval castle. Flames of martyrdom are transformed into the tortuous pangs of unrequited love. The sapphic ballad “Good Luck Babe!” plays, and once again, Joan catapults into the popular imagination.

Joan of Arc has become, unwittingly, the patron saint of Generation zoomer. A historical symbol of ultra-traditional catholic belief and a cross-dressing peasant: she’s complicated. Her current cultural status is a result of this dichotonous identity. Take the Joan meme format. It’s an image of Joan, usually the 1903 engraving by Albert Lynch, with white text formatted over that reads “how it feels to be a girl”. Bigmouth Strikes Again plays over the image. In the cult of the Sad Girl, as Rayne-Fisher Quinn states. Women who construct their identities “through an artfully curated list of things they consume”. It appears that historical figures have entered the identity consumption list under the service economy. She was a misunderstood medieval heroine who died for her fifteenth-century subculture. Joan’s overriding identifiable features; her girlhood, her potency for hearing voices, the fact she's misunderstood, tend to stand above of association as a symbol of French reactionary nationalism.

When I ask the admin of @joan.of.arca about our generation's pre-occupation with her account’s namesake, she explains, “I think she's the perfect subject for these ‘online girl’ memes…she exists in our collective imagination, she is the quintessential relatable, toxic, sad-girl heroine. She’s trad-cath, she’s androgynous, she’s nineteen and she feels things more deeply than everyone else” (inquiring with @joan.of.arca about the choice of username, they replied that she “was super into the musician Arca at the time” and that the username had little to do with the actual saint but that she sometimes wanted close her eyes and channel her spirit).

Contrasting the introspective outlook of the sad-girl’s ideation of Joan, the saint did die for a cause outside of herself. Despite the largely secular fantasies in which she appears - on screens large and small - she remains a figure of action rather than complacency. Compared to the lackadaisical heroine of Ottessa Moshfegi’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she is a heroine with a capital H. As Marina Warner describes in Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) “She is a heroine of history”. The constant flux of Joan’s identity says more about our own self-mythologising tendencies than it does anything truthful about her short, tragic life. She is a blank slate onto which thousands of young woman may project their romantic vision of themselves, noble in their misery, (metaphorically) dying for a cause.

Review of Staub (Störung) with Maren Karlsson at Soft Opening

"it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections." Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p.1

Maren Karlson, 'Staub', 20 June - 3 August, 2024. Installation view at Soft Opening, London. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London. Photography Lewis Ronald

On a visit to Soft Opening, Antonia Marsh shows me one of four images cited as reference for the show Staub (Störung) featuring new works by German artist Maren Karlson. “The uranium falls onto the snow", Antonia tells me, “and someone writes out the word". The image is a document scan featuring a photograph and caption that reads “Staubbelastung im Erzegebirge" [dust pollution in the Erzebirge]. The word “Staub" is written into a substance coating a recent snowfall in the photograph. “Staub" in German means dust. It’s curiously literal, transcribing a noun into the matter it describes.

Staub (Störung) shows Karlson's paintings from photographs of Kombinat VEB chemische Weke Buna, a chemical factory in Schkopau, East Germany. At Soft Opening, which, incidentally, was a factory before it was a white cube space, Karlson transforms these remnants of Soviet-backed industry into a series of nine canvas works and seven drawings. The photographs are banal and obsolete; intended only as documents of the factory's decay, their beauty seen only by a subjective viewer (bringing to mind Andre Breton’s found objects - picked up at the Puces de Saint Ouen flea market in Paris - which are equally banal and revered). Karlsen’s method is a world-building exercise akin to the surrealist tenet of recombining and presenting the facile in sublime ways.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London.

Visually, Karlson’s work merges traditional abstraction with science fiction realism. Lee Lozano’s brash animism meets HR Giger’s sensual perversion. One of the prime features of Karlson’s method is taking the functional - knob, screw, hinge - and abstracting it to be just recognisable. She doesn’t do away with the veristic. Mechanical digits are animated into fetus-like substances which gestate in a large fleshy expanse of beige, grey, and earth tones. Metal fragments appear like teratomas, immature human tissue, on Karlson’s canvases. I find these moments in which the mechanic is anthropomorphised surprisingly touching.

Staub (Störung)’s press release paints the artist, quite obtusely, as a radical political agent. Karlson takes what Mark Fisher labels “the disintegration of existing socialities and territorialities" (ruined factories) and turns it into an alien future (post-industry and post-capital). In the painted work, Staub Störung 9, where industrial elements lifted from the photograph of Weke Buna are depicted in an ear-like curvature. Antonia directs me to the corner of the photograph the canvas depicts; it’s nondescript, as expected - Karlson prioritises “background noise" over more recognisable mechanical elements in the factory - but one can still make out the two shapes of Störung 9. Karlson captures the biomechanical merging of flesh and machine (comparisons to the work of Tristan Hsu, who showed in Hardcore (2023) at Sadie Coles, feel apt. Hsu’s silicone sculptures convey a sense of the human form gestating in an industrial, factory-made mould). Staub Storeng 9 resembles a xenomorph incubator from the Alien franchise as much as it does a hearing aid; as industry accelerates and old technology is left behind, the feeble human body meets the outdated machine. Karlson’s radicality lies most obviously in her celebration of the ruins as locations for new, re-calibrated forms.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London.

The sketches at the back of the soft opening gallery demonstrate the skill, craft and engineering involved in Karlson’s image manipulation and gestural science fiction. In Staub 4, Karlson takes an inkjet print - an enlarged section of one of the documents - and “affects structural logic" by connecting the worn-away segments of factory with a foreign ectoplasm rendered in graphite. It’s not a material native to the factory or even this world, but a third, more fictional substance that, I infer, is its own independent, organic lifeform. At first glance, the works at Soft Opening are a simple exercise in abstraction. Unlike Lozano, Karlson does not use pop-referentiality to refute any mainstream trend—yet—her process is not merely abstracting. Content is digested, reprogrammed, and gestated. A science-fictional method of formal dissection brings Maren Karlson’s work into dialogue with ideas of the Anthropocene and the longing to integrate human and non-human matter. In the last drawing of the show, the word “Staub" (dust) is overlaid across a vast Piranesian chamber, an ominous prophecy of imminent (human) disintegration.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London.

Karlson doesn’t appear as a satirical painter. Her works don’t embody any kind of pop-referentiality, and her style does not seem to refute any mainstay trend. It appears to be a refreshingly complex form of abstraction that complicates and engages with the value of representation. A science-fictional method of formal dissection brings Maren Karlson’s work into dialogue with ideas of the Anthropocene and the longing to integrate human and non-human matter. In the last drawing of the show, the word “Staub" (dust) is overlaid across a vast Piranesian chamber, an ominous prophecy of imminent (human) disintegration.

Roe Ethridge on the beauty and perversity of Americana

Ahead of new shows in Gstaad and London, Roe Ethridge discusses the American psyche, memory and Freudian twists.

Who is that girl? A face appears repeatedly in Roe Ethridge’s photographs. The woman is youthful and expressive, striking without eccentricity. The sort of girl that Jeffrey Eugenides might have immortalised in fiction. Her name is Louise Parker, and she embodies the kind of beauty you’d see over a picket fence, through a bedroom window, or in a yearbook photo pinned to the fridge.

Parker first met Ethridge on a shoot for Double Magazine in 2010, and the two have been friends and collaborators for the past decade and a half. In her face, Roe saw the revival of the suburban American environment he grew up in. This nebulous, subjective description of American life is essential to Ethridge’s work. ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’, a survey show spread across Gagosian’s locations in Gstaad and London, archives both the beauty and perversity of Americana.

Parker was a street cast. She hadn’t modelled before, but – Ethridge calls me from his home in Far Rockaway, New York – she knew exactly who he was: “It became this kind of immediate, collaborative process…she knew what was cooking". Parker was studying at Bard College under veteran American photographer Stephen Shore at the time, “she knew a lot," says Ethridge. This was not your traditional photographer-muse relationship. Louise knew what Ethridge was trying to achieve from the get-go; she identified him with what was starting to be labelled “the new school of synthetic photography" in the late 2010s.

“It’s intended to be modular," Ethridge tells me of his exhibition, “especially the commercial works". In London, Duck for Burberry (2023) and Candy and Comme des Garçons (2024) could easily be replaced for another of Ethridge’s sleek promotional pieces (he’s previously shot for Chanel, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton). The exhibition is an interplay of genres: brand photography, editorial campaigns and documentary images. ‘Happy Birthday, Louise Parker’ blurs the line between right and wrong, documentary and constructed, subject and object. In Ethridge’s hands, photography is several degrees separated from the real.

Roe Ethridge, 'Louise on David's Refrigerator', 2012–20. © Roe Ethridge. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Roe Ethridge, 'Pic 'n Clip #3', 2017. © Roe Ethridge. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Roe Ethridge, 'Auggie with Racoon Tail', 2015. © Roe Ethridge. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Roe Ethridge, 'Lee Lou at Sunset Park Ferry Terminal', 2021. © Roe Ethridge. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Louise on David’s Refrigerator (2012-2020) is a pretty meta image. It’s an invitation poster for a show called ‘Le Luxe’ that Ethridge did for Goldmann-Sachs in 2010. It’s an image of Louise in a yellow bathing suit, which “got pretty dinged up, pinned to a refrigerator for ten years with a dragonfly clip". Roe describes that his friend David –“it doesn’t matter who David is" – sent him a photo of the photo. The image in ‘Happy Birthday Louise Parker II’ is a printout of the original file David sent. Ethridge could have shown the original print, but he chose the image in its domestic setting, marked by time, beaten up and part of what Ethridge calls “using the image as an object".

Ethridge’s penchant for meta-framing past works also has a technical aspect. His preferred printing method allows him to create “camera collages". For the past ten years or so, his process has been to print through a process of dye-sublimation. This involves printing not onto paper but onto coated aluminium. The product is a thin, rigid print that can be placed anywhere.

This method allows for images such as Louise with Still Life (2014), a photo of Parker against the background of the American flag, to act as a prop within a still life. The image sits atop a super-varnished light wood cabinet surrounded by a tacky Halloween skull, a plastic water bottle and a dated landline—remnants of domestic American life. At first glance, it looks like a portrait on a funeral casket, a vanitas image with a plastic memento mori. It’s not death that occupies the photo, it seems, but innocence lost to adolescence. Parker’s role in the still life is spectral, making clear what Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida: “The photograph always carries its referent with itself".

When asked about a closely cropped image of a car pulled from a river, Durango in a Canal, Belle Glade, FL (2011), the artist has a description ready: “The car is a soccer mom type car…it’s an ordinary American mom vehicle". The disrupted quotidian of a suburban car toed from murky water creates a new “genre" for the artist, akin to 70s film noir: “It’s an example of a juxtaposition that creates its own third sound", he says.

The strain to protect the ordinary is at the heart of American culture, immortalised in films like American Beauty (1999) and Election (1999). With its emphasis on food (orality) and the nuclear family (Freud), Ethridge’s work is a psychoanalyst’s wet dream. In fact, for American Polychronic, the first comprehensive catalogue of the artist’s work (Mack, 2022), the renowned analyst Jamieson Webster contributed an essay on desire, repulsion, hysteria and mysticism. Ethridge, too, discusses Americana in terms of the repressed: “The middle class in America are not boring. Everyone has complex stories. Americana was a way to use that feeling of being trapped in the suburbs as a teenager". He celebrates his influences, Alex Katz and Lee Friedlander, for the “ordinariness" of their subjects. The droll American character, think Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (1986), became an avatar for Ethridge. As an artist, Ethridge is refreshingly open to Freudian readings of his work; “As a subject matter, as a place to come back to, it’s not always Americana. It’s mom, you know, it’s your mother".

Read Me to Filth: Honor Levy

The author of My First Book on the tattoos she regrets, retelling Shakespeare for Gen Z, and how long it takes for a cultural event to become a bouncy house.

The opening page of My First Book (2024), the debut story collection by Honor Levy, reads, “Monkey covering eyes Emoji." We know this internet language, at once ironic and self-defacing, and it feels out of place in a hardcover book published by Penguin Press. Converting Twitter language into print has been done before (Man Hating Psycho [2021], by Iphgenia Baal), but this time, it’s by a “microcelebrity."

We’ve seen the forebears of My First Book in the generational autofiction of Chris Kraus or Natasha Stagg. But there is something slightly more licentious and even pathological about Levy’s writing. My First Book takes heavily medicated prose to a new, highly surreal level. In her use of internet signifiers and extended online metaphors, Levy documents Gen-Z’s hive mind in all its chaotic splendor – here is an author who can successfully pull off using “RAWR XD" mid-sentence while criticizing the logic of #MeToo. As with Donna Tart’s A Secret History (1992) or Elif Batuman’s Either/Or (2022), Levy’s writing contains copious, sometimes esoteric references. My First Book’s language of internet subcultures and memeology is both its selling point and, to members of the X literary community, its downfall.

Levy’s first-person narrative is punctuated by loose ends, internet conspiracies, and a general cacophony of Adderall-ridden voices, which, for better or worse, simulate in the reader a feeling of being truly “schizo." Her style originates from both a genuine desire for satire – as Levy asks, “wouldn’t it just be funny to write cultural criticism and personal essays that are just filled with lies about real culture and fake culture together" – and the writer's own, highly palpable paranoia.

Lydia Eliza Trail: Your writing style is infamously dichotomous for integrating brain-fried internet slang within extended prose. This combination has garnered you labels such as “The voice of Gen Z" as both an insult and as accolade.

Honor Levy: My friends and I used to joke about the voice of a generation. Is it picked during the generation? Is it after? Is it democratic? Is it the person who makes the most people angry? The person who most people of a generation relate to? The person who talks in slang in print? Or is it the person who is the most controversial?

Recently, a profile about me in The Cut went semi-viral and sparked a lot of online discourse. But basically, I have nothing interesting to say, like, on a meta-level, or even on a non-meta level anymore. I’m not being called “the voice of a Generation" by magazines who profile me. People are mad, so they’ll repeat it, like “voice of a generation," “Dimes square," “across state lines." It's a repeatable search engine optimization thing – but it’s also, like, the idea of a voice of A generation is funny, as Hannah Horvath [from the TV series Girls] said best.

LET: People read the Cut piece, and they were pissed. People didn’t even read the book, and they were pissed. There’s a sadomasochistic need for a scene to exist, so one can chastise oneself for not being a part of said scene, whilst simultaneously shitting on it.

HL: Yeah, I mean, stop defining yourself in opposition to something. But, that being said, if you want to be in Dimes Square, just join. They let literally anyone in down there.

Portrait of Honor Levy. Photo: Callum Hansen

LET: How do you get your notes down?

HL: Google Docs. Notes app. I have a Notes app tattoo I need to get removed. You know they really said stick AND poke when they gave me that. I got it in freshman year of college – I was in a room with some cool girls. “Yeah we are doing stick and pokes!" I thought, let me get something funny … It’s not a joke. Your body isn’t a joke.

LET: Let’s talk about My First Book. I want to ask you about “Love Story" – it’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet (1597) through the lens of a schizophrenic internet meme page. There is something about the anachronistic contrast between the medieval and the modern that is really beguiling; they are Eloise and Abelard, they are “Rawr XD, Stupid, emo, gay, Cringe."

HL: I feel that a short story is a great thing for 10th-grade literature students to analyze for the little references. My references in “Love Story" are mad intentional. The Eloise and Abelard thing, that’s actually from The Sopranos [1999–2007].

LET: The story “Internet Girl" describes an adolescence spent navigating the extreme, oft-disturbing forums of the internet. The tone is unserious, almost naive. There’s a quote, “all at once, there are two girls and one cup and two planes hitting towers," that I wanted to ask you about.

HL: I mean, do you remember the first time you heard of 9/11?

LET: I don’t think I heard about it until I was ten, in 2011, when The New York Times published its ten-year anniversary cover, and the images showed people who had jumped out of the buildings right before they hit the ground. It was grotesque.

HL: The first time I learned about it, I remember thinking everybody knew. I was like, oh, everyone has been thinking about this, except me. People my age (twenty-six) remember it; they have memories of watching it on TV as it happened. I have memories from before 2001, but not of that. It would have been psychedelically traumatizing to go through that collective event. It’s weird that some people just experienced it secondhand through a screen, however many years later. You know that phrase: it takes 100 years for something to become a bouncy house, e.g., the Titanic bouncy house. I’m pretty sure there’s already been a Twin Towers bouncy house. In “Internet Girl," I’m interested in the image after-life of 9/11.

11-meter Titanic inflatable slide

LET: Have you ever thought about putting images in the book? You have text art, but your writing feels so vividly connected to the internet. Like, when you talk about the “Big Chungus" meme or UwU (an emoticon that resembles a cute or kawaii face) culture.

HL: Originally, I had a bunch of meme pictures and a screenshot, but, basically, they didn’t need to be there. They weren’t doing anything. What I want to do next is to work with an artist and have something very intentional about it. But, you can trace memes as intellectual property, so we couldn’t include them.

I like the idea that, if all images of memes get erased, then you could still find some in My First Book. It’s funnier if there are no pictures of memes contained within it – they stay a mystery, just described.

LET: Reading your book was like reading a language I’d only ever seen in virtual references. Sometimes IRL, but so rarely through prose. Did that writing style come naturally to you?

HL: Before fiction, I wrote plays and would go on long-ass monologues. When I started writing prose for the first time, I just knew this book couldn’t be boring – not that the opposite of boring is necessarily a good thing – but I thought had to be easy to read, at least.

LET: In “‘Z’ for Zoomer," you define a set of key phrases; Autism, ADHD, Based, Cringe, Doomer, Edgelord, Fail, Ketamine. They’re not your average dictionary definitions; your characterizations of these words are emotional and situational. The chapter is like Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society [1958] for 2024. These words cannot be defined concretely; as you say, “Words cannot always be defined by their opposite." Why did you include this section?

HL: ADHD is interesting. I have all the symptoms, but then again, I’ve heard it said there are different traits in girls; sitting very still, being really good at following rules, etc. Even though “‘Z’ for Zoomer" is about how dated everything is, reading back, it’s like a rap battle or Leo Strauss’s discussion of writing; each word can mean something different and contain different layers.

My editor and I went through so many different framing devices for this story, but trying to codify generational words becomes embarrassing. They were making fun of me online, saying, “Oh, she wrote the Skibidi toilet book." I just found my Notes app, and I actually wrote 2,000 words about Skibidi. You think that you roasted me, but you just read me.

LET: Are the narratives in My First Book autobiographical?

HL: A lot of writers’ first books are about putting their childhood memories in, little details from their past. At the time I was conceptualizing the book, there was a real personal-essay boom – I had just become aware of cultural criticism. I thought, is this a funny form, or does a personal essay book need to be serious?

We wanted to call the book Here Lies after the Dorothy Parker book Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker [1939]. I was thinking, wouldn’t it just be funny to write cultural criticism and personal essays that are just filled with lies about real culture and fake culture together?

LET: OK, we’re gonna do the photos, let’s walk to Soho Square.

HL: Oh no … I was wearing a way cuter outfit yesterday. I’m wearing business casual. I’m really beastly when I get my photo taken, so annoying. I'm naturally a little annoying, but for photos, I turn to a different level.

LET: You’re like that kid, the TikTok saint who died young and had a weird shrine made. These magazine photoshoots will be your effigy.

HL: [Singing “Dear God" by XTC] Dear God, hope you get my letter now/ I pray you can make it better now, down here; dear god/ I don’t need a big reduction on the price of beer.

Tits, arse and squashed sterotypes: Beryl Cook meets Tom of Finland

It’s an unusual pairing, writes Lydia Eliza Trail on a new joint show of work by Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire. But these opposing cultural and sexual standpoints make for a raucaus duet of unabashed erotica.

At Studio Voltaire, a hall resembling a protestant church is hosting two artists once dubbed ‘erotic hobbyists’. Beryl Cook’s (1926-2008) images of larger-than-life women laughing, drinking and frequenting strip clubs captured a national imagination - reproductions of her work became a staple in living rooms, pubs and hotels across the country. Equally dedicated to the depiction of pleasure is Tom of Finland (1920-1991), who transformed his youthful desires for local lumberjacks and farmers into an imaginative universe filled with figures embodying homosexual, machismo ideals. In this show, Studio Voltaire is addressing a gap in institutional representation of popular art. By affording us a glimpse of erotic world-building – hedonistic and pleasure-seeking – ‘Beryl Cook/ Tom of Finland’ is not your usual historical exhibition.

It’s an unusual pairing; these artists come from very different cultural and sexual standpoints. Finland rarely, if ever, represented women. In his autonomous and unpublished work, women invariably play the unenviable role of sour moralists or ignorant housewives, while Cook relished in unabashed and raucous female protagonists (her characters are reminiscent of the validating and important work done by the @loveofhuns Instagram account). Works like Ivor Dickie (1981), a female-commissioned piece depicting a male stripper giving ladies a glimpse of his crown jewels, are postcard favourites. Joe Scotland, director of Voltaire, considers their similarities more important than their differences: “They both prioritised pleasure in their works and denied any sense of shame". Indeed, tits and arse are celebrated with equal aplomb.

Walking through ‘Beryl Cook/ Tom of Finland’, it becomes clear that Cook was an astute cultural commentator. Instead of satirising her communities, as seen in the work of William Hogarth and James Gilray, Cook observed. A favourable comparison is L.S Lowry; both artists were categorised as naive painters in their lifetime, infamous for their distinctive method of portraying the human form - as Lowry stated in a 1966 interview, “My paintings seemed to get more response in the places where people knew the subjects I was painting", Scotland notes, "Cook documented those around her, particularly working-class women, and people saw themselves represented in her work". While Lowry’s popularity drew from his crowd scenes of ‘matchstick men’, Cook’s trademark is notably fuller, a rotund figure recalling Stanley Spencer and Fernando Botero. Curved, gigantic buttocks are larger than life and a little fetishistic - dominating the canvas and, in turn, the viewer.

Hyperrealism has often been derided as kitsch, gauche or unimaginative. In fact, it easily lends itself to fantasy - used in pornographic illustration and political propaganda alike. Initially inspired by porn magazines and soviet posters, Tom of Finland honed his chiselled protagonist (see The Complete Adventures of Kake), across his 60-year career. The depiction of virile men with near-perfect torsos, slim waists and consistently larger-than-average cocks carried symbolic importance to the artist. Finland’s goal was to provide positive, hyper-masculine images for the gay community, combatting the stereotype of the sissyish, prancing homosexual popular in his youth. As Scotland adds, “it was quite transgressive to represent gay men so machismo, and so freely". The exaggerated human proportions of both artists make an interesting comparison: “Considering their distinct ways of hyper-realising the body, it felt instinctive to pair Cook’s work with Tom of Finland."

The exhibition invites us to observe subcultures once hidden from sight. The city of Plymouth, where Cook lived and worked for 40 years, is a favourite subject – its working class and military history form a subtext for leisure scenes such as The Lockyer Tavern (1974), one of Cook’s most recognised works, depicting the ‘back bar’ – a well-known queer hangout. Tom of Finland also depicts real-life cruising spots - ports and roadsides become the backdrop for casual sex and secret liaisons. While Cook’s work is less pornographic, she had a keen eye for representing the illicit in her community. ‘Beryl Cook/ Tom of Finland’ presents an erotic topography of queer pleasure.

This show is a lot of fun. It is not your usual, sombre representation of two artists’ careers. It is thoroughly libidinal; sex is present in the extreme. The show is, in some sense, a turn-on. As Tom of Finland once said, “If I don’t have an erection while drawing, I know it’s no good." May the re-evaluation of smut by British institutions continue.

Sibylle Ruppert’s Dark Fantasy

In Ruppert’s work, vices surround, engulf, and even penetrate her human protagonists.

Detail of Sibylle Ruppert, "La Bible du Mal" (1978), crayon and charcoal on paper, 79 7/8 × 144 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (all images courtesy Project Native Informant, London)

In the charcoal drawing Dessin Pour D.A.F de Sade, 1978, the contorted body of a figure with male genitalia and female breasts is devoured by what can only be described as “the stuff of nightmares". Sibylle Ruppert’s (1942-2011) monsters are an amalgam of the reptilian, the sadistic and the overtly phallic. These erotic references can be literal - one monster’s head entirely consists of the head of a penis - and stylistic, as she covers flailing human limbs, appendages and digits with painfully bulging vascular detailing. Like her forebearers and noted influences Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon, and Georges Battailles, Ruppert constantly draws upon sado-masochism as her muse (hence her dedication to the infamous Marquis). At Project Native Informant, London, the first UK solo exhibition of work by the artist, Frenzy of the Visible, shows drawings and collages made throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.

Ruppert’s works centre on the human figure, albeit often grotesquely disfigured. Her draftsmanship - while dark and violent - is unmistakably accomplished. The musculature of figures in her 1970s works, including Ma Soeur mon Epouse (1975), J’ecrasai le Ver luisant (1979) and her magnum opus, La Bible du Mal (1978) recall the accentuated and sublime bodies created by Mannerist artist Michelangelo, whose homo-erotic sketches depict the human figure with rippling, heavily shaded muscles. Moreover, Ruppert’s work suggests a mind susceptible to the deeply perturbed. This was a shared humour of the Renaissance master - his melancholic sketch, Il Sogno (1533), was widely identified as an allegory for the human soul awakened to virtue from vice. The vices are shown as twisting, thrashing human figures surrounding a tortured human soul. Ruppert’s work can be read as the inverse—vices continue to surround, engulf, and even penetrate (as in the right-hand panel of La Bible du Mal) her human protagonists, who are still firmly placed within a dystopic nightmare.

Frenzy Of The Visible post-humously celebrates an artist whose oeuvre was largely ignored in her lifetime, as is often found with female artists dealing with transgressive subject matter. It would be amiss not to acknowledge that Ruppert’s work now is not just a matter for a finds itself amongst a milieu of films and theory exploring the core rsubject matter of her work: the trans-human. One of Ruppert’s most significant influences, H.R. Giger, created the design work in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Ruppert’s mechanic body horror is also immortalised in filme, in Titane (2021), where a woman is impregnated by a car - Julia Ducournau’s accelerationist porno almost totally recalls Ruppert’s camp sketch Hit Something (1977) depicting a human/motorcycle hybrid. The show is a beautiful ode to the artist’s dark fantasy, which, as Lautréamont states, is “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table".

Sibylle Ruppert, “La Bible du Mal" (1978), crayon and charcoal on paper, 79 7/8 × 144 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches

Sibylle Ruppert, “Ma Soeur mon Epouse" (1975), charcoal on paper, 40 1/ 2 × 49 1/4 × 1 5/8 inches

“Vampire Junkie" Accelerationist Aesthetics at Rose Easton

“Accelerationism is best defined as… the only way out is the way through" (Shaviro, 2015)

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us." (Fisher, 2009)

Scott Keightley, Quintet (Samuel Coleridge Taylor), 2021

Blue Marcus’s debut curatorial project at Rose Easton, Vampire Junkie, consists of four emerging artists Samuel Guerrero, Hampus Hoh, Scott Keightley and Callum Jones, showing three sculptural works and two mounted pieces. Vampire Junkie explores the idea of Accelerationist Aesthetics. In terms of the visual, this manifests in general futurity and machinic Matriphagy, a distinct lack of human presence, and, weirdly, a perverse kind of hope. Matriphagy (the condition) references the mother’s consumption by its offspring. When paired with accelerationism, this produces a dystopia in which humanity is consumed by the technology it birthed.

Accelerationism begins in Nick Land’s office at Warwick University. Between smoking pot, listening to Jungle and taking amphetamines, his vision for accelerationism took on a sadomasochistic tone. Land reaches for capitalism and extols it for its inhuman, violent power. Land dreamt of consumption (more accurately, he dreamt of being consumed). In fully expressing the potentialities of capitalism - social, political and technological - he hopes we will be able to exhaust the inexhaustible and reach a point beyond. What this “beyond" constitutes in the afterlife of capitalism is unclear. For Marx, it was communism - but in 2024, this feels untenable. The show Vampire Junkie grapples with defining a visual language for the accelerationist prophecy.

Hampus Hoh, Auxiliary Scape, 2024

First, to wrestle with Vampire junkie. Speaking of the afterlife concerning capitalism conjures images of George A. Romero’s slow-moving mall zombies and their desire to consume, which runs with them to the grave. The term “Vampire-Junkie", however, is more theoretical than literal. Mark Fisher’s essay, A Fairground’s Painted Swings explains the phrase as follows: “The Vampire-Junkie pursues to the bitter end. It is an unsated addict." Addicted to what, exactly? To the future, I guess. As Fisher says: “Why would men, given the choice of sex with a monkey, or sex with a robot, always choose the robot?". The robot (think of Stepford Wives) is the ideal partner. Technology, backed by capitalism, is the perfect lover with an artificially enhanced libido. We are junkies, making love to our oppressors. In this light, accelerationist art remains entirely immanent, modulating in one place, enjoying the pleasure of futurist aesthetics and the zombie system it lives under.

Callum Jones, The exact moment Kim Deal’s voice cracks, 2024

Works in Vampire Junkie relish in dominion. In Hampus Hoh’s work, Auxiliary Scape (2024), machinery appears suspended in glass. The structure, caught, captured and pinned to the gallery wall, is - forgive the BDSM reference - the human figure submitted to capital through suspension. Visualising the result of acceleration on humankind (I think of Lady Cassandra, from the Doctor Who episode “The End of the World", who claims to be the last pure human but is instead a thin, organless piece of skin stretched taught across a metal frame) results in the whittling down of the organic into the mechanic. A fetish is usually an object capable of producing a feeling of both eroticism and disgust, as in Meret Oppenheimer’s 1936 Object (Fur-covered tea cup). Instead, Auxiliary Scape presents us with the debris of neoliberal capitalism as a fetish; reinforced glass, door locks, french horns, trumpet mouthpieces and stainless steel are suspended in thick glass. Hoh has presented the accelerationist fetish for usable, industrial material - the cyborgian over the human. As Deleuze writes, “There is no such thing as either man or nature now".

In Quintet (Samuel Coleridge Taylor), 2021, and Amid a Place of Stone, 2021, by Scott Knightley, objects tesselate across the surface of a music stand. Glass finials, bolts, knobs, and chandelier glass pierce music sheets that are UV printed onto the stand. This detritus resembles the general futurity that’s become synonymous with accelerationist aesthetics - spreading across the stand’s armatures like a living, breathing fungus. Unwittingly, it reminds me of the show The Last of Us, a dystopic romp that imagines humanity's destruction by funghi. Consumption is at the heart of Accelerationist aesthetics - it is a familiar, maybe obvious, metaphor in the age of AI - the music stands crawling with technological bucolic growths represent the collapse of authentic artistry. Knightley nevertheless builds on the theatricality of accelerationism; in their baroque materiality, these works suggest that humanity’s collapse will be operatic.

Samuel Guerrero’s painting, Prayers of the Million Inhabitants (2024), depicts a blurred and sped-up stadium - Humanity is the intended gladiator. As Blue Marcus describes in her accompanying publication, “The stadium urges individuals to sacrifice their bodies and their agency for some blurry ideal". All sense of perspective and foreshortening is underwritten by this “blur" as with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), where a concentration of space in a technocratic dystopia renders distances into a single point - both futuristic vistas decentring the human subject. Given that Accelerationism in verb form means “Go Fast", it is difficult not to view Prayers of the Million Inhabitants (2024) as a Velodrome surrounding the human subject, who has been accelerated to the point of being rendered an amorphous, gaseous substance right at the centre of the work.

Samuel Guerrero, Prayers of the million inhabitants, 2024

What’s refreshing about the desire to accelerate is its no-nonsense approach to fantasy. To fantasize, as Lauren Berlant describes in Cruel Optimism, is how people “hoard idealising theories and tableaux" about how they, how the world, may add up to something. Accelerationism rejects false positivity, instead reaching for an attachment to that which will destroy. I’m drawn to imagine an accelerationist aesthetic in the language of H.R. Giger, whose biomechanical style envisions a post-human future ruled by Xenomorphs. The “face-hugger", a parasitoid who makes contact with the host's mouth for implantation purposes, embodies ideas of mechanic matriphagy. The Exact Moment Kim Deal’s Voice Cracks, by Callum Jones, lacks the futurity associated with Landian accelerationism, partly due to its similarity to an early 20th-century vintage photograph. Low-resolution film stills are exported and printed on layers of etching paper, which buckle under the weight of the image they hold. A hazy, out-of-focus image of a crowd of people, blurred to be unrecognisable, conjures feelings of melancholia. Jones's work seems to ask, as Richard Coyne expressed in Technoromanticism (2000), “When the digital apocalypse ensues, what will remain of the human legacy?".

Philippa Snow’s Trophy Lives: “I’ve been unhinged in this particular way for more than a decade now”

Philippa Snow’s much-anticipated book, Trophy Lives, dissects celebrity culture and the artists defining our dystopia. Lydia Eliza Trail caught up with the author, critic and ‘Lindsay Lohan scholar’ to get the 411.

Sam-McKinniss, Star Spangled Banner (Whitney), 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

One could argue that reality television is a far cry from fine art. However, in the 21st century’s ring-light mirror, figures like Kim Kardashian appear as the ultimate artists of our dystopia. Philippa Snow’s Trophy Lives contemplates the new art form, the public self, and its constant slippage from the screen to the gallery wall.

The essay includes images of works pertaining to the cult of the individual, from Sam McKinniss’s Star Spangled Banner (2017) and Elizabeth Peyton’s Swan (Leonardo DiCaprio) (1998) to spreads of Amelia Ulman’s infamous Instagram performance, Excellences and Perfections (2014-2018). Here, Lydia Eliza Trail catches up with the author, cultural critic, ‘Lindsay Lohan scholar’ and Plaster columnist to discuss mortality, Instagram and, of course, the Kardashians.

Spreads from Kim Kardashian, Selfish, 2015, published by Rizzoli.

Lydia Eliza Trail: Hey Philippa, thanks for speaking with Plaster. How are you feeling about the release of Trophy Lives?

Philippa Snow: No problem! I feel like I always do whenever a fairly large project of mine is about to be unleashed on the general public, which is a bit like the turtle from the Looney Tunes cartoons when he gets spooked and shoots back into his shell.

LET: Was there an idea, artwork or reality star that kickstarted this project?

PS: In 2013, I wrote a piece that was a mocked-up gallery text about Paris Hilton, muddling the details of her “work” and biography with those of the Austrian artist VALIE EXPORT, for the now-defunct art website ArtSlant. So, I’ve been unhinged in this particular way for more than a decade now. Also, I think there’s something pleasantly egalitarian about analyzing forms of culture that everyone else can access.

Spread from Trophy Lives, by Philippa Snow.

LET: This essay discusses eternal youth and its relationship to Instagram, art and the self. How do you feel about your own mortality?

PS: I’m glad we’re sticking to such light questions. I actually just entered the second half of my thirties yesterday, so if you are a member of Gen Z reading this, for instance, I imagine you will perceive me as being at death’s door already. To answer this more seriously: if you’re talking about ageing, I was reading an interview with the playwright and screenwriter Lucy Prebble in the New Yorker recently, and she was talking about getting older as a woman being a blessing because it meant never again being mistaken for an assistant when she walked into a meeting where she was actually the boss. That’s something I agree with. If you’re talking about dying itself, somewhat unusually for a goth, I am terrified of it and try not to think about it too often.

LET: Trophy Lives is shorter than your first book, Which As You Know Means Violence. What drew you to an illustrated essay?

PS: When I pitched this, I was also shopping around a proposal for a full-length essay collection elsewhere, and I wanted a shorter-term project post-Violence. The idea—which I’d been dancing around for a while in things I’d already written—seemed to me to be the kind of thing that would sustain a text that was longer than a magazine piece but shorter than my previous book.

LET: I love the moment at which you compare Instagram to a 24-hour well-lit gallery where everything and anything is examined under sallowing lighting. What is your screen time like?

PS: It has been absolutely dreadful in the past. I turned off the thing that logs it on your phone, let’s put it that way. I’m not fantastic at using social media myself—I haven’t had I’m-still-calling-it-Twitter for years, and Instagram now is less user-friendly for people like me who don’t really like to post images of themselves. Nonetheless, the lure of scrolling through content posted by people who are good at social media is quite strong. That said, I’ve cut the amount of time I spend on Instagram radically in the last few months, and I can’t say I miss the way it used to make me feel, which was sort of depressed and inadequate and judgmental and envious all at the same time for no good reason.

LET: You discuss two larger-than-life female icons in the essay: Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Who do you prefer?

PS: Paris is a fascinating practitioner but, I fear, has proven herself to be a dreadful person in some respects in the past. Perhaps she has reformed, and Kim has her own controversial aspects, but on balance—it’s Kim Kardashian for me.

Still from Jay-Z, Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, 2013.

LET: Reading Trophy Lives drew me to contemplate my own relationship with popular culture. How would you describe your consumption?

PS: I recently wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books about Vanderpump Rules—a show currently in its 11th season which I have watched absolutely every episode of—which was just shy of 3,000 words long. I feel like that probably answers the question.

LET: If you could own an artwork of or by a celebrity, what would it be?

PS: It would definitely be Sam McKinniss’ 2019 piece Lindsay, which shows Lindsay Lohan in a state of mysterious distress behind the wheel of a car. I love his paintings—I was thrilled to have one of Whitney Houston on the cover—and I’m also something of a Lindsayologist. The film magazine Little White Lies once referred to me as a “critic and Lindsay Lohan scholar,” and I was so pleased that the quote was my bio on everything for about three years.

Jame St Findlay - Objects of Profane Illumination

In Life Span at Glasshouse Projects, Jame St Findlay displays a collection of objects, both quotidian and marginal, separated from their intended use. Buoys, usually hung from the sides of London houseboats, are rendered in glazed ceramic and suspended from the gallery ceiling. The artist imagines these ordinary objects as future relics of our contemporary age. Their purpose becomes unclear; they transform into mysterious, archaic, and alluring markers of a civilization whose practices have long been lost to the annals of time.

An iconographic language is developed throughout Life Span. From advertising slogans to Getty images, moments of 21st-century life appear scattered across the surfaces of St Findlay’s fired clay. These fragmented images conjure uncanny yet touching moments—viewing the old BT piper logo as a faded Barthesian symbol of early 2000s mass media is unexpectedly moving. The slow dripping of river water echoes through the exhibition, grounding Life Span in its urban environment, and crucially, in the preserving silt of the River Thames.

Jame St Findlay is currently completing their final year at Royal Academy Schools; their moving image work Death Knell (2022) is being shown at Camden Arts Centre as part of the 2023 Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Life Span ran until the 9th of March at the incubator space Glasshouse Projects, part of the Gathering space.

Hi Jame, it’s great to talk to you. I was wondering if you could introduce your practice to METAL. How did the show for Glasshouse Projects develop? Did you have any key texts, films, or artworks that inspired you while preparing the show?

Jame St Findlay: Hello METAL. I am a multidisciplinary artist working in film, performance, sculpture, and drawing. My work deals with themes of collapse, the ultra-quotidian, and reality.

Having primarily exhibited film work in the past, Life Span marks my first-ever presentation of solely sculpture. I wanted the show to be centered around the buoys; they acted as a focal point from which all the other work in the show developed. I had previously exhibited two of the forms as part of a student showcase at The Royal Academy, where I displayed a buoy suspended above a flooded polyester suit jacket. I decided to carry this format into the show, marrying each suspended form with a different flooded vessel.

In terms of artworks that inspired me, I have been looking at the work of sculptors like Magali Reus, Liz Magor, Cathy Wilkes, and Spencer Lai. Liz Magor’s recent show at Focal Point Gallery really resonated with me. I also loved Spencer Lai’s recent show at Neon Parc in Melbourne (which I, unfortunately, only saw online). The show featured a huge assemblage of small dolls, perfume bottles, and other ephemera enclosed in the gallery behind an unpainted picket fence. I appreciate work that breaks through the confines of traditional sculpture displays and plays with space.

Entering Life Span, one is struck by the buoy displaced from its usual setting. Its materiality is subverted; rather than floating plastic, it appears as suspended ceramic forms. Could you discuss the symbolism of the buoy within the show?

Jame St Findlay: Most of my ideas come to me while in transit. In the summer of 2022, as I walked down the canal, I was struck by the houseboats adorned on every side with lattices of ropes and buoys. I thought they were beautiful, almost as if the boats were wearing jewelry. At that time, I had been working with ceramics for a while, and it felt natural to translate that shape into clay.

It was as if I could see past the buoy’s menial, logistical function and appreciate its formal qualities. Once I produced and suspended the first one, I was entranced. They became lonely sentinels—time capsules that took on their own life and identities.

A particular feature is the large-scale numbers painted directly onto the gallery floor between artworks. Then, the jesmonite clock faces fixed to the ceilings. One is aware of the passage of time—is this the intended effect?

Jame St Findlay: Time and temporality are recurring themes in my work and life. I’m fascinated by humanity’s obsession with time, particularly in relation to achievement, and the concepts of wasted versus well-spent time. Time is both mundane and omnipresent, almost invisible yet impossible to fully comprehend.

The clock face numbers reference how every lived moment is categorized within the numbers one to twelve. I began incorporating this sequence into my drawings and sculptures. On the gallery floor, the numbers are rendered in sieved flour, giving them a solid appearance, but they are fragile and fleeting. Most didn’t survive beyond the first week, and that ephemerality was important to me.

How does text figure into Life Span?

Jame St Findlay: Text is crucial to my work across all media. I’m a constant note-taker. The text in Life Span is a mixture of automatic writing, borrowed song lyrics, and logos or text from advertisements. I’m interested in how, when removed from its original context, text can take on new meanings. One buoy reads, “Ask me what I did with my life,” a phrase borrowed from the Duke Dumont song I Got U (2014), which is both a pop anthem and a poignant reflection.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors observe the bi-weekly raining of artworks onto the floor or into receptacles beneath them. How did you implement this process of raining?

Jame St Findlay: The raining sculpture is Time Keeper 2, a ceiling-mounted clock face that rains twice a week for an unspecified period of time. It’s displayed alongside Time Keeper 1, a similar but static version. I wanted to create a work using water that wasn’t formulaic or generic, like the fountains often seen in contemporary art shows.

The rain in the gallery disrupts the space. It contrasts with the tidy conventions of an exhibition setting and gives the show a sense of life and movement.

The receptacles vary from large stone troughs to plastic bottles. Were these found objects?

Jame St Findlay: Yes, the vessels include a mixture of found objects and items on loan. There’s a deep plastic catering bucket from my school kitchen filled with water and cooking oil, a found photograph laminated at the base. A Belfast sink from The Royal Academy courtyard, and a bird bath bought from a garden center. These vessels vary in material and symbolism, blending the mundane with the poetic.

The press release mentions the figure of the nameless heterosexual male. Who is this character?

Jame St Findlay: The everyman in my work represents the antithesis of my lived experience. As a gay artist, I find it more interesting to explore heteronormativity and societal expectations than to focus on my own queerness. The nameless heterosexual male embodies a life model defined by conformity, fatherhood, marriage, and work in a capitalist framework—one I find myself at odds with.

One buoy is suspended from the silhouette outline of a rose on the gallery wall, another hangs above a bird bath. Could you discuss these elements?

Jame St Findlay: The rose silhouette comes from an open-source stock image, and the bird bath is a mass-produced item. Although their sources are completely sterile, they still evoke romanticism. I’m fascinated by the way generic objects can suggest meaning and warmth, despite their artificiality.

The show features an iconographic program, with stock images and logos transformed into a new hieroglyphic language. Do you consider these a part of your own atlas?

Jame St Findlay: I admire Nancy Spero’s scroll works and how no image has a hierarchy over another. Similarly, in Life Span, I present logos, religious imagery, beauty salon terms, and silhouettes side by side without imposing a value system. It’s more of a sprawling mind map than an atlas.

As the press release states, “Moments of familiarity indulge our instinctive urge to decipher.” Do you consider the objects in the show to display a history, akin to an archaeological find?

Jame St Findlay: While making the work, I didn’t initially think of the buoys as future relics, but I appreciate that reading. Perhaps they will appear as ambiguous remnants of our civilization in the future. The exhibition aims to blur the lines between the present and the speculative.

Rineke Dijkstra’s New Portraits Offer a Diverse Picture of Dutch Society

As her new exhibition Night Watching and Pictures from the Archive opens in New York, Rineke Dijkstra talks about the importance of casting in her work and drawing inspiration from Rembrandt.

Rineke Dijkstra, Ponteland Highschool, Newcastle, UK, February 17, 2000, 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Copyright: Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra captures her modern-day subjects with the skill of an old master. Her photography is famed for its intimacy and verisimilitude. “You could say a good portrait gives soul to a person,” she tells AnOther, “I always look carefully for moments where people are unguarded.” In a new show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, the artist revisits her archive and presents never-before-seen works. This show focuses on the interpersonal relationships of duos and groups and how we form ourselves through others.

There is a particular charm in Dijkstra’s ability to capture youth — depicting children and teenagers as autonomous individuals, their personalities in flux. Her Beach Portraits (1992–1993) series elevates the youthful subject with an objective gaze through the medium of portraiture. As unwavering and detailed as her 17th-century influences, such as Rembrandt, Dijkstra’s work calls for careful looking. Intimacy, familiarity, and personality are revealed to the careful observer.

Working with a 4x5-inch camera on a tripod, Rineke gives few instructions while photographing. In her 2019 film Night Watching, the artist shadowed school classes and tourists as they reacted to Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) at the Rijksmuseum. The film traces visitors from all aspects of Dutch society and follows her signature technique of a straight-on angle and full-frontal pose. Following on from photographic giants such as August Sander and Diane Arbus, this bare-bones approach only emphasizes her ability to draw out the complexity of her subjects.

Here, the artist tells us about her photographic method, delving into her archive and observing moments of intimacy…

“Two years ago I started reorganising my negatives and contact prints. It was an interesting process, because with thirty years having passed, I noticed all these new relations and possibilities in my own images. I started to build a collection of group and double portraits of people who connected in a certain way. In the 90s, I had focused on single portraits — I now became interested in the relationships between different subjects in one image. Their postures, their expressions — what the similarity of an outfit says or how people distinguish themselves. The best photos, I noticed, always contained a certain contradiction; a kind of tension, both in the figures themselves, or in their relation.”

“In the years 1992–1993, I had just started taking beach photos. I didn’t want to focus entirely on one subject, and photographed everyone who seemed interesting to me at that time; individuals, but I also made many double and group portraits. Now that I have returned to my old images, it struck me that very different forms of meaning come into play in the double and group portraits. The posture of the subjects is still important, but by showing several people in one image, elements such as the mutual relationship become much more important: you start to wonder how these people relate to each other, how that relationship becomes visible in the image and on the basis of which visual criteria you as a viewer actually come to your conclusions. Prejudice and assumption, on the behalf of the viewer, comes into play — which I think is interesting.”

“The Night Watch is made to impress; it is large and dark, and you really have to take your time to see what is happening. The composition is genius; there is a lot of life in the painting. The lances which the men hold largely determine the framework, and keep the group together, emphasized by Rembrandt’s use of light. When the directors of the Rijksmuseum invited me to take a group photo based on The Night Watch, I had to think very carefully. It seemed an impossible task. But then I thought I maybe could make a video. I found it interesting to see how much each child looks at the work — interpreting the painting from his or her own perspective and experience.”

Shir Cohen and Olivia Sterling

The Meme as Discourse

Shir Cohen, Tradwife 1 (2023). Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour, London.

Shir Cohen, Tradwife 2 (2023). Image courtesy Huxley-Parlour, London.

Olivia, what was the compositional decision in your works to depict the torsos of only female figures, their breasts and muscular arms, but no head?

Olivia: I never give my figures heads as I want them to maintain a universality. They are often representatives of their race. But here, the action is focused on the sausages at the mercy of the butchers. Wound Spray is about the incel tendency to obsess over body parts, namely wrists, penises, and breasts. I attempted to understand and visualize the incel’s view of a woman’s body. Incels view women as sexual creatures and equally as gatekeepers of sex. Therefore, they appear to them as monstrous or even scary. Plus, a figure with no head is less confrontational. When no head or human eyes are confronting the viewer, it feels like you are gladly partaking in their objectification.

Shir, in the 84 drawings presented at the start of the exhibition, a series of symbols recur throughout: the form of a bird, the dismembered human form, The Star of David, and skeletons. What do these symbols signify to you?

Shir: I try to use my works on paper as a diary, so different themes tend to repeat themselves. Dismemberments and skeletons are related to the feeling of always being dissected or judged by my physical usefulness. It’s also about how a lot of bigots are absolutely obsessed with bones — they’ll say if you have the wrong skull shape you’ll never have sex or never be able to transition. Stars of David were used by Jewish people but also used to mark them before genocide. When they come up in my work, it’s usually about marking and reappropriating them.

Your embroidered works have a wonderful effect of peeling away from the wall. Also, pairing black marker with delicate stitching creates a great contrast—how did you arrive at this technique?

Shir: It’s a bit funny — I know I’m supposed to make my embroidery drawing with something that can wash off later, but I don’t plan these things well enough in advance and just draw what I like and embroider over the parts I think should be embroidered.

What is next for you both? What can we expect to see looking forward from your practice?

Olivia: I am having a two-person show with Guts Gallery alongside some group shows next year. I’d like to do part two of this show, as it has been wonderful to do it conceptually, physically, spiritually, etc.

Shir: I’ll be in a group show in ArtPort Tel-Aviv this December called More Than Enough. It’s a group show of Israeli queer artists dealing with issues of orientation and spatiality. I also loved working on this show, so Rage Comics 2 would be a great plan.

Photos that Explore Hedonism in the Hellscape of Modern Life

We Revisit Galleries from the Recent Dazed Archive that Document Pleasure-Infused Scenes from Tokyo, New York, Ukraine, London and Beyond

We’re all familiar with Tumblr-esque images of Bianca Jagger riding a horse into Studio 54, or pictures of heaving dance floors in Ibiza during what we’re told was the “golden age” of clubbing. But what does hedonism look like today?

Below, we revisit ten photo projects from the Dazed archive which explore unbridled excess and hedonistic youth culture movements. From the abandoned, derelict warehouses of London to ‘kawaii sleaze’ nights in Tokyo, the underground clubbing scene in pre-war Ukraine, New York’s decadent nightlife, and beyond, we gather together some of the galleries that document contemporary hedonism.

Jesse Glazzard, The World Before Sanitiser (2021)

During the pandemic, hedonism became a scarce commodity. Images shared by Kim Kardashian on her private island contrasted with the sorry Zoom-based events experienced by most in lockdown. During this period, photographer Jesse Glazzard began mourning the loss of a queer community and nightlife. As a form of memorial, Glazzard pieced together images of queer clubs and performance venues for their zine The World Before Sanitiser, commemorating what was no longer accessible. A zine that captured “the rawness of the spaces we’d go to” and records the “almost sacred” feeling that queer nighttime events came to present to those who missed them most.

In Glazzard’s zine, contemporary hedonism is captured through a lens of bittersweet longing. At the time of publication, it was still uncertain if this scene would emerge on the other side of lockdown. As Glazzard told Dazed, “When the pandemic is full over, there will be a huge party; it’ll be even better than the ones we remembered.”

El Hogg

Hedonism has the capacity for more than simple indulgence. While pleasure plays a crucial role, hedonism can be an outlet for uninhibited expressions of selfhood. Reflecting on his portraits of London’s queer club nights, photographer El Hogg reiterates that “it’s not just about partying”, it’s about performance.

Portraiture is a central focus of Hogg’s practice. Having photographed many of the capital’s best queer raves – including Inferno, Riposte, T-Boys Club, and Babylon – Hogg focuses on portraits of individuals, capturing their unique aesthetic as opposed to wider clubbing shots. Here, hedonism is the thrill of self-expression. Hogg tells Dazed, “There’s no one hotter than queer people.”

Quand La Ville Dort by Nordine Makhloufi

In 2019, Nordine Makhloufi quit their day job to commit to photography full-time. Quand La Ville Dort (or ‘When the City Sleeps’) is an intimate, candid photo diary of Paris’ nocturnal life.

Stylistically, the series pays homage to the confessional photography of Nan Goldin, whose The Ballad of Sexual Dependency [1985] portrays intimate moments of love, loss, ecstasy, and pain in 80s downtown New York. Goldin writes, “The diary is my form of control over my life… it enables me to remember.” In its recollection of Goldin’s work, Quand La Ville Dort continues creating an archive of queer histories. Reflecting on his subjects, Makhloufi says: “They are themselves, they are their truth.”

Jaime Cano

Jamie Cano’s 2020s Rave Archives documents the microcultures of London’s illicit rave scene. The exclusivity of these events – their locations usually disseminated over Telegram or Instagram DMs – allows Cano to photograph people at their most liberated. “Nothing is staged,” he tells us. “The people I photograph must be genuine. I hate fakeness – you can smell it from afar.”

The scene Cano captures is far from opulent. Lit by stark flash photography, London’s youth crowd together in abandoned, semi-derelict warehouses – “rooms with no air, just sweat” – and the result is a poignant and often funny record of euphoria.

Tyrell Hampton, Go Home

“If you go there, you’re going there to be seen,” says Tyrell Hampton, describing one of New York’s infamous restaurants, Lucien. Exploring scopophilia in the city’s clubs, New York nightlife is Hampton’s ultimate muse.

Speaking to Dazed earlier this year, the photographer reflects on the New York scene, discussing how and when he was first initiated. He “found solace in a crowded room,” feeling that he “could just be quiet… people-watch… I could just get lost in everything.” Like a kid in a candy shop, Hampton calls the late China Chalet home, “I had to go every time there was a party. Otherwise, I felt like I was missing out.” Here, he shares his fascination with beauty and his ability to capture some of New York’s most illustrious residents in moments of pure pleasure.

Visvaldas Morkevicius, Public Secrets

The work of photographer Visvaldas Morkevicius explores the nightlife of his home country, Lithuania. Describing his city, Morkevicius says the parties can vary from “five stages in a skate park” to the “old gay club in the basement with a blowjob room.” These images capture the distinct local DIY club scene. Morkevicius captures nightlife scenes composed of scraped knees, smashed car screens, and partygoers passed out in the undergrowth.

Nazar Koplak, The Club Kids of Pre-War Ukraine

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2021, the underground party movement that emerged in pre-war Lviv and Kyiv possesses a unique spirit of rebellion against regularity and conformism.

Shot before Russia’s invasion, Nazar Koplak’s portraits of underground parties in pre-war Lviv and Kyiv capture what he describes as “pure positive energy.” Taken between 2016 and 2019, the series documents the club kids on the scene. Reflecting on these lost days, Koplak recalls being “lost in the days, losing count of them… it was so carefree.”

Gut Level, Joy in Precariousness

If Covid taught us anything, it’s that we live in a state of precarity. For Sheffield-based collective Gut Level, the theme of ‘joy of precariousness’ became their guiding principle. Considering the near-constant pressure placed on non-mainstream UK nightlife by the powers that be, Gut Level raises two fingers to the forces working against it. In 2022, the local government booted the collective out of their long-running venue on Snow Lane. “There’s no such thing as a stable space,” says Frazer, part of the group of friends who started the collective along with Adam, Hannah, and Katie.

Gut Level demonstrates the political potential of nightlife, putting left-wing values into action through community projects. The collective shows tolerance and inclusivity aimed at uniting disparate groups in solidarity and class struggle. “I’m using the language of socialism to describe what we’re doing,” says Frazer. Gut Level rejects the corporatisation of queer spaces which transforms queer bars into “polished and clean” spaces. Instead, they embrace that which is subversive, precarious, and messy.

Gracie Brackstone, Life’s a Parade

Gracie Brackstone’s photographic series Life’s a Parade captures queer kinship, finding community, and the euphoric moments preparing for the party. The focus of Brackstone’s work is the freedom found in the community. Returning to Manchester after a stint in London, Brackstone describes the city as “the land of the free.”

The phrase ‘life’s a parade’ reflects the feeling and spectacle of queer nightlife. Dressing up, creating outfits, and experimenting with one’s identity: “Every day in Manchester feels like a parade. To me, Manchester is the home of freedom… my own self-built circus.” The photographer’s flat is her sanctuary and a space for “becoming an adaptation of yourself.” Several figures in Blackstone’s series wear the same blonde, platinum wig as she records herself and others donning the costume for their self-built circus.

Nick Haymes, Kawaii Sleaze

In 2019, photographer Nick Haymes became aware of a ‘culture shift’ occurring among Tokyo’s youth. Discovered via the collaboration of Tokyo DJ N2’s KyunDesu event and the LA-based Subculture Party, Kawaii Sleaze documents this pop-culture crossover (‘Kyun’ is slang for excitement when you see something cutesy). This genre is highly cybernetic and intended to empower a digitally-preoccupied generation. Warped variations on recent micro-trends appear mixed with the more classic styles of Tokyo’s Harajuku district. “I think Japan is not how the West perceives it,” Haymes explains that these parties are something “new and fresh.” Guests wearing a mix of ballroom and Y2k feature alongside gyaru dress as fairycore and cottagecore blur with the aesthetics of kawaii. Here, fashion can transcend language barriers as hedonism facilitates “perfectly seamless crossovers” between LA and Tokyo.

8 Women Artists Using Ceramics to Subvert Art Traditions

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Untitled, 2021. Photo by Greg Carideo. Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York.

Christabel Macgreevy, Sankofa Bird with Silver Egg, 2022, Tristan Hoare

The field of ceramics is evolving. In recent years, the medium has garnered new mainstream interest and acclaim. Meanwhile, women artists are seeing long-overdue engagement with their work. As their medium evolves, female artists, both emerging and established, are exploring the versatility of clay.

Here, we focus on eight artists who criticize the hierarchies that delegate female ceramicists and their work to the periphery. Ceramics have been regularly sidelined in the history of contemporary art. In 1941, critic Clement Greenberg introduced his concept of “the decorative,” which carried negative associations with femininity and craftwork—the opposite of the ideal modernist aesthetic. And, as Louise Bourgeois noted in 1979, “When you work in the school of abstraction, you have to avoid…the decorative.” Today, female artists are working to bridge the barrier between the nonfunctional sculptural object and the functional craft object. Their vessels are often warped, asymmetrical, and uncanny—even, sometimes, creating imitations of the mundane.

The hyper-tactile vessels made by these women rail against aesthetic perfection, debating the traditional role of women in the art world as mere objects of visual admiration. Paralleling emerging trends toward figuration in contemporary painting, artists place a faux-naïf style in dialogue with the grotesque to depict the female form. The grotesque, as outlined by art historian Frances Connelly in “The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture” (2012), can “spring from its maker’s free imagination, unfettered by rules of design or canons of beauty.” Clay, a craft material on the outskirts of fine art, is an apt medium for artists intending to transgress boundaries.

Recent exhibitions have drawn attention to this trend for craft figuration and the imperfect in contemporary ceramics. Last year, “Strange Clay” at the Hayward Gallery highlighted the medium’s growing plasticity, while the current exhibition “Funk You Too!” at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York traces the growing trend for what curator Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy calls the “aesthetic of optimism.” Today, the beguiling medium of oddball ceramics offers a starting point for those looking for something more than the perfunctory vessel.

Ruby Neri, B. 1970, San Francisco. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ruby Neri, Untitled, 2018, Galeria Mascota

In Ruby Neri’s work, the human body is a harbinger of desire and repulsion. Her work features in “Funk You Too!,” a reinterpretation of a 1967 exhibit in which her father, Manuel Neri, also participated. Ruby Neri is a forerunner of what MAD’s deputy director Elissa Auther labeled as a new generation of Funk ceramic artists.

Untitled (2018), for example, speaks to the artist’s nontraditional technique. A misshaped ceramic vase is anthropomorphised into the naked figures of two women, their lips and nipples rouged, akin to a Schiele nude. By applying spray-based glazes onto her pieces, Neri combines the effervescent effect of watercolor with the solidity of a decorative vessel.

Ruby Neri, Revelations, 2022, David Kordansky Gallery

Ruby Neri, Past Present Future, 2022, David Kordansky Gallery

Neri is increasingly known for large, floor-based vases and wall-mounted ceramic sculptures, like Past Present Future (2022) and Mamma (2021), which equally reference 1980s riot grrrl bawdiness and prehistorical representations of the female body. These works accentuate anatomical zones—visually paralleling handheld female statuettes and fertility charms, such as the Venus of Willendorf. Neri’s work is singular, using ceramic to build the monumentally feminine while retaining the tactile associations of craftwork.

Sally Saul, B. 1946, Albany, New York. Lives and works in Germantown, New York.

Sally Saul, Bewildered, 2022. Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.

Sally Saul, Bewildered, 2022. Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.

Artist Sally Saul had been working in ceramics for over 30 years without critical recognition before recently experiencing a reappraisal from the contemporary art market. “Sally Saul: Knit of Identity” at Rachel Uffner Gallery in 2017, the artist’s first solo show in New York, received wide acclaim. In 2022, she was added to the roster of Venus Over Manhattan. Originally turning toward clay via San Francisco’s Funk movement, Saul refrains from showy ostentation in her work, with presidents, saints, and the natural world all depicted with the same equitable honesty.

Sally Saul, Sultry Day, 2022. Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.

Sally Saul, Sultry Day, 2022. Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.

Regarding the pieces featured in “Knit of Identity,” Saul wrote: “Memory, or an editing of memory, informs several of my pieces…fragments that evoke a time and place, refuge, physicality, and act as a talisman.” In Bewildered and Sultry Day (both 2022), Saul creates Botero-esque silhouettes, employing a faux-naïf figuration to depict the human form. Saul’s most recent ceramic figurines are melancholic, reflective of the environmental destruction described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Often open-mouthed and animated, the works are active guides through Saul’s constructed world.

Brie Ruais, B. 1982, Southern California. Lives and works in New Mexico.

Brie Ruais, Intertwining Bodies, Roots, Hair (130lbs times three), 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto.

Brie Ruais’s work expands the notion of corporeally oriented ceramics. “The sculptures tap into the body’s knowledge as opposed to the mind. I let the body and clay lead,” Ruais said in the press release for “Some Things I Know About Being In A Body,” her 2021 solo show at Albertz Benda. This tenet is expressed best in Intertwining Bodies, Roots, Hair (130lbs times three) (2022), which was featured in the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition “Strange Clay.”

The tactile imprints which form the limbs of Ruais’s sculpture deliberately recall the artist’s movements while mining for materials in a clay quarry, recorded in the triumphal video art piece Digging in, Digging Out (2021). Engaging, embedding, and emerging from the wet, raw earth, the artist then repeats these excavation marks in the studio, impressing her exact body weight into foraged clay. The marks of the artist’s clawing hands are then fired and painted, as in Spreading Outward from Center, Blue Eye (2022). These intensely expressionistic, wall-mounted pieces portray the future and cross-medium potentiality of clay work. Ruais’s latest work is featured in a solo show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles through June 24th.

Alake Shilling, B. 1993, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Alake Shilling, installation view of “A Bug's Life” at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles, 2023. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch.

Alake Shilling has stated she hopes the viewer of her works will become an “accessory of comfort.” In her reinterpretation of plush toys, Shilling invokes memories of a simpler time. Childhood has always been a source of creative inspiration for the artist—yet Shilling’s works are never saccharine. Instead, they conjure a sense of displacement in the viewer. In the book Alake Shilling: The Hippest Trip in America—By Land, Air and Sea (2023), the artist displays images of her relatable source material: Disney cartoons, children’s animations, and memes. Works like Jolly Bear (2021) are uncanny: totally monochromatic versions of their original inspiration. On a recent podcast, the artist said that she intends for her sculptures to create a universal experience, striving to capture both pleasure and pain.

Alake Shilling, installation view of “A Bug's Life” at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles, 2023. Photo by Joshua White. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch.

A solo show at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles space, “A Bug’s Life,” debuts a new series of Shilling’s works. The artist cites inspiration from animal totems in the traditional mythology of Yoruba culture, combined with an aesthetic influence from the stationery brand Lisa Frank. Works like Snelly Boop (2019) are animistic, grotesque explorations of this ultra-positive commodified reverie.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, B. 1929, Caracas, Venezuela. Lives and works in Venice, California.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Tile Table, c. 1990. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy of the artist and kaufmann repetto Milan / New York.

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s unusual objects recycle mass-produced images. Having worked in clay since the 1970s, the artist draws upon many influences, from Peter Voulkos to Toulouse-Lautrec, Zuni patterns, and Betty Boop. In her tile pieces, she transposes episodic elements from comic strips, using the stylized patterns of Hispano-Moresque tiles. Frimkess is as likely to use a delft blue pigment, traditional in Northern European pottery, as she is to mimic a vessel representing a Mesoamerican deity.

Throughout her life, Frimkess has continually returned to the comic folklore figure of Condorito. The Chilean comic book hero exposed society’s hypocrisies and made his popular debut in 1949, the same year Frimkess relocated to Santiago. “I tell everyone he’s my philosopher,” the artist said in a 2020 interview with Michael Ned Holte for Mousse Magazine.

Frimkess’s skill is her ability to conjoin modern folklore in wry, politically conscious picaresque narratives, as in Cup in Spanish (2010). Distorted figurines of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, depicted as wary and a little bewildered, are Frimkess’s most famed works. In 2024, the artist’s work will be the subject of a major retrospective at LACMA.

Christabel MacGreevy B. 1991, London. Lives and works in London.

Christabel Macgreevy, Witch Bottle (White Hellebore for the Humours), 2023, Tristan Hoare

Christabel Macgreevy, Witch Bottle (Adonis Vernalis & Pheasant's Eye), 2023, Tristan Hoare

Christabel MacGreevy’s objects are imbued with ritual. In “Sexing the Cherry,” a dual show with Rafaela de Ascanio at Tristan Hoare, asymmetrical vases contain literary and historical references. Works like Witch Bottle (White Hellebore for the Humours) and Witch Bottle (Adonis Vernalis & Pheasant’s Eye) (both 2023) critique the historical mystification of female healing practices.

Women folk healers were, as Silvia Federici wrote in Caliban and the Witch (2004), subject to persecution as witches with the advent of early-modern capitalism. MacGreevy depicts these forgotten subjects alongside other decisive female figures, such as Salome I (2023), who is shown in graphic applique carrying the head of John the Baptist. In works like Ace of Hearts (2023), a figure wraps around a vase, fluid and nonconforming.

Lindsey Mendick, B. 1987, London. Lives and works in Margate, England.

Lindsey Mendick, Potato Head, 2021, Cooke Latham Gallery

Lindsey Mendick’s 2022 debut show at Carl Freedman Gallery, “Off With Her Head,” introduced the artist’s Rabelais-esque artistic method. In fully immersive installations, Mendick’s ceramic pieces are not merely exhibited, but rather, they perform. In I Drink To You Tracey (2022), Tracey Emin’s piece Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996) is portrayed as tableaux, presented to the viewer within a box.

Meanwhile, in I Drink To You Europa (2022), the mythological tale of rape is subverted. Presented as a camp, ceramic candelabra flickering in the darkened gallery, the sculpture is both functional and nonfunctional. Mendick depicts Europa in a moment of rapture, receiving oral sex from Zeus disguised as a bull.

The artist’s brilliance is similar in her more abstract works. In Bursting at the Seams (2021), bulging eyeballs protrude unexpectedly from the delicate, reflective surface of the glazed ceramic—a playful, grotesque interpretation of the traditional vessel.

Diana Yesenia Alvarado, B. 1992, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Orejas, 2019. Photo by Jeff McLane. Courtesy of the artist and The Pit.

Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Cometa Verde (Caterpillar ser), 2021, Galeria Mascota

The past year has been eventful for ceramic artist Diana Yesenia Alvarado. Her work Lista Para Volar (2022) was part of “Funk You Too!” and the artist is in residence at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Alvarado’s sculptures function as mnemonic devices, devised to capture the sounds, smells, colors, and overall sensations of a predominantly Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles, where the artist was raised. These sculptures are vibrant and psychedelic, creating a cinema of sensation. In Mezkalita (2020) and Cometa Verde, Caterpillar ser (2021), colors bleed and meld, a product of the artist’s desire to allow her materials a life of their own.

Daughters of Cain, Sharp Objects & How the Recession Gave Rise to the Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic is an aesthetic which understands the world to be dying. It celebrates crucifixes, fading wallpaper, one-room schoolhouses and gauche, technicolour images of Jesus Christ. As a disclaimer - but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise - Southern Gothic is definitely not Kim Kardashian’s 2018 editorial dressed in Amish cosplay. Instead, it’s true crime snapshots and a faded, dirty American flag. Southern Gothic is the sweat dripping from Robert Patterson’s brow in The Devil All the Time, the deranged sister of cottage-core, a Lisbon girl impaled on a white picket fence: it is the dialectic between the grotesque and American mythology.

My first encounter with Southern Gothic was, as you might expect, on TikTok. Much of its success appeared to originate in Hayden Anhedönia’s alter ego: Ethel Cain. Although not necessarily mainstream, #Ethelcaincore has garnered enough interest to induce dismay for those intent on gatekeeping Ethel Cain. There is no better summary, I think, of this aesthetic than Anhedönia’s description of her own fanbase, or ‘daughters of Cain’, as “Girls that fuck in dirt pits, girls that think mildew smells good, girls who know you’re supposed to smoke a lot of weed before listening to Preacher’s Daughter…”. A video on TikTok titled Very Specific Aesthetics pt.41 visualises Southern Gothic along similar lines. Tumblr-esque images abound; eerie churches inscribed with apocalyptic messages, a photographic recreation of the painting Christina’s World, and an editorial of Mia Goth wearing a nightgown in the forest. These are disparate elements, which, in typical TikTok fashion, appear to sanction the idea that being depressed and living in the middle of nowhere is enough to lay claim to an aesthetic.

Yet, in 2023, Southern Gothic is more than just a micro-trend. It’s deeply political. Crucially, there are theatrical visions of the genre found on TikTok, and then the reality of what it portrays. As we enter into a global recession, there’s significance in popular culture’s fetishisation of the South. Anhedönia, talking to The Face, describes the South as a corner of the States destined to crumble into oblivion, because that’s the way it was built. In this light, the region is an antidote to the false optimism and insipid lightness offered by neo-liberal identity. The red belt, in the US, is passè. It occupies a place of deep ambivalence in the American national imagination. Tara McPherson writes in Reconstructing Dixie: “the south today is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line”. YouTuber Natalie Wynn - aka ContraPoints - confirms this in her video essay ‘Opulence’, “Americana’s faded grandeur is easily mythologised into a Gothic romantic character”.

Southern Gothic appropriates the language of a much older tradition. European Gothic described a world caught in a ruinous state of violent decay sometime between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman invasion. The Gothic allegorised the world southerners faced at the end of the U.S. Civil War and again during the Great Depression, with authors like Tenessee Williams and William Faulkner. In A Street Car Named Desire, Blanche Dubois is a faded belle and a personification of the South: a morally dubious character who invokes the audiences’ sympathy and derision. For contemporary audiences, the Gothic South might be an abandoned church, a relic of a once vibrant community - embodying the melancholy of a society caught in a maelstrom of economic downturn and cultural acceleration.

Southern Gothic is un-accommodating to consumerism in a way that antecedent aesthetics or ‘cores’ on the internet are not. As we enter into a huge economic slump, the desire to build your own identity through Amazon shop-fronts on TikTok has been reviled. In Neo-Liberalism, large amounts of money are funnelled into convincing people that identity is about consumer choice. Still, it's much harder to marketise the abject.

“Southern Gothic may be alluded to through Pinterest boards, but its reality invokes generational trauma, religious fundamentalism and the macabre living just below the surface.”

Often, what this aesthetic conjures is not even material. It’s a lethargy - the sleepy air of the American South evoking a dark history through its stagnant present. Writer Stephanie LaCava describes the mass suicide of the Lisbon sisters, in Sofia Coppola’s 1999 The Virgin Suicides, as a “desperation to escape suburban gothic idolatry”. Southern Gothic may be alluded to through Pinterest boards, but its reality invokes generational trauma, religious fundamentalism and the macabre living just below the surface. The atmosphere is stifling, as Mother Cain warns us, the South is not for the weak hearted.

Conjuring beauty in things left behind is Southern Gothic’s modus operandi. What can’t be left behind is the history of Black life in the American South. In 2016, Beyoncé released her seminal album Lemonade, heavily drawing on Julie Dash’s debut film Daughters of the Dust (1991). The film follows the female members of a Gullah-Geechee community off the coast of South-Carolina, at the turn of the 20th century. In both pieces of media, time is circular. Past, present and future run simultaneously. In the video for All Night, Beyoncé sits on a typical southern veranda, reciting: “the past, the future, merge to meet us here”. Dash employs the southern landscape, rendered in hazy sepia tones by Arthur Jafa’s cinematography, as a backdrop for the multi-generational tales of the Gullah women. In breaking Hollywood’s expectation of Black cinema as violent, urban and gritty - Daughters of the Dust re-imagined the role of Black women in Southern history outside of popular media. Here, the Southern Gothic finds its most useful application; as a subversive tool, finding beauty in the unfashionable.

The TV show Sharp Objects is a modern Southern thriller based on the Gillian Flynn novel of the same name. A journalist, Camille, returns to her home in Wind Gap, Missouri, to investigate the murders of two young girls. Throughout the series, the protagonist is haunted by flashbacks to her youth. Between inscribing the words ‘sacred’ into her skin with a needle and thread, Camille ponders why graphic murders would occur in such a sleepy, conservative town. The viewer - the outlier - can’t imagine them happening anywhere else.

But Sharp Objects is just a part of a broader media genre exploring Southern Gothic. In True Detective, the Deep South becomes a stage-set for the occult. The cult True Detective follows embroils church leaders and Republican congressmen, cutting close enough to reality that it verges on the conspiratorial. This trend in Media toward horror-filled, Southern-located crime dramas reflects geopolitical anxiety about a marginalised, angry and disenfranchised Republican voter. As noted in James Pogue’s article for Vanity Fair on the dissident right - working-class southern voters have, ultimately, been abandoned by US politics. An en masse return to Southern Gothic by creatives as well as kids exploring aesthetics feels inevitable for anyone feeling abandoned or alone following a global pandemic, endless reports on corrupt governments and a culture pushing us further into isolation via individualism.

Who Needs Art Archivism When We Have Instagram?

Caught within the matrix of the Instagram algorithm, searching for inspiration, it is easy to lose yourself. Sometimes, while scrolling past four identical pictures of Kate Moss holding a cigarette, shots of ballet pumps paired with legwarmers, or bleached eyebrows, it is hard to feel fulfilled. The internet is a lawless wild west when it comes to image dating; such aforementioned images whip around the theoretical high school cafeteria, becoming the inspo for aesthetic-orientated cults; heroin chic, ballet-core, fairy-core, Y2K, whimsy gothic, lolita-core: ad infinitum. In Techno-capitalism, the past appears flattened - trends from disparate periods emerge simultaneously, easily accessible through the Instagram algorithm.

In his essay The Archival Impulse, Hal Foster describes how the function of the archive has mutated alongside the age of digital information. As information becomes increasingly commodity-orientated, relating solely to the production of capital, the archive concedes to the database. But the archive is, by definition, an accumulation of historical records or materials. The Instagram archivist preserves historical moments rather than data, which seems alien in an app like Instagram. In an age preoccupied with nostalgia, these new online libraries present a new and refreshing mode of engaging with a history that breaks from the disjointed perspective afforded through social media. By presenting specialised, highly specific knowledge through an easily accessible, open format - these misnomer accounts are the solution for doom-scrolling aesthetes.

In the Fruits Magazine Archive (@fruits_magazine_archive), over twenty-five years of Harajuku youth subculture is documented. The account curates the work of Shiochi Aoki, a street fashion photographer working since 1985. In over two-thousand posts, Aoki steadily documents fashion shifts and individual experiments of Japanese youth from 2001 until the present day. While these outfits range from the quotidian to the statement, goth to lolita - Aoki presents a definitive style bible for today’s youth. In 2017, Aoki announced that Fruits would stop publishing - citing that “there are no more cool kids to photograph”.

Other archival accounts curate content that matches the moods of Gen-Z’s appetite for past trends. Your Fashion Archive (@yourfashionarchive) is run by designer and artist Oliver Leone. Bringing to light the unnoticed, esoteric elements of underground subcultures - Leone produces visual essays of transgression from across the world. ‘Scans of the 1999 8th Wave Gothic Festival in Germany, from the Japanese tattoo magazine BURST Vol.22’ is just one example. Others feel more familiar; providing source material for many a Depop hashtag; Kawaii fashion, Hysteric Glamour, and Cyberpunk aesthetics. As long as micro-trends have existed, so has the fashion archivist.

Perhaps one of the most endearing aspects of the online archive is that it does not overtly, or even covertly, try to sell us anything. Any social media literate individual will know the near impossibility of navigating the digital sphere without feeling the pressure to spend. The influencer economy is able to sell to us in a way that looks, and feels, unobtrusive.

As noted by Emily Hund in her 2023 work, The Influencer Industry, Instagram is created for ‘producing, evaluating and marketing content relied on a positive association with authenticity’.

In a world where authenticity is constructed by the rules of online engagement - it may feel far-fetched to describe any Instagram account as genuine. The Westwood archives (@westwoodarchives) dedicated to the late, great fashion designer is one exception. The account owner runs meticulous documentation of Westwood’s oeuvre - a refreshing view into an icon who has recently been distilled into her orb necklaces and rings. Overlooked elements of Westwood’s history appear; images of The New Romantics runway, the designer’s fascination with pirates, and the pieces featured in the cult-classic anime ‘NANA’. Considering Westwood’s fascination with the outmoded, unfashionable and ridiculous - it feels suitable that her work be showcased through an archival lens.

The celebration of a life’s work is one of the crucial tasks of the individual archiver - as demonstrated in the James Baldwin dedicated collection (@jamesbaldwinarchive). Administrated by Egyptian-American writer Fawzy, the archive is described as a place to focus on the life and work of the Black queer genius. The archive curates images of Baldwin throughout his life, accompanied by quotes from his writing - compiling images, interviews and facts to shape an easily accessible online portrait. Fawzy includes links to Baldwin’s writing: A Report from Occupied Territory, Letter from a Region in My Mind, and his dispatches from the civil rights movement. These sources may not always appear totally unfamiliar: while they have been drawn from the archives of mass culture - their act of retrieval represents something crucial in our present moment.

“By undermining the Instagram algorithm’s focus on the monetary, the online archive may be the one positive side effect of our visually-saturated cultural moment.”

John Tagg, in his essay The Archiving Machine; or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet, writes how the archive becomes the repository of collective memory. As the archive mutates, from the rules of scientific documentation to a community-led act of remembrance - the importance of accounts such as Alayo Akinkugbe’s becomes clear. A Black History of Art (@ablackhistoryofart) is dedicated to highlighting overlooked Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers from art history and today. Alayo Akinkugbe, an art historian and curator, presents an archive that is notably absent from the curricula of traditional art institutions and universities. Works by Deana Lawson, a contemporary American photographer of Black lives in the public and private sphere, coincide with the portrait of Katherina, by Albrecht Durer, painted in 1521.

More than any other archival example discussed here, this account demonstrates the ability of the archive to produce strands of connection between the past and present, and foster new trajectories.

The Archival Instagram impulse presents an exciting new future for the online sphere. By undermining the Instagram algorithm’s focus on the monetary, the online archive may be the one positive side effect of our visually-saturated cultural moment. They are reminiscent of the non-commercial orientation of Web 1.0, the history of which is now preserved by digital archivists in projects like text files and WWWTXT, and foregrounds a hopeful beginning for Web 3.0.

In Hardcore at Sadie Coles, Sex gets political.

Eighteen works in a group show at Sadie Coles HQ present sex as a tool of political subversion.

Miriam Cahn, “Leischbild/famillienbild", 2017

Artist, sexologist and adult filmmaker Annie Sprinkle was one of the pivotal players of the 1980’s Sex Positive Movement, and the first porn star to earn a Ph.D. In 101 Uses For Sex, Sprinkle’s 33rd rule describes ‘‘Sex as an art form". The self-described multi-media whore explains that sex “can be very creative" and “a great way to express oneself’. At Sadie Coles HQ, the group exhibition Hardcore features eighteen artists preoccupied with the sexually explicit and sado-masochistic. Aimed at provocation, the show examines the diverse nature of intimacy through photography, sculpture, leather, chains, whips and silicon genitalia. Hardcore provides a response to Annie Sprinkle’s sexual manifesto. In bringing underground expression to a mainstream gallery space, it is an event at once revolting and revolutionary. This is a must see exhibition - excellent for a first date, less good to see with family.

Cindy Sherman, courtesy of The Artist and Hauser & Wirth.

The works at Sadie Coles HQ vary from the representational and figurative to the symbolic and dismembodied; the least explicit works simply signify the act of sex. In Monica Bonvicini’s work Breathing (Calm), 2023, a large leather flogging device swings, like a metronome, from the gallery ceiling - carving a dramatic semi-circle in front of bemused visitors on opening night. While the object generated a nervous, excited atmosphere amongst the crowd - it’s movements were gentle. The hypnotic lull of Bonvicini’s installation recalls the feeling of Le petit-mort; the moment of introspection post-orgasm, when, as Reba Maybury outlines in her exhibition text - ‘the brain forgets itself’.

Reba Maybury, aka ‘Mistress Rebecca’, is an artist, writer and political dominatrix. Her accompanying exhibition text tackles Hardcore as a state of mind, making a distinction crucial for the more scandalised members of the public: “these works are not seducing you, because they are not about you". These pieces present the great diversity of sexual pleasure - from Joan Semmel’s interpretation of the foot fetish to Bob Flanagan’s penis stretching torture device - there is no kink community left behind. In Bonvicini’s Beltdecke #6, men’s black leather belts are braided together to form a kind of S&M craft-object. The belts form inter-connected strands, alluding to the historical importance of the material in bringing together the 1980’s queer leather community.

Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of The Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica

Hardcore does not waste time with societal niceties. The best works are fantastically grotesque. It takes a moment to notice that Untitled #257(1992) - from Sherman’s ‘Sex pictures’ series - captures acts of sexual humiliation between dolls, rather than humans. The piece holds an uncanny mirror to society's love of highly graphic pornographic media, one of the main curatorial aims of Sadie Coles and John O’Doherty. As they told i-D: “The concept of Hardcore is to explore the impulses inherent to being human, specifically the more complex dynamics related to sex…prompting new conversations surrounding the attitudes we as a society choose to accept, and why"’. Adding to the list of well-renowned artists in the show, including Carolee Schneeman and Tishan Hsu, the work of Miriam Cahn is brilliantly perverse. Leischbild/famillienbild (2017) depicts two figures having sex with kinetic frenzy. Cahn’s work never fail to make me laugh: while her subject matter is often obscene, the 73 year old artist finishes her figures with absurd, crudely drawn smiley faces. The faintly ridiculous outcome makes a welcome change from what Reba Maybury calls “the banality of sophistication" valued in the contemporary art world.

Since 2015, Maybury’s instagram has been famous for its images of the artist as a larger-than-life dominatrix cradling her subs, who appear tiny and naked. For myself and the general public, these posts are humorous examples of men being belittled. But these images also celebrate sexual roleplay for its subversion of social hierarchies, similar to the artworks shown in Hardcore, they demonstrate the importance of “pleasure as something to take seriously" rather than just a by-product of gratification.

Speaking with i-D, Coles and Doherty outlined the political urgency of the show: “Cancel culture has complicated the openness of dialogue, and equally mounting repressive conservative forces have sought to demonise or police sexuality." One aim of Hardcore is to provide an alternative avenue of discussion around sex via contemporary art. Works such as Bruce LaBruce’s Female Liberation Army (2005) demonstrate the artist’s belief that transgressivness has always been synonymous with political incorrectness. Typical of LaBruce’s fondness for combinig revolutionary zeal and libidinal politics, two naked women embrace amidst a blood spattered room - one totees an AK-47 and a guerilla style scarf. It’s no wonder the artist’s works have previously been censored, as Reba Maybury writes, “the policing of who is allowed to possess sex will be endless." Headless Body In Topless Bar, 2023, forms part of Darja Bajagićs ‘Ex Axes’ series. The sequential display of axes carry stills of actresses from violent pornographic films. Bajagić highlights these dark corners of the internet in order to draw out similiarities with America’s very public obsession with gruesome murder and true crime.

In Hardcore, sexual play is a state of limbo; rules are upturned, convention disregarded, pants are thrown away and dicks are left in hands. The exhibition depicts the point at which, as Maybury writes, “discomfort links arms with curiosity and pleasure holds hands with disgust."

Interview with Qualeasha Wood

All Around Me, 2023, woven jacquard and glass seed beads 152.4 x 406.4 cm, 60 x 160 in

Qualeasha Wood is a textile artist whose work contemplates the realities of Black American Femme ontology. Wood was recently included in It’s Time For Me To Go at MoMA PS1, an exhibition of works made during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2022. In May 2021, her work was featured on the front cover of Art in America. Within her multi-dimensional tapestries, the artist inhabits a digital avatar that has been with her since childhood. Converting the haptic into the digital, the artist is defining new ground for fine art in the age of Web3. TANK meets Qualeasha Wood to discuss her upcoming exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, TL;DR, the artist’s first solo show in Europe.

Interview by Lydia Wilford

Lydia Wilford: Your first European solo show has just opened in London. What’s the inspiration for the name, TL;DR?

Qualeasha Wood: TL;DR stands for “too long, didn’t read”. The work stems from the processing following the pandemic and the huge upturn in my career. There was a loss and then, ultimately, a rebirth of self. I felt like I was losing a bit of myself – the ability to be a human being, not just an imaginary figure. Whether it’s through a phone screen, a tapestry, or a tufting, I felt a constant desire to be vulnerable and honest, especially on social media. Often, when people find out there’s something traumatic or controversial tied to work, that then becomes the narrative. I’m cognizant that, in terms of timing, my career shot off right after George Floyd’s murder. That was when all Black artists were, you know, having their big moment. My friends who hadn’t been showing before were suddenly invited to partake in shows. I had a similar moment where people bought my work left and right. And I remember worrying that one day I would wake up, and it would all just come tumbling down. I am basically at a point now asking: Who am I? I am facing all this pressure from society and the art world about how I look and what I wear. When I needed to make more work, I became obsessed with this work’s value, especially a selfie and a tapestry work. I don’t fit within a societal standard for how I look. Previously, I have been angry in my tapestries. Recently, I have been focusing more on grief and joy as two sides of the same coin.

LW A certain Forever 21 red dress has featured prominently in your previous works. What made you switch to white? What’s the symbolism of that choice?

QW The red dress had this very overtly sexy association. When I met collectors on studio visits, their immediate reaction would be: “Oh, this is so charged”. I’d say, “This is just some dress I owned”. I just swapped the red for the same model in white. I am getting married in a year, and there is a specific symbolism around white dresses; virginal, pure. The assumption of innocence has never been afforded to me, even as a kid. I have always been fighting the idea of being sexualized in my everyday existence. The choice was not to argue for my own innocence, it was about furthering the idea that a white dress on my body produces a particular language, regardless of context or intention. No matter how hard I try, I will never have that moment of not feeling a gaze upon me.

LW Your work induces an atmosphere of semi-religious experience, as you borrow from religious iconography, and the tapestries are monumental in size. In TL;DR, you have produced these church-kneelers – objects which feel personal and intimate.

QW Recently, I collaborated with [luxury furniture company] Roche Bobois, and I finally got to experiment with what it meant to make an object. I had two different goals for the church kneelers. One, making something that could be fully functional but would require some kind of sacrifice; the second was making something entirely useless. I settled for the in-between. It’s an art object, but it also propels someone to get down on their knees and have a moment, not necessarily to pray, but a meditative moment. The text on the kneelers is from a prayer I often heard in the church or confession, and I just changed the language. When I was younger, I met this guy on Twitter who was interested in praying to me, basically worshipping me. It was never physical. He built an altar with a prayer mat and dedicated it to me. He had a photo of one of my tapestries on this screen in the center and prayed to it. We’re still in contact. I think the concept of absolution within the act is fascinating. I wanted the kneelers to feel approachable – like a dirty trick – where you wonder how it functions within the rest of the gallery space. The colors match the tapestries, and the text is hard to read. In a way, I am trying to force the audience to have a moment of hesitation.

LW How did you find the kneelers? Are they sourced from churches?

QW We sourced them from actual churches. Online, on eBay mainly. We wondered how realistic we wanted these pieces to be and decided on just the bare bones. Some churches sell these weird wooden sculptural fragments, and – in an ideal world – I would fill an entire space with these structures. People always ask me if I have ever wanted to show in a church, but I’m more interested in making a structure than showing within one. I want to build my own church in a gallery.

LW There’s a lot of fragmented Gothic architecture in the background of your tapestries. It appears as a fantasy realm that greets you as you enter into the digital sphere.

QW I play a lot of video games, and my visual language is inherited from those. I think about entering a portal through to another world and the fragmentation and distortion which occurs through digital processing. Everyone is moving into AI, but I still work with my own software. In Photoshop, there’s this content awareness removal tool. It’s a deletion, but it sources and pulls from other parts of your image. If I bring in one column, I can source it and have it fragment across the screen – allowing for random tweaking – to create something more authentic. After working all this time with digital, I know how a column will weave.

LW There is a dialogue between the haptic and the cybernetic in your work. Is a stitch equivalent to a pixel in your tapestries?

QW Yes, in the tapestries there is quite a literal relationship; every stitch equates to a pixel on the screen. So for every tiny, minute detail, it will render. I think that’s the beauty, and what I love about working with technology over working on a handloom is that if I make a mistake or a typo, it will pick it up. The machine won’t correct it for me – if I don’t delete something, the little pixel trail will still be there. In Power Off, there is blue beading atop all the text boxes, which was where I had a typo but I didn’t want to do it over again. In Accountability.Readme the crackling behind the figure, these black lines, are thunderbolt moments in the sky. Those are just leftover pixels from deleted images. It is quite a literal process, but sometimes I work against that, oversizing my work and forcing the machine to crop it. The remnants are cool.

LW Does it have personal relevance for you, working digitally?

QW My first experience with drawing was on a computer. My mom used to hate to watch me draw or color. She always said, “You don’t draw within the lines!”. On Microsoft Paint, I used a limited color palette, which is the color palette I stick to now. Drawing on the computer was never permanent. Now, when I make tufting drawings, it’s the same thing. I still use my mouse and not a stylus. I freehand the tuftings onto their frames, but recently I have been projecting to have more accuracy. I operate my drawings from a more naive standpoint – the tuftings are parts of my childhood, lingering memories of my youth. I don’t need them to be the most highly-rendered, overshot image we’ve ever seen. It requires balance. The digital-to-physical relationship is very inspiring to me. The screen is the most important part of our lives – moving it into a physical space is fascinating.

LW You mentioned that your tuftings spring from elements of your childhood. There is one work, Time Out, with a figure surrounded by mirrors facing a corner. What is the story there?

QW My parents tried to explain a lot of things to me. I didn’t get put in timeout too often, but I fear being alone, which comes from my childhood. Time Out depicts a time I visited my aunt’s house, and she had so many mirrors all in one room, like a fun house. That was the first time I became aware of being a person. That was the first time I focused upon my reflection – a self-actualizing moment. Now, my images are everywhere.

LW How does it feel to center yourself in these works, and to have the art world’s gallerists and buyers contemplating your image?

QW It is a very overwhelming feeling. At first, it was powerful to be in a position of adoration. But it can be the weirdest experience: when people critiqued the work, they critiqued your image. With the side-eye effect, I felt like the Mona Lisa. When The [Black] Madonna Whore Complex got bought by the MET, everything just blew up. Even at the Studio Museum in Harlem, I struggled with the desire to be seen. I wanted to focus on rebuilding a relationship with myself. That is where these newer works come from – a narrative is always being pushed with my image. Now, I control my image. I am protective of it and of others’ intentions with it.

Qualeasha Wood: TL;DR is now on show at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until June 4.

Interview with Silvia Kolbowski

Silvia Kolbowski’s film Who Will Save Us? (2022) brings together different dystopias. In a mashup of two science fiction films from either side of the 20th century, the work follows the subject under capitalism from industrialisation to digitisation. As in previous works – After Hiroshima Mon Amour (2008) and That Monster: An Allegory (2018) – Kolbowski employs the editing process to re-animate the past, analysing the role of the political agent within imbalanced power structures. Who Will Save Us? envisages group psychosis, shot through with slivers of the past. Lydia Wilford spoke to Kolbowski about the storming of the Capitol, psyche and politics.

LW Metropolis (1927, directed by Fritz Lang) and THX 1138 (1971, directed by George Lucas) differ in historical background, but crucially, speak to one another across time. How was it that you came to choose these two films to collate?

Silvia Kolbowski I usually begin a project by thinking about and reading around what I surmise to be a social conundrum of critical importance. Given the disastrous political shifts of the past few years toward authoritarianism as a mass reaction to neoliberalism, not only in the US, but around the world, I had become fascinated by mass group dynamics, not to say mob mentality, especially in relation to conspiracy theories or enthrallment to destructive leaders. The strange thing is that I cannot remember how I decided to work with Metropolis. I’d never actually seen the film, but I must have had enough popular knowledge of it to know that it was relevant to my focus on group dynamics in a world of polarised wealth. It also had the proto-digital element of a robotic figure, and I did know from the start that I wanted to add the more contemporary register of the digital because mobs now exist in both physical and algorithmic forms. But I had never seen THX 1138, and I can’t remember how I got to it! Maybe in both cases, I was led to the films by the algorithms of a search engine.

LW Hannah Segal wrote that group behaviour realises itself in a way that would be considered mad if conceived in the individual. Madness is, therefore, sanctioned by the group. How does this idea relate to the specific cuts you have chosen to collate within Who Will Save Us?

SK In leading up to making the film, I read Wilfred Bion’s theory, developed in the 1940s, of the Basic Assumption Group. This was an analysis, based on his years of clinical observation, of the psychical elements of dysfunctional group behaviour, especially regarding the ways that the group constructs or accepts leaders. I think I drew my title from his work on groups. Unless one looks through the lens of the psyche, it is hard to understand why, for example, groups might be drawn to or create unstable leaders, leaders who work against their interests. Bion was, in fact, part of the same psychoanalytic circle as Segal in the 1950s. But academic research and filmmaking are two very different endeavours, and when it came to making the film, I focused on filmic strategies. My concern with spectatorship means that I rely on the “language” of a given medium in attempting to construct a spectator. In making a short film, I dealt with excerpts and the meanings I could create through montage. Reducing the footage by 90% was not as hard as it sounds, because both Metropolis and THX 1138 are films that I do not feel entirely aligned with – in other words, their stories were not ones that I wanted to retell in whole. I wanted to borrow the parts that I found useful to my allegorical approach, but through the process of selection and elimination, I was able to write a new “script”. From Metropolis, I retained the sections that emphasised the polarisation of wealth in physical terms – below and above, the burden of physical labour, the spectre of the robot, and the rebellion that follows the breakdown. But telling the new story I wanted to tell – of the psychical motivations of mob behaviour - involved repeating footage and “misusing” footage. For example, I rewrote some of the titles I used, retaining the graphics of Metropolis, and used the affect of the actors for different aims. From THX 1138, I selected differently, using very short lengths of footage as puncta of sorts, to shift the temporal and technological registers throughout.

LW Could you elaborate on the symbolism behind “misusing” footage within your work? The concept of manipulated footage feels pertinent to our current political climate and the uncertain status of truth in media.

SK That’s an interesting association. The news media has always been subjective and not simply a reporter of facts. That said, the dizzying number of contemporary internet platforms do facilitate the proliferation of egregious distortions by algorithmically supercharging formulas that monetise inchoate grievance and misfocused outrage. The question for me isn’t why so many lies and distortions proliferate today, but rather why mass populations are so susceptible, at a psychical level, to these distortions. I think that the answer lies with the fact that the governments of wealthy nations refuse to rein in the sadism of the neoliberal regime, which means that precarious mass populations will continue to be susceptible to distortions that crudely aim to displace their un-named fears – fears created by the very regime that persists at the top heights of power, as if invisible. But truth and facts have never been an ethical consideration of artmaking, and spectators should not approach art expecting them. Art is an interpretive practice – it’s not a history lesson. At its best, I think it creates a lens through which to think more actively about historical context. I “misused” footage because I wanted to retain the popular associations with those films, while changing the parts of the stories that I found problematic. THX 1138 projects a vision of mind and physical control by digital technology that is too categoric. But its narrative brings together technology and several other factors in prescient ways, such as the footage I used from it at the end of my film, which portrays the emotional detachment created by the digital image. Metropolis idealises capitalism as a ruthless regime that has the potential to be benevolent in the right hands. That is the happy ending of the film. This is wishful thinking. But its depiction of stratified worlds remains impactful, and I was able to utilise that while drawing out the psychical aspects that are underplayed in the original film.

LW This idea of distortion from vertical authority does not feel misplaced from Silvia Federici's writing on the use of sex as an instrument of division. Could you talk about the moment in Who Will Save Us? when the workers turn their anger onto the figure of the witch?

SK Yes, in her review of Who Will Save Us? Lara Holenweger also connected the witch in my film and the thesis of Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch. I would say that the mechanisms by which social division – essential to maintaining the primacy of capitalism for the few – is sown are complex, because there is a psyche involved in social relations, not just pragmatic, if cruel, material aims. So, sometimes the divisiveness can be overt – the direct demonisation, by a political group seeking power, of a large and/or marginal segment of society, as we see happening now in the U.S. and other countries with reactionary governments in their demonization of LGBTQ+ communities and the radical outlawing of abortion. But sometimes more complex mechanisms are involved because the psyche can generate its own divisive discourse and activity. For example, I pointed out in a blog post about seven years ago that I believed that Trump was a symptomatic outgrowth of mob mentality and not the other way around. This has borne out, as there have been many times that one can witness Trump having trouble managing his followers. This is because, as Bion described from his clinical experience with groups, groups don’t just form around leaders, they can also, for example, designate highly flawed leaders, even in their eyes, because it accords to them the active task of healing them. Also, troubled and aggressive leaders can be attractive to a dysfunctional group because it quickens them – gives them a purpose in a context of precarity and powerlessness. In our period of destructive capitalism, power at the top doesn’t even have to play the largest role in divisive demonisation. It can spring from the precarious and anxious group.

LW You mention Trump, and the storming of the Capitol is a moment when the group could be seen to overpower their leader. It has become infamous across all corners of the internet – and carries interesting visual comparisons to scenes from Metropolis. Who Will Save Us? shows that psychic repression can have serious consequences. Do you feel your work is allegorical to this event?

SK I think that the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol thought it was following its leader, although you’re right in that they likely took it beyond what Trump, in his wildest dreams, had in mind. By the way, we can invoke historical moments when the storming of an institutional building was undertaken with the aim of establishing democracy. But on January 6th, little ideology was present; it felt more like a display of the destructive power of disavowal as a defence. I think this moment of capitalism is all about destructiveness for reasons too complex to elaborate here. I do use an allegorical approach in Who Will Save Us? because I feel it is an aesthetic strategy that has the potential to bring together the past and the present, to allow the spectator to feel like the prophetic prescience of earlier cultural projects illuminates their present.

Interview with Yvette Mutumba

Yvette Mutumba is a Berlin-based editor, curator, and academic. This year marks the tenth anniversary of Contemporary And (C&), the magazine she co-founded to connect and acknowledge networks of cultural producers in Africa and the global diaspora. It and its sister publication, C& América Latina, aim to investigate the contemporary visual arts in an accessible and non-academic fashion. From 2012 to 2016, she was curator at the Weltkulturenmuseum in Frankfurt. In 2020, Yvette was invited to become a curator-at-large at the Stedelijk Museum, the Netherlands’ leading modern and contemporary art museum. Through her study and research, she has come to believe that Western museums cannot plan their future without acknowledging their history of legitimising racist and colonial violence.

Interview by Lydia Wilford

LW How has your time at the Stedelijk Museum been?

Yvette Mutumba I started in the summer of 2020, right after the wave of Black Lives Matter protests caused by George Floyd’s murder. It was coming over to Europe and a lot of institutions were pledging solidarity, which was kind of problematic. Many people assume that the museum decided to invite me at that point as a curator who comes from a different perspective, but they had asked me before. The idea was to be “at large”, meaning that I had distance from the conversations happening within the institution; as an observer, I was giving feedback and input. After a couple of months, I wrote a report that started with the website and their presentation of the museum as a “museum of icons”, without questioning who these icons are or acknowledging the fact that they are mainly white and male. Words like “canon” would be used, and I was saying – what is the canon? Who says what the canon is? There are a lot of canons. What possibilities are there to bring to light aspects of the collection that have not been considered or works that may be problematic and need to be re-examined? Shortly after I joined Stedelijk, Charl Landvreugd was appointed as head of research and curatorial practice, and I’ve been working with him and Gwen Parry on the Stedelijk Studies Journal. When we took it over, it was a very straightforward academic journal, with mainly white Dutch academic authors and a mainly white Dutch editorial board. So, we started by thinking about what Stedelijk Studies could be. We had an open call that, for the first time, was sent out to networks beyond the Stedelijk connections, like the C& network. It was uncomfortable, though, because writers would not be paid, it being an academic journal. I don’t know anyone who has the luxury of writing ten pages of text for free. However, someone based at a university with a university salary, who does this kind of thing only to add to their publication list, can afford to do that. The impossibility of paying contributors in that first issue of Stedelijk Studies that we did was reflected in who would send abstracts. It’s also a peer-reviewed journal, which is common in the academic sphere, but it became clear that with the few texts not written by Dutch people, the feedback was often super-critical. Peer reviewers would, for example, say, “Well, this author hasn’t quoted all the recent literature published on museum studies and collections.” I would say, “Yes, if someone is based in Johannesburg or Nairobi, even if they’re adjunct to a university, they don’t necessarily know all the publications that have been published in Europe on the topic and they don’t have to.” Their references are of equal importance; their text is not less valid than a European academic text. It became very clear that the norm for academia is very much Westernised.

LW Art history or museum studies has such a strong reputation for inaccessibility, in the UK, too.

YM Accessibility is what led peer-reviewing to be changed for Stedelijk Studies. We said, OK, we can have an excellent text that is also a speculative text; something that comes from performance. Next time, we may have artistic interventions. This is all knowledge production, just from various perspectives, and we don’t want to value one higher than the other. That’s the project of C&; the idea of accessibility is realised through no payment barriers when it comes to content, free educational programmes and paying stipends for mentoring programmes. The briefing authors get is: “We believe that you can talk about a complex topic in an accessible way.” It’s not necessarily easy – it might even be harder – but it is possible. We have a superb young readership aged between 18 and 35, which is quite young for an art magazine that doesn’t do fashion or film. It’s important for us to make the point that, although we don’t want to be didactic, this is connected to education. There’s an upcoming generation of people around the world that is really committed to the content that we provide.

LW Enos Nyamor, a writer for C&, states that, “as art writers, we’re not able to solve famine or cure diseases, but we can enrich our communities, by articulating, affirming or even negating aesthetic standards”. Is the idea of negating aesthetics important at C&, especially in the art writing you commission?

YM C& is more about providing a space to do that. If a person comes to us with a perspective that focuses on specific concepts – like negating existing aesthetic standards – then this is clearly important to make visible. It is a platform for a variety of approaches, for directions or perspectives that come from numerous voices. There is always the possibility for someone to say: “It is all about aesthetics as a political statement.” But we avoid this weird expectation or idea that certain aesthetics are connected to Africa or the “African Global Brand”. It is, of course, problematic, and more predominant than people would admit. I’ve been confronted with it many times; someone will say, “It doesn’t really look like that person is from Africa.” I would say we, as a magazine, strongly oppose that.

LW Do you have an idea of what the museum of the future might look like? A broad question, I know.

YM There is a speculative text by Ashley Gallant that I really love in Stedelijk Studies Journal #12. It’s about this idea that artworks or rather the idea or concept of an artwork become not only owned by everyone but shared by everyone; copyright wouldn’t apply. Instead of lending an object, a museum would lend a description of the idea of the object, and the museum would create it itself or get members of its audience to make it. Gallant speculates on that idea of what she calls post-copyright. For me, the museum of the future is a commonly owned space. There are ways of doing that not only with ethnographic collections but with contemporary art, too. In a shared ownership between certain communities, the public sector, and maybe still also specific circles of collectors, the dynamics would change a lot. This vision of the museum is maybe kind of utopian. I’m hopeful it would go in the direction of letting the art speak, giving artworks an agency that is beyond the moment. It should become a given that certain political aspects and histories are part of the trajectory of those museums. That’s the ideal. It will take some time to get to that point. We talk about the idea of “the museum”, but there is no monolithic “museum” because what happens inside is so complex. No museum can actually speak with one voice. You don’t know who wrote these wall texts, and they present a very subjective way of telling the truth or untruth.

LW [Curator] Clémentine Deliss has spoken about how the process of digitalisation can be invasive and even violent at times. Will Stedelijk digitalise its collections?

YM At the Stedelijk Museum I am not involved with this, but simply from the perspective of accessibility it would of course make sense. That is the main reason why museums do it. Clémentine was speaking about ethnographic collections, and I think there’s a difference between those and contemporary collections or modern collections. The basis of, for example, the Stedelijk collection is white male artists, and so digitalisation is not as violent an intrusion. Many ethnographic objects are not supposed to be imprisoned in a very specific collection or museum. New permanent exhibitions in the Stedelijk look critically at the artworks’ histories. Using a digital sphere can make sure that other narratives are acknowledged.

LW There’s an idea around “open storage” or “museum universities” that’s beginning to emerge, which would allow artists and eventually the public to interact with and even re-arrange objects usually not on display.

YM Contemporary art collections, not only ethnographic collections, have been financed by money that came from colonial exploitation. So, we all own it, right? The minimally appropriate response would be to make it so that anyone can have access. Within the walls of the museum, there are so many things happening that people outside are just not aware of, all these processes of restructuring, discussions, emotion and pain. Museums should be much more honest about it so that they can try to connect with communities that would never think of going there. It can feel like there’s this huge threshold that they have to cross. A museum can seem so inhuman, a huge machine. I’m always for access, access and transparency as much as possible. I worked as a curator and as a custodian myself, so I’m aware that institutions can be hesitant, simply because they don’t want people who are not experts to enter and make up their own narratives. But any narrative that can build around these artworks or objects that are defined within the collection is relevant.

LW If museums acknowledged the failures that come with all of this change, then people would relate to them a lot more.

YM That’s key. There’s a documentary, White Balls on Walls [2022], directed by Sarah Vos. It involves the director of the Stedelijk, Rein Wolfs, and it gets down to the key issues. There are moments where Rein says, well, up until now, I’ve only exhibited white artists.

LW I have one more question that’s not related to museums. Is there a book, piece of music or artwork that has made you think lately?

YM A book by Minna Salami called Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone [2020]. Salami manages to pull off a very difficult task: reflecting on such complex notions as art, beauty, liberation and Blackness by intertwining these concepts with storytelling, academic study and social criticism. This methodology, which Salami calls “sensuous knowledge”, merges emotional intelligence with rational thinking. I find it very inspiring.