Tactile With The World: An Interview of Photographer & Filmmaker Lewis Khan

interview by Lara Monro
photographs by Lewis Khan

British Photographer and filmmaker, Lewis Khan, uses London as one of his many creative resources. The city has great sentimental importance to the native South Londoner, who has lived on Bonnington Square for most of his life. Tucked away behind the traffic of Vauxhall, the square is one of 300+ housing cooperatives in London, owned and run by its tenants. It has a unique and fascinating history that owes much to the squatters who moved in during the ‘80s as a preventative measure to avoid demolition of the residential buildings. The community set up a whole foods shop and vegetarian café, which is still there to this day. 

Unsurprisingly, Khan draws much influence from the solid foundations of his local community. As a result, his interests focus heavily on the study of emotions, relationships and belonging. Working with stills and moving image, his achievements include Theatre, a photo series documenting the realities of medical professionals over a period of four years at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and West Middlesex Hospital in London and It’ll Soon Be Nighttime (2021). This filmic work focuses on a long-standing friendship with the 58-year-old George, who Khan met at the age of fifteen. 

Khan adopts the collaborative and inclusive mentality of Bonnington Square within his creative practice, which prompts a personal and insightful approach to his work. He spoke with Autre to discuss why he is drawn to photography and film, his recent trip to the States, and why he enjoys finding beauty in the small things. 

LARA MONRO: Can you tell me a bit about your creative practice and your journey with it? When did it begin?

LEWIS KHAN: I’m a photographic artist from south London. I work with stills and moving image, and my work is a  study of emotion, relationships, and belonging. I’m interested in the experiences that the pursuit of taking pictures opens up, particularly portraits. Taking photos for me is a way of being tactile with the world. I enjoy finding beauty in the overlooked, and using the medium as a means to form connections with people and places.  

What do you seek to uncover through your work and what are some of your biggest achievements to date?

There have been some amazing milestones for sure; early on having my graduate work Georgetown exhibited at the Photographers Gallery, having Theatre published as a limited-edition photo book in 2020, being represented by At Trayler. But to be honest, I’m just so grateful that I get to do something I love full time. I realized it the first few shoots back after everything had been off for so long with the pandemic. I’d never taken a moment to pause before then. I guess l was always wrapped up in trying to do this, and that, and the next thing.

MONRO: London is one of your most important creative resources. What is it about the city that  you find so intriguing/inspiring? 

KHAN: London is home, it’s where I grew up and have always lived. I feel like a product of it and that doesn’t feel like a negative thing. I see it as a foundational place, a base. Familiar and well trodden.

MONRO: Can you tell me about your community in Bonnington Square and what it means to you? 

KHAN: Bonnington Square is a deeply special place to me. It’s an ex-squatting, now housing co-operative, community in Vauxhall in South London. It’s where I grew up along with a lot of my closest friends.  What’s really amazing is that because of the housing co-operative we’re all still able to live there as adults. Everyone moves houses around the street quite a bit and a lot of our parents still live there. A lot of our generation are there too, and now even some of our generation have kids, so there is the next generation living on the Square. Everyone knows everyone on the street, it’s kind of village life. Eastenders tucked away next to the massive traffic junction in zone 1 London. I feel really lucky to have grown up in that environment, the sense of community, wider family. Growing up here definitely shaped my outlook on things.

MONRO: You have worked with film when documenting your community of friends and family. Your most recent work: It’ll Soon Be Night Time, follows one specific character, George. Can you  tell me about him and your relationship? 

KHAN: George was someone I met as a teenager, after he moved into a flat on Bonnington Square. It’s a super social street, everyone knows each other, and there always used to be a big bunch of us out skateboarding, playing football in the road, hanging out smoking on the benches, etc. George used to blast music and sing, walk with his radio and flags, so it didn’t take long before he got to know everyone.  

As we got more acquainted we would chat in the street, and George would often talk with heart about his past. Certain names and places would come up again and again, and I started noticing those same names written on lamp posts and pavements around the area too. I didn’t really understand George’s story in full, but I felt the emotional weight of what he was telling me.  

In 2013, I made a short film entitled Georgetown about him. The process ended up being a way for me to better understand George’s story more substantially. The act of “doing the film” gave license for us both to speak on things more deeply, and reason to spend extended periods of time hanging out. This is a good example of what I meant by the experiences that the pursuit of taking pictures opens up.

Since making Georgetown, George and myself have remained close. We see each other a lot and speak often on the phone. During the various Covid-19 lockdowns and being isolated indoors, we were speaking on the phone a lot, and I started to see a specialness in the ordinary chit chat of the phone calls I hadn’t noticed before. I bought a recording device for my phone and started to record the calls we were having. I liked that the words were now tangible things, not lost to the air. I think because we were all living so isolated from one another, the value in these fairly ordinary exchanges felt increased. I didn’t see George much over that period but heard his voice a lot and  started to find our phone call space unique. These recordings then became the motivation and the basis for the video piece It’ll Soon Be Night Time. 

screen capture from It’ll Soon Be Night Time by Lewis Khan

MONRO: What have you found most informative about working with film and photography? 

KHAN: Probably the number of different experiences, places, people, settings that I’ve had time with through film and photography. It’s a privileged position of getting to live all these different snippets of different ways of life.  

MONRO: Why do you think you are drawn to film and photography as your main mediums? 

KHAN: I enjoy their foundation in the real world, and how they enable me to have a specific type of interaction with people and my environment.

MONRO: You are currently travelling around New Mexico. Can you tell me about the trip and what you hope to gain from it? 

KHAN: Yeah that’s right, I’m out here at the moment. The reasons for coming here were a mixture of things. For the last couple of years I’ve been working on projects where I’m either exploring something personal or I’m working with someone, or a place that is close to me emotionally. This was in part due to the pandemic; that much more isolated life caused me to focus on making work that was more introspective. My practice is largely documentary-based so the work needs to be "of" something. Sometimes with an idea or concept that isn’t immediately so straightforward to represent through documentary photography or video, that figuring out process can be quite lengthy and at times I can get quite bogged down mentally. Having finished those pieces of work I found myself needing a switch up in process, a palette cleanser to cut through some of that previous mental clogginess. I wanted some time to travel, which is  something I haven’t done since pre-pandemic, just some focused time to make work in an intuitive way. I’ve always been fascinated by the desert, the plants and the tufts that grow there, the concept of an ‘oasis’ I find interesting. How humans are interacting with that terrain I also find interesting. These points along with my overarching interests in belonging and human experience made me take this trip.

MONRO: What is next for you? Do you have anything in the pipeline, any creative goals? 

KHAN: One of the pieces of work mentioned above I’m yet to put out, It’ll Soon Be Night Time. It’s a video piece made of phone recordings between me and George during the pandemic and then video  footage mainly of times before that when we were going places and doing things, Vauxhall/ Bonnington Square and people-focused mainly. It’s a very personal piece of work so it’s always interesting to see how that will be received, but I'm really looking forward to giving it an audience.

Romancing A Wound: An Interview of Estefania Puerta

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portrait and interview by Abbey Meaker

Estefania Puerta is a Colombian immigrant womxn whose interdisciplinary art practice transcends genre. Experiential installations featuring sculpture, video, scent, writing, and performance are steeped in layers of psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and profound insights into language, memory, ritual, and time. 

In early fall, after months of trying to connect, Estefania and I caught up on my back porch, listening to the trees, watching the light change. The pandemic made it challenging to get together, but she was also busy in her studio preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition Womb Wound, opening this Sunday, October 11th at Situations in New York. 

Hearing her describe this new body of work and the ideas investigated within it, I knew we had to sit down more formally—a perfect reason to delve more deeply into its transporting complexity. Her work evokes one’s own process of recollection which condenses, displaces, and plummets us abruptly into the forgotten (or misplaced) recesses of our past. 

ABBEY MEAKER: You’ve titled this body of work and your upcoming exhibition Womb Wound. You explained in a recent interview with Rachel Jones that this title represents an extended investigation of healing, of birthing something, being the holder and nurturer that then becomes wounded. This is definitely a universal paradigm: what does it mean to be rejected by a society that relies on those who have been cast out to sustain itself? And what happens when the rejected refuse the parasite?  

ESTEFANIA PUERTA: I’m glad you brought up the extended metaphors of wombs and birth. I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it. 

“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: Healing is an ongoing and sometimes unpredictable process, but ‘being healed’ of something implies a fixed state, yet all life forms are in a constant state of becoming. What value do you see in the act of nursing a wound, or ‘romancing a wound’ as you poetically put it, if it can never fully recover but instead continually evolves? 

PUERTA: Many of the ways in which I describe what I’m thinking about in the work just ends up feeling web-like instead of linear. Even thinking about the idea of romancing the wound—what does it mean to ease pain in a way that’s not healing it but enticing it into submission. I think healing is a constant state of becoming empowered in all the complexities that a wound offers, whether it be rage, sadness, pain, forgiveness, empathy, resentment, trauma, acceptance, etc. If healing is a portal into these complicated states then the wound is this fountain, a source, an opening and a flowing sting that keeps us in the simultaneity of being  animals and highly conscientious beings. I find that the wounds that I carry have also become what nurses me; they offer me a space to be truthful in the complexity of my experience being alive. The value I see in romancing a wound is thinking of it as taming a wild beast and knowing how to slow dance with it instead of trying to fight it away. 

MEAKER: You have said that this work is very personal, especially with regard to the family history and mythologies you’re mining. Even within this personal thread, the feeling of disconnect from family and the attempt to piece together fragments of an unknowable history is something I deeply connect with, albeit for very different reasons. 

PUERTA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I feel like it's something that many of us, if not all of us, can relate to: the erasure of our own history and these glimpses we may have: moments of vulnerable truth that are obscured by a murky mystery. In my family there are moments of clarity that I have about the ways in which we exist—the characters in my family and the mystery about who they are, who they were. These histories get erased but manifest in other ways. I romance around these murky mysteries and create different signifiers to dwell with a bit. 

MEAKER: It’s interesting, the function of remembering. Memory has so much to do with one’s sense of self and the forging of their history. If we can’t remember, we create stories, stand-ins. 

PUERTA: Yes, for sure. But I think that’s the thing about the self referential vs the identity politics around it all. That is definitely a part of it and inevitable because we are all political bodies in this society. But I realized a lot of what I was dealing with was a personal, familial connection and the way that has been impacted by politics, but getting more into the heaviness around it. In some ways I feel like dealing with the political was my way of avoiding the familial and realizing that it’s something I actually want to deeply understand. I wanted to find a soothing place within that unknown. I’m always thinking about a family member and each of the pieces I make become homages to them and reflections in this really subtle way. There is a correspondence that I feel like I have with my family. In that they do become these mythological creatures to me that hold powers and different codes to a family history that then becomes a world.

MEAKER: Kind of a way to commune with ancestors.

PUERTA: Yes, but they are usually people that I have known or know. But they do still feel like ancestors to me because of that moment of unknowing them. There’s something about, especially older family members, that feel like they are both here and in some deep past that I don’t have access to. 

Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: This familiar/unfamiliar quality imbues your work with a sense of the uncanny. The sculpture titled Mija is particularly reminiscent of a body. It has an interior architecture, a bone structure. It has the qualities of an organism in that it’s alive and dying. It has a vibrancy and vitality but also shows signs of decline: dying plants against glowing water, soft and fleshy material edged by muddy mop-heads. Can you talk about these provocative, paradoxical qualities? 

PUERTA: Thinking of the too-muchness of all these materials, the excess in both ways of fleshy softness and the raggedy edges. I think of the mop heads as a filter, both in their material, cultured significance and also as a proposal and simulacra of cilia and other filters that exist in nature. My dad was a janitor for the majority of my life and I have a lot of love and fond connections to this material; riding on the floor buffing machine that felt like a giant, gentle beast as my dad was its tamer, guiding it across the floor. At the same time, I feel that sharpness in how immigrant labor can be almost fetishized in the U.S, how immigrants are seen as the filters, the holders, the purifiers of what others do not want to deal with. How these mops literally hold the muck and grime and how I think of them as tendrils protecting the soft interior of this sculpture. The guiding term I was thinking about for this piece was “creature comfort” and thinking of bodies that need regeneration, that are not just beat down and exhausted but are actually resting, re-generating, feeding themselves, finding comfort. Some referential inspirations are the feminine grotesque and the goddess of fertility, Artemis. 

“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

MEAKER: I’m thinking about flowers: they are prized for their external beauty and arousing scent (how they satisfy us); yet once picked, the flower wilts, browns, drops its pedals, leaving only a rotting, stinking tuft that is hastily discarded by its once devoted admirer. 

PUERTA: We remember a beautiful flower but not the decaying flower. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a fruiting body. Fungus as a fruiting body, flowers as a fruiting body, the body having its own potential to fruit in these dark places. The operation of nature within all of that. Not just the appearance of it but what does it actually do and mean and how do we identify with these processes.

MEAKER: Your sculpture Enrejada is similarly dichotomous. Spilling out of a grid-like structure lined with ears made of wax, are tendrils of pink fabric, hair, and a coiled umbilical cord. This feels like a raw, traumatic memory. Bits and pieces disconnected and out of place, trying to find each other. The burden of remembering and forgetting. 

Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

PUERTA: Hmm interesting, yeah, as you know, I am really interested in psychoanalysis and its poetic and very real history as it relates to hysteria and women’s experiences. Trauma is described as this type of repetition, a loop that you play over and over again but can never find the ending to it.  I do think this piece plays with that notion of repetition, the over emphasis of something that cannot be forgotten. But perhaps for me, the pain attached to trauma isn’t as present for me, I was thinking more of familial lineages (there is a spice blend in the sacks that my mother uses) and also what it means to be a sentient being. I made the ears during a time when I was in deep turmoil and a creative block. A friend read my tarot and saw an image of a tongue licking flowers and instructed me to get out of my head. I was talking myself in loops and what I needed to do was be present, to listen to the earth around me in a much more embodied way. As she read my tarot, I had this material in my hand with no purpose and instinctively started making ears, they felt beautiful and cathartic in my hands, they felt right and that just led me to other ideas of these pieces typically being seen as their primary sense of existence. We talk a lot about the gaze in a visual way, but what if a sculpture can hear you? What does it mean to have empowerment through another sense? To have auditory sentience and being-ness in the room and offer the act of listening to the “talker,” instead of the “viewer.” In that way, this piece actually feels really therapeutic or healing to me.

MEAKER: What has it been like making this work during a time of incredible tumult, fear, sickness, unknown, radical uprising? So much of what has been hidden has now come to light. 

PUERTA: It has been both my refuge and sanctuary, as well as the sharpest mirror reflecting the darkest parts of my soul. The part I may not have been ready to deal with. Making art always feels like you’re putting your hands into a void and hoping that whatever you’re holding onto or making gives something back to you that is nurturing. It was a hard, weird time to try to define what would be nurturing and whether it was even something worthwhile to define in this moment. And then coming back to the romantic and true feeling around art being its own space that, for better or worse, can keep us grounded in a different reality that isn’t always a hyper-politicized and materially cruel place. I realized that I am a valid person and that I am worthy of existence and expressing my existence. In that aspect, I feel so grateful I had this show to work towards; to have a mirror I had to constantly face, to ask the hard questions and get to the other side of it, where I feel more empowered than before. 

Womb Wound is on view from October 11 - November 15 with a reception on Sunday, October 11, 12-7 PM @ Situations in New York

An Interview of Julian Klincewicz

Text and Photographs by Adam Lehrer

The 21-year-old, San Diego-based, multimedia artist Julian Klincewicz lives within an interesting dichotomy. In some ways, the lanky, curly locked and minimally dressed creative is a pure embodiment of the millennial artist mindset: his work is informed by a preternaturally vast exposure to a plethora of pop culture (punk, hip hop, celebrity culture, movies, and lots of skateboarding), he is indifferent to antiquated Generation X “empire” notions of “selling out” and is open to branding when he admires the work of said brand, and he is of a deeply open-minded disposition, putting his hand to any creative medium that interests him. At the same time, Klincewicz’s work is the antithesis of what has come to be understood about millennial culture. Though he hasn’t been alive long enough to actually remember the analog world, the tired cliché of “an analog man living in a digital world” applies to Klincewicz tenfold. As a genuine creative “polymath,” he counts published author, photographer, musician, and fashion designer amongst his various job titles. But Klincewicz discovered his artistic spirit through a medium that now seems anathema to the ultra-polished aesthetics of digital media: behind the lens of a VHS camcorder that his aunt found in his Grandma’s attic. “I started shooting because I was interested in videos, and I had a VHS Video camera,” says Klincewicz. “And then I had some conceptual ideas because that’s the way I think. Impulse and intellect complement and inform each other.” 

It’s hard not to feel envy towards Klincewicz having cultivated such a unique aesthetic and interested audience at such a young age. But it became clear to me, through exploring his work and communicating with him, that he is an undeniable talent with a singular voice and a powerful method of communicating that voice to the world. I had to speak with him. 

ADAM LEHRER: Your early video work and VHS work straddles the line between nostalgic VHS aesthetics and the immediacy of digital culture. When you started shooting these videos were you ever conscious of a conceptual or philosophical idea driving it, or did you just really love shooting video?

JULIAN KLINCEWICZ: With video, and specifically my early VHS videos, I’ve always had some conceptual ideas behind them, but I also enjoyed the process of filming and editing. The first video I ever made was intended to make the viewer uncomfortable, which, in retrospect, was a very naïve way, or a very young way, of understanding the concept that through art you can emphasize and create human emotion. I took a lot of influence from Ray and Charles Eames, and their idea that you can create an overview of a given experience, giving the viewer all the tools to create their own connection with it, and complete the work themselves if they want to.

I identify with you and your work quite a bit. Like you, skateboarding was my original obsession and everything else bled out from that initial interest: photography, fashion, art, writing, video. Why do you think so many artists in 2016 had roots in skateboarding culture?

I think that skateboarding is this really unique “sport” in that it’s a place where everyone is rooting for everyone else. At the skate park or spot, you’re excited when someone else lands the trick they’re trying, and that creates this unique understanding of what individual growth and community can look like. Skateboarding inherently supports creativity and DIY ethos. 

I think having the experience of going to a spot and knowing you’re going to get kicked out and knowing most people view your passion as destructive or dangerous gives you a greater sense of self-motivation, which is something you absolutely need in pursuing arts. 

When you decided to be an artist, how did you come to the conclusion that you would be a multimedia artist dabbling in everything, as opposed to a painter, or a sculptor?

Again I think that’s something that’s a mix of a gut impulse that later took on a more conceptual approach. Being an artist is a way of being in the world. I identify as an artist in the same way I might identify with a gender or sexual orientation: I couldn’t not be it. It’s very much the way I see and connect things, and make sense of the world and myself. 

Do you think that as millennial artists start to come into their own, the very existence of traditional painters and sculptors might be challenged? Is the creative polymath to 2017 what the abstract expressionist was to the ‘50s or what the pop artist was to the ‘60s?

Oh boy (laughs). Let’s start by defining what the “millennial mindset” is: anything is possible, we have the potential to achieve anything, we have to be doing more and we have to be doing it now.  Because if we don’t, firstly, someone else will. Secondly, having seen the generation above me prove that university education does not guarantee job safety and that the three generations above me failed to act in the interest of my generation in terms of sustaining our planet and mental health, there is no option for us to fail. The world we live in today may very well not exist tomorrow. That awareness essentially creates a hyper anxious and excited state of emotional and mental flux, both good and bad.

When did you first become aware of the power of style and fashion to define one’s self? 

I didn’t understand style or fashion at all. I still don’t really think I do. I can see it in other people, but when it comes to myself, I don’t know a damn thing. I like wearing all black. Dylan Rieder [recently passed pro skateboarder] influenced my perception of the relationship between style and the self; in skateboarding and life. He taught us that you can either do an ollie impossible over a bench, or you can do an impossible over a bench and look better than River Phoenix while doing it. Dylan changed everything.

The designers you’ve shot videos for, which range from the heavily art informed Eckhaus Latta, the cult-y and conceptual Gosha Rubchinskiy, and the conceptual meets pop culture massiveness of Yeezy, don’t share that many aesthetic similarities, but do propose a way of dressing and all interact with both the art and pop culture worlds. What do you look for in designer collaborations? 

I try to work with people that I feel challenged by. There should be something in the brand that I identify with and understand, but that I also can learn about. Gosha, Kanye, and Eckhaus Latta all have that in common. They’re people that I’m inspired by and for whatever reason I feel like I can contribute something to what they are trying to say. So when I get the opportunity to actually work with them, I try the best I possibly can to contribute everything I have to their worlds, and learn as much as I can.

In your fashion show, ‘Hey, I Like You’ did you approach this as an art project, or did you approach this as a designer making products (albeit art and culture referencing products) that you hope to sell? Should there even be a distinction between these two ideas? 

The runway show installation, 'Hey, I Like You,' was very much an art piece. It was about using a runway show as a medium to express a feeling or atmosphere. I tried to create something special and unique for a specific audience that would get to see it in real life, but with the understanding that a chunk of the project would live online as well, and be received as a “collection,” versus an art piece. I embrace that as well. The medium of the runway show is tied to fashion and products. They’re all integral parts of the piece.

I’m curious about your series of zines that explore the human relationship to objects. To me, digital culture has enabled an interesting dichotomy in our relationship to objects. Though we are increasingly less dependent on objects, the objects we choose to surround ourselves with become increasingly more important. Is that what this series is trying to express? 

When I’m on my phone because I’m bored for 30 seconds in line at the grocery store, I feel fine and I feel a bit lonely even though there’s people all around me. When I hold my favorite book, I’m transported to another world. I’m connected to a specific thing. Human beings are not digital. I think a lot of people in my generation are forgetting that and it’s creating a sense of isolation.

I’m bored of the Internet. But with my guitar strings I can bend and touch and make sound or silence with them. We need connection, we need reality, and we especially need people to function as people. 

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