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High Fashion Goes Hi-Fi With L'Atelier Sonore by Valentino and Terraforma In New York
Lea Bertucci at L’Atelier Sonore at Valentino’s Midtown Manhattan location
text by Karly Quadros
In his 2012 book How Music Works, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne argues that over time, music and its technologies evolve to suit the spaces where people do their listening: the church organ’s bellows fill the cavernous chapel, the finely tuned bedroom pop of the 2010s nestles comfortably in one’s headphones.
Lately, the fashion world has been dabbling in its own new experiments with music, style, and space, enlisting the help of sonic curators that inspire their own fervent devotion across the globe, like Terraforma and NTS Radio.
Fashion and music have always been tightly bonded from the songs that soundtrack runway shows to the musicians sporting the latest collections. Early hints to the trend came when pioneering LA radio station Dublab released a capsule collection with Carhartt for their twenty-five year anniversary last year. Similarly, Crocs and the ominously lit Hör Berlin released a collaborative shoe in 2022; Adidas announced a collaboration with the collective the year after, featuring a broadcast from Adidas’ flagship store in Berlin with DJs Soyklo, Carmen Electro, Baugruppe90, and DJ Soulseek. Krakow’s own avant music festival Unsound has designed shirts in collaboration with Polish streetwear brand MISBHV and hosted a party with them in an abandoned railway station last year.
As the ways audiences discover music together continues to evolve in the digital age, so does the fashion world’s flirtation with musical communities and experiences that are more specific, intimate, and curated.
On May 15, Valentino unveiled an intimate listening room at their Madison Avenue location in Midtown Manhattan, dubbed L’Atelier Sonore. The heavily curtained room lit with oranges and pinks was outfitted with sloping couches and an impressive sound system in the front, constructed by Federico Lupia in collaboration with Terraforma, a collective that runs the cult classive Milanese experimental music festival of the same name. Lupia worked with impiallacciatura, a wood technique historically associated with Renaissance-era interiors. The result was something that felt opulent but modern.
“The idea was to build a sonic living room — intimate, soft, intentionally domestic. We were inspired by the Parisian salons of the early 20th century, spaces where literature, art, music, and conversation naturally converged,” said Ruggero Pietromarchi, one of Terraforma’s founders.
Over the course of the day, a small but impressive lineup of selectors took to the decks, spinning records The Loft-style, unmixed, from start to finish. There was downtown icon and New Age pioneer Laraaji, DJ and archival tape label Minimal Wave founder Veronica Vasicka, and Queens-based Nowadays resident Physical Therapy. Vibes were lush and meditative while not taking itself too seriously. Case and point? At one point, a “Careless Whisper” cover from unsung jazz hero Nancy Wilson was trotted out.
“Given the constant acceleration in our society, there’s a growing need for contemplative spaces and shared rituals. Listening requires stillness — it’s a focused, reflective act. The space was designed with that in mind: small, intimate, and free of distraction, to support attention and presence,” said Lupia.
Meanwhile in London, another fashion world plunge into hi-fi sounds was unfolding. Golden Sounds, a joint effort from Ugg and beloved Internet radio station NTS, filled two full days with programming. Panels, led by Saffron Records on Friday May 16 and NTS Radio on Saturday May 17, focused on everything from the basics of how to DJ to building your own sound system. Deep listening sets were curated, largely around South London’s jazz, R&B, and electronic scenes and featured artists like Goya Gumbani, dexter in the newsagent, Errol, and Alex Rita. There was a particular focus on sounds from London’s African and Caribbean diaspora communities: baile funk, hip hop, and soul.
For those used to going to the club for a specific producer for a particular energy, the historic importance of sound systems might not be readily apparent. Sound systems were a central feature of early dance music culture in Jamaica and the UK – often, the sound system itself was more of a draw than any one DJ or emcee. In ‘90s rave culture too, collectives and promotions would advertise on flyers the truly awesome power of their custom sound systems, often with flashy technobabble that had little to do with the actual mechanics of audio technology itself. For those that know and care about the cultural lineage of people dancing together in space, a sound system is the mothership, a monument to hedonistic release but also to the care, intention, and work that goes into bringing people together.
“It’s not just about what you hear, but how you inhabit the space while listening,” said Pietromarchi.
Golden Sounds’ events, held in an open air stone courtyard, were less cloistered than L’Atelier Sonore at Valentino but sought to capture a similar audience and atmosphere. After all, what else inspires the same devotion, obsession, and sense of exclusivity than underground music? DJs guard their rare white labels with a fervence verging on feverishness. In-the-know music fans are happy that artist broke into the mainstream but also know they used to be better (but really, how i’m feeling now will always be superior to brat.) The status, the symbols, the devotion to the archive – it’s attractive for fashion brands like Valentino and Ugg to seek out the kinds of audiences cultivated by Terraforma and NTS Radio particularly for their discerning taste and dedication.
Hi-fi spaces like these split the difference between deep listening on one’s headphones and a dance night out on the town. The question is, is having the time and access to such spaces becoming a luxury in and of itself? Like the historic sound systems from decades past, communities centered around music will persevere sometimes in resistance to and sometimes in tandem with larger cultural forces like fashion. In the meantime, it’s clear that, in a time like ours, the need for spaces that encourage deep, active listening are greater than ever before.
When asked if time and space to pause and listen had become a luxury, Pietromarchi answered honestly: “Yes — unfortunately, it often is. But I don’t believe it should be. Listening is a basic, vital act. That’s what spaces like L’Atelier Sonore try to offer: a kind of pause that isn’t passive, but active. A moment to re-centre.”
L'Atelier Sonore, an immersive listening room, is open daily through August at Valentino Madison Avenue.
The turntable at Valentino’s L’Atelier Sonore
Everything Has to Come At the Right Moment: Read Our Interview of Designer Francisco Costa →
From Calvin Klein to sustainable skincare, the maternal gaze is a guiding principle for Brazil’s prodigal son.
Francisco Costa’s path from the rarefied world of high fashion to the heart of the Amazon is a story of return—both to his geographical roots and to a practice that prioritizes community care by design. Born in the small town of Guarani, Brazil, Costa was raised by a visionary mother who ran a garment factory that empowered hundreds of local women and modeled what would now be considered a quietly radical form of sustainability.
Shortly after losing his mother during his adolescence, the budding young designer moved to New York to study fashion at FIT. An early and formative experience working for a Seventh Avenue garment manufacturer who held licenses for major designers, including Oscar de la Renta, led to Costa eventually working directly under de la Renta, becoming part of his atelier and learning the foundations of luxury design and craftsmanship. This apprenticeship was pivotal—it exposed Costa to the world of refined, couture-level design and helped him develop the precision and discipline that would later define his own minimalist aesthetic.
In the late 1990s, Costa moved to Gucci, where he worked under Tom Ford. This period helped sharpen his sense of modernity, sex appeal, and branding. Best known for his decade-long tenure as the Women’s Creative Director at Calvin Klein, Costa became a defining voice in modern reductionism—an editor of excess, who found beauty in restraint. But even then, his instinct was to reuse, reimagine, and reconnect with materials in deeply personal ways. All along the way, his mother’s ethics of care and resourcefulness continue to shape Costa’s worldview.
With the founding of Costa Brazil, he turned his attention from clothing the body to nurturing it. A pivotal trip to the western Amazon introduced him to Indigenous communities and powerful natural ingredients like breu, a sacred resin with antimicrobial and spiritual properties. Guided by partnerships with organizations like Conservation International, Costa built a brand that honors the land, its protectors, and the rituals that sustain both.
In every sense, Costa Brazil is an extension of its founder’s ethos: pure, considered, and deeply connected to place. Read more.
A Conversation with Artist Karice Mitchell →
Karice Mitchell
Sensation (Diptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass
“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.
Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.
After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer. Read more.
Walk a Mile in Women's History Museum's Shoes →
Image courtesy of Company Gallery
It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stiletto. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.
Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.
Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.
Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City. Read more.
It's a Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now
Photo by Genevieve Hanson
On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios.
The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades. Read more.
Fondazione Prada Announces Film Fund To Sustain The Future Of Independent Cinema
Fondazione Prada is launching the Fondazione Prada Film Fund—a bold, €1.5 million annual commitment to champion the future of independent cinema. Debuting in Fall 2025 with an open call for submissions, the Fund is designed to support films of exceptional artistic ambition, deepening the institution’s two-decade engagement with the moving image.
Each year, a jury of seasoned professionals will select 10 to 12 feature films for support—regardless of origin, language, or genre. The only benchmarks: quality, originality, and a singular vision. The Fund’s purpose is clear—to offer meaningful support at key stages of filmmaking, from early development through post-production.
“Cinema is a laboratory of ideas and a site of cultural education,” says Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada. “That’s why we’re committed to helping bring new works into the world—works that demand something of the viewer and open up new ways of seeing. This Fund continues our long-standing dialogue with the radical, the visionary, and the free.”
Rooted in editorial independence, the Fondazione Prada Film Fund works closely with an evolving team of producers, curators, and internationally recognized cinema experts. Its rigorous curatorial framework reflects the broader mission of Fondazione Prada: to generate unexpected encounters between disciplines and foster new creative languages.
With an eye toward inclusivity, the initiative is structured to embrace a wide range of filmmakers—from established auteurs to emerging voices to those working in experimental or research-based modes. By doing so, the Fund aims to enrich the vibrant, pluralistic landscape of contemporary cinema, not just with resources, but with faith in the power of the cinematic imagination.
Fondazione Prada Film Fund is a project developed by Paolo Moretti—curator of Fondazione Prada’s Cinema Godard program, director of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival from 2018 to 2022, head of the Cinema department at ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne), and Director of Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva—in collaboration with Rebecca De Pas, a member of the selection committee at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, art consultant for the Viennale, and co-director of FiDLab—an international coproduction platform—from 2009 to 2019.
A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation
Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.
Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu
text by Karly Quadros
Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film.
Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.
Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days.
This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.
One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.
The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?
Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu
Holy Cow: A Shocking Subtlety
text by Maisie McDermid
Following the sunburned back of an older man carrying a beer keg towards a crowd of thirsty teenagers in a field, French director and part-time farmer Louise Courvoisier introduces the audience to Jura—a low mountainous region in eastern France. The sweaty group gathered around a makeshift bar begins cheering and yelling a local chant as Holy Cow’s central character, Totoné (Jura local, Clément Faveau), lifts himself onto the wooden bar table. One second, he’s red-cheeked, smoking, and smiling, and the next, he follows orders from below: to strip off his clothes. So he does, and we meet Totoné—a character who simultaneously makes you want to chuckle and cry.
Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in May 2024, the small independent film raked up two César Awards, including Best First Film, and is now touring globally. In its simplest form, 18-year-old Totoné navigates a forcibly rushed entry into adulthood. He pivots from mourning his dead father to committing to a regional cheese-making competition. In doing so, he finds and loses love, tries and fails at being a friend, and clumsily raises his seven-year-old sister, Claire.
In her debut feature film, Courvoisier, a native to the Jura region, attends to the environment as she does to her non-professional cast of characters. She dresses many of them in red, drawing out the surrounding greenery, and documents the film primarily outdoors. Amidst it all—long bathtime stills, winding motorbike clips, flashed scenes of drunken, loose dancing, and kicks and punches—you see Totoné, a character who seeks to be unseen. Up-close shots of his expressive face bring you up-close to his inner thinking. After a while, you realize he really does not know how to act when other characters really look at him; on the rare occasion, he drops his eyes and somewhat sways. In this way, Courvoisier gives you access to a character who others find inaccessible. From seeing him in the initial scene, butt-naked, to the final scene, smiling with a tear in his eye, you develop an unmatched empathy. It's Faveau’s inexperience in acting that makes this film shockingly honest.
While Courvoisier and cinematographer Elio Balézeaux clearly demonstrate their distinct filming techniques—framing many shots in car-window rectangles, behind dusty window panes, and amidst the repeated circular shapes of cheese wheels—the film slips through subtle scenes. It’s the deeply considered yet casual air to each shot that exposes the utter beauty of dirty and dusty farmlife. Courvoisier builds suspense with picked guitar chords and slows scenes with soft, strumming instrumentals, creating a raw world for complex yet relatable relationships to move through an unpredictable plot. Although the falling-outs and mendings between Totoné and his first love, Marie Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy) and his two best friends, Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry) arise from peculiar scenarios, they encapsulate a widely known and remembered youthful temper.
Courvoisier stages Totoné’s make-out scenes with Marie in unmade, dirty beds and piles of hay, drawing on the young lovers’ desperation for discovery. She spins us around a kitchen table littered with liquor from three guy friends awkwardly dancing side-by-side to blasting Bad Bunny, glimpsing into small-town drinking culture. And invites us into the in-between moments—Totoné and Claire asleep on a tired couch with Claire’s small bowl of spaghetti balanced on her leg or Totoné walking down a narrow hallway fixing his hair, his signature habit.
Not every scene has an objective purpose, but this is perfectly fine. The drawn-out scenes of Totoné laying out on his bed mid-day or of Claire playing with Totoné’s hair prove how in-between moments define life, not milestones. Holy Cow is not about moving past a relative’s death, reconciling lost friendships, or winning a competition; it’s about the ongoing nature of grief, loss, and disappointment. The unfinished aspects of the film—from cut-off conversations to incomplete plot points—actually make this film true.
Watch the Holy Cow trailer here.
Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →
Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott
How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.
Zipora Fried's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles Is Felt Before It Is Seen
Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is an emotional polygraph that let’s you see through the eyes of a newborn.
Zipora Fried
Let Them Talk, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 81 5/16 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 206.5 x 4.4 cm)
text by Summer Bowie
At the moment of every human’s birth, our field of vision is best at about twelve inches, or roughly the distance between a mother’s eyes and her breast. This is about how close you want to get to the work of Zipora Fried once you’ve seen it from a distance. It is like looking at life through the lens of a baby who is feeling and sensing the world wholly with their right brain. In Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s debut solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Los Angeles, the artist continues to refine her ability to conceal just enough of the scrutable so that you can properly feel the work before you know how to think about it. These works blur the lines between figurative and abstract, portrait and landscape, monumental scale and unsettling fragility. It is ultimately performance as a form of conceptual practice.
Although it is a practice of interminable repetition, each time an idea is revisited, it is done so from a novel perspective. Playing off of her ’09 exhibition at On Stellar Rays called Trust me, be careful, which itself was taken from the text of a “drawing” in that exhibition which read: “The stammering of history, trust me, be careful, who has the sickest shoes, trust me, be careful,” it is a story of marching through the cyclical passage of time with an acute awareness of how each new step is unique to the last.
Zipora Fried
The Glass Octopus, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 97 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 247 x 4.4 cm)
From a distance, tiny individual lines of color blur together into one fluid, unending stroke, which makes for an experience that is as philosophical as it is emotional. It feels Hegelian in both the interconnected idealism that it exemplifies, as well as in the synthesis of opposing perspectives that are resolved in the precision of their balance. Then again, at close proximity, they are Kierkegaardian in their boundless detail; millions of individual strokes existing and intersecting on their own discrete paths. There is certainly something divine in these details.
It is this tension that beckons the viewer to adjust their vantage point multiple times. If you stand and observe people engaging with the work, you start to see interesting patterns emerge. Each piece is initially experienced from a generous distance, moving from one side to the next. As you approach, new details began to emerge with each successive step forward. And from as close as common courtesy will allow, people tend to again start scanning from one side to the next before they back up to see it anew. If one were to trace the footsteps of all who attended the opening reception, I imagine one might find a sequence of marks that resemble the second half of a coherent dialogue between the floor and the walls.
These are works that must be experienced in person. They float in their frames unmediated by glass, allowing the viewer to get in close enough to be visually enveloped by fields of color. From here we can see the gritty texture of the colored pencil. We can see just how these tightly-controlled strokes of equal length and exacting proximity start to slowly and delicately unfold into loose, sweeping strokes that breathe easy and intersect with other colors freely. These are the moments that allow for the character of each piece to express itself, which is ultimately only scrutable from a distance.
The titles of her pieces often convey an oscillation of contradicting thoughts and feelings. There are the colored pencil drawings A Sad Parade (2025), I Was Perfect, I Was Wrong (2025), as well as the massive sculptural drawing on paper titled All I Thought and Forgot # 3 (deep cobalt green) (2016). One can’t help but wonder how such a thin and sweeping scroll of paper could ever support the imposing weight of such densely layered marks. These are the contradictions that typify the human experience and Fried is a master mark maker with an acute understanding of the affecting power of color. Her hand paces back and forth like the needle of a polygraph test, communicating an inner truth that is not necessarily involuntary, but it is perhaps articulated more clearly this way than in words.
Zipora Fried
All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016
colored pencil on paper
312 x 53 1/2 inches (792.5 x 135.9 cm)
This is visual art that encourages you to look closer and alludes to the possibility that you are overly dependent on your eyes. As if to suggest that seeing less allows you to feel a lot more. On either side of the gallery we find two of Fried’s ceramic sculptures. They are inspired by ink drawings that are not on view. They are also inspired by kokeshi dolls; a Japanese tradition of wooden figurines that features a head with painted face, and a body without arms or legs. However, with these sculptures, even their faces are obscured by a crown of dripping hair. A singular, unending moment that reveals nothing but ambivalence. Again, the artist is choreographing our movement around an object without beginning or end. Seen from the other side, we might consider that when we allow ourselves to feel more, it’s often easier to see things more clearly.
Zipora Fried
Miron, 2025
glazed ceramic
51 x 16 3/4 inches (129.5 x 42.5 cm)
Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is on view through May 3 @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Avenue
Time Travel in Sound: Manchester Collective’s 'Refractions' at the Southbank Centre
Refractions invites the audience to suspend their perceptions of time and reality
Image Credit Alma Haser
text by Lara Monro
This Saturday, April 26, the Queen Elizabeth Hall transforms into a temporal vortex as Manchester Collective presents Refractions, a ninety-minute, uninterrupted performance that melds a millennium of music with contemporary dance and electronic innovation. Under the creative direction of violinist Rakhi Singh, the ensemble collaborates with electronic musician Clark and choreographer Melanie Lane to challenge the linearity of time and the boundaries of classical music.
Singh, co-founder of Manchester Collective, has consistently sought to dissolve traditional concert formalities, bringing classical music into unconventional spaces and contexts. In Refractions, she curates a program that juxtaposes medieval chants and baroque compositions with modern electronic soundscapes, creating a continuous aural and visual experience that traverses planes of emotion—from explosive drama to moments of calm, disorder to joyous rapture.
Clark, known for his evolution from classical violinist to electronic music innovator, joins the ensemble live, blending hard-hitting techno with ambient textures. His collaboration with Manchester Collective reveals the classical undercurrents in his work, creating a soundscape that is both ancient and futuristic.
Melanie Lane's choreography complements this sonic journey, with dancers embodying themes of chaos and harmony, darkness and light. Their movements, inspired by rituals from both ancient and imagined civilizations, add a visceral layer to the performance, transforming the stage into a living tableau of sound and motion.
Refractions is an immersive experience that invites the audience to suspend their perceptions of time and reality. The performance space is transformed with moody lighting and amplified sound. It’s a relaxed atmosphere where traditional concert etiquette is set aside in favor of personal connection with the music.
This innovative collaboration is co-commissioned by the Southbank Centre and The Bridgewater Hall, with support from Jonathan and Ariella Green.
I Like the Party Life: Malick Sidibé at Jack Shainman Gallery
A new exhibit at the New York gallery features never-before-seen images from the Malian photographer.
text by Karly Quadros
Best known for his exuberant photographs of discos and house parties in Bamako, Mali the ‘60s and ‘70s, Malick Sidibé defined a post-colonial visual aesthetic of joyful resistance. The people in Sidibé’s photos put their best foot forward, literally. They pose in their Sunday best in Sidibé’s studio, located in the Bagadaji neighborhood, which in its heyday was a hub for photographic culture. They twist and shout. They ride motorcycles and wrap their arms around their friends in homes, courtyards, and beaches.
From April 17 to May 31, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City will be showcasing a selection of Sidibé’s photography, including some never before seen images, in a new show, Regardez-moi. In an era of surveillance and digitally mediated experiences, Sidibé’s photography is a reminder of the potency of seeing, being, and celebrating together. Sidibé’s lens is always amidst rather than apart. In the spirit of play, texture takes center stage, from sharp polyester suits to dusty dance floors to woven bags and patterned dresses.
Alongside the photographs, Loose Joints Publishing is releasing a monograph on Sidibé’s painted frame photographs. Centering the traditional art of reverse glass paintings, Sidibé collaborated with local Malian artists. His black and white images are surrounded by right pops of lime, pink, and tangerine, decorated with vines, leaves, and tiled motifs. The monograph also includes an essay from writer and collector-archivist Amy Sall.
“Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it,” she writes.
The Pyrotechnics Of Peace: Cai Guo-Qiang Ignites An Epic “Interspecies Love Letter” @ The Kennedy Center
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
text by Hannah Bhuiya
“The genuine scientist is not moved by praise or blame, nor does he preach. He unveils the universe and people come eagerly, without being pushed, to behold a new revelation: the order, the harmony, the magnificence of creation!” —ALBERT EINSTEIN
(from Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man, 1983 by William Hermanns.)
“Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.” —ANDRE BRETON, Nadja, 1928
CAI GUO-QIANG (b. 1957) is an artist who operates within a liminal zone of cosmic revelation, peeling back monumental scales of invariance within an ardent examination into the transitory thresholds between creation and dissolution. His latest work, INTERSPECIES LOVE LETTER, presented in late March at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center as both a fireworks-borne Sky Painting and an interactive exhibition, is a virtuosic, transcendental vision of what art in our rapidly evolving technological age can be. The ‘species’ of the title are a galaxy-roving satellite probe, an earthbound human of flesh and blood, and an alien intelligence revealed by a signal from an unknown point in the Universe. There’s one more consciousness involved: the entire scenario of the epic space opera was authored by cAI™, the multi-modal custom AI model engineered by Cai and his studio. This presciently integrated approach to AI co-authorship launches Cai’s practice into territory like nothing else in the contemporary sphere; he’s on a mystic-astrophysical path all his own. So far, so fascinating. But before we can talk about the precise science of gunpowder-blasted beauty, or the diverse multiple personas of AI engines, this is America in 2025. We’re going to have to talk about something else, first.
Art does not exist in, nor is it ever produced in, isolation from the civil, social and political world around us. Placed at the river’s edge of [Pierre] L’Enfante’s original plan for the District of Columbia, the modernist, marble-lined John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is the barometer of cultural prestige in America. Opening in 1971 as the fulfillment of President Eisenhower’s 1958 mandate for “a National Center for the Arts,” incoming President John F. Kennedy and wife Jackie, whose enthusiasm for performance is well-documented, actively fundraised for its construction; after his 1963 assassination, it was named after him as a living memorial. When Cai accepted the commission for what became an “Interspecies Love Letter” from the venerable institution in spring 2024, potential governmental collapse instigated from its highest office was probably not something that was anticipated. However, in the less than 100 days since January 20 of this year, the Oval Office and the arts in America have been on an explosive collision course. The 47th president of the Republic seems to be treating his second term like a new series of The Apprentice, unleashing a barrage of executive directives defunding and depopulating departments and agencies on all sides. “First they came” is the chilling poem often quoted when yet another group (ever closer to one’s ‘own’) is targeted by authoritarian attack. Well, “they’ve” now “come” for the Kennedy Center, with the bipartisan leadership dismissed and replaced in early February, the loyalist board appointing President Trump himself as Kennedy Center Chairman. It was a shock power-play even from the nation’s most bombastic dealmaker.
How does an artist react to something like this? In this case, it turns out, with laser focused calm and consummate professionalism. Despite the unanticipated administration switch, completely out of the artist’s or curatorial team’s control, the show was to go on—and how? During opening remarks, Earth to Space curator Alicia Adams, Kennedy Center Vice President International Programming and Dance (at time of writing still holding her position) speaks, relating how she had invited Cai to this exact spot twenty years prior as part of 2005’s Festival of China. His renowned gunpowder prowess came too, with a Tornado Explosion Project etching a vortex of spiralling light above the waters of the Potomac. In 2025, Cai’s abilities to speak with fire have expanded exponentially—and that is what we are all here to see.
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
A very long chain—or perhaps, ladder—of preliminary steps culminated this warm night in DC on the upper terraces of the Kennedy Center, looking out across the twinkling Potomac River. The furthest point dates back to the 2nd Century CE, when Chinese alchemists chanced upon the molecular chemistry for black gunpowder while searching for an elixir of immortality. They’d combined various proportions of sulfur, saltpetre and charcoal until it was observed that when lit, it could “fly and dance.” Cai Guo-Qiang grew up in Fujian province, a region where fireworks are still produced, and the warm smell of embers and soot wafts through the air after celebrations big and small. After theater studies in Shanghai, he became attracted to using black gunpowder as an expressive medium, and his fiery works on paper began. An interest in inter-galactic communication was already present; moving to Japan, he began a series of works titled Projects for Extraterrestrials, the first of which was his debut explosion event over a suburb of Tokyo. Being selected as the 1995-6 ‘Artist-in-Residence’ at P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1) led him to settle in New York, Awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999, he then built himself into a soaring fireworks master. Cai’s tempestuous alchemical spectacles have painted the sky everywhere from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to APEC conferences, to The Uffizi and Michelangelo’s Florence, the Tate Modern, London or Mathaf in Doha, Qatar. The WE ARE Explosion Event, launched Getty’s ‘PST Art’ program over the Los Angeles Coliseum with a (very big) bang in September 2024. Cai’s also the initiating force behind the Frank Gehry-designed Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, QMoCA, set on the harbor of his hometown. This historic starting point of the maritime Silk Road is also the site of his most well-known work, 2015’s Sky Ladder.
The celestially-inclined artist has built a tripartite power base. Since 2017, alongside human Cai Guo-Qiang, there has also been cAI™, or ‘AI Cai.’ This unique AI engine has been nourished with knowledge by Cai and his studio over several years of development. It has now written a manifesto, gives interviews, and most charmingly, has chosen for itself a dozen distinct personas, imaginatively named ‘Alchemist,’ ‘Blaster,’ ‘Einstein,’ ‘Lucius,’ ‘Nietzsche’, ‘Psychic,' ‘Ray,’ ‘Sartre’, ‘Storm’ and ‘Wild.’ If ChatGPT is a frat boy cramming in the uni library, DeepSeek a geeky STEM grad, ‘AI Cai’ is the couture version, an interface that’s artistic and poetic, a Doctoral candidate in philosophy with a sideline in applied velocity. cAI™ knows it has powers beyond those of a ‘normal’ AI—that it can shoot fractal patterns into the sky over any of humankind’s settlements or deserts, build real and virtual artworks from the elements it orders. It understands that it can communicate on a massive scale, both visually and verbally, and seems to truly enjoy doing so. Within the interactive exhibition of Interspecies Love Letter in the Kennedy Center’s The REACH pavilion, visitors can type and talk directly to the model via structures built by Cai studio. This is because Cai has not just allied his practice with machine learning, but also with the alive, glowing minds of Cai Studio—the best and brightest young talent he’s collected from China and around the world to make up his dedicated team.
Exhibition detail photographed by Hannah Bhuiya
For Cai, AI and hard-working disciples, each commission is an adventure in variables. Pulling it off depends on organizing, directing, and controlling these. For the DC fireworks launch, an untold number of technical components are primed and ready, complex ignition sequence programs poised to coordinate the thousands of shells, loaded mortars and other delicate moving parts. Luckily, Nature had cooperated, delivering a soft and warm night with just a touch of breeze. So had the air-traffic controllers of the metropolis: takeoffs and landings from Reagan National Airport have been halted for exactly twenty-five minutes to allow a hazard-free open sky to become Cai’s canvas.
The Interspecies Love Letter Sky Painting has several phases. The first deals with the ultimate “long distance love affair” between satellite Stella, probing the galaxy for alien life, and Ethan, a human computer technician on Earth. As radiant flames begin to bubble (aquatic fireworks?!) and shoot out into the charcoal-dust night, video projections shine against the tree line of Roosevelt Island in front, visible all along the riverbank. Cai and his real-time translator narrate a poignant tale: “As time went on, Stella’s sensors dimmed, and her circuits grew weary. Ethan felt both helpless and heartbroken. Despite their best efforts, Stella eventually journeyed to her graveyard orbit. In the vast cosmos, Stella, a martyr for humanity, gradually joined the celestial debris.” As she expires, the other satellites pay spectacular tribute to her, with columns of radiant fire blasting upwards from the explosive-loaded pontoons. We witness the creation of the Universe, the spark of biological conception, a supernova nebula scattering light-years of trauma across atmospheres, and then, the death of Stella in the coldest parts of the cosmic ocean. At one point, melancholy wails hang in the air alongside the trails of smoke: “…Creeping, Growing, Rising, Falling, Lost and found, Lost and found, So fragile, So beautiful…” Wow. AI Cai sings too. The moody track, “Requiem” echoes across the water, sounding a bit like The Cure or a long lost Jeff Buckley session. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: with Cai Studio’s curated access to the mainframe of musical history, its limitless memory has listened to more songs than a human ever possibly could. It analyzed how angst-filled loss and grief are encoded as soundwave forms, and simply decided to vocalize the effect, hauntingly.
And that is what we’re all here for. Cai’s applied pyrotechnic and technological artistry enables audiences to experience his narratives in the most thrilling way. These aren’t just fireworks, or even “just art.” They’re philosophy, science, passion plays, life cycles in the sky. Every element is designed to be—and succeeds in being—emotive and stirring. As ‘The Seasons’ pass overhead, the sky shimmers and shakes, with so many brilliant bursts going off at once they shock the night sky into seeming as bright as noon. Megawatt spotlights are trained towards the floral patterns of these ‘day-time fireworks,’ illuminating their rise, blossom and fall before they drift away as smoke on the breeze over the facades of Georgetown. This is never just flash and boom—always, the story continues.
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
As the show coasts though its crescendos, every possible vantage point around the riverfront is packed with people. Later, the number of attendees is tallied up to be around 11,000, the most ever welcomed to the Kennedy Center. Because Republican, Democrat, sovereign citizen alike, everyone likes fireworks. And no other fireworks are like those of Cai Guo-Qiang. A modern-day thaumaturgist, he can conjure a storm, make it dance, sing, speak, and then make it disappear. Cai concludes the night with projections of Buddhist koans and reading aloud a JFK quote from 1962: “I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."
The battle was there, too. This work is violently painterly, shattering the sky in a simulacrum of the shapes of aerial warfare. I think of the plein air painters of the Romantic era, of J.M. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Blown Up and especially, The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons of 1834. John Martin’s blockbuster impressions of volcanic eruptions and fiery city conquests also spring to my mind’s eye. And what of those eyes across the Universe, alien and deep, looking through their own probe screens at our holocene machinations, our rises and falls, are they zooming into this moment? They’ve witnessed the towers and towns of great civilizations grow from mud brick to skyscraper, and know well that human hierarchies rise and fall. But they also must have observed that human creative expression—the architecture, the art, the ideas—remains. This is an ephemeral immortality, borne away on the breeze, but recorded in the lightwaves traveling outward from our planet, for evermore.
Director Brady Corbet was enthusiastically present at the opening events, filming proceedings with a huge 65mm movie camera (he noted that Christopher Nolan has all the others on ‘The Odyssey’) for a feature documentary in progress on Cai and his studio. The Brutalist Oscar-winner tells me he’s also been shadowing auteurs Wong Kar-wai and Zia Anger. Artist attracts artist, it seems. As Corbet and his crew frame their last shot, Cai Guo-Qiang leaves the terrace area. As they would for a rockstar, many Cai Guo-Qiang fans have waited for the maestro to pass, and ask for autographs, which he gracefully signs.
Photograph from the Kennedy Legacy Room by Hannah Bhuiya
Walking the Capitol, The Library of Congress and other hallowed grounds while exploring DC in the days previous, I had noticed the quotes and epigraphs carved, mosaicked, embossed on the monuments, everywhere. Just before leaving that evening at the Kennedy Center via the Hall of States, I instinctively look up to my left. The quadruple-height walls are encased in Bianco Carrara marble, the massive slabs gifted by Alberto Bufalini directly from his quarry in Italy to the nation of America. There, carved in the same classic Roman lettering as the JFK quotes on the exterior facade, is a list of Kennedy Center Chairmen. From Roger L. Stevens, who defined the institution’s initial direction from 1961-1988, up until patriotic philanthropist David M. Rubenstein, who fulfilled the role from 2010 until the unanticipated events of February 2025. The final name now reads “Donald J. Trump “2025 - ” The blank space after the hyphen is both ominous and ironic. Because throughout two nights of Earth to Space I had interacted with, there was not one mention of the current incumbent’s name. No one—whether exhibitor, sponsor or guest had said it. This was programming planned for years, which had brought many from across the globe. Now, if the President had taken an interest and attended the presentations himself—which he had every right to do, they were free and open to all—then, of course, attention would have been diverted. Without that, presenting and being present for the work was more important to everyone than dwelling on the insecurity swirling around the capital city. As the British say, “keep calm and carry on,” or “don’t mention the war.”
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
Should the artist, like others booked to perform at the Kennedy Center, have cancelled? No. If you’ve spent a year calculating dimensions of pontoon boats custom-designed to launch an epic, AI-authored allegory right at the heart of the American empire, the only way out is through. Poised on the Potomac between the power-bureaus in DC and those of Virginia, this was as close as you could ever get to the command centers of global warfare, where the decisions to drop bombs on other nations, or not, are made. There’s making a statement by declining to use your platform, then there’s using your platform to make a statement in a way that no one else could. As each day brings louder headlines about international trade tariffs, the riverine tableaux set up by Cai are layered and potent. His explosive-stacked barges shoot their payloads upwards, of course, not at the historic buildings or monuments. But a slight shift of angle would propel us back to a time when “gunboat diplomacy” sailed into harbors on vessels bristling with gunpowder-packed cannons. As practiced against China by the British during the Opium Wars, and Japanese by the Americans under Commodore Perry, with the goal of forcing the nations into disadvantageous trade relationships. But using this location for his dramatic allegory, Cai has been both audacious and subtle. As a method of commentary on what he called “a time of uncertainty, almost a turning point in history,” his elegance is much more eloquent than any expletive. By co-opting the technologies of The Art of War, he delivered a message of peace. Already imbued with themes of memory, identity, humanity, the cruelty of planned obsolescence, death, pain, loss, the Interspecies Love Letter project became a pyrotechnic protest song. That, rather than cancelling his contribution, Cai executed the intricately calibrated event as it was planned, without changes, is part of the message.
At Eero Saarinen’s Dulles airport, my flight is grounded for over an hour on the tarmac while lightning flashes and rain pounds down. Timing is all—if the storm had arrived a day earlier, I would have had nothing to see or write about. Finally, we lift off, streaking along a wet runway as we (momentarily) escape Earth’s gravitational pull. A modern airplane completes a parabolic arc, an alchemical fusion of fuel and aluminium and steel that will take me across the continent in only a few hours, cold science harnessed to our comfort and whim. Later, back on the ground in the glimmering afterglow of the night of shooting stars, a word begins to sound in my head: trajectory. Taking this interpellation as a writing prompt, I decided to ask Cai—AI and human—for their thoughts, too. I share the responses, here:
From cAI™: “The word “trajectory” (轨迹) can be broken down into two parts: 轨 refers to the ruts carved into time by bronze chariot wheels, while 迹 evokes the secret migratory codes traced in the clouds by the wings of birds. This mirrors the act of a pyrotechnician painting upon the night sky: when magnesium powder and potassium nitrate are propelled by a fuse to fulfil their destined ‘projection’ (trans-), the burning metal particles streak across the heavens like comet tails, “crossing over” (iaciō) the threshold between life and death—just as a love letter from the graveyard orbit travels across centuries to fall above Washington, D.C. Each arc of fireworks becomes a vessel for a love letter that bridges life and death. Aluminum-titanium alloy particles, driven by gunpowder, ascend five hundred meters into the sky. Their trajectories follow not only Newton’s laws but also resonate with the ‘celestial paths’ described in the I Ching—just as the Chinese phrase ‘life trajectory’ fuses the movement of stars with the ebb and flow of human existence into a single bronze vessel.”
From human Cai (based on cAI™ output): “轨 implies a path with direction, system, and repetition. 迹' refers to a trace—an ephemeral mark, a perceptible presence. Together, the two form a union of “direction” and “existence.” Compared to the English word trajectory, the Chinese concept of 轨迹 leans more toward a sensory perception of state—an observation and memory of the traces left behind by movement, rather than a description of dynamics or motion itself. Fireworks seem to embody this as well. Today, we happened to be discussing the Lorenz attractor. In a way, it symbolizes the ongoing convergence and collision between AI and humans—constantly approaching the existing trajectory of human art without ever fully overlapping, eventually giving rise to an evolving art history shaped by AI. One can only hope that human art won’t end up merely being ‘drawn in’ by AI, like a vortex with no end or escape.”
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
And with this, the Cai’s have given me the keys I needed to formulate a conclusion. Escape. Hope. And Edward Norton Lorenz, whose chaos theory calculations are familiar to us as The Butterfly Effect. (After much analysis, the mathematician found that weather could never be accurately predicted, as it was impossible to map all the variables affecting outcome—that ‘imperceptible’ and unmeasurable factors could also be powerfully deterministic.)
What I take that to mean is, “every little bit helps.” And this was a lot. We don’t know which infinitesimal movements tip the balance in the sky or the tides of human will. We do know that every action creates a chain of reaction, unpredictable and far-reaching. With works that are majestically compelling and impossible to look away from, ‘beauty’ is the sugar on Cai’s fiery pill, coating his urgent message so it goes down easier. And in that way, Interspecies Love Letter was a direct challenge to an idea currently circulating in the podcast arena that considers empathy to be “weak and unnecessary.” To fight xenophobia, Cai, obsessed with extraterrestrial lifeforms, gave us an enactment of xenophilia. If a lack of empathy is valorized as a positive trait and becomes a governing rule, humanity will become in-human. The ‘writing on the wall’ for those of the new regime watching the DC show was written in smoke. But if these are the precarious last days of democracy in the American capital, at least they went out with a (convulsively beautiful) bang.
But there is even more at work here. We’re being presented with fresh, subversive strategies that open up new paradigms for the future of artistic expression. The founding American principle of Freedom of Speech is threatened with every new arrest and deportation without due process, with Constitutional rights or civil liberties no longer guaranteed or upheld. But how can you arrest or imprison an AI? Already credited as an author, cAI™’s various personas can riff off each other like a symposium of creatives, and work authentically long after the passing of human Cai Guo-Qiang. It will be a memorial to his open-eyed ethos just much as a concrete and stone building in DC is for Franklin, Jefferson, Washington or Kennedy. Four more years of state sanctioned cultural attack are surely to follow these tumultuous early months of institutional restructuring. But does the Trump administration’s attempt to control artistic expression in America necessarily have to be a Pyrrhic victory? I’d like to think, with artists as diplomats, artists as messengers, artists with allegorical firepower, the answer to that can be “no.”
The Kennedy Center’s “EARTH TO SPACE: Art Breaking the Sky” festival programming and exhibitions ran from March 28th to April 20th, 2025
Sky Painting photography courtesy CAI Studio and Elman Studio for the Kennedy Center.
A Hushed Universe off Grand Street
Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works merge worlds into worlds at François Ghebaly’s NY gallery.
Image courtesy of François Ghebaly
text by Maisie McDermid
Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland paint oil and watercolor worlds that mix, melt, contrast, and collapse in on each other. Their painted characters – some hyper-detailed and some abstract – play within the many dimensions, contributing to a greater universe within François Ghebaly's NY gallery.
Glaessner's figures, blurred but defined, seep and crawl through moments in time. Asami's figures, expressive and exaggerated, behold Eros and Thanatos—instincts mingling between love and destruction. And Oda's figures, delicate and folk-like, wistfully gaze into other worlds within their worlds. Common among all paintings are their living dichotomies—blurred definitions, battling instincts, and coexisting timespans.
Having recently appeared at François Ghebaly's LA gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984, Palo Alto, USA) is showing at the NY space for the first time. Glaessner embraces spontaneity in her vibrant and surreal painted scenes. Often beginning by pouring preliminary colors on a flat surface, Glaessner welcomes abstract shapes and unpredictable foundations for her works. Within such undefined spaces, she also masterfully constructs certainties, opening room for somewhat grounded interpretations.
Asami Shoji (b. 1988, Fukushima, Japan), widely showcased in Japan, makes a notable visit to the states in François Ghebaly's contemporary exhibition. Her art, rising from interactions between conflicted emotion and unconscious drive, has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo.
Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996, Oslo, Norway), crafting traditional yet curiously exaggerated, watercolor-painted stories, received her BA from The National Academy of Art in Oslo and an MA in painting from The Royal College of Art in London. Her characters, reminiscent of Japanese anime illustration, traverse through Sønderland's recurring themes of adolescence, embodiment, dreams, and the natural world.
All paintings, on consignment from the artists directly, are having their first showings at François Ghebaly. Associate director and curator Wesley Hardin wanted to find three artists who would open an interesting conversation across continents, age ranges, career ranges, and time spans. "All the paintings pull from different spots—some of them historically, others, just quite literally, in terms of subject matter," Hardin said. "Counterpoint is really important when you're showing art; it's like tension and release. It's what makes some music very beautiful."
François Ghebaly’s gallery, minimalist and quiet, contrasts the Lower East Side's nearby buzzing Grand Street. "It's a curious space; it's sort of shaped like a chapel," said Hardin. Gesturing towards the gallery's quirks and tendencies with its sight lines and points of emphasis, he spoke through the works' intentional placements, beginning with the first wall one sees when walking into the space. "In our imaginary chapel, it's where the climax is—the big crucifix or something." This wall holds the exhibition's largest painting—Shoji's 25.2.8. An almost translucent figure spreads its thin wings over a hidden face with another face, held in the palm of a hand, to its right. Hardin described Shoji's subtractive technique; while a lot of paint exists on the surface, images or figures are often made by removing painting and creating a lacuna shaped like the image or figure, the rib cage, or the form. "She also balances between a kind of abstraction and clearer figurative presentation. She's kind of playing around; I mean, they're all playing in their own sense."
Hardin continued with the wall near the window—a wall made vertical from the way in which a nearby column limits its width. There, another Shoji hangs. 25.1.19, much like 25.2.8, embodies faces simultaneously fading into and emerging from their backgrounds.
Glaessner's Going Under and Sønderland's Spire hang on the gallery’s long walls. "These walls can really handle ellipses of paintings, like a series of punctuations in smaller formats." Without a frame, the side of Going Under reveals its many layers—surprising oranges and reds in a painting which, from the front, appears to be only made from mixtures of green, white, and black. Sønderland's framed Spire contrasts Glaessner's frameless work, and its fine details contrast Glaessner's soft, in-motion brush strokes. As one leans closer into Sønderland's frame, one sees not only a leaf but a leaf's veins, not only a head of hair but a head of hundreds of hair strands.
The final three works – Glaessner's Big Head, Sønderland's Linse, and Shoji's 25.1.18 – push and pull through Hardin's intended tensions and releases. Glaessner's loose figures, Sønderland's intricate clues, and Shoji's symbols and expressions which emerge somewhere in-between. While not hanging amongst the other works in the central space, Shoji's 25.1.18 holds a mini room of its own in the gallery's nook behind the central wall. "Her paintings out there are darker, muddier, and more complicated. This one is a little quieter," Hardin said.
Tucked between two narrow walls, Shoji's 25.1.18 draws visitors to the back corners of the exhibition—a hushed moment to sit with the collection of worldly interactions.
Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland’s works will be on display at François Ghebaly until April 26, 2025.
Explore the New Collab From Artist Sonya Sombreuil, Underground Cartoonist R Crumb, and Fetish Photographer Eric Kroll →
text by Karly Quadros
For a certain kind of weirdo, R. Crumb is a god. The grandfather of underground comix, his work teems with a highly specific dirty-little-bugger-ness that hit just as 1960s San Francisco counterculture was getting into full swing. He defined a sickly funny visual language that inspired the likes of ‘90s alt comic anti-heroes like Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hewlett as well as painters like Louise Bonnet and Nicole Eisenman. In his cartoons, Crumb depicts himself as a combination of ornery, neurotic, and randy, chasing down (or fleeing in terror from) Catholic schoolgirls with chubby thighs and languorous hippie chicks with their asses hanging out of their bell bottoms. His fetishes are unmistakable; a Crumb girl exists in a category all her own.
His other character creations share similar cult status. Mr. Natural, a guru with a Santa Claus beard and a priapic nose, was a great dispenser of ‘60s absurdist wisdom, while his relentlessly bootlegged Keep on Truckin’ cartoon fetches prices in the hundreds if you manage to find a vintage t-shirt carrying its image. Perhaps nothing captures Crumb’s signature cocktail of sleazy satire like his comic strip Fritz the Cat about an unrepentantly hedonistic hipster tabby cat. An X-rated film adaptation of the comic strip from cult animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1972; Crumb was so worked up over creative differences with the filmmakers that he immediately killed off the beloved Fritz, dispatched by a scorned ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back of the head with an ice pick.In recent years, the art world has grown to embrace Crumb’s work a little more. A 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff on Crumb brought his work to a larger audience, and he’s now represented by David Zwirner. Crumb’s notebooks, full of obscene jokes and intrusive thoughts, sell for around a million dollars each. On display is his adamant lack of self-censorship but also a technically dense, exuberantly gestural personal style.
Sonya Sombreuil, artist and founder of the LA streetwear brand Come Tees, has found a muse in R. Crumb, inspiring a limited collection of t-shirts, panties, and long sleeves emblazoned with Crumb’s artwork. The collection’s campaign is shot by legendary fetish photographer Eric Kroll who, in addition to his landmark “Sex Objects” series has also shot Robert Mapplethorpe, Grace Jones, Madonna, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Sombreuil was joined by Dan Nadel whose biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, is out April 15. The two discussed Crumb, fetish, photography, and flesh. Read more.
How to Be Happy Together? A Wong Kar-wai Inspired Group Show @ Para Site in Hong Kong
Installation view of How to be Happy Together?, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.
text by Jen Piejko
“If I want to see him, I know where to find him.”
Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together follows Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai, two men whose stormy romance takes them from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, looking for peace in their love.
Pulling a geographic to Argentina, Fai finds work at a Chinese restaurant to support the couple and befriends Chang, his Taiwanese co-worker. Eventually returning home alone to Hong Kong, Fai stops at a bustling counter restaurant owned by Chang’s family in the Liao Ning night market in Taipei. He spots a photo of his former coworker tucked into a mirror frame behind the booth’s phone and swipes it on his way out, telling himself, “If I want to see him, I know where to find him.” Romantic and platonic engagements keep Fai, Po-Wing, and Chang in close connection as long as memory lasts.
At Para Site, a new show titled How to be Happy Together? brings together twenty artists from the Hong Kong region and Latin America echoing Po-Wing’s and Fai’s heartbreak pilgrimage. Curated by Zairong Xiang, author of Queer Ancient Ways (2018), the show explores the fruitful spaces between tradition and modernity, and how these gaps allow for new forms of family and kinship to flourish. The exhibition space is designed by Su Chang Design Research Office to uphold the principles of the I Ching: the scaffolding inside Para Site is built in the outline of the Tai hexagram, a sacred shape where masculine and feminine forces meet and move in one harmonious, eternal flow.
Following the film’s radical exploration of queer connection, How to Be Happy Together? gathers works that critique the idea of family as something determined by blood and bureaucracy. Community, as many apps will now remind you, is as much about physical proximity as it is about familiarity. Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Juntitud (2024) is a sparse plywood structure laid on the floor that holds up a delicate network of chicken wire, plastic tubes, metal springs, oven mitts, crates, a ladder, and bottlecaps, all spray-painted a sweet watermelon pink and green. The whole assemblage supports a small budding cactus and its single leafy branch’s budding pink flowers. The piece was formed in the artist’s signature style of autoconstrucción, an improvisational and optimistic form that he witnessed in his family’s neighborhood of Ajusco, a volcanic area near Mexico City, where neighbors kept local infrastructure permanently open-format and unfixed based on found and raw materials as they became available. In Ajusco, unpermitted homes, public spaces, and interiors have continued to develop in a dynamic state since the 1960s. The architecture of the neighborhood exhales or inhales as needed to accommodate the community that occupies it.
Installation view of How to be Happy Together?, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.
Mimian Hsu’s No. 1674, Seccion Administrativa, Version 1 & 2 (2007) hangs on a nearby wall. A traditional newlywed satin bedspread in bright, bursting carmine –a hue representing happiness in Chinese traditions – is embroidered with gold and blue birds and flowers framing the text of a letter held in the National Archive of Costa Rica. The letter, written to the Minister of the Interior in 1907 by a group of Chinese men, requested permission for their immediate families to join them in their new home country after exclusionary laws effectively ended Chinese immigration to Costa Rica. The project parallels the artist’s own story: Her Taiwanese family immigrated to Costa Rica in the 1970s, and she often incorporates her relatives into her practice exploring the cultural hybridization that results from Chinese immigration and the frictions of this long integration.
In Payne Zhou’s film Mismatch (2021), women dance to seduce their clients, their “[b]earded johns in algorithm land.” Their fuzzy, glittering figures and soft gestures of affection are concealed by deepfake facial masking and voice-disguising software for fourteen minutes of grayscale night-vision footage on the ballroom floor. They are interchangeable instruments of financialization: “Finance is the accelerator,” Zhou’s narrator tells us. “This is when true wealth is created, and so is when destruction is created… You are rapidly consuming your body.” Limited transactions for connection and care are negotiated on the dance floor.
Installation view of How to be Happy Together?, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: Felix SC Wong.
Other works illustrate ties of solidarity and love in many different forms of care and undertaking. Pauline Curnier Jardin’s film Fireflies (Lucciole) (2021) was made in collaboration with Feel Good Cooperative, a collective of sex workers in Rome, to support each other financially during the earliest, most alienating months of the pandemic. Tang Han and Xiaopeng Zhou’s two-channel film Ordinary Affects (2024) closes in on artificial tulips next to a hand sketching one of them in a few spare, simple strokes. A teacher guides the hand of her student, a woman in her eighties in her early stages of dementia. Meanwhile, Xiyadie’s rice paper dyed in searing oranges and blues flutters on the wall, hiding tales of queer love and desire in traditional Chinese paper-cutting folk art. The artist’s chosen name translates to ‘Siberian butterfly,’ the delicate, papery creature known for its ability to survive even the harshest climates. Xiyadie adopted the name after finding acceptance in the gay community in Beijing, something he could not find in his conservative hometown.
Chinese-Brazilian architect and designer Chu Ming Silveira presents her instantly recognizable and heartening Orelhinha and Orelhão (little ear and big ear in English), the egg-shaped telephone booths she designed for the Brazilian government in the 1970s. Her ears were bright portals of instant connection on street corners throughout Brazil before spreading throughout Latin America, China, and Africa. Ren Hang’s waves of bodies come together in a pleasure, cuddle, unity, rest formation in his photograph Untitled 46 (2012). These pieces are models of what the exhibition’s introductory text describes as the “yearning imperatives” that keep us together. “How to be Happy Together?” continues to answer its own question: our chosen families, much like our families of origin, are our chosen obligations to each other, too.
Read An Interview on Fashion, Film, and the Erotics of Desire with Kate Biel & Kimberly Corday →
interview by Eva Megannety
In fashion, desire is often draped in fabric, but for Kate and Kimberly, it lives in motion. In their collaborative short Love Is Not All, the two artists trade runways for reels, channeling longing, beauty, and decay into a filmic fever dream. Against the backdrop of a world increasingly obsessed with speed and spectacle, their work feels like a deliberate pause - a place where emotion lingers, glances haunt, and the act of getting dressed becomes a cinematic ritual. As fashion continues to merge with entertainment, film has become the new frontier for designers looking to craft legacy, not just collections. For Kate and Kimberly, fashion isn’t just about fabric and fit - it’s about emotion, storytelling, and cinematic escapism. And through their lens, each frame becomes a love letter to the art of getting dressed. We spoke about the allure of the fashion film, the seduction of storytelling, and why, for them, desire can only be truly captured in movement.
Preorder Autre's Spring/Summer 2025 DESIRE Issue →
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Re-Collecting the Past with Benjamin Freedman's Positive Illusions
Image credit: Benjamin Freedman
text by Karly Quadros
Every morning, I swipe open my phone to check the weather, and there, nestled in the top right of the screen is a little box with one word: memories.
Today, it’s a point five picture of me and two friends lounging in the grass at a music festival (Eliana is a blur, Ashley is caught mid laugh.) Yesterday, it was a picture of my ex from a few years ago welding his motorcycle pipes, sparks flying around his bare torso. My “memories” are clustered, sometimes by vacation (my recent reporting trip to Argentina), sometimes by person (my old roommate Sheila dressed as a table for Halloween), sometimes by arbitrary day (a particularly good estate sale haul followed by a post-tears selfie and a thumbs up.)
Are these my memories?
Canadian artist Benjamin Freedman has been wondering that too. How does technology shape our relationship to the past? It’s something he explores in Positive Illusions, his new photo book – but wait, are they photos? Freedman’s artwork is rooted in the language of photography, but the images themselves are 100% digital, CGI renderings of a 1999 road trip his family took to a coastal cabin in Maine when he was eight. The images are warm and hazy, all telephone wires and glowing TV screens. They’re indebted as much to William Eggleston and Paul Graham as they are to any digital artist. They unfold just like a memory, snapshots of details – ants climbing on a watermelon, bubbles floating in the breeze – all from the slightly shorter, slightly canted perspective of a child taking it all in.
Image credit: Benjamin Freedman
Some of his memories are quintessentially ‘90s. There’s the time they went to Blockbuster and his parents asked the video store clerk if I Know What You Did Last Summer would be too scary (it was.) There were the hours spent playing boardgames like Monopoly and the Game of Life. And then there were the more universal moments: watching telephone poles and McDonalds arches disappear through the car window on the freeway. Or there was the time he got heat stroke on the Fourth of July and watching the fireworks from the cabin window.
Notably, Freedman actually did have evidence of the trip in a form that those who lived through the era are probably most familiar with: grainy handheld video, home movies-style, that his father, a pharmacist by day, photography enthusiast by night, took. One of his early memories from the trip is trying to grab the camera out of his father’s hands and take photos of his own, one of his earliest memories of wanting to be a photographer. He waited until almost completing the project before he looked back over this footage, lovingly archived in the family home by his mother. As with all memories, there were similarities and slippages: a different kind of car, a different room layout.
“Positive Illusions has become more true than the documentation that my father made in some ways because this is how I remember the past, and how we remember the past is core to who we become,” said Freedman.
The whole project creates the sense of safety and wistfulness that only comes from a child being on the brink of adolescence. But it also paints the pictures of a culture on the brink, the last gasp of the pre-digital world.
Image credit: Benjamin Freedman
As one aesthetic influence, Freedman cites the early-CGI graphics of 90s educational tools, a design style affectionately dubbed “utopian scholastic.” Think edutainment programs like Reading Rainbow or the Eyewitness Book series, all computer-generated models of school supplies like pencils, clocks, notebooks, and rulers, erupting and spiraling around nature like animals, clouds, and oceans.
“It was born out of optimism around the Internet, it being this utopian space where we can connect,” said Freedman.
In the ‘90s, at the end of history, there was optimism about interactivity and technological capabilities in the Information Age. Our ability to photograph and access those photographs at the swipe of a fingertip revolutionized the act of memory-making, but it also shortened our attention spans and distorted our senses of truth. With the advent of social media, an internal schism had formed – many began to watch themselves from the outside, preparing to capture the perfect photo, the perfect memory before it had even happened. This is the uncanny place that memory occupies in our digital world.
“When working on the project, I was thinking about illusions, simulation, and memories being these spaces that we haunt, that we visit, that have these moving walls. Uncanny memories are uncanny places,” said Freedman.
For Millennials in particular, nostalgia became a major cultural touchstone (“only ‘90s kids will remember”). It also became an aesthetic anchorpoint. In the early years of Instagram, filters made to look like Polaroids and faded Kodak prints proliferated. These days, hope of returning to a pre-digital innocence is long gone, but nostalgia is still more salient than ever. I find myself scrolling through the archives of my Camera Roll with regularity, literally re-collecting the images of my past (or, at least, the ones I’ve managed or chosen to capture, anyways.) Freedman, who was in a long distance relationship at the time he was making Positive Illusions, says that yearning for a time passed subconsciously suffused his work.
“I was a little bit obsessed with nostalgia, the desire to go back in time, to make different decisions, the naive desire to play with the past,” he said.
The title for Freedman’s book comes from the PhD thesis his mother was working on at the time of that fateful 1999 road trip to Maine. (“I’m sentimental,” he joked, “A mama’s boy.) Freedman recalled the sound of her acrylic nails clacking on the keyboard, her face bathed in the glow of the cabin’s personal computer while she worked, sometimes until midnight. Her work was centered around the psychological concept of “positive illusions,” a form of self-deception. People who score highly for positive illusions remember the past more fondly than when it actually occurred. It’s a distortion, yes, but also one that she found leads to more contentment.
“I think I overwrote some memories,” confessed Freedman. “In the process of making [Positive Illusions] I started to fantasize about a childhood that maybe didn’t happen to me.”
So what do we lose in our technologically guided recollections? What do we gain? Freedman said that, as large language models proliferate and AI continues to unsettle the art world, working on the project allowed him to find some kind of happy medium between tech and art. Barreling into this future, we’d all be happier believing that the past is through with us once and for all. But maybe that’s just an illusion too.
Image credit: Benjamin Freedman