The Choreography of Posting Online: Read an Interview of Maya Man

 

Photo by Charlotte Ercoli

 

interview by Emma Grimes

Maya Man is a New York-based digital artist whose work probes the changing landscape of identity, femininity, and authenticity in online and offline culture. Through websites, code, and generative AI projects, she explores how we perform ourselves in digital environments.

One of her signature projects is Glance Back, a browser extension that randomly takes a photo of users on their computers every day. Created in 2018, the project archives what Man calls “the moments shared between you and your computer,” turning the quotidian encounters with our devices into a digital diary. She is also the creator of FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, a coffee-table book that compiles her generative artworks styled after the glossy and aesthetically pleasing graphics commonly found on Instagram.

Central to her practice are questions of authenticity and performance: what does it mean to perform and post on the internet today? Is performance inherently corrosive or just another facet of human expression? For Man, she tackles these questions with thoughtful nuance.

Her latest project, StarQuest, is a solo-exhibition currently on view at Feral File. Drawing on her own childhood as a competitive dancer, Man uses generative AI to restage the choreography and interpersonal dramas of the cult reality series Dance Moms. Read More.

Read An Interview Of Gallerist & Editor Oyinkansola Dada →

An image of Oyinkan Dada at the DADA gallery launch

Sahara Longe: Deceit, 2025 | Green and purple nude, 2025

interview by Lola Titilayo
photography by Ugochukwu Emebiriodo

Sitting at the intersection of art, culture and fashion, Oyinkansola Dada is a multidimensional creative force. Trained as a lawyer but driven by a deep commitment to storytelling and cultural awareness, she has become one of the most dynamic connectors of artists across the African diaspora. As the founder of Dada Gallery, DADA Magazine, and the style-driven cultural phenomenon Lagos Is Burning, she has built a community that uplifts emerging voices while redefining how contemporary African creativity is seen and celebrated. With the recent opening of her first permanent gallery space in Lagos, Dada continues to shape the continent’s cultural landscape; promoting authenticity and creating spaces where African art and identity can thrive globally. Read more. more.

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych Questions the Source of Our Unsettling Discomfort with Solitude @ New Theater in Hollywood

text by Summer Bowie
photographs by Roman Koval

As feelings of isolation grow increasingly profound in our society, it seems logical that we would bifurcate our psyche in an effort to keep ourselves company. Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist, proposed that the human race began with what he called a bicameral mentality, where our inner monologue was believed to be the voice of external gods making commands. There was no self-reflection, no ability to perform executive ego functions, such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection. British philologist Arthur William Hope Adkins believed that ancient Greek civilization developed ego-centered psychology as an adaptation to living in city-states. Could it be possible that the development of those city-states into supermetropolises infinitely connected by social media might effectively bend the arc of our psychological universe back toward bicameralism? Might Narcissus look so deeply in the mirror that he would eventually forget its existence?

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych comprises three acts and an epilogue, directed and choreographed by Mamie Green, with a live, original score by Dylan Fujioka. When the house doors open, the stage is occupied by a rotating, black office chair, a folding chair, a small area rug, and an inflatable mattress propped against the wall. The first act, titled “Doppelganger,” begins with two women played by Bella Allen and Anne Kim. They are dressed identically in white tanks and black pants. One lies down on the rug so that the other can roll her up like a fresh corpse. Our narrator, Raven Scott, watches from above, the twin dancers serving as stand-ins for her allegory’s rotating cast of characters. She walks down the stairs to a mysteriously ambient symphony of bells, strings, and keys recounting her experience with cinema escapism—a coping mechanism for loneliness so firmly tied to the 20th century that you could almost feel nostalgic for it. She speculates on whether movies might actually be able to watch us back and celebrates the cyclical nature of time captured on reels of celluloid. The dancers start this act as a duet while our narrator tells their story. By the end, our narrator becomes integrated into the dance, the divide between subject and objects dissolves, forming endless constellations of triplets.

From the red velvet seats of the movie theater, we’re thrust into the 21st century with “Camgirl,” the second act, written by Lily Lady and played by themself and Mandolin Burns. Sonically, it feels as though we’re in a yoga studio and our heroes aren’t dressed identically, but their shared vibe is equal parts casual and sexy. They walk toward each other from opposite corners of the stage and meet in the center with the inflatable mattress. Lady rolls like a log across the mattress, mirroring the opening of the first act with the rug. Our camgirl doesn’t need a camera. Its existence is as inherent as the audience they can scarcely see behind the stage lights. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote: “​​A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.” Lady claims that they’ll do anything to avoid pain as their alter ego supports them through endless bouts of self-pity. The two embrace from either side of the mattress, and move together as a trio that is only two-thirds human. The mattress slowly deflates until the two melt into an embrace on the floor. The lights go red and the music gets industrial. Our dancers skip together across the stage; Burn fires on all cylinders in a solo dance that ends with her wrapping the deflated mattress around her body like a dress while Lady watches and contemplates a “form of introspection that ceases to be disaffected and self-indulgent.”

Act three, “The Kid,” eschews the text, pulling us into a pure movement experience with the office chair performed by Ryan Green and Ryley Polak. Practically indistinguishable in size and shape, they form a twisted counterbalance on the chair as it spins slowly centerstage. I’m reminded of how difficult it is to truly carry the full weight of oneself—to be solely responsible for the consequences of one’s existence. They are like the opposing forces of the id and superego, constantly keeping one another in check. The inertia of their movement echoes the chaotic percussion of dissonant, grungy drums and electronic glitching. Supporting one another through inversions and barrelling leaps through the air, their dance is an endless chain reaction of ever-impressive acrobatics. Suddenly, they are bathed in an ethereal overhead spotlight, and their spinning turns to melting. They’re like cogs propelling one another with teeth turning on opposite planes. Unlike the previous acts, their ending feels quietly triumphant.

The epilogue is populated by all of the dancers at once. The New Theater stage can hardly contain all seven of them, and yet each feels just as lonely as ever. Our cast is a mix of trained dancers and actors who know how to move. However, they don’t feel mismatched as mirrors. Their talents are perfectly complementary and masterfully executed. Green’s trademark, multidisciplinary approach to theater has found its most subtle balance in Loneliness Triptych. Her players embody their characters while allowing the text, music, and choreography to inform their lived experiences. They film themselves as they vape and exchange props to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” a turn-of-the-century ballad about refusing to forgive. We’re left to wonder if the source of our loneliness isn’t simply a product of our elective, disaffected self-indulgence. If we do not, indeed, prefer it.

Tehching Hsieh Made Time His Medium

Tehching Hsieh
One-Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece)
Photo: Cheng Wei Kuong

text by Hank Manning

After driving past horse farms on the way to Beacon, a suburb an hour north of New York City, I entered the Dia to join a sea of guests from around the world. We had come to see the oeuvre of Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist who completed six durational pieces between 1978 and 1999 and has since declared himself no longer an artist. However, the exhibition, which he helped design for its two-year run that began in October, is as much a work of art in its entirety as any of its particulars on display. 

For his first one-year performance, Hsieh lived in a small cell in his studio, furnished with a bed and sink, pledging to abstain from speaking, reading, and writing entirely. A friend helped him daily by supplying food and cleaning his waste, as well as taking a daily portrait photograph; all 365 now hang in chronological order. We also see the cell that was Hsieh’s home, still furnished with the material goods he had: paper towels, toothpaste, a glass, mattress, gray blanket, bucket, and a change of clothes labeled with his name. 

Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

Next, in Time Clock Piece, Hsieh took even more photos—one every hour, on the hour, again for an entire year. The next exhibition space takes the form of a square with the same proportions as the first. These self-portraits are also hung in chronological order, underneath punch cards he stamped for each. Posed next to a clock, they serve as evidence that he rarely slept more than fifty minutes at a time, although Hsieh does list the occasional instances when he failed to clock in due to sleeping through his alarm. 

Seemingly tired of spending too much time in his studio, Hsieh proceeded to the opposite extreme—he attempted to spend an entire year outdoors. Daily maps document his walks around lower Manhattan. He also penned the times and locations he ate, defecated, and slept. (To my surprise, he seems to have returned to typical eight-hour nights.) To survive the harsher environment, he had heavier clothes than his prior prison-like attire and carried a few new items, including an “I ❤︎ NY” plastic shopping bag, a radio, and a Swiss Army knife, all now on display. Again, Hsieh gives full disclosure: police detained him for fifteen hours—unfortunately indoors—after getting into a street fight.

Hsieh’s fourth year-long performance was his most collaborative—he spent the entire year attached by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano. The two, staying close together but avoiding touch, were not a couple and had not met prior. Their daily photos show mundane activities—sleeping, cooking, typing. A few days are labeled “Fight.”

The next two rooms take up an equal amount of space in the museum as the previous four. For his final year-long performance, Hsieh declared that he would neither make, look at, read, nor discuss art. Then, for thirteen years straight, he would make art but not publicly reveal it. At the end of this final performance, he released only one piece, which looks like a ransom note reading: “I kept myself alive.” Whatever else he did to occupy his time, the exhibition provides no hints: the two rooms are nearly entirely unadorned. Walking through these open rooms after looking so carefully at each day’s record in the previous four inspires a sense of awe. We imagine the freedom Hsieh may have experienced in contrast to the passage of time in our own lives. 

Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

The exhibition is constructed like a scale model of Hsieh’s life experiences. We see photographs taken from every day of his first four strenuous pieces, experiencing time at an accelerated rate, but at the same consistent intervals he charted his progress. Beginning each with a shaved head, his hair is almost the only discernible change over the spans of the first two projects, while the latter two show a vast number of environments. The small spaces between each room even estimate the “life time” (rather than “art time”) of under less than one year Hsieh passed between each piece.

“Why did he do this?” a six-year-old girl asked aloud what we were all wondering. Walking through and imagining myself attempting and failing any similar feat in a fraction of the time, I perceived the work as effective social commentary. After all, no matter how much I assume Hsieh suffered, many people’s real-life situations are even more perilous, as they live in prison cells or unhoused involuntarily and indefinitely.

 

Tehching Hsieh
One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)

 

Alternatively, it is easy to see Hsieh as a trendsetter. Today, online influencers gain followings through any number of stunts, from, like Hsieh, living in intentionally difficult situations, to the more inane, like counting up to a million or eating dangerous quantities of food. Hsieh likewise often welcomed audiences. While living in his cell, he opened his studio for six-hour periods, allowing anyone to come and see him in person. Living outdoors and then with Montano, he advertised public meetups via flyer. 

But Hsieh claims neither of those ambitions. He says he struggled when he first moved to New York, undocumented, spending six years feeling like he just went back and forth between his home and the restaurants where he worked. He asked and answered himself: “What am I looking for? I am already in the piece.” Art comes from life, and life’s most basic and important element is time.

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is on view at Dia, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York

Bisa Butler Weaves An Endless World of Love in “Hold Me Close” @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

A close-up of a quilt by Bisa Butler, depicting a man and woman embraced, looking into the distance calmly.

Bisa Butler
Les Amoureux du Kinshasa, 2025
After Amoureux Au Nightclub, 1951-1975 by Jean Depara
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, glass rhinestones, plastic beads, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
95 x 59 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

text by Laila Reshad

Bisa Butler’s Hold Me Close at Jeffrey Deitch is a reflective meditation on forever, negotiating our allowances to seek closeness in one another in a polarizing and alienating landscape disfigured by reality, by today. Where reality warps our sense of relationality to time and place, it is such that Butler’s intricately woven and layered mosaics of memory, whether contrived or lived, speak to a far more precedented truth that is largely absent in works of the contemporary American canon. Butler’s work is truthful and radical, a headstrong resilience narrating the stories of each person stitched into memory. In each depicted face, whether solemn, or overjoyed, we are pulled into their complex and vivid worlds. The works are full of life and detail, and I contemplate how they can be so easy on the eyes and yet distinctly subversive. Layers of tinted fabric composite countless pieces into faces, projecting color onto each world the characters inhabit. Intricate embroidery overlays each face, elevating the cosmic feeling that comes about when viewing the pieces in stillness for a while. The images that form begin to take shape and breathe–we really stand before the people we look upon, peering into their inner worlds and the intimate moments they exchange among each other, between us and them.

Butler’s journey was more complicated, having come into the medium as a young art student. She explains, “Professionally, I made my first quilt when I studied art at Howard in my B.F.A., but I was a painting major. I really didn’t have the license to go canvas-free until I took a fibers class at Montclair State, of which the whole entire fibers curriculum was probably initiated in the ’70s by white women, feminist professors who pushed that all art students at Montclair State had to not just have the regular foundations–which was drawing, painting, sculpture, design–but they also pushed that you had to have fibers and jewelry making. Thank goodness they did that because I was the beneficiary of it.” From there, Butler took on what came naturally to her and so continued her lifelong dedication to experimentation, to pushing herself across mediums, to endless possibilities. When I ask if she still considers herself a painter, she says, “I feel your creativity ends with you when you stop living. So whatever I put my mind to, I am. Right now, I’m doing fiber, and maybe I’ll do that forever, but maybe not. I’m starting to wander into sculpture, thinking about soft sculpture. Before I’m working, I’m sketching. I’m still designing clothing. I’ve been making purses lately. I remember seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s grave, which just reads ‘artist.’ I think ‘artist’ is good, it covers all the bases. I feel like my talent has always been limitless.”

 

Bisa Butler
Hold Me Close (My Starship), 2025
After Untitled, 1974 by Steve Edson
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, faux fur, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
90.5 x 54 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

 

There’s a genealogical nature to quilting, particularly in its ties to Black history both domestically and abroad, that communicates family history, positionality, class, background, ethnic origin, and cultural practices. Butler’s work is inventive and rooted in a knowledge of the history that shapes and informs her work, even though she doesn’t have a direct familial tie to a quilting ancestry–she takes shape and fills a void to synthesize the two sectors of culture she negotiates between, both Black American history and African history. The matrons of quilting have certainly informed her work from a critical perspective, explains Butler, “I went to the Whitney and I see all these quilts on the wall by African-American women, specifically the quilters of Gee’s Bend, which had last names like that of the Pettways. I thought these women were wealthy. I thought each one in the show was a famous artist. You have a show at the Whitney. You have to be making money. I was walking around the room thinking, I got it. I know what I'm going to do now. I’m going to be a fine art quilter just like them.” 

Butler not only calls on the women of Gee’s Bend, whose work solidified her aspirations of becoming a quilter, but also the women of Ghana who use varied patterns in their quilting practices to signify fertility, wealth, class, and obscured ruminations on marriage and family, among many other things. So many messages are implicit and visible in her work, but the most engaging component is the various ways in which she subtly reinforces the narrative of the quilts. She establishes a legacy in her lineage, pushing forward what it means to shape and colorize fragmented or disregarded memories that matter. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes this possibility when she writes on “critical fabulation,” wherein the absence allows for something to grow, for truth to emerge in what the Black artist materializes grounded in a Black historical truth. Butler constructs moving portraits of Black life, and through this, she historicizes a consciousness of her experiences, enmeshing them with ruminations on community, love, and her own familial ties. We don’t know who each subject is, but they are real, and we see their most intimate and honest forms when we look at them in these portraits. Butler expands the possibilities of the quilting canon, directing and dialoguing new approaches to the discipline by working through the absence of an archive, and by narrativizing the social and political themes of her work. She takes on the question of Black joy and resilience in the face of growing political and social tensions in the United States, suggesting that in order to feel seen, one must seek safety in a tender closeness. Through this, she stewards what we know to be true across cultures, languages, and even words: that our memories are shaped by those who help us feel safe in our daily lives.

Butler traces some of her earliest quilting work to her own family, crediting her father for the materials that opened the door to the themes she continues to unpack in her work today. She explains, “One of my first quilts was an imagined portrait of my grandfather. My father’s from Ghana, born in 1939 in a more rural part of Ghana in the north. Very agrarian. And he doesn’t have any photographs of his dad, so I never knew what he looked like. That’s always been in my mind, you know, what did my grandfather look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? I decided that I would find a photo of an elderly northern Ghanaian man because they have a specific kind of look. When African people see me, especially if they’ve traveled extensively, they know not only that I’m Ghanaian, but they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re from the north.’ It’s something about the sort of long narrowness of my face and my nose. So, I found a picture of a man, and I made my first quilt.”

 

Bisa Butler
Coco With Morning Glories, 2024
After Coco, 1993 by Dana Lixenberg
Cotton, silk, lace, netting, tulle, sequins, glitter, beads, glass gems, metal beads, silk and polyester woven fabric and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
84 x 55 inches
Private Collection
Photo by Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

 

“I was using my father’s dashikis from the ’60s because I couldn’t afford fabric. I asked him, ‘Do you mind if I use these?’ not thinking. I just wanted African fabric because I thought this would be a good way to tell the story of a man from Africa. But it wasn't until it was done that I realized, oh, these are my father’s shirts. My father is one of those people who’s worn cologne his whole life. When I go into his room or touch his things, I can smell his cologne, and his shirts faintly smell like cologne. My grandfather's DNA is in my father. My grandfather’s DNA was in the portrait I made of him.” Butler’s lifelong dedication to her craft was solidified after this first project. “After seeing the Whitney exhibition on quilts at that time, I felt successful with that portrait. I felt like my father loved it. I loved it.”

An archival project in a stream of consciousness, Bisa Butler intentionally selects her materials to immortalize those who came before her in the fabric of time and memory. Perhaps this is what her larger project is: to solidify people in textural form. Textiles woven and stitched into each other, culminating into a whole that feels like we’ll know them forever. The exhibition was born out of our political time–the isolative, alienating properties of emotion Butler was working through. They leave us with a desire for our own versions of the depicted affections on display, a brazen introspection. Coco with Morning Glories (2024) depicts a pregnant woman looking into the distance contemplatively, a soon-to-be mother filled with warmth and hopefulness. She reflects, “Theorizing what I would put together really came from this moment that we’re in...I called the show Hold Me Close because that’s how I was feeling, like, goodness, I need somebody to hold me because I’m feeling terrified all the time. And that’s not a good state to be in. When we’re in a time of crisis, human beings, we usually band together. I was looking for images of people who were engaged in comforting each other, lighthearted moments, intimate moments. It could be mother and child, or father and child, lovers, friends. Most of the pieces in the show feature two people in them. There’s one with a very pregnant woman…. My grandmother had ten kids, and I was having my first daughter. I think I was exactly nine months pregnant. I was like, ‘I cannot wait for this baby to be born.’ My grandmother said, ‘This is the best time. You don’t realize it. Your baby is totally safe right now. You don’t have to worry. Are they cold? Are they tired? Are they hungry?’ The pregnant woman is also holding her baby very close.” Bisa Butler’s world of love is endless, is forever.

Vaginal Davis’s Magnificent Product Chronicles Five Decades of Her Playful Defiance @ MoMA PS1

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Magnificent Product marks Vaginal Davis’s first major US institutional show, presenting art from her early Los Angeles projects to her more recent Berlin-based creations. Organized thematically instead of chronologically, the works take viewers on a journey filled with vivid colors, humor, and emotion.

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

The exhibition begins in a light mint-green room titled Naked on my Ozgod: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat. This square room features green sheer curtains along every wall, with hundreds of photos from Davis’s early Los Angeles years covering the walls behind the fabric. Visitors are invited to slowly peel away the fabric from the wall to get an intimate view into Davis’s personal life before seducing them into the next room. This section is inspired by one of her first art exhibitions, originally held at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles. 

In the next space, HAG, Davis reconstructs her old Sunset Boulevard apartment in Los Angeles, the site where she produced many iconic zines, such as Shrimp, Yes, Ms. Davis, and Sucker. The dimly lit room glows pink and includes a walk-in box in the center. Inside, its walls display drawings and figurines of a woman’s head, possibly self-portraits. The slanted floor creates a warped, unbalanced environment that meshes reality with fantasy, just like the work it supports. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another engaging room in Davis’s collection is HOFPFISTEREI, where visitors are encouraged to interact with her artwork. A table and four chairs occupy the room’s center, surrounded by piles of Davis’s zines, writings, and creations. A photocopier stands nearby for visitors to print out copies to take home. 

Davis also utilizes a screening room, which resembles the Cinerama Dome movie theater that operated on Sunset Boulevard from 1963 until 2021. Here you can watch low-fi videos she created during the 1980s, showcasing her range of personas as an artist, queer activist, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and more. These recordings, much like the earlier photos, give visitors a detailed and in-depth view into Davis’s life; they’re a testament to how interconnected her art is with her identity. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another striking installment is from her Wicked Pavilion collection, displaying a reimagined version of Davis’s teenage bedroom. However, instead of her in the rotating bed, a large phallic sculpture sits in the space. The room is completely pink, from the walls to the rug to the curtains. A miniature desk sits in the right corner, topped with two lamps, a pile of jewelry, and an array of colored nail polish, hinting that Davis’s has relished dressing up as the showstopper she is since her youth. 

Along the ceiling, dozens of images are hung from a clothesline. These photos are of Davis’s muses, such as actor Michael Pitt or actress Isabella Rossellini. While visitors take a look around the bedroom, they listen to a mix of the song, “A Love Like Ours,” from the 1944 film Two Girls and a Sailor, interviews that Davis herself conducted for LA Weekly in 1996, and a voice message from Davis’s own secret admirer, creating a fully-immersive experience.   

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Across all of these works, Davis’s playfulness and defiance shine through. Magnificent Product is a living experience that can be overwhelming at times, yet each room offers a sense of freedom. Davis commands her viewers’ attention—and she intends it that way. 

Magnificent Product is on view through  March 2 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Read an Interview of Mariko Mori, the Japanese Artist Redefining Light, Time, and Spirituality →

Mariko Mori: Radiance at Sean Kelly, New York, October 31 – December 20, 2025, Photography: Jason Wyche, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

interview by Alper Kurtul

Tokyo’s energy, New York’s boundless creativity, and Miyako Island’s quiet, almost womb-like protective nature. Japanese artist Mariko Mori redefines light, time, and space as she moves between these different worlds. Her latest project, Radiance, brings together ancient stone spirituality and advanced technology to make the invisible visible. Her self-designed home, Yuputira, which she dedicates to the sun god, is not merely a living space for her; it is the architecture of becoming one with nature. Ahead of her upcoming retrospective, Mori shares with us both the source of her creativity and the enduring meaning of silence in the contemporary world. Read more.

Sharon Eyal: Into the Hairy at Sadler’s Wells

text by Lara Monro
photographs by Katerina Jebb

This Thursday, Sadler’s Wells will showcase Into the Hairy, the newest work from Sharon Eyal and longtime collaborator Gai Behar. Created for S-E-D Dance Company, the piece further refines Eyal’s unique choreographic language: a vocabulary of subtle intensities where sensation becomes form and form becomes meaning.

Those familiar with Eyal’s universe will recognize the pulse: a charged, hypnotic physicality that sits somewhere between ritual, runway, and rave. But Into the Hairy marks a shift, a paring back. As Eyal has recently said, her work has become “more precise, more clean, more pure, more minimalistic… less is much, much more.” What remains is movement distilled to its emotional core. 

 
 

Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and created in close dialogue with London-based producer Koreless, the work is set to an original score that seems to emerge like breath through the body. Eight dancers move in unison that is both fierce and strangely intimate, the kind of togetherness that, as Eyal herself puts it, can make one feel “even more alone.” Clad in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s sculptural bodysuits, their forms are sharply visible; muscles, tremors, and the subtle hesitations of choice read like text.

Eyal often speaks of being uninterested in comfort. She wants the struggle, the fracture lines, the place where control and surrender collide. “Everything you see starts with my body,” she has said, improvisations that are then mapped, repeated, and refined until they become something shared. In Into the Hairy, that process is palpable. The dancers carry a vulnerability so present it feels like a kind of heat on the surface of the skin.

The result is both sensual and severe. A work that holds the paradox of contemporary life: closeness and distance, ecstasy and restraint, the collective pulse and the solitary self. It is a reminder that the body is an archive, that movement can speak before language, that emotion doesn’t need to explain itself to be understood. At Sadler’s Wells, Into the Hairy arrives not simply as a work of choreography, but as a deepening of Eyal’s ongoing inquiry into presence, power, and the vulnerability of being seen.

Into the Hairy is showing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on November 13, 14, and 15 at 7:30 p.m.

In Dialogue with the Present: Read An Interview of Designer Ying Gao →

An image from all mirrors collection, featuring both menswear and womenswear

All Mirrors Collection. Photography by Malina Corpadean.

What happens when couture meets code? Montréal-based fashion designer Ying Gao is recognized for consistently pushing the boundaries of fashion through her exploration of fabric manipulation, interactivity, and technology. The use of unconventional materials to make wearable art is prominent in her work, as evidenced in her All Mirrors 2024 collection, made of soft mirrors and 18-karat gold finishing. In 2023, her In Camera collection experimented with reactivity in fashion design by coming to life when photographed. Even as early as 2017, she made waves with interactive fingerprint technology that only recognizes strangers in her Possible Tomorrows collection. The infusion of technology in her work adds a sense of movement and interaction that captivates audiences, and each collection has a special story to tell. Read more

Read An Interview of Abbey Meaker on Her New Book of Photography "MOTHERHOUSE" →

In the summer of 2012, I visited the decommissioned St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, with the polymathic visual artist and writer Abbey Meaker for the first and only time, to bear witness to her documenting the space. Upon entering, I knew nothing of the premises or its history, except that it was the former residence of her grandfather and great-uncle, whom she had never known. The air had an inexplicable weight to it, as though it were filled with lead particulates, and it felt like my heart was being held in a vice. I later read numerous violent testimonies from the children who lived there and about those who were disappeared, like Abbey’s great uncle. We also visited the nearby Mount Saint Mary’s Convent, which had a wholly inverse energy. Its private chapel bathed in natural light felt like an ebullient sanctuary. Still, what connected the two spaces, which had undergone minimal modifications since the late 1800s, were the former living quarters in each. A haunting chiaroscuro was created by the sunlight’s dauntless efforts to break through the shutters, curtains, and blinds that covered each window, all of which remained after the buildings had become inoperative and left in dire states of disrepair. Thirteen years later, Meaker has curated the resulting images into a book of photographs called MOTHERHOUSE that serves as an uncannily vivid portrait of what it felt like to occupy these illusory spaces. Read more.

Gibney Dance Company Performs Work by Choreographer Johan Inger in Its Annual Up Close Series

text by Caia Cupolo
photography by Hannah Mayfield

The Gibney Company has returned to New York Live Arts with its annual Up Close series, where the company collaborates with choreographers to revive past works and showcase new ones. This year’s series features Swedish choreographer Johan Inger’s Rain Dogs (2011) and Bliss (2016), as well as a world premiere of When It Was. Inger is an internationally renowned choreographer who got his start after dancing for Nederlands Dans Theater in the ’90s. Since then, he has created works for major companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Hubbard Street Dance, Gauthier Dance Company, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and now the Gibney Company.

The program was a journey through Inger’s emotionally charged theatrical style, moving through works of distinct tone and mood. The set for the opening piece, Rain Dogs, was minimal, with a few radios in the upstage right corner. One soloist, Graham Feeny, began the piece holding a radio. He performed a brief solo, composed of many gestural moves and interactions with his prop. This vignette set the tone for the rest of the performance through the contrast between his solemn stares at the radio and playful gestures. It is a raw and tender reflection on solitude and the search for identity, rendered through facial expressions and gesticulations that could only be read in an intimate setting like New York Live Arts. The rest of the dancers entered the stage, moving from a tight vertical line to an explosive, passionate constellation, cued by the soloist’s clicking of the radio. The latter half of the piece was accompanied by black debris floating down from the ceiling like snowfall.

This high-spirited piece was beautifully contrasted by the world premiere of When It Was, a tender duet set to Samuel Barber’s melancholic Adagio for Strings. As an elegy, the piece captured the quiet strength and eventual fragility of partnership, using breathtaking lifts and moments of sustained balance to question identity and dependence. The technical precision required for such vulnerable, slow-tempo movement was impeccably executed, bridging the program’s more visceral works with quiet reflection.

The evening culminated with Bliss, an audience favorite set to Keith Jarrett’s iconic Köln Concert. The piece is an ode to sheer, ecstatic joy. The choreography matched the music’s soaring, free spirit with expansive, loose, and brightly colored costuming. The work evolved from a communal drift into an explosive, unified dance party, demonstrating the company’s ability to shift from internalized drama to luminous, communal exuberance. The curtain call was succeeded by a celebration of Gibney dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau’s last performance with the company. She gave everything to the dance in Bliss and was sent off with a standing ovation.

Ultimately, Gibney’s Up Close performance of Inger’s works is a triumph of the contemporary repertory model. The dancers exhibit a technical mastery that allows them to embody radically different choreographic languages. The Up Close series has featured works by Yin Yue and Rena Butler in the past; now, it presents the humanistic storytelling of Inger. The series confirms that when art is presented without distance, the result is a deeper, more meaningful connection.

Teenage Passion: Sam Contis @ American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York

text by Perry Shimon


“Perpetual self-optimization—as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self—represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation. As an ‘entrepreneur of himself,’ the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly – and even passionately. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely. 

Under neoliberalism, the technology of power takes on a subtle form. It does not lay hold of individuals directly. Instead, it ensures that individuals act on themselves so that power relations are interiorized – and then interpreted as freedom. Self-optimization and submission, freedom and exploitation, fall into one. 

-Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2014)

“Sometimes when things you love get really commercial, you end up feeling betrayed by it.”

-Gwyneth Paltrow

Sam Contis’ Phases, in the American Academy of Arts and Letters galleries at Audubon Terrace, presents 24 miniature photographs: tightly-cropped, daguerrotype-sized portraits of teenage girls approaching or crossing the finish line of a race—anguished and ecstatic faces in a graduation evoking a lunar orbit. Nearby, Five Kilometers, a three-channel video work of lone girls running through a New England landscape bleeds their climactic, intense, and layered breathing into the adjoining gallery. 

Considerations of power and gaze are often present when viewing representational work today, particularly in a contemporary art context, and especially so when looking at adolescent women’s bodies in a galvanized state. Critical discourse, social media, and institutional reprimand have produced a conservative and cautious climate in art contexts, more so than other milieux of visual culture. It seems more common today in an institutional setting to encounter critical interrogations of the gaze, than the kind of unadorned looking on view in Contis’ presentation. Contis leaves the space for us to make our own assessment and curator Noa Wesley, in the accompanying gallery text, offers:

When the runners’ rhythmic breathing rises to a crescendo—full of droning moans, gasps, the holding in of a cough—each girl begins to look like her will is running ahead of the body that carries her forward. And then the sound cuts out and they continue to run. Their pace intensifies. In the relief of that silence, we experience ourselves watching the runners perform an incredibly intimate feat of endurance. Their effort, and the amount of time that has passed since the starting shot, is newly visible: Sweat is pushed back, cheeks flush red, grimaces appear. The audience becomes voyeur to the ecstasy of their labor. The moment their pace reaches its peak, a low, sustained drone made from the instrumentation of the runners’ voices swells in; the suspended sound is an ominous anachronism. We watch their faces as they finally cross the finish line and continue to watch until, one by one, the screens cut to black. Wait a few minutes for the film to replay and the girls appear again, back at the starting line. You can leave them there, knowing their race will continue, just as the moon keeps roving round and round. 

This curious framing seems to naturalize the competition, toiling endurance, and “ecstasy of their labor,” making this cycle as inevitable as the cycles of the moon. 

Han in his Good Entertainment offers:

The construct of true or serious art, strictly separated from mere entertainment, arises in concert with a number of dichotomies characterized by internal tension: reason / mind versus the senses, for example, or transcendence versus immanence. The positing of dichotomies is characteristic of occidental thinking. Far Eastern thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward complimentary principles. Rather than stiff oppositions, reciprocal dependencies and correspondences preside over being. The dichotomy of mind versus the senses, which grounds the concept of a low art addressed only to the demands of the senses, never developed in the Far East. Nor does Far Eastern culture recognize the idea of artistic autonomy or the conflation of truth and art. No passion for truth, which suffers the extant as false, predominates in Far Eastern art, and it proposes no utopian antithesis to the existing world that serves to negate it. Negativity does not animate Far Eastern art. It is primarily concerned with affirmation and entertainment.

I wonder how much of a Christian tradition informs the production and reception of this work, and likewise the development of the neoliberal achievement subject. Is it possible to view Contis’ work as entertainment? Does the “ecstasy of labor” constitute a form of entertainment? For me, encountering the work after coming from a Dia de los Muertos celebration at Met Cloisters suggested a syncretic tendency for culture to overflow any attempts to neatly contain and classify it. The resonances between Contis’ passionate visages and medieval Christian iconography are clear enough, though an afternoon spent watching a New York crowd dance to cumbia, adorn ofrendas with plastic toys, and place calaveras among Christian icons complicates any easy casting of Christian tropes.

Phases is on view through February 8 @ American Academy of Arts and Letters Audubon Terrace, New York

Otherwise Part III: Anomic Aesthetics

NASA

text by Perry Shimon

In the harsh enlightenment of Western colonial barbarism, the predominance of Christianity gives way to a secular age of science—largely divorced from ethics—and often deployed by formations of power and mechanisms of enclosure. This historical period of rapid social and ecological devastation, forced migration, cultural erasure, and genocide produced a spirit of the age that the twentieth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim called anomie: an unmooring of the shared values that ground social life. The dictates of limitless capitalist accumulation, along with the violent disintegrations and dislocations enacted in pursuit of these ends, plunged society into a state of despair. This age of compounding socio-ecological disintegration characterizes the contemporary. Artists today take up questions of ethical refoundation in an unprecedentedly complex, scientistic, and globally integrated world.

In Give More Than You Take (2010), Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong worked as a seasonal berry picker in Swedish Lapland and requested that a museum director in France display, in the galleries, the corresponding weight of berries he picked, comprised of out-of-use office supplies. In a 2019 installation at SFMOMA, he presented the work alongside a film, a hunting tower he dismantled alongside other precarious seasonal workers, and an equivalent weight in Californian walnuts. His Spoon (2019) comes from a collaboration with villagers in Napia, Laos, who have been collecting undetonated U.S. bombs and melting them down into spoons to sell to tourists. Phinthong asked them to create free-form reflective circles, alluding to metal’s liquid state, which he paired with postcards mirroring the villagers’ hands, laboring in bomb-cleared land that had been converted into monocultured cotton fields. These works invite consideration of geopolitical histories, labor, and negotiations of value within contemporary art contexts in an age of anomie.

 

In 2016, the American artist Jill Magid intervened through a complex suite of relational and aesthetic gestures into a curious and troubling situation involving the archive of one of Mexico’s most significant architects, Luis Barragán. The archive had been bought by the CEO of the Swiss furniture design company Vitra as a gift for his fiancée, Federica Zanco, who made the materials difficult to access. With the consent of Barragán’s living relatives, Magid exhumed his cremated remains, had them pressed into a synthetic diamond, and then proposed the diamond to Zanco in exchange for repatriating the archive to Mexico and making its contents accessible. The work evolved into a documentary and a series of installations, sparking an extensive discourse around ethics and cultural heritage: Is it ethical for a European collector to acquire a significant Latin American archive and withhold its contents from researchers? Is it ethical to exhume one’s remains to create an artwork that intervenes into the matter?

British artist Simon Fujiwara—an auteur of the anomic—consistently produces shorts within already-fragile circuits of ethics with his baroque, multimedia, relational practice. Whether reproducing a make-your-own Anne Frank House kit in a gallery, alongside a life-size wax replica of Frank and a massive remote-controlled camera trained upon it, or launching a multichannel lifestyle-branding campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of a former grade-school teacher who had been fired after nude pictures of her were leaked, his works plunge viewers into a dark wood of ethical uncertainty.

An excerpt from a recent press release announcing a new installation by French artist Pierre Huyghe summarizes this anomic condition in a familiarly opaque style of art speak:

“The large-scale environment encompasses film, sound, vibration, dust, and light. Presented as a myth, the film at its core follows a faceless and hollow human form. Pierre Huyghe describes the form as ‘a hybrid creature, an infinite membrane carved by void,’ adding that ‘An observer witnessing the ambiguous nature of the entity, its monstrosity, follows states of indeterminacy—of the uncertainty of being, living, or existing. The film portrays an inexistent being, a soulscape, a radical outside, striving to combine empathy with the impossible.’ The artist describes this fictional world as a ‘vehicle for accessing what could be or could not be—to relate with chaos; and turns states of uncertainty into a cosmos.’”

A section of the LHC tunnel, CERN. (Wikipedia)

Simulated Large Hadron Collider CMS particle detector data depicting a Higgs boson produced by colliding protons decaying into hadron jets and electrons (Wikipedia)

The preoccupations and rhetorical framings of the sciences tend to co-articulate the agendas and anxieties of an age. The rise of deregulation and limitless growth espoused by neoliberalism in the late twentieth century emerged coextensively with science’s preoccupation with a boundaryless and ever-expanding universe. Perhaps the Hadron Collider is the greatest monument to an atomist tradition of thinking that allows the world to be violently divided into operational parts. In the resulting moral vacuum, the Euro-American imperial project and the socio-ecocidal trajectory of neoliberal capitalism have produced an aesthetics of anomie.

Autre Magazine FW25 "Work In Progress" Celebration & Panel Talk with Caltech Astrophysicists @ l.a.Eyeworks

Last night, at the expansive new l.a.Eyeworks campus in Los Angeles, Autre magazine invited guests on a journey through space and time to celebrate its FW25 “Work in Progress” issue. The evening opened with a captivating panel featuring Caltech astrophysicists Katherine de Kleer, Cameron Hummels, and Mike Brown, moderated by Autre’s managing editor Summer Bowie, who guided a conversation spanning black holes, dark matter, and the possibility of life beyond Earth. The discussion gave way to an intimate cocktail soirée, where guests mingled under the stars with drinks courtesy of Madre Mezcal. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Jafar Panahi's "It Was Just an Accident" Implores Us to Weaponize Our Laughter

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

text by Hank Manning

Jafar Panahi doesn’t have to look far to find inspiration for his films. He often portrays a fictionalized version of himself, a filmmaker speaking truth to power. In real life, Iranian authorities have twice imprisoned him, first for making “anti-regime” films and then for inquiring about the condition of another imprisoned filmmaker. He was released the second time after engaging in a 48-hour hunger strike, but continues to face restrictions on his travel and filmmaking. 

Although he does not appear onscreen in It Was Just an Accident, which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it may be Panahi’s most personal film yet. His first feature made after his second imprisonment, he shot it clandestinely with a small crew in Tehran to avoid having to work with state censors. The resulting long takes and often close quarters give the film something of a documentary, true-to-life feel. The characters’ backstories, motivations, and fantasies were inspired by his own stay in prison—although he says he did not personally suffer physical torture—and conversations with fellow prisoners.

One night at his repair shop, auto mechanic Vahid hears a sound that has haunted him for years: the high-pitched squeak of an improperly attached prosthetic leg. It belongs to Eghbal, a prison guard who tortured him and other political prisoners. Vahid instinctively springs to action, trailing and then assaulting and kidnapping his former tormentor. But doubts arise—Vahid was blindfolded in prison, so he can’t be sure he has found the right person. He enlists other former prisoners to help him confirm. They likewise depend on secondary senses—smell and touch—to try to identify the man.

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

The members of Vahid’s ad hoc party—wedding photographer Shiva, her ex Hamid, bride Goli, and groom Ali (who was not a prisoner and is consequently the least passionate character)—use different strategies to navigate life in a brutal authoritarian country. Shiva initially hopes to forget the torture she endured and live quietly resigned inside the system. Goli, who faints when reminded of her imprisonment, persuades Shiva to at least pursue a confession and an apology. Hamid, filled with rage, demands ultimate vengeance: the immediate killing of his former tormentor. From the conflicts between the victims-turned-captors, we see the difficulties that ordinary people face in opposing authoritarianism. Unlike those inside the regime, who are either chosen for their lack of morals or carefully propagandized to not see the humanity of others, people outside the regime have a variety of morals and desired approaches. These large groups must balance demands for resignation, justice, and vengeance, making unified action more challenging.

Over time, these differences swell. Some passionate emotions subside into logical considerations. Vahid, who at first intended to bury Eghbal alive, becomes hesitant, especially when learning that Eghbal has an innocent wife and young daughter. The party must contend with the fact that their hostage is only one member of a large, oppressive system. They consider whether he can be blamed for following orders, no matter how cruel, or whether he is also a victim who had no choice but to do brutal work to support his family. Yet, if a man who commits violence against the innocent doesn’t bear responsibility for the regime, then who possibly could? But then again, even if he is guilty and deserving of the worst treatment, will enacting revenge do anything to help the group, if they can even get away with it?

The film is too honest to provide any easy answers. Individual viewers will likely align themselves more closely with one or another member of the group’s moral philosophy while simultaneously understanding the flaws in each. The film’s final shot unsettles every conclusion we’ve formed, leaving us to wonder if any sort of resistance could lead to a proper resolution.

It Was Just an Accident, Photograph courtesy NEON

The film inspires a surprising number of laughs. In particular, a running gag features Vahid paying bribes to security guards and nurses, demonstrating the way that corruption permeates all areas of society. We are reminded that no matter how horrifying authoritarian regimes are, they are also inevitably ridiculous. Since tyrants insist on being taken seriously, we cannot forget to weaponize our laughter.

Although clearly set in Iran, the key politics, such as the regime’s justifications for the prison sentences, are intentionally left generic enough so that audiences can easily imagine parallel scenarios developing under any authoritarian government. While the film does raise more questions than it answers, its one seemingly unavoidable conclusion is that authoritarianism, in any form, must not be allowed to take root. Even those who place themselves at the top of an oppressive hierarchy eventually meet their fate, as systems centered on ever-escalating violence quickly spiral out of control, consuming everyone within them.

Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room Is an Unchanging Link to Nature in an Ever-changing City.

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo-John Cliett, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation

text by Isabella Bernabeo

I buzz myself in and start to walk up a narrow, rickety old staircase inside an old New York City building located at 141 Wooster Street. A pungent smell greets me as soon as I hit the second floor and turn to enter the exhibit. That’s when I see it. Mounds of dirt thrown inside an apartment’s meant-to-be living room. It’s an unusual sight, and it causes me to think, what am I supposed to make of this?  

Built in 1977, The New York Earth Room has been hidden behind a Soho door for nearly half a century. Walter de Maria installed the piece on the second story of German art dealer Heiner Friedrich’s gallery and apartment building, where it still lies to this day. 

The exhibition contains a white room filled with 250 cubic yards of unsterilized dirt, 22 inches deep, across 3,600 square feet. Originally, the exhibit was intended to last only three months, but it remained on display indefinitely. 

The New York Earth Room wouldn’t be what it is if it were placed in a small town in the middle of the rural Midwest. It’s the fact that it is installed in such a fast-paced city that makes the experience special, especially in the middle of Soho, where materialism and consumerism are practically the only things on visitors’ minds.  

This artwork forces its visitors to slow down and take in their surroundings. The dirt is slow and unwavering, offering a relaxing getaway from the bustle of activity outside. Yet, it is also quite surprising and provocative to witness so much dirt thrown inside a room, where it is so quiet that all one can hear is their own breath.   

The space is not just for tourists. New Yorkers who love hiking and camping also find meaning here. The piece provides locals with an escape from the city’s constant chaos. It is very much a sanctuary space. Spaces like this are hard to find without taking the Metro-North upstate.

As such, it fits perfectly in the city’s melting pot. It proves that anyone can belong. 

Maria himself never commented on the meaning of this piece, wanting each person to create their own connection. However, it’s notable that the Earth Room was installed only a few years after the United States Environmental Protection Agency was formed. And just a few years prior to that, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was released. This was a time when environmental awareness was exponentially on the rise. I’d like to think that this piece has been preserved to represent humanity’s obligation to care for our own Earth.  

This context adds to the artwork’s significance. However, this wasn’t Maria’s first or even second Earth Room installation.

Maria had actually built the first Earth Room in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and the second one was made in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974, both of which were temporary exhibits that were dismantled after a few months. 

Maria died in 2013, and since then, Bill Dilworth has been the face of The New York Earth Room through the Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974 by Friedrich. Dilworth cares for and maintains the exhibit by constantly watering, raking, and weeding the dirt, and even cleaning mold off the walls. 

Visitors can see The Earth Room Wednesday through Sunday between the hours of 12:00-3:00 pm and 3:30-6:00 pm for free. People can ring the bell to be buzzed into the apartment and make their way to the second floor for viewing. Photography is not permitted.

A New Era of Dance at Southbank Centre Begins with KUNSTY

Bold Tendencies, 2024 - Bullyache Rehearsal © Dan John Lloyd

text by Lara Monro

From the dark, psychologically charged paintings of Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville’s visceral reworkings of the body, to the rise of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, the UK has long fostered artists who trouble expectations and stretch the limits of form. Contemporary dance evolved within this same cultural impulse. 

Emerging in the mid-20th century and influenced by American modernism and European Expressionism, choreographers rejected the rigid hierarchies of ballet in favor of movement grounded in emotion, collaboration, and lived experience. The establishment of institutions like the London Contemporary Dance School and London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the 1960s helped this shift take hold, while companies such as Rambert opened space for contemporary choreography within previously classical structures. By the early 2000s, the UK dance landscape had grown increasingly international, hybrid, and experimental. Wayne McGregor’s appointment as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, for example, was a symbolic moment that signaled the avant-garde entering the mainstream.

Today, this spirit of experimentation is (slowly but surely) being reflected in the programming of public cultural institutions. The launch of KUNSTY, a new festival series at the Southbank Centre, foregrounds this commitment, championing artists who are reshaping what performance looks and feels like in the UK.

Rather than centering traditional staged dance, KUNSTY platforms independent British and international artists working at the intersections of dance, live art, cabaret, and club culture. The work showcased is playful, political, and deeply communal, embracing forms of performance in which audiences are not only spectators, but co-participants. Autre spoke with Aaron Wright, Southbank Centre’s Head of Performance and Dance, about the motivations behind the festival, the risks it welcomes, and the kinds of encounters he hopes it invites. 

Having joined the Southbank Centre only two years ago, Wright describes the launch of KUNSTY as part of a broader effort to nurture a new generation of UK artists while sustaining the institution’s evolving international program.

Cabrolé! © Jon Archdeacon

“I’ve focused on reigniting a program of international performance for our larger spaces,” he explains. “Now that it’s finding its feet, I wanted to make sure we were also supporting a new generation of British artists who might one day scale up to create larger shows here. The Southbank Centre is an engine of creativity. We have to nurture the next generation, particularly artists working in multidisciplinary ways.”

The festival’s playful title, drawn from the German kunst (art), signals a desire to attract audiences who are open to the unexpected: those drawn to work that is “a bit unusual, a bit queer, a bit arty.”

“I hope it gets people talking about the endless possibilities of performance,” Wright says. “In the UK, we often make theater in quite a conventional way. I want audiences to recognize the sheer creativity of many artists working on the fringes.”

This is clear in the festival’s programming. Cabrolé! curated the KUNSTY Cabaret Lounge in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, gathering twelve of London’s most exciting cabaret performers to stage late-night, high-intensity sets. While London-based queer performance collective and club night Wet Mess blurs boundaries between performer and audience entirely, dissolving the line between stage and dance floor, and inviting those present to move as part of the work. 

“Many of the performances in KUNSTY are incredibly live,” Wright notes. “They feed off the presence of the audience rather than asking them to sit passively behind a fourth wall.”

A man hugs himself. We see him from behind with a jacket that says "CRAZY ABOUT DISCO NIGHTS" on the back.

Adam Russell-Jones, Release the Hounds, 2025 © Mayra Wallraff

Meanwhile, artists such as Adam Russell Jones and Courtney May Robertson return to the UK with work shaped by their experiences within Europe’s more overtly avant-garde dance ecologies. And in a major highlight, Australian artist Justin Shoulder presents a stunning hybrid performance that combines drag, mask work, puppetry, and club ritual.

“This is the civic role of international programming,” Wright says. “To introduce audiences to work that could never have been made here.”

The festival also underscores dance’s capacity to address urgent social questions. Sung Im Her’s 1 Degree Celsius merges choreography and atmospheric data to consider the climate crisis, while Tink & Abra Flaherty’s Gen X Gen Z explores parenthood, identity, and generational exchange.

KUNSTY ultimately expands what can be seen, and who can be seen, on the UK stage. It nurtures the conditions in which diverse identities, bodies, and narratives are not only visible but central to how performance is imagined. In doing so, it reinforces the UK as a place where boundary-pushing art continues to thrive, and where movement remains a vital language for thinking, feeling, and being together.

Sung Im Her, 1 Degree Celsius, 2025 © Asian Cultural Center (ACC)

KUNSTY takes place across the Southbank Centre from Wednesday, November 5 to Saturday, November 8, with performances and late-night events unfolding throughout the Queen Elizabeth Hall and foyer spaces.

Reborn with Dario Vitale: Versace's SS26 Collection Preview

The harshness of Medusa’s gaze transforms into a smile. Vitale blends Gianni’s bold use of color and desire for imagery with today’s rationality.

text by Alper Kurtul
photographs by Alec Charlip

Versace’s Spring/Summer 2026 preview took place in New York at the Tea Room of the Prince George Ballroom, located within the historic Prince George Hotel complex between Madison and Fifth Avenue. This century-old structure, with its Beaux Arts-inspired elegance, has been transformed into an event venue, and it is said that the women’s tea room, which opens onto the ballroom, and other former common areas have been restored and adapted for contemporary use. 

The first thing felt upon entering the hall was the reality of a changing of the guard. Donatella Versace’s departure from creative management after nearly thirty years and the arrival of Dario Vitale, who worked for many years at Miu Miu building products and images, signified not just a change in name but a shift in perspective. The news that this transition was confirmed in March and that Vitale took over in April marked a turning point in terms of the brand’s future and potential strategic directions. Every detail seen while walking around the room signaled the tone of this new era. 

Vitale’s background in the Prada school is evident in the rational structure and material discipline characteristic of Mrs. Prada. However, here, instead of harsh minimalism, an exuberance that winks at Gianni’s legacy has been chosen. The door opened by the Versace Embodied project had already paved the way for this direction. A line starting with a bronze relief of Medusa merges with the present through black-and-white portraits documenting the youth of Southern Italy, Collier Schorr’s intimate drawings, and Eileen Myles’ search for raw expression. Vitale’s softened use of Medusa in the preview gains a joy that flirts with pop art. This narrative becomes a manifesto on how the house’s codes have been updated. 

 
 

The silhouette language rises above a powerful and controlled nostalgia. It returns with high-waisted pants, prominent shoulders, pleated fabrics, and layered stylization, reminiscent of Miami in the ’80s and ’90s. Suits that look like they jumped out of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice screen but fit today’s urban body stand out. Printed denim and silk pieces adorned with Marilyn Monroe portraits and Warhol-inspired Pop prints take center stage. This is both a direct reference to Gianni Versace’s 1991 Spring/Summer collection and a contemporary echo of the brand’s longstanding dialogue with photography, prints, and identity politics. On the accessories side, gold-toned surfaces and Greek key motifs create a vibrant exchange between antiquity and pop culture, while each silk blend fabric used on the prints is finished by hand. This craftsmanship is particularly evident in the undergarments, where hand-applied paint transitions and micro print transfers on the fabric layers make each piece unique. The human face motifs, inspired by archival portraits, are not printed but hand-painted directly onto the fabric, giving every garment a slightly different expression that feels intimate and alive, as if each carried the touch of its maker (except for Marilyn Monroe, some of the faces that may seem like celebrities actually belong to random people, which subtly forces the viewer to look closer and question what feels familiar). The mannequins used in the exhibition are original models from the Gianni Versace era, handmade in the Milan workshop in the 1980s. These mannequins perfectly reflect the Italian tailoring standards of the period and Gianni’s sense of form. With their handcrafted surfaces, the garments’ lines are displayed as if on a sculpture rather than a mechanical display; the warmth of the human body is preserved in the way the clothes are presented. Thus, the material of the past is transported to today’s stage, and the weight of craftsmanship combines with the energy of modern colors and forms to become a narrative of dynamic confidence.

In footwear, the first hints of the Onitsuka Tiger collaboration are visible as the signature move of the new era. Tai Chi-inspired, low-profile models and a loafer interpretation offer a taste of tailoring, where Japanese production precision meets Italian leather. This collaboration was a separate headline in the news flow of Vitale’s debut season and looks set to become a key file for sneaker enthusiasts in the coming season. The emphasis on Versace partnering with a sports shoe brand for the first time in the sneaker field clearly opens the brand’s door to the street. 

Versace is reestablishing the relationship between myth and the body. The sculptural coldness of the gods gives way to a warmth closer to the human scale. The harshness of Medusa’s gaze transforms into a smile. Vitale blends Gianni’s bold colors and love of imagery with today’s clear sense of rationality. The styling feels fluid, mixing tailored pieces with soft layers that add movement and depth. Each look carries the energy of spontaneity, turning maximalism into something quietly human. This approach strengthens the brand’s relationship with the city and manages to remain wearable even in a hub of intensity like New York. The preview proves that grandeur can be conveyed not through ostentation but through measured assertiveness. Therefore, the expression of rebirth encompasses not only the new creative director but also the brand’s return to itself to find a fresh direction.

Bergen Assembly: We Are All Passers But Not Everything Vanishes

A Review of Across, with, nearby – The Fifth Bergen Assembly, Norway 

Bergen Assembly Open Office, outdoor view. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio


text by Maja Ćirić

I land in Bergen, greeted by rain (of course) and trolls—oversized, 3D, half-folklore, half-welcome committee. They stand at the airport like a soft portal, opening into a city where myth and weather slip into each other. Some places pray for rain. Bergen—Europe’s wettest city—prays for it to stop. But weather, like time, is arbitrary. “You can wear the watch, or you can live the time.”1

Looking in from the street, I’m drawn like a moth to the low, electric hum of a neon sign: The Bergen Assembly. A glowing threshold. Inside, discarded garments from Haukeland Hospital hang from the ceiling in Before Incineration (2025), an installation by the architecture collective Al Borde, working with reuse and spatial constraints—suspended like ghosts who never left, part of the Bergen Assembly Traces.

 

Audience gathers amidst Al Borde’s Before Incineration, 2025, an installation at the Bergen Assembly Open Office as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

 

It’s the opening weekend of not quite an exhibition, not quite a symposium. Something that slips through cracks, porous, shape-shifting. Part visual, part discursive, part performance—and part something unnamed, lingering in the mist between buildings.

Here, the city listens. The fjord leans in. The landscape itself becomes venue, vibrating gently as the three-joint conveners—Adania Shibli, the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS), and Ravi Agarwal—together with many tracers, stir the waters at this planetary edge.

To convene is not to curate. It’s to call in what lingers—traces, flickers, the almost-visible. It allows things to collide, drift, dissolve—not to lose meaning, but to hold it differently. It’s a deliberate mixture of form, thought, feeling, and rupture. Not chaos, but intimacy. Not neatness, but density. It speaks across borders, across bodies—a soft unfastening of structure, and a firm refusal of silence.

Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo, Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV ‘270° Version’, 2024, installation view at the Bergen School of Architecture as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

It moves horizontally more like a 270° view stretched across 13 screens—Post-Capitalist Architecture TV: 270° (2024) by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo—disrupting the fixed gaze of perspectivalism and introducing the constantly shifting, place-responsive worldview of the Sámi, a nomadic Indigenous people whose perspective refuses to stand still. Stolen Horizon III (2023) by Prabhakar Pachpute doesn’t just span the wall; it digs. Mining becomes a metaphor: not only an industrial act but an excavation of layered cultural and ecological memory, like the Roman warship unearthed in Serbia’s Kostolac coal mine, the painting reveals what lies beneath. The exhibition at BAS, too, reaches wide and deep. It unfolds like echoes overlapping—somewhere between light and dark, like Susan Philipsz’s Slow Fresh Found (2021), submerged frequencies resonating through the silo chambers of the Bergen School of Architecture. Like Meet the Locals: Underwater, Jana Winderen’s sound performance — creatures beneath the surface emitting sound, barely audible yet deeply present. Like a negotiation between hands — shaping clay, tracing keys, trimming hair — Koki Tanaka’s videos unfold in the in-between. 

It presents like the Palestinian mujaawarah2 — the ancient rhythm of gathering, of passing through, of sharing not only space but also violent structure, like the Nakba3, for a moment in time. After all, let us not forget that the Oslo Accords—those fragile, trembling agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—were signed in the quiet of Norway in 1993, when the world briefly held its breath, believing that maybe, just maybe, the weight of history could soften, and something like peace could begin to bloom between two long-wounded nations.

Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, Laitïam, 2023, installation view at Nonneseter as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Yet, the Communist Museum of Palestine is an ongoing attempt to unfasten planetary life from the sustained violence and erasure that is the Nakba—not as event but as structure, not only of Palestine, but of the world. Here, the Nakba surfaces as a planetary wound, encoded across timelines, geographies, and peoples — each struggle activating another. Through its دال-صفر (d-0) project, the Museum conjures mujaawarah, a proximity practice, invoked by many, but perhaps most hauntingly by Munir Fasheh4, Harvard-trained, and stitched into the pedagogy of his seamstress mother, who knew mathematics schools dare not teach. He saw what schools miss—knowledge is not education. And so Bergen Assembly leans into this unlearning and re-knowing—not alone, but together, inside the close—redrawing the communal without asking permission. 

In the stone belly of the Tower Base, Bergen’s oldest building, two other mothers hold space from different eras and origins. Lapdiang Artimai Syiem’s Indigenous Khasi mourning of a male fawn in a video reenactment of the U Sier Lapalang folk tale  — set within a landscape, trembling, alive — flickers against the permanently placed bronze hush of a WWII memorial, mother and child locked in stillness. They don’t mirror, they murmur. Two bondings, grief as grounding, placed not to resolve but to hum across the grain of time. Story slips through—not as history, but as presence—where architectures remember without speaking, and temporalities touch without fusing.

AgriForum’s Acts of Re/Collection at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, exhibition view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

Stranges Stiftelse, founded in 1609 as a poorhouse for women, is an architecture of exclusion—narrow rooms tucked along galleries, reached by steep wooden stairs, each one overlooking the communal hall like a quiet witness. What does it mean, spatially, to be poor and alone? Bergen Assembly doesn’t just enter these spaces—it listens to them. Archives for Social Change gathers here, not as display, but as companionship: five independent archives holding the quieted, the refused, the tender revolutions of those who organized, resisted, and cared. Skeivt Arkiv (Norway), the Dalit Archive and Feminist Memory Project from Nepal Picture Library, the Grindmill Songs Project of rural India, and Stiftelse’s own historical papers lean into each other—histories not aligned but in relation, held together by the will to remember what power tried to forget. In five tiny former bedrooms, five imagined lives of women unfold — drawn from the archives, rewritten with care by selected writers who listened closely to what history left unsaid. A delicate matchmaking that resonates in all directions and remains punctual. 

At Bergen Kunsthall, founded in 1838, the walls pulse with gestures of resistance, memory, and collective becoming. The space unfolds like a palimpsest of movement—across borders, histories, and urgencies—centering experiments in anti-colonial thought and radical togetherness.

Bergen Kunsthall, installation view showing Vikrant Bhise’s Memory, Resistance, and Consciousness, 2023; as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio

Entering frontally, you are immediately met with Memory, Resistance and Consciousness (2023) by Vikrant Bhise — a painting rooted in the uncompromising legacy of the Dalit Panthers, the revolutionary Indian collective that fought fiercely against caste apartheid, gendered violence, and class oppression. The canvas doesn’t just hang — it insists. A call, a cry, a continuum.

To the left, under a luminous shamiana—the ceremonial canopy transformed into a porous site of gathering—the AgriForum comes alive. Convened by Agarwal, hosted by FICA5 and artist Sanchayan Ghosh, this space shelters a living, breathing archive: Acts of Re/Collection — multidisciplinary, agrarian, artistic. It murmurs of seed, soil, root, spirit — an ecology of shared memory and speculative farming futures. The shamiana is less an object and more an embrace — an architecture of hospitality and insurgent pedagogy.

Organizing for Social Change at Stranges Stiftelse as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio

At the end of the space — the black box — five films from The Directors (2022) by Marcus Coates, artist and amateur naturalist, unfold with quiet intensity. Each is a collaboration with an individual — Mark, Lucy, Anthony, Marcus, Stephan — who has lived through episodes of psychosis. Through Coates’ reenactment and shared authorship, they reclaim their narratives on their own terms. The screen becomes a threshold — trembling with vulnerability, lucidity, and quiet courage. Here, video is a terrain of radical empathy; a gentle, yet powerful, gesture toward dissolving the stigma still tethered to mental health.

On the right wing, history ricochets, as convened by Adania Shibli. A retrospective of Gruppe 66’s6 three seminal exhibitions held at the Bergen Kunsthalle is shared rather than displayed. This Scandinavian, situationist-leaning collective unfolds through contemporary reinterpretations of their co-ritus (collective + rite) method from the late 1960s and 1970s — a choreographic practice of resistance, ritual, and rupture born as a response to institutional complacency. Here, the past is not archived; it is re-embodied, re-spoken in new tongues by today’s artists.

Gruppe 66 at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, installation view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

Just as water carries the memories of others, EPOS—the literary boat, a floating library serving coastal communities in Western Norway from the 1960s until 2020—hosts an art program, Water as a Linker and a Separator, embarking on a multi-stop journey through the Hardanger Fjord. We, the opening weekend crowd, boarded EPOS towards Salhus. Greeted by sound: a performance, a tidal offering. An offering to the sea by Elin Már Øyen Vister and collaborators, held at the shoreline where the boat had anchored. So archetypal it felt like it could move the tide itself. From there, we drifted inland to the Textile Industry Museum, once a knitting factory, still holding the breath of labor long after the machines fell silent in 1989. Inside, among worn looms and the lingering echoes of a working-class neighborhood of wooden Nordic houses, disruption did not appear as rupture, but as something more familiar — a condition. It drifted across borders, nested in nearby trouble, stretched between closeness and distance.

What the Bergen Assembly conveners seemed to offer was not a tangled complicity, but something gentler: a kind of relief. Like the twisting machine we encountered on the museum floor—its metal arms plying colorful threads together, not to confuse, but to hold. To bind. There is a quiet force in that gesture, in the re-threading of what has frayed.

Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Jakkai Siributr’s There’s No Place (2020–ongoing) picks up this thread with aching precision. His textile banners—suspended like breath from the ceiling—began in a refugee camp on the Thailand–Myanmar border. There, members of the stateless Shan community were invited to stitch their life stories, one thread at a time. Through embroidery, memory passed from hand to hand. Siributr resists fixed authorship; instead, the work becomes a space—porous, open, collective—where narrative is not imposed but invited, and where histories are not merely preserved, but reimagined and remade.

From Lakota Indian poems to the Norwegian literary act of naming the industrial meat complex, the undertaking of the Bergen Assembly feels less like an exhibition and more like a search — for a word, a wound, a world still forming. Art for those who aren’t truly invested, yet still addressed. For the half-interested, the distracted, the ones who stumble into it accidentally. Maybe especially for them — because they carry the weight of the big pockets, the silent majorities, the soft architecture of society. 

If this assembly of relations weren’t rooted in Bergen, I doubt it would hum with the same resonance. Here, the land presses in—not as a distant backdrop, but as presence. The damp air, the weight of the sky, the quiet rhythm of water folding into stone. Everything feels shaped by something older, heavier. Isidora Sekulić’s letters from Norway in 1914 captured it simply: “So much of nature in this country—by its beauty, its terror, and its power—is superior to man, that all the importance and interest of Norway’s past seem to be more the will of geology and geography than the fate of a people.”

It’s true here. In Bergen, the past doesn’t live in monuments or myths, but in the earth’s sheer force—in cliffs, fjords, moss, and cloud. The works don’t just occupy this place; they are held by it, folded into a terrain that remembers more than we do. Maybe that’s the point: resonance isn’t always about meaning. Sometimes it’s about atmosphere—about being in the right kind of weather to feel it.

Had this been placed further west—closer to the art world’s centers of gravity—it might have slipped into commodification or the tidy boxes of identity politics. The focus would shift from fragile, shifting relations to something more legible, more fixed. But here, the rhythm is slower, softer, less utilitarian. There’s no pressure to explain everything. It’s a place where work can take its time—where ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve, but a space to inhabit. And that difference in tempo changes everything: how the pieces unfold, how they breathe, how they hold you.

We were listening to a panel at the famous Amundsen Bar at the Grand Hotel Terminus, one of Bergen Assembly’s venues. Someone mentioned it was once the place from which an explorer was bid farewell, setting off to find a friend lost on an expedition further north — a journey from which he never returned. It seemed fitting. In a way, the Bergen Assembly had sent us out as explorers too. But unlike that story, we came back — and brought a friend with us. 

We are all just passersby. But even in passing, something stirs: a feeling, a flicker, a thread pulled loose. Impermanence doesn’t absolve us. If anything, it sharpens the need to take responsibility.

To witness. To respond. To stay, if only for a breath. A footprint in wet moss. A glance that clings. A gesture, unfinished but felt. What we touch touches back. Nothing holds. But everything leaves an imprint. And Bergen Assembly, in its passing, left traces—soft, deliberate, awake. It remembered to take responsibility.

Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Bergen Assembly is on view through November 9 @ Halfdan Kjerulfs Gate 4, 5017 Bergen

1 At one of the panels, Rene Gabri quoted a wise man from Jerusalem. ↩

2 Mujaawarah is a group of people who want and decide to be together, with no authority within the group and no authority from outside ↩

3 The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. ↩

4 Munir Fasheh is a learning theorist and practitioner, who taught mathematics and physics. Based in Ramallah, Fasheh founded the Tamer Institute for Community Education during the first Intifada as a center for developing learning environments outside of schooling in Palestine. ↩

5 The Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art. ↩

6 Gruppe 66, which directly intervened in the cultural status quo; Konkret Analyse, blending abstraction with gesture; and Common Life/Samliv, a fusion of art and learning, taboos and togetherness. ↩

"Embrace" by Klára Hosnedlová @ Hamburger Bahnhof


text by Arlo Kremen

Embrace is the largest installation of the Czech-born artist Klára Hosnedlová. The installation was produced as the culmination of the annual CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof—the old train hall turned art institution. Her resulting work has a remarkable all-at-once effect, where disparate facets of existence overlap: tactile, industrial, sound, history, architecture, scale, the land, and heritage are all interwoven in her piece, compelling visitors to sit patiently in Hosnedlová’s singular world.

The artist transforms the exhibition hall’s original floors with grey stone tiles. The plane of grey is interrupted by gashes of sand, dirt, and water—natural material invades the clinical space of art reception. Industrial speakers sourced from Berlin clubs, some of which no longer exist, pile onto some of the intruding earth beds. While some speakers amplify the audio cycle for the show, others lie entirely inert as empty vessels.

The show’s soundtrack was developed by Berlin- and Brussels-based composer and artist Billy Bultheel. The track cycles through a women’s choir, Lada, who sing in Moravian micro-dialects, instrumental sections, church bells, and the voice of Czech rapper Yzomandias. Much of the work originates in memories and histories of where Hosnedlová grew up, the Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště, where the inorganic structures of central-east European communist industrial architecture and the region’s rich cultural landscape came into contact. The eight steel walls bordering the show hold sand-covered reliefs that similarly evoke memories. Both referring to Moravia’s history, they also call on the socialist wall friezes common in public buildings. With the fossils embodying both prehistoric and communist histories, they turn to Hosnedlová’s childhood in the immediate aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, her birth taking place just a year after and three years before the formation of the modern Czech Republic in 1993. But they simultaneously represent her childhood hobby of collecting fossils, believing them to be remnants of another world.

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

These reliefs also bear the work of glass-making artisans whose practice has been informed by generations of glass-makers, joining the separate referents of the reliefs through their regionality and as a historic artisan medium. Like claws, the hand-cast glass protrudes from the reliefs, mimicking, too, the carbonization of a prehistoric relic. Nine pieces of colored glass in total, whose material contrasts with the rigid structure of the reliefs, balancing fragility and durability.

The embroideries embedded in the reliefs act as portals to the past, depicting scenes from unseen staged performances that were photographed at brutalist structures in Berlin. These slow, intimate moments transport the viewer into a still past. Some depicted scenes emphasize physical touch. One embroidery shows a man with a lighter flaming right by his ambomen; his skin, brightened by the fire, evokes the sensation of a flame near the skin—its primal warmth. Another shows someone fiddling with a lit match, meditating on the feeling of an enclosing fire, a moment before movement. These gentle images are blown up within the immensity of the reliefs, both in size and in their references to ancient life and architecture, considering these ephemeral interactions with the body and natural phenomena like fire as contained within the vastness of history, politics, and culture.

 

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

 

Some reliefs, displaced from the steel walls, are fixed to the hemp and flax tapestries hanging in the middle of the hall. Six in total, they hang from the ceiling and culminate in clumped tendrils, which cover the floor around the tapestry. Each is made from spun flax and hemp and dyed in an earthy tone from plant-based dyes. Such works also return to Bohemia, for the region has a long, pre-industrial tradition of flax and hemp cultivation that largely ended after the Second World War, when global industrialization and the legacies of colonial trade displaced regional textile production across Europe. For these works, Hosnedlová worked with the last flax and hemp processors in that region of modern-day Czech Republic. These fixtures, both blocking the viewer out and trapping the viewer in, disassemble traditional notions of inside and outside, inculcating the viewer into a landscape.

The show accomplishes an evocation. Through Embrace, a feeling of loss and slippage permeates, but its subject is not turning to pure nothingness. What is decaying—whether it be the cultural traditions and history of Moravia due to colonial capitalism or the regional sonic topography of language and music felt passing through the dusty, beaten, and partially defective speakers—it is going somewhere. Whether in memory-soaked imaginative environments like the one Hosnedlová crafts, or as a relic for new generations to uncover, the artist demonstrates her trust that the Moravia of her childhood will not disappear—it will carbonize under the earth for someone else to uncover and cherish as a key to another world.

Embrace is on view through April 1, 2026 @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50, Berlin.