A Force Of Expression: Dario Vitale's Electric New Vision For The House Of Versace

Binx on a bike. Photographed by Stef Mitchell, 2025 Binx Walton, a model and artist, captured by Stef Mitchell. Renowned for her arresting and intimate portraits of independence and youth, connecting with the irreverent and youthful attitude of Versace.

This week, Chief Creative Officer Dario Vitale unveiled “Chapter One” of his new vision for the House of Versace, founded by Gianni Versace in 1978. Described as a “force of expression,” it connects the present with the brand’s historical DNA of unbridled creativity, with a clear path for the future. The project will take shape as a series of visual chapters, “fragments of people, places and emblems that embody its values.” Chapter One includes work from Camille Vivier, Steven Meisel, Eileen Myles, Collier Schorr and more. Photographs, poetry, art, music, and film, alongside objects from the Versace archive capture the house’s “uncompromising strength, rigour and sexuality” and a celebration of pure freedom. Click here to see more.

‘Untitled’. Illustrations by Collier Schorr, 2025 Collier Schorr, an artist and photographer, whose intimate portraits cast a confronting lens on the subjects of her work, responding to the intimacy and sexuality that defines the House with a series of original illustrations.

Rich In Your Ways: An Interview of Polite Society Designer Surmai Jain →

 
 

In the bustling streets of Bandra, nestled in a quiet corner, Polite Society is something new, innovative, and revolutionary. A label doesn't just sell clothes; it builds identity while being honest to itself, its consumers, and the earth. A brand that says” Be rich in your ways,” Surmai Jain, the Founder and the creative mind behind the label, has a diverse take on everything, having lived through different cities and worked through equally different fields; her approach to everything blends her stories seamlessly. In this conversation, Surmai shares her journey of building a label that is more of a community, her cross-cultural influences, and perspectives on sustainability. Read more.

Between Puppeteer and Prop: Kaari Upson’s Dollhouse—A Retrospective @ The Louisiana Musuem

Kaari Upson, Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

text by Kim Shveka

Kaari Upson, one of the most significant and versatile artists of her generation, was notable for her ability to merge various media, exchanging textures and techniques from one work to the next. Her boundary pushing complexity is one main motif of Dollhouse - A Retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the artist’s first career retrospective spanning the last two decades of her life.

Upson wove her own life in and out of her work, clawing at the walls of domesticity, memory, and identity, to re-inscribe herself between body and psyche, fact and fiction.

At the center of the exhibition is The Larry Project (2005-2012), her most discussed work. “Larry” was born when Upson passed an abandoned house in her hometown of San Bernadino, back in 2003. She formed a fictional character based on the abandoned belongings of her unknown neighbor, whom she named “Larry,” basing his appearance on Playboy mogul, Hugh Hefner.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

Larry and his shadows are shown throughout the exhibition, encapsulating the entirety of Upson’s approach to her creation—blurring sentience and the conspicuous into a mirror of self, home, and American culture. Larry might be viewed as a catalyst, accessory, or supplement. He might also be seen as a prop, mirror, or vessel. Whatever he is, he is not the “center,” she said.

Her performance with a life-sized Larry doll, her manic drawings littered with scrawls and body fluids, her forensic adherence to his archive—none of it was really about him. He is not the center.  

The center, if there is one, is the house. Kaari Upson has stated that San Bernardino had become the landmark of her art making practice, always circling back to her origins in an attempt to untangle the knot of subject and memory, of desire and trauma. Upson understood viscerally that her core memories cannot be erased, so she found herself looking forward and backward in an attempt to recreate her own neighborhood, in the time and place of its situational trauma, and created her art from that place. In THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, first shown in Venice in 2019 and now reinstalled at Louisiana, overlapping models of domestic spaces are obscured from any coherent scale. We peer into corners, stumble through projections, eavesdrop on voices. The effect is both theatrical and intimate, claustrophobia disguised as play, a look inside Upson’s childhood, or perhaps her memories from it. The show’s title, Dollhouse, is an open metaphor: architecture as anatomy, art as a vessel to her soul. Here, the artist was once the puppet, but now she’s the puppeteer.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

By the end of the exhibition, we meet Untitled (Foot Face), a series of 140 drawings repeating the same wide-eyed head and the same severed foot. Her mother’s. A symbol, a scar, the last image Upson left us before she died. Like everything else in her work, it’s both singular and serial, intimate and estranged. She traps us in the loop that she orbited from her early beginnings to her untimely passing.

In Dollhouse, Kaari Upson doesn’t offer resolution, only recursion. Her work doesn’t ask to be understood, it insists on being felt, like a bruise you can’t remember getting. She left behind no manifesto, just fragments, skins, splinters. And yet what emerges is a radical form of autobiography: not a story told from the outside, but one lived from the inside out.

 

Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2007
Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

 

Dollhouse - A Retrospective, is on view through October 26th at The Louisiana Museum, Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark

Why Look at Animals? at EMST Athens

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025


text and images by Perry Shimon


At EMST Athens, curator Katerina Gregos has staged an ambitious year-long group exhibition, Why Look at Animals?, that insists on confronting the urgency of human-animal relations in an age of ecological collapse. Bringing together over sixty artists across all four floors of the museum, with an extensive public program and a duration that resists the usual velocities, Gregos opens space for more-than-human perspectives, ecological commitments, and sustained engagement.

Perhaps the most haunting image, from my several visits, came from Ang Siew Ching’s quietly devastating film High-Rise Pigs. In a long shot resembling grainy security footage, two pigs in a vast, automated slaughterhouse attempt to communicate across the brutal architecture confining them. Their enspirited distress is unmistakable, magnified by the mechanical indifference of the setting. The film examines one of the largest pig-killing operations in China, exposing the violence hidden in industrial agriculture’s scale and automation. I first saw it in the basement galleries of EMST, and later at its rooftop screening that paired the film with a BBC4 documentary inspired by John Berger’s titular essay “Why Look at Animals?”

Paris Petridis, Eye Witnesses, 2006-2022

The rooftop crowd, gathered under a balmy night sky with the Acropolis glittering in the background, constituted its own form of public assembly—though one seemingly far removed from what might constitute a public discourse, or agora, today. The juxtaposition underscored a recurring tension: the urgency of animal and ecological suffering often being sequestered within esoteric institutional spaces. Precisely for this reason, a show of this scale and depth feels all the more urgent—insisting that such questions not remain peripheral but be brought into sharper collective view.

Sammy Baloji, Hunting and Collecting, 2015

Sammy Baloji’s Hunting and Collecting confronts visitors early in the exhibition with an archive of disturbing colonial images documenting the hunting and display of animals, often in the name of science. Arranged around a minimal architectural structure recalling natural history dioramas, the images are paired with a massive wall listing foreign NGOs operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a pointed gesture, implicating museums and nonprofits alike in the colonial and neocolonial abuses that shape human-animal relations. At the center sits a book of abstracted cartography, suggesting how gridded systems of spatial control—once used to seize land and wildlife—continue today in the biopolitical regulation of lives, human and non-human.

Janis Rafa, from We Betrayed the Horses, 2025

Janis Rafa, The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, 2023

Power is the explicit subject of Janis Rafa’s multi-channel film and installation on equestrian cultures. Horses—long symbols of strength and nobility—are here subjected to a BDSM-inflected mise-en-scène that renders them debased, humiliated, and instrumentalized. Red lighting, metallic soundscapes, sexualized accoutrements, and statistical neon signage produce a disturbing reckoning with the ways power and libidinal desire entwine in histories of domination. If Rafa’s staging verges on spectacle, it does so to force viewers into confrontation with the brutalities often masked by cultural mythologies of the horse.

Wesley Meuris, Enclosure for Animal (zoology), 2006 - 2021

Wesley Meuris offers a quieter but equally scathing indictment: minimal watercolors of architectural typologies designed to contain absent animals. Their bureaucratic banality is chilling, exposing the violence encoded into the very blueprints of zoos. The work resonates with James Elkins’ recent experimental novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, in which a microbial ecologist is assigned to assess stereotypical behaviors of caged animals worldwide. Both suggest how rationalized, institutional systems quietly normalize the suffering of captive beings. Meuris’s watercolors also recall the paintings of Gilles Aillaud, the philosopher-painter and close friend of John Berger, whose 2022 Pompidou retrospective broadly surveyed his decades of images of animals suffering in modernist captivity.

Radha D’Souza & Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), 2021

On the top floor, a reimagined setting of Jonas Staal and Radha D’Souza’s Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) anchors the exhibition’s political horizon. Documentation of previous trials accompanies a speculative tribunal that indicts states and corporations for climate crimes, expands legal subjectivity to non-human witnesses, and frames justice as intergenerational responsibility. Rooted in D’Souza’s critique of neoliberal legal systems in What’s Wrong with Rights?, the work demonstrates how law itself must be reimagined if multispecies flourishing is to become possible.

David Claerbout, The Pure Necessity, 2016

Annika Kahrs, Playing to the Birds, 2013

Across its many registers, Why Look at Animals? insists that the treatment of animals today—whether in factory farms, zoos, laboratories, or postcolonial landscapes—will be remembered as one of the most barbarous chapters in human history. Visitors will find their own affinities among the sixty works, but what matters most is that each piece, in its own way, speaks to the ghastly urgencies at stake: the systematic and exploitative abuse of sentient animals and the ecological implications for all life on Earth. In insisting that these realities not be confined to the margins, the exhibition models how institutions can play a vital role in amplifying what is too often silenced or sidelined.

Acropolis view from the roof of EMST

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025

Capitalocene Ikebana: The Animist Assemblages of Yuji Agematsu

text and images by Perry Shimon

Fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
near my pillow

— Bashō

There is a friendliness towards the abject, a distinctly Shinto, open and capacious reverence in Yuji Agematsu’s daily practice: meditative walks and the gathering of small bits of detritus to make delicate, ikebana-like assemblages inside cigarette-cellophane vitrines.

New York, Agematsu’s chosen home, has been given the rare privilege of seeing two full years of his unwavering practice on view: one vitrine—or ‘zip,’ as he calls them—from each day of 2023 and 2024, shown respectively at Gavin Brown’s house in Harlem and Donald Judd’s former studio in Soho, where Agematsu worked for twenty-five years doing building maintenance and art handling.

The vitrines of 2024, displayed in the airy Judd Foundation gallery, place the two artists in a fascinating conversation. Judd’s cold, machinic, monolithic forms assert and insist on themselves, while Agematsu’s works embody a fluid becoming: daily meditations on the plural forms encountered during his sensitive perambulations.

Donald Judd Foundation, Soho, August 2025

In Absence (2007; trans. Polity, 2023), Byung-Chul Han contrasts the Western concept of essence—identity, duration, inwardness, permanence—with an Eastern notion of absence, which precedes and “gathers” an ever-changing relationality or becoming. One could see this as a fundamental difference between Judd’s paradigmatic modernist objects and the fleeting, friendly assemblages of Agematsu, however stylized and reductive these contrasts may be.

In Shinto thought, there are eight million kami, or spirits, each worthy of consideration and respect. The number is shorthand for the infinite and ever-growing. When Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 7th century, Buddha was welcomed simply as another kami among the rest. Agematsu’s practice can be read through this animist disposition: a reverence for the infinite pluralities of the world, even in its discarded fragments.

At the risk of overdetermining the work, I experienced it as profoundly ecological, illustrative of a disposition that might serve us well in imagining what Anna Tsing calls “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” Agematsu’s practice suggests a clear-eyed willingness to look closely, to re-enchant the detritus of our shortsighted and economically ravaged world.

One of the great challenges of our time is to find a balanced, reciprocal relationship to the earth—and especially to our waste. Agematsu’s careful, sublimative approach offers one model, resonant with political ecology, discard studies, and circular-infrastructure thinking. His work reminds us of the need to reorient our relationship to the abject itself, and to transform our systems toward more stable, regenerative ecologies. Our very survival may depend on it.

Power in Vulnerability: Jenny Saville’s Anatomy of Painting

Drift by Jenny Saville, 2020-2022 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

text by Poppy Baring

Before you have time to fully enter Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting retrospective, you are faced with a colossal painting of the artist and her sister towering over you, not in an oppressive way, however. Hyphen, made in 1999, is mesmerizing and bright. Light pinks dominate the huge canvas, presenting two fresh-faced, marble-eyed young girls. The composition makes for an interesting opening piece. With one face facing towards you as you enter, but with the subject's eyes looking away, the other looks up, meeting visitors with huge open eyes. You are instantly aware of the emotion and intimacy, although her eyes meet yours, her head is occupied and nestled, resting in her sister's neck.

With a few more steps, you are opposite Propped. A painting again made with pink, red, and brown tones that add brightness to works that are seemingly conveying dark emotion. This painting shows a woman perched on a stall, wearing only a pair of silk shoes. The work at first feels overpowering. The strength of her body is apparent, and her face, only slightly visible at the very top of the canvas, looks down at the viewer, but there is also vulnerability in the subject. Her fingertips cling to her thighs, and there is a feeling that her balance is not completely secure. Lopped writing from an essay by the French Feminist, Luce Irigaray reads, “if we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” It is clear that the power of these pieces comes from their vulnerability, as (Luce suggests) is true of women. Saville considers this piece to be her most succinct of her early works. Early indeed, Propped was exhibited in her graduate collection at Glasgow School of Art, which led to Charles Saatchi buying her work and commissioning new works for his gallery in London.

Reverse © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy Gagosian

Anatomy of Painting is presented, for the most part, in chronological order, showcasing the development of her practice. As you leave the first wing of the show, a timeline of Saville’s career explains her time studying in Glasgow and her fascination with artists of the Italian Renaissance. An inspiration that is clear as you enter the next room, which is full of detailed charcoal and pastel drawings that dance around the room. They are rich and intimate studies showing the bones behind her mountains of painting, but they are indeed beautiful works in their own right. In Pieta 1, Saville is responding to Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of The Deposition, made in the 1500s to depict three figures supporting Christ after the crucifixion. As with many of her works, when you begin to walk away from the drawing, feeling you have analyzed all the different figures consuming the canvas, you are brought back, realizing you have missed a hidden element.

In the final section of the show, visitors enter back into a room full of paintings, this time more colourful than the works that welcomed you. The end of the exhibition feels just like that, a full stop to her exploration of portraiture so far. Through these works, she explains, “ I wanted to see if I could make an almost abstract portrait,” and whether you interpret that in these works or not, they are truly mesmerising, with eyes and lips showing enormous emotion that somehow seem more real and important than the viewer's own.

Hyphen by Jenny Saville, 1999 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is on view through the 7th of September at The National Portrait Gallery in London, WC2H 0HE

Maybe Some Shows Aren't Meant To Be Revived: And Just Like That ... We're Free

A farewell to a show that once defined a generation’s voice on love, friendship, and selfhood—and a reckoning with the hollow echo of its revival.

Sarah Jessica Parker in And Just Like That, season 3
Courtesy of Warner Bros.

text by Kim Shveka

And Just Like That is finally ending after its third season, and as a die-hard fan of Sex and the City, I never imagined I would be so relieved to say goodbye to Carrie Bradshaw. SATC was aired alongside Will and Grace, Friends, and Felicity, yet, from its pilot, it stood apart as something more candid, vulnerable, and ambitious than the rest. It was a show dedicated to women that intimately portrayed sex, heartbreak, independence, friendship, and mistakes, striking a chord with a broad audience. Its four women were flawed, complex, honest, and achingly human. They were not written to be role models so much as mirrors, often provoking us to look inwards and consider the lessons within their innumerable blunders through life.

I first watched SATC at sixteen, and I’ve re-watched it annually, each time with new opinions, feelings, and resolutions. Like many fans, I grew up with the characters, initially adoring Carrie, later finding her insufferable, and ultimately loving her in spite of it all. Through her, I’ve learned to make peace with my imperfections and I wanted to see myself in each of the four women: adventurous and free like Samantha, compassionate and hopeful like Charlotte, grounded and independent like Miranda, human and magnetic like Carrie. Her charisma and glamour made her a favorite to many. Together, they balanced each other’s flaws, supported each other, and formed something larger than themselves.

The fashion in Sex and the City became as iconic as the women themselves, yet its brilliance was born from constraint. In the early seasons, with little budget for designer wardrobes, costume designer Patricia Field embraced resourcefulness, mixing thrift store treasures, vintage finds, and bold, unexpected pairings. The result was fashion that felt alive, intuitive, and deeply personal, with each woman’s style tailored perfectly to her written personality. Carrie’s life revolved around her love of fashion, her character intertwined with her eccentric choices, making her a definitive fashion icon. These clothes were not curated for brand partnerships or mass appeal; they were worn like declarations, each outfit an intentional extension of the women who wore them.

Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon in And Just Like That season 3
Courtesy of Warner Bros.

That resourcefulness carried the show until fashion itself became part of the plot. The turning point came with the now-iconic “baguette” episode, when Carrie was robbed of her Fendi baguette bag designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi, alongside her strappy Manolo Blahnik sandals. At the time, the bag was already the it-accessory, splashed across magazines and coveted by fashion girls everywhere, but Sex and the City gave it a cultural immortality that no ad campaign could touch. By then, fashion had already realized the power of fame, with supermodels becoming celebrities, and actors and musicians gracing the covers of every major fashion magazine. Still, it had not yet fully entered television and cinema as a narrative tool. Silvia Venturini stated that she loved the show, and the connection between the colorful baguette bag and Carrie’s personal style was only natural. By taking a risk on an unfamiliar marketing method and succeeding, she paved the way for many brands to follow. What began as intuitive, character-driven styling suddenly revealed fashion’s power as a storytelling tool, and brands quickly understood the value of being seen in Carrie’s world. From that moment, designers lined up to be part of the show, and television itself entered a new era of fashion collaboration. Carrie’s Dior saddlebag, Samantha’s pursuit of an Hermès Birkin, Charlotte’s Prada ladylike minimalism—each became unforgettable not just because of their labels, but because they were woven into their stories, defining new traits within each brand’s respective DNA.

And yet, while the fashion moments became endemic to the show, they were never the true center of the story. At face value, Sex and the City was about dating in New York, but its real glue was friendship—deep, loyal, unshakable friendship. It was the kind of friendship that many women long for, more essential to a life well lived than any bag, shoe, or spouse.

So why does And Just Like That feel like an entirely different creation? The keyword is zeitgeist. SATC existed in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Filmed in the streets of New York, it captured the evolving lives of women in their thirties who existed before our current series of financial collapse and culture war. Its creators were blissfully unaware of how its discourse would age in the era of cancel culture, giving them the freedom to prioritize entertainment and appeal to an audience that was familiar with feelings of disagreement. They did this so well that the show became part of a cultural lexicon. It was revolutionary precisely because it epitomized the moment, and it remains relevant due to the strong nostalgia it evokes.

In And Just Like That, the same characters we grew up with have been updated in service to a woke culture that lives more in the writers’ imagination than the heroines themselves.

The series aspired to honor the dignity of older womanhood—portraying Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte as women still evolving in midlife. But in its eagerness to do so, it became tangled in an attempt to be all things to all audiences, folding inclusivity into the script with such obvious calculation that the storylines felt forced. Where Sex and the City had once reflected the zeitgeist by being fearless, provocative, and unconcerned with pleasing everyone, And Just Like That felt so desperate to appease an audience on the other side of a generational divide that it found itself giving midlife crisis rather than embracing the possibility that with age rarely comes wokedom.

The two follow-up SATC films were hard enough as it is. But the remake/revival frenzy thrives on nostalgia, convincing itself that the magic of the past is guaranteed to endure. While the love of its audience is guaranteed to generate revenue, it was an endeavor that was bound to dilute its legacy. As a core audience, our loyalties were exploited, and in exchange, we were met with weak storylines and unconvincing character arcs that challenged our ability to continue suspending disbelief.

John Corbett, Sarah Jessica Parker in And Just Like That, season 3
Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Even the fashion, once the soul of the series, feels lost. In Sex and the City, style was interwined seamlessly into the characters and their storylines, each outfit an extension of personality and circumstance. In And Just Like That, fashion overwhelms rather than enriches. Characters appear almost exclusively in off-the-runway pieces. Even minor figures who appear for less than a minute, like Harry’s personal shopper, who is dressed in a gold Schiaparelli jacket, don impossibly extravagant looks for people of their stature. What once felt real and intuitive now comes across as forced and too flashy; styled to shock rather than to complement the character. Once again, we are left flustered from the loss of authenticity, replaced crudely by obvious, in-your-face brand collaborations.

Sex and the City was built with intention, energy, and honesty. And Just Like That could have been an entirely new show with any other four women, and its impact would be unchanged. Instead, it wore the skin of something that had already lived within us. Worse, it was not even enjoyable as a hate-watch because of its deep connection to what we once loved. Some stories earn the right to remain untouched because they have already said what they needed to say, perfectly, in their own time.

Materialists Embraces Its Label While Refusing to Be Tied Down

With her sophomore film, Celine Song confronts the harsh realities of finding love in the age of late capitalism.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) and Harry (Pedro Pascal) in Materialists.
A24

text by Kim Shveka


After her success with Past Lives (2023), at only thirty-six years old, Celine Song is back with Materialists, a self-proclaimed rom-com film. Here, the use of an aging genre serves as bait, only to reveal a somber and unflinching analysis of modern dating. In many ways, it looks and acts like a rom-com, but with a realness that challenges the genre. Unlike most romantic comedies—Hollywood’s once-beloved blockbusters, Materialists startles us with the terrifying unpredictability of authentic romantic connection. It does so with such bold intention that it forces you to re-evaluate your own moral barometer. It does stick to the rom-com tradition of being a bit quirky, but without ever softening its clear focus: the harsh reality of looking for love in an increasingly vapid society.

Instead of leaning on the cliché of romance as a battle of the sexes, Song presents dating as something far more unsettling: a stage where one’s self-worth is itemized and measured, where affection is dispensed, and where frank connection risks being reduced to trade. Through the eyes of Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, love is a game of calculation. What is usually portrayed as a series of clever lines and happy accidents becomes a negotiation of value, often cruel and exposing, where emotions are fragile collateral to the forces of status, money, and appearance. To make this point explicit, Song threads price tags throughout the film, attaching literal numbers to everything from “acts of love” to Lucy’s makeup—the mere cost of admission to the neoliberal dating market.

The film begins with a cold open scene of a prehistoric couple exchanging a flower ring, marrying without even knowing what a wedding is. Immediately, you connect this spiritual, non-materialistic moment with the film’s title. With that unexpected artistic choice, Song sets the tone for the entire story, as we watch Lucy grappling between the primitive—her true love—and the present moment—her desire for comfort.

Lucy is a failed actress turned successful matchmaker in New York City. She is instantly revealed as the best at her job, though ironically incapable of finding her own match. At a wedding of a couple she paired, the bride has second thoughts and calls Lucy to her room. The bride admits she fears that she’s not marrying her fiancé out of love but because she likes how her sister is jealous of her. Lucy reflects for a mere second and answers: It’s because you deem him valuable. What may seem like a banal answer comprises the film’s central question of value in motion. Soon, Lucy meets the groom’s brother, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, eyeing him as a potential client. He is what matchmakers call a ‘unicorn’ —a tall, wealthy, and handsome man. He’s that enduring mythic catch made exponentially rarefied by our current era. Of course, it doesn’t take long before his value to her shifts from potential client to mate; a subtle yet significant shift in the nature of their transaction. As they flirt, they are abruptly interrupted by John, a waiter who is quickly revealed to be her ex, played by Chris Evans. Over a quiet cigarette outside the venue, they let us into the depths of their long, complicated love story.

Lucy begins dating Harry, who takes her to fancy restaurants, sends her bouquets, makes pleasant conversation, and truly is the perfect gentleman. In Materialists, not a single emotion goes unacknowledged, and in what feels like the first time in cinema history, Harry is even seen paying the bill on-screen. Lucy even comments on how elegantly he does it, leaving no room for confusion that he is the provider, which leads to an honest conversation about her underlying insecurities. She sees herself as too old, too poor, with nothing to offer, such that she finds Harry’s interest in her bewildering. Yet Harry declares that he sees value in her, and through him, Lucy begins to detach from her analytical ways, surrendering carefully to her emotions.

While everything seems perfect between the two, Lucy can’t seem to shake her feelings for John, who is a thirty-seven-year-old struggling actor living with three roommates. In a flashback to their relationship, Lucy and John are driving to a restaurant for their anniversary, arguing over financial problems. It ends with Lucy saying, “It doesn’t work between us, not because we aren’t in love, but because we’re broke.” The line is brutal in its honesty, and it represents the most succinct summary of the film’s question at hand: In today’s world, is love enough? To answer this question, Song gives Lucy two choices whose compelling contrast mirrors her inner conflict very nicely without ever attributing much to the men’s personalities.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) in Materialists
A24

At face value, the plot screams rom-com: two men, one woman, a choice must be made. But with its emotional intelligence and honesty, Materialists defies the genre’s tendency toward guaranteeing a fun watch. It was made to confront the way that financial security governs modern intimacy and to suggest that this is just one unfortunate product of a failing economic system. It lays bare the inherent contradictions that we think love is supposed to resolve. Wanting love does not mean rejecting security; wanting comfort does not mean giving up passion. Song captures this trope without hesitation. And yet, despite its harsh message, Materialists still carries a rhythm that feels light, offbeat, and witty. Rather than shying away from ugliness, she reinforces that it is a part of being human. Even the soundtrack reinforces this paradox: instead of popular songs, the film relies on mellow piano, almost elevator-like in tone, looping through each scene. The score builds tension by refusing to release it, heightening the strangeness and unease, while simultaneously laying a cushion for our eventual realizations.

The fact that Materialists was written by a young woman is evinced throughout the film, as if we’re viewing the world through the collective lens of a frank feminine experience while dating in the modern world. It’s volatile and fierce, deep and shallow, a beautifully rendered realm of inner conflict. Song’s perspective gives the film its pulse: she captures the contradictions of wanting both freedom and security, love and stability, romance and realism. Her voice carries an honesty that isn’t trying to universalize the female experience, but rather to present it in its full complexity with a vulnerability that makes the film feel alive. In only her sophomore film, Song reveals herself not just as a strong director, but as one with a voice entirely her own. Her vision feels deliberate yet alive, her choices inventive without ever being showy. She threads value, price, and desire together with a precision that feels effortless, like she’s bending the form of cinema to her will while keeping its meaning sharp and intact.

By making Lucy a matchmaker, Song cleverly refracts the dating-app culture of our time through a more timeless form. The algorithms of swipes and stats are concealed in the guise of “intuition,” but the effect is the same: relationships are matches, profiles, and data. And yet, because the device is matchmaking rather than apps, the film resists the inevitability of dating itself. Materialists is both of this moment and cleverly unattached to it.

The Travel Agency Lets You Book A Trip To A Transportive Cannabis-Buying Experience

In the heart of SoHo, The Travel Agency’s newest store redefines what a cannabis retail space can be. Designed in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture and Big Heavy Studios, the space blurs the line between gallery, lounge, and retail environment. Rather than presenting cannabis as a commodity, the store frames it as part of a larger cultural and aesthetic conversation—one rooted in art, design, and community.

Upon entry, visitors are welcomed into sculptural interiors that emphasize materiality and form. Curved walls, reflective surfaces, and fluid architectural gestures create a sense of movement, encouraging exploration and discovery. This atmosphere is further amplified by a kinetic installation from BREAKFAST, the New York-based studio known for merging technology, art, and motion. Their piece transforms the space into something alive—responsive, shifting, and dynamic—reminding guests that retail can also be experiential.

At the core of the store’s concept is the launch of the world’s first international Bong Gallery, a curated collection of glassworks that treat smoking devices as objects of artistry. From experimental designs to collectible pieces, the gallery challenges stigmas and elevates functional objects into the realm of fine art. This nod to craft and creativity underscores The Travel Agency’s mission: to foster a new cultural language around cannabis that goes beyond consumption and engages with design, history, and innovation.

By merging high design with interactive art and curatorial vision, The Travel Agency’s SoHo store sets a new precedent for cannabis retail. It is less a shop and more an immersive cultural destination—an environment where cannabis is positioned alongside architecture, technology, and global artistry. Here, purchasing becomes secondary to experiencing, and the future of cannabis culture is rendered not only visible, but tangible.

What I Eat In A Day: Nothing

 
 

text and images by Vermeer Ha

Open TikTok and you’re greeted with a slot machine of women not quite eating. “What I eat in a day” videos, filmed in diffused apartment light, showcase cucumber slices, matcha, a single rice cake with almond butter. It’s not framed as wellness. It’s aesthetic. It’s girl dinner!

The term began innocently enough: a can of olives, a string cheese, a handful of chips. A meal not intended for male consumption or anyone’s approval. Originally it was a joke—a playful nod to the strange, snack-like dinners many women make for themselves when no one is watching. But, as with most things on TikTok, the joke calcified into a trend, and the trend metastasized into something darker. Now it’s a quiet collective agreement of not needing much—a lifestyle built on the soft eroticism of restraint.

I’ve participated too. Once, I posted a photo of my own girl dinner: a close-up of my Prozac, a handful of cherries, a glass of red wine, the rim of the glass haloed in lipstick like salt on a margarita. Also pictured: a vibrator. The caption was self-aware, maybe even funny. I can’t remember.

 
 

I joined TikTok during the pandemic. I watched trends rise and fall. I absorbed the platform’s new vocabulary, born from censorship and irony. Suicide became “unalive.” Ass became “dat ahhh.” It was absurd but poetic in its own way. Language, like sea glass, reshaped itself to fit the medium—what was once sharp worn down into something vaguely familiar but entirely different.

These codes are legible if you spend enough time marinating in the app’s glossary of brain rot. But the more dangerous grammar is subtler. The algorithm doesn’t just reflect your preferences—it hones them, coaxing you toward extremity. As The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Briefing podcast put it, TikTok “learns your deepest desires” in an eerie few beats, feeding you more of what keeps you watching. Every observable input is tracked: your search queries, the velocity of your scrolling, the pauses between swipes. Anything over five seconds counts as a view. Each becomes a signal, aggregated and weighted against billions of others to predict your next move. The result is not a mirror, but a statistically optimized version of you—built to keep you watching.

Over time, it can feel more intimate than self-knowledge—drawn from impulse, from the hidden parts of the mind that rise only when you are certain no one is watching. The algorithm pulls from the same place as your late-night searches: the weird medical question at 3 a.m., the kink you’ve never said out loud, the idle thought about disappearing or having an affair. Your search engine has always known. Now that information lives inside every feed you open, refined and fed back until it can predict not just your habits but the outline of your most private impulses.

When I began shaping my own feed, I searched for innocuous terms like “healthy dinner ideas” or “easy meal prep under twenty minutes.” I often forget to eat—not for any alarming reason, but because decision-making can feel impossible. Just figuring out what I want, what my body wants, is enough to drain me for the rest of the day.

At first, the algorithm obliged. Between niche fashion accounts, videos of borzois, and primitive tool survivalists, it offered me recipes: smoothie bowls, salmon with blistered vegetables, quinoa in a jar. I clicked. I bought the ingredients—spirulina, colostrum, collagen powders, and various leafy greens. Everything ended up rotting in the bottom drawer of my fridge.

Then the feed changed. Slowly at first. “What I eat in a day as a model.” “How I stay thin for castings.” Then, carousels of reconstituted pro-anorexia Tumblr images, posted without comment, recycled like vintage. The descent is gentle. You don’t notice the slope until you’re already sliding.

You’d think that, at thirty-two, I would be immune. But that’s the hubris of mortals who believe age can shield us from influence. I began to feel the weight around my hips as a gravitational pull into depression. If I sat and felt a softness in my stomach, I would reach for a fiber pill and a cigarette instead of lunch. Hunger became proof of discipline. A performance of elegance.

And the app cheered me on.

What I didn’t realize was that my own behavior—clicking certain videos, searching specific phrases—was reinforcing the spiral I was already in. When I searched for “healthy” dinners, I was rewarded with aspirational videos that confirmed a deeper belief: eating less is glamorous. The more I lingered, the more the algorithm assumed I wanted proof. And so it offered me more.

TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t care if the content is healthy. It doesn’t moralize. It optimizes. In the span of a month, my vague curiosity about eating better snowballed into a kind of guided fasting: bone broth breakfasts, five-hundred-calorie meal plans, women with translucent skin and visible ribs demonstrating Pilates routines—all to the beat of a Lana Del Rey song slowed down by thirty percent.

The algorithm doesn’t ask if this is good for you.
It only asks: What will make you stay?

Inside the Fantasies of Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

text by Poppy Baring

Delusions of Grandeur is the Wallace Collection’s largest exhibition of contemporary art to date and Grayson Perry is fully involved in every aspect of this display. From narrating the audio guides, writing the object labels, curating the exhibition from his favorite pieces in the museum’s collection, to creating a new body of work that responds to that selection, Sir Perry is threaded through this complex exploration of identity and mental health.

Through Shirley Smith, an imaginary artist created by Perry, the English artist uses ceramics, painting, textiles, and even wallpaper to bring visitors through a corridor of his mind. “The Story of My Life” tapestry shown in the second room of his exhibition extends this sentiment to museum visitors. It captures how Perry interacts and how he suspects other people to interact with artwork they see at a museum. The large tapestry includes fragments of paintings from the collection that mainly include female characters scattered throughout the canvas. These figures phase into Netherlandish landscapes that also bop and weave throughout the piece, and overall, this tapestry comments on how viewers relate artworks back to themselves and their lives.

 

Grayson Perry © Richard Ansett, shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London

 

The idea for the fictional Shirley Smith was influenced by the artist Madge Hill. Having navigated traumatic experiences in her early life, Hill challenged her trauma into her art and, surprisingly, considering she was an outsider artist who had no formal training, exhibited her work at the Wallace Collection in 1942. Sir Grason Perry, a title which somewhat dilutes his anti-establishment stance, then invented his own ‘outsider artist’. He envisioned Shirley to be obsessed with the Wallace Collection so much so that she saw herself as the heiress of Hertford House, home to the collection.

Complicating the exhibition even more, Perry brings in yet another identity, the Honourable Millicent Wallace, the alter ego of the alter ego (Shirley’s imagined persona). Delusions of Grandeur follows Shirley’s delusions, delving deep into her emotions and her fantasies of wealth and friendship. This exhibition underscores mental illness throughout the three rooms. For example, in the piece titled ‘A tree in a Landscape’, all the characters that are present in the Wallace collection miniature series have been compiled together into a family tree. Each of these miniature portraits has then been given a DSM-5 (the UK’s standard classification of mental illnesses) diagnosis.

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Perry admits that these imagined characters were created to somewhat distance himself from the creation of the pieces presented, explaining that Shirley’s existence gave him the freedom to play with colors and pattern that you wouldn’t naturally associate with the museum. However, not all of the new work on view is made by Shirley Smith. Some of the works are that of Grayson Perry, some by Shirley, and even some by Shirley as Millicent Wallace. It’s not usual for Perry to rely on a central fantasy figure when creating an exhibition, but the identities present in Delusions of Grandeur leave you doubting who is real and, indeed, where the fantasy begins and ends.

Delusions of Grandeur is on view through October 26th at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN

Grayson Perry. I Know Who I Am, 2024. Cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué. 234 x 234 cm
92 1/8 x 92 1/8 in © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Read an Interview of Curator Rajiv Menon →

 

Suchitra Mattai, Set Free, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

 

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation. Read more.

India Couture Week 2025: Threads of Identity, Echoes of Dreams

 

image courtesy of JJ Valaya

 

text by Parrie Chhajed

Every July, Delhi transforms. The city, with its bustling character and chaos, becomes home to the patronage of Indian fashion. A legacy, a staged walk by greats, it hosts the India Couture Week, a celebration of craftsmanship and couture, a sanctum where heritage meets modernity, and where the past and future walk parallel. 

India Couture Week 2025 was held at the iconic Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi, curated by the FDCI ( Fashion Design Council of India ). The week staged poetic interactions between culture and innovation, local and global. 

Since its founding in 2008, India Couture Week has become a pivotal event in the Indian fashion calendar. The event is an ethos of the Indian spirit rooted in traditions, craftsmanship, and artisanal heritage. An answer to the Paris Haute Couture Week, an interpretation derived from India’s passed down stories and values, honoring the handicrafts that characterize Indian design. 

Through the years, ICW has recognized and defined moments in the careers of Indian designers and placed India on the global stages and fashion and luxury map. It remains one of the few platforms where, every year, we backtrace further into our culture and craftsmanship while creating new stories and keeping up with today's silhouettes and innovations. 

While last year revolved around softness and sentiments, the 2025 couture week conversed about identity, urging us to look deep within. The ideologies were seen being represented through shapes, silhouettes, and styles appliqued with reimagined traditions.

Through the lenses of legacy, identity, and reinvention, stories unfolded on the runway, and the ones that shone out the most were: Rahul Mishra, Amit Aggarwal, JJ Valaya, Aisha Rao, and Ritu Kumar.

Rahul Mishra – Becoming Love

 
 

The week opened with Rahul Mishra’s ethereal collection titled Becoming Love, which unfolded like a flower in the rain. Inspired by Sufiism’s magic, Mishra’s couture offered seven stages of love, each captured in finely hand-embroidered stories across fabrics such as silk organza, velvet, and tulle.

A combination of magnificence and reality. While one moment, a gown shimmered like Klimt’s The Kiss, the next, a lehenga carried the ache of longing. Alas came Tamannaah Bhatia, walking down the runway in a sculpted floral gown—proof once again that Rahul Mishra stitches emotion into every sequin.

Amit Aggarwal — Arcanum

 
 

If Mishra spoke of emotion, Amit Aggarwal answered with introspection. His collection Arcanum—a word meaning ‘mystery’—explored identity through the architecture of DNA. Using his signature polymer techniques and handwoven metallics, Aggarwal built garments like sacred codes: twisted helixes, cocooned corsets, and chrysalis gowns.

But behind the science was softness. There was something deeply moving about how structure met surrender. Couture here was not just worn—it was inhabited. Aggarwal reminded us that even the future has ancestry.

JJ Valaya — East

 
 

No one stages drama quite like JJ Valaya, and East—his closing show and a celebration of 33 years in fashion—was an imperial epic. A curation and compilation of Ottoman silks, Rajput extravagance, and East Asian tapestries, the collection was detailed and imaginative. Catalogued a collection where there was something for all, embroidered jackets, obi-style belts, brocaded cloaks, and voluminous skirts, as if they were brought to life. 

Rasha Thadani and Ibrahim Ali Khan closed the show with old-world poise and new-world flair. It was a fitting finale—part history lesson, part fantasy film.

Aisha Rao — Wild at Heart

Making her ICW debut, Aisha Rao was the season’s freshest dream. Her collection Wild at Heart bloomed with lotus petals, banana leaves, and rose-gold mosaics—each appliqué whispering a kind of untamed tenderness. She layered nature into couture like a fable.

Sara Ali Khan was stunning in a beautiful Banarasi lehenga. Rao's world feels like a place where rebellion is subtle and fantasy is intricately woven with thoughtful details. The entire show was truly unforgettable.

Ritu Kumar – Threads of Time: Reimagined

A quiet storm came in the form of Ritu Kumar, one of the original matriarchs of Indian fashion. In Threads of Time: Reimagined, Kumar revisited and revitalized her archives, reworking iconic prints, paisleys, and kalidars for a new generation. It felt like a love letter to Indian textiles, with the wisdom of decades and the freshness of reinvention.

This wasn’t nostalgia—it was memory made malleable.

What We Saw, What We’ll Remember

This year, ICW saw a return to tactility. Couture was about touch—embroideries you could feel with your eyes, textures that moved like memories. There was structure, but also surrender. Motifs of roots, DNA, nature, and spirituality ran across collections like leitmotifs in a symphony.

We saw metallics meet brocade, corsetry meet kalidars, and flowers sprout from pleats. And above all, we witnessed a reclamation of Indian identity in high fashion—not as tokenism, but as a language only we know how to speak.

India’s couture scene is now more intimate and more international than ever before. With young voices like Aisha Rao stepping in with fresh fantasy and veterans like Rahul Mishra and Amit Aggarwal pushing boundaries between concept and craft, couture is evolving. Indian fashion today isn’t just bridal lehengas, it’s chronicles of the land, reflected in silhouettes and fabrics, expressed by the artists, with imagination for the bold futures.

The designers were encouraged to reflect, dream, and truly connect with their vision.

Lumière sur la Place: Reflections from This Year's Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles

text and images by Perry Shimon

It was hard to locate the disobedience in this year’s theme of disobedient images at this extremely pleasant festival, in the extremely charming UNESCO city of Arles, in the extremely agreeable Provence region. The works on view this year spanned the familiar preoccupations of affluent liberal audiences: conflicted zones, colonial histories, marginalized identities, and trauma narratives. It evokes a peculiar, perhaps Catholic, sequence of hedonism, sermonizing, and repentance. As though wandering through an artful overabundance in the palimpsestic old city, pausing for long leisurely meals on la place, must be atoned for by encounters with images of intense suffering and historical prejudice. 

The opening week coincides with the Fête du Costume, where locals dressed in 17th-century finery perform elaborate processions around the city, simulating past rites into less-violent echoes of themselves; bullgames replacing bullfights. Such transformations invite broader comparisons. One could make a case for this as a cultural evolution: perhaps the collection and trophy-like display of images, many from formerly colonized and marginalized peoples, is a less violent enactment of the collection and domination of lives, labor, and time. Is this an incremental improvement, a continuum, a contestation, or a symbolic order? The answer may shift depending on one’s vantage.

Adam Ferguson, Église Sainte-Anne

Arles has long been a seat of power: from the Celto-Ligurians, through Roman emperors, to today’s LUMA Foundation with its €150 million Gehry-designed castle and landscaped pleasure ground. The unpopular-with-the-locals architectural folly is a striking distillation of neoliberal values; the imperial and the cultural entangled through architecture, objects, history, and spectacle. Inside, exhibitions with titles like #metime, slide installations from Carsten Höller, and accounts of early industry-led collaborations between tech companies and avant-garde artists sit comfortably together: all an expression of a technocratic, individualistic, neoliberal worldview.

Wael Shawky, I am Hymns of the New Temples, LUMA

Ho Tzu Nyen, Hotel Aporia, LUMA

Also on at LUMA was Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples, an immersive film installation of cosmological marionette theatre set in Pompeii, which filled La Grande Halle; and a significant retrospective of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, offering a broad survey of his technologically situated engagements with Asian history, including a particularly haunting and fascinating work commissioned for the Aichi Triennial—Hotel Aporia—which explores wartime visual cultures and philosophical currents in Japan.

Lumière des Roses, Cloître Saint-Trophime

Some of the highlights of the photo fair this year included selections from Marion and Philippe Jacquier’s Lumière des Roses gallery in Grenoble, whose collection of anonymous, often amateur photography was installed in the cloister of Saint-Trophime. Within the austere, devotional architecture of the cloister, the effect was wondrous; small, strange pictures suggesting unknowable interiorities of past lives lived below the usual interests of history.  

Retratistas do Morro, Croisière

The Retratistas do Morro presentation, subtitled João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta: Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970–1990), offered selections from a massive archive focused on two key photographers who, over half a century, documented residents of the Serra community—one of Brazil’s largest favelas. The work resists exoticization, intimately contouring the kin and cultures of this supremely syncretic, culturally vibrant era. What emerges is a celebration of quotidian life, a revealing counterpoint to the structural violence imposed upon its subjects. 

Diana Markosian, Father, Espace Monoprix

Diana Markosian’s Father was a complex, exquisite rendering of the Moscow-born artist’s reconnection with her estranged father, building on her earlier Santa Barbara project, which detailed her mother’s abrupt departure from post-Soviet Russia to marry a Californian farmer—taking both children and leaving the father behind in the middle of the night. In Father, the artist enlists her father, now living in Armenia, to participate in a staged reenactment of their reunion. The carefully lit, highly-stylized scenes stand in stark contrast to a vitrine filled with his actual, voluminous, and desperate correspondence: letters scrawled in Armenian to anyone he could think to contact in America, trying to locate his family. All above an open and bustling Monoprix grocery store.

The Louis Stettner presentation in the Espace Van Gogh showcased the underrepresented work of a resolutely twentieth-century photographer. It carried an affirm-the-canon sensibility, offering more-or-less poignant takes on familiar humanist themes and modern alienation, with highlights throughout, particularly a somber series depicting New York train commuters.

Batia Suter, Octahydra, Cryptoportiques

Batia Suter offered a hypnotic meditation on spatial resonance, projecting architectural affinities onto thin, overlapping muslins suspended within a 1st-century BCE Greco-Roman crypt. The work resisted explication, asking instead for a kind of intuitive attentiveness to form. For me it evoked underground server farms, circulating images, and a kind of visual associative learning and recombination characteristic of the age of AI. Nearby at LUMA foundation, the artist Tino Sehgal hung selections from their collection of photographs in a like fashion, determined by a surface-level visual similitude—inviting the question: after like is grouped with like, what remains outside of the data and dictates that determine them so? 

Augustin Rebetez, Primitive Manifesto, Croisière

Augustin Rebetez’s Primitive Manifesto presented an unhinged, accelerationist, Rube Goldberg machine of anarchic play, mental illness, and attention economies, unfolding noisily through the Croisière. The cursed AI images and hyperbolic memes, produced at Trecartinesque velocities, were a humorous and upsetting break from the other more measured and polished official offerings.  

Lisa Sorgini, Église Sainte-Anne

Lisa Sorgini’s sensitive and intimate family portraits shot during the ‘Black Summer’ immediately preceding the COVID lockdowns were a highlight from On Country: Photography From Australia in the Église Sainte-Anne; the beauty and terror of raising a family in troubling times. Letizia Battaglia’s Always In Search Of Life in the Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel exhibited a powerful survey of the committed photographers' unsparing work, centered on midcentury Palermo; dark clouds of Christian passion and mafia violence tinged with quietly sublime silver linings. 

Letizia Battaglia, Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel

This Rencontres wasn’t so much disobedient as familiar, and that which was verging on disobedience felt more like a performance to please the structures of power and privileged audiences. The title suggests simply that art is subordinate, should know its place—and if it steps out of line, it can be easily controlled, domesticated, and put back to work in service of its owners. On the whole, though, Rencontres is a marvelous, superabundance of thoughtful and beautiful images in-and-around the official presentations. There are ample opportunities to revel and wonder together in the slow plazas, myriad exhibitions, Mediterranean light, and historically rich surroundings. À la prochaine.

Libraire Du Palais

Le Sauvage

Sophie

Triangle of Rebellion: Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely & Pontus Hulten @ Grand Palais in Paris

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, Repainted photo of 'Hon,' 1979, NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION, Santee, California. Courtesy of 2025 NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION / ADAGP, PARIS


text by Kim Shveka

Artistic couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were bound by a rare creative chemistry that defied rules and norms. They were known as the rebels of the ‘60s art scene who ambitiously pushed back against a world too eager to impose order. When the couple met curator Pontus Hulten, the three formed a rare triangle of trust and mutual vision.

Presented at the Grand Palais, this exhibition traces the rich journey of these two artists through the lens of Hulten, sharing their conception of a disruptive, multidisciplinary art in a profound historical approach.

Presented in ten chapters, blended and forming a complete journey through the intertwined lives of the three protagonists, the exhibition truly feels like a voyage. Swaying through the rooms, one cannot escape being washed by a ray of feelings: joy, frustration, freedom, injustice. The experience is curated with such intention that, if you allow the feelings to linger with you, the deeper truths within the art unravel.

 

View of the exhibition at Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou.

 

The first room of the exhibition tells the story of Impasse Ronsin in Paris, an artists’ colony in the Montparnasse district that was known to be an international melting pot of creativity. In 1956, Saint Phalle and Tinguely both lived and worked there, although each had been married to their previous partners at the time. Both marriages eventually came to an end, and by 1960, Tinguely and Saint Phalle embarked on a love affair that would intertwine their artistic paths. Tinguely had already known Pontus Hulten, an early believer in rebellious visionaries, and so he introduced his new partner. Hulten was immediately captivated by the young artist and encouraged her to pursue her career as an artist. After gaining traction with her Tirs (Shootings), Saint Phalle embarked on a new series depicting female stereotypes through grotesque, disturbing sculptures, establishing her artistic path and vision, which she followed until the end of her career.

Jean Tinguely, impasse Ronsin
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

The next rooms hum and clang with the energy of Jean Tinguely’s machines, creations of rusted steel and chaos, many of them still in active form, bursting with sounds of screeching and rattling. Hulten greatly admired Tinguely’s ability to include movement in his works, eventually setting aside his own art to focus on bringing Tinguely’s art center stage. Hulten aimed to offer artists a place in a society marked by liberty of thought and action. He imagined a world where art isn’t hiding in a museum or a studio, but shouted from the streets, quite literally. This took the form of art that refused passivity; it was uncomfortable and rebellious, taken out to the streets of Paris to address the public directly, offering them new art forms that were interactive and dynamic.

 

L’Accouchement Rose, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1964
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

 

Scattered like secrets throughout the exhibition are handwritten letters, correspondence between the two artists and Hulten that reveal a high degree of intimacy. Small drawings and sketches crowd the margins: filled with humor, inside jokes, and mostly love. They are love letters, and in reading them, we understand that this isn’t another collaboration between artist and curator. It was a family they formed, held together by a visceral, wild vision and belief in one another. Hulten didn’t just support their work—he adhered to it completely, with a rare kind of loyalty and conviction. Through him, their art found the space it needed and deserved; he created a space for them to grow, to experience, to see themselves without limitations. And through them, he found his true desire and ultimate purpose. From the safety of this nurturing nest, the three were capable of flight.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Pontus Hulten and Jean Tinguely.
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten is on view through January 4th, 2026 at Grand Palais, Square Jean Perrin - 17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower 75008 Paris

A Good Read: Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje

 

Cover Design by Emma Ewbank. Photograph © Nathan Landers

 

text by Poppy Baring

Ivona and Vlaho personify the often-felt but never easy human experience that is being so close but ultimately, impossibly, and frustratingly out of reach from the ideal happy ending. Told by Ivona, Slanting Towards the Sea depicts a heartbreakingly intense and oh-so-tangible love story set against the lapping Croatian sea. Passing between their youth and budding university relationship, following through a childless marriage, and divorce brought about by wider family pressures, this story tells the effects and sadness of love and longing.

Touching on themes like death, infertility, employment, and numerous other relatable life events, Lidija Hilje writes this story openly, never skimming a subject but revealing it in sharp focus. As Ivona attempts to find her feet in her homeland, she is continuously hit by attacks that seem to throw her off balance, whether it’s adoption difficulties or visa frustrations, only in the end does she realize that the life she has remained attached to has not fully served her.

This is a book that you never want to end, one that is a joy to go back to and which feels like you are zooming into a summer romance. Describing the life of Ivona and bringing readers along as the characters discover hidden and complex parts of themselves, Hilje writes with vivid imagery of Croatia’s changing seasons, where we can feel the stillness of a night at the height of summer or picture the hush of the olive grove that comes “seeping into your soul if you make your self still enough.”

While Ivona moves through the chapters of her life, which remains tethered to her ex husband’s, Marina (Vlaho’s wife and mother of his children) and Asier (Ivona’s new love, the first in nine years) provide sounding boards to her actions and inner voice. With the potential she holds looming over her head and while she’s kept by aging parents in her childhood home, our protagonist tries to claim a life of her own, free from concealed resentment.

The story ends with a poignant statement about parent and child relationships. Vlaho’s life is revealed to be “a sum of his countless confessions to others,” and in the end, he makes a decision in the hope of changing a pattern of choices that goes back generations. Slanting Towards the Sea is Hilje’s debut novel, but it feels as though it has inhabited our bookshelves for years, collecting watermarks from summers past.

 

Lidija Hilje.  Suzy New Life Photography.

 

A World With No Safe Word: Read An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan →

Nicolette Mishkan
Lethe's Harem, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length. Read more.

A Deep Dive into a Century of Swimming and Style @ London’s Design Museum

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Walking into this Design Museum exhibition doesn’t feel too dissimilar to walking into an indoor leisure center. After stepping down a wide white staircase and through a small corridor, you approach Splash!, a show investigating a century of swimming and style, together with the social and cultural impacts of the sport. This exhibition was designed, unsurprisingly, with swimming environments in mind. The central plinths, located in each of the rooms, which are divided into Pool, Lido, and Nature, are scale models of the three separate swimming spaces.

In the first room, Pool, these islands are models of the London Aquatic Centre and have been made from Storm Board, a recycled plastic waste that can later be remolded into different shapes. Entering this room, you are greeted by a large, bold lithograph poster that speaks to a poolside chicness that is often associated with the sport. The late 1920s poster was one of the first attempts to ‘brand’ the seaside as fashionable, bold, and modern. Seen next to this is a 1984 poster by David Hockney for the Los Angeles Olympics. A symbol of affluence and leisure, the poster celebrates California life and shows a swimmer immersed in a pool, with a pattern that mimics the one painted on Hockney’s own pool.

Overall, this room features interesting swimming treasures, namely Olympic and Paralympic swimsuits of medal winners past. The costumes and stories of Tom Daley, Yusra Mardini, and Ellie Robinson guide you down the room, where you then meet 1920s and 30s knitted swimsuits and swimwear catalogues. Labels explain the history of wool swimmers, starting in the 1920s, initially with the intention of promoting hygienic clothing, as well as magazines that advertise the “suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Blue arrows painted on the floor then bring you into room two, Lido, which opens into a show of swimsuits and clothing. Aiming to include an extensive range of themes and topics, from architecture to fashion, politics, and fabric development, the exhibition can feel slightly overwhelming at points and sometimes, because of its broad objectives, fails to dive fully into one topic or another. The rise of mass tourism, sun protection trends, ‘homosexual activity,’ and changing beauty ideals are all discussed before you have had a chance to fully feel like you’ve entered the room. These weighty topics are paired next to swimwear-clad light blue mannequins, which don’t naturally transport you to the beach.

 

Rudi Gernreich, Monokini, around 1964. Jersey, Tricot. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Hasselt.

 

There are, however, a few iconic pieces that are thrilling to see in person. Pamela Anderson’s iconic 1990s red Baywatch swimsuit, seen by roughly 1.1 billion viewers weekly, is one, and a 1964 Monokini by Rudi Gernreich, which was designed in a statement about liberating women from hyper-sexualisation, is another. As visitors continue, swim caps from the 1970s and from Miu Miu’s 2016 collection also stand out, and the line-up of accessories from ‘bathing shoes’ to Speedos brings a sense of charming nostalgia to the show.

The third and final section of Splash! is Nature, which touches on folklore and myths associated with the sea. Century-old tales of Merfolk are addressed before discussing the niche and unexpected contemporary trend of mermaid-core. Finally, a fascinating film about the haenyeo-women of South Korea finishes the exhibition. This film brings visitors underwater with a woman who follows her mother twenty meters below sea level with no help from a breathing apparatus. This historic exploration for seafood and seaweed has been conducted by women for centuries, and is an intense but extraordinary end to a fact-filled summer exhibition.

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style’ is on view through the 17th of August at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, W8 6AG