David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition @ Louis Vuitton Foundation

A truly unmissable exhibition that offers a rare personal experience in a dynamic dialogue between the artist, his art, and the admirer.

David Hockney
"Bigger Trees near Warter or/ou Peinture sur le Motif pour le Nouvel Age
Post-Photographique" 2007
Oil on 50 canvases (36 x 48" each)
457.2 x 1219.2 cm (180 x 480 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Prudence Cuming Associates
Tate, U.K

In the largest exhibition of one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries to date, David Hockney takes over the entirety of the Louis Vuitton Foundation building. This truly monumental exhibit encompasses over 400 works, including a wide variety of media, from traditional oil and acrylic paintings, ink, pencil, and charcoal drawings, as well as digital works on photographic, computer, iPhone, and iPad devices, alongside immersive photo and video installations. Hockney himself curated and was deeply involved in every aspect of the exhibition's design, personally overseeing the sequencing of each room. With the artist creating his own retrospective, visitors get to have a rare, intimate insight into Hockney’s creative universe and process, revealing the evolution of his art over the past three-quarters of a century. The exhibition is an explosion of vibrant, relatable, joyful, and deeply immersive works, radiating the artist’s characteristic joie de vivre and effortlessly infecting viewers with a ray of emotions.

The exhibition unfolds across eleven rooms within the foundation, each thoughtfully organized by theme, period, and medium. This thematic progression aims to provide viewers with a profound and multifaceted understanding of Hockney’s diverse artistic universe. The journey commences with an impactful introduction, showcasing Hockney’s most iconic pieces, including A Bigger Splash (1967), Portrait of an Artist (1972), and Portrait of My Father (1955). This deliberate choice to open the exhibition with such emblematic and grand works strongly establishes Hockney’s primal artistic direction throughout his extensive and prolific career.

 

David Hockney
Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972
Acrylic on canvas
213.36 x 304.8 cm (84 x 120 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

 

The following room features four large paintings that mirror one another, all interconnected by a profound theme exploring human communication—both with others and with oneself. Two almost identical paintings face each other: Pictured Gathering with Mirror (2018) and Pictures at an Exhibition from the same year. Both depict an exact replica of twenty-five figures seated and standing in various positions. In the former, they face a mirror, while in the latter, they face a vibrant exhibition. This visual dialogue creates a compelling interplay of reflection and perception, drawing viewers into Hockney’s intricate world and capturing their attention at the start of the journey.

 

Installation views David Hockney 25, galerie 4
© David Hockney © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

 

The foundation’s first floor is entirely dedicated to David Hockney’s time spent in Normandy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, he completed 220 works solely on his iPad in 2020, all under the sentimental title Do Remember, They Can’t Cancel the Spring. Overflowing with hope and a renewed admiration for life, Hockney discovered an infinite number of subjects in his surroundings, celebrating the subtle nuances of change, the shifting seasons, the mundane, painting plants in all their varied states. By embracing the iPad, he allowed himself to revisit the same motifs, continually and rapidly renewing his artistic output, while also being able to document his entire creative progression from a blank screen to a finished work of art. While the medium of art painted on an iPad is often subject to criticism, the preceding display of Hockney’s previous works affirms his skill and clear artistic vision. This daring embrace of new technology, particularly at the age of eighty-two at the time, is truly admirable, indicating his fearless willingness to experiment with practices often associated with younger artists.

 

David Hockney
"27th March 2020, No. 1"
iPad painting printed on paper, mounted on 5 panels
Exhibition Proof 2
364.09 x 521.4 cm (143.343 x 205.276 Inches)
© David Hockney

 

The next section transitions to showcase Hockney’s dialogue with other painters, displaying his respect for those who inspired him. He pays homage to artists such as Fra Angelico, Cézanne, Picasso, and Van Gogh, reinterpreting their works with his own vision and aesthetic. As seen in A Bigger Card Players (2015), where he directly references Cézanne’s Card Players (1890-1895), Hockney creates a powerful mise en abyme by incorporating the same work in the background, alongside Pearblossom Hwy, which is positioned in the same room. The interior wall depicted in the image echoes the very room we are in, creating yet another mise en abyme, this time for the viewer themselves. The understanding of the painters who preceded him, and their contributions to the art world and to Hockney himself, allows us not only to admire Hockney for his deep respect for these grand artists but to perceive art in its totality from a much broader perspective.


As we approach the end of the exhibition, we discover Hockney’s passion and love for opera. In 1975, the artist was commissioned by the Glyndebourne Festival to design the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, and since then, opera and set design have remained deeply close to his heart. In this installation, we discovered his latest creation, Hockney Paints the Stage, a musical and visual reinterpretation of his drawings and sets for various operas. This room truly adds another dimension to the exhibition, not only through the overflowing operatic scores of Mozart, Wagner, and Stravinsky, but also by firmly establishing Hockney’s comprehensive artistic background. Within this 360-degree, light-filled room, one truly realizes the depth and sustaining love for life that Hockney has and can communicate, and by this point, you can feel it too.

 

Installation views "David Hockney 25", galerie 10
Hockney Paints the Stage, 2025
Creation of David Hockney & Lightroom
Conception 59 Productions
Installation views "David Hockney 25", galerie 10
© David Hockney © Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage

 

Leaving the opera room, filled with emotion, the exhibition climaxes in a more intimate space that unveils David Hockney’s most recent works, painted in London, where the artist has resided since July 2023. These particularly enigmatic paintings draw inspiration from Edvard Munch and William Blake, exemplified by After Munch: Less is Known than People Think (2023) and After Blake: Less is Known than People Think (2024), directly inspired by Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. The title appears three times within the painting, feels like a deliberate mantra, beautifully combined with a landscape depicting the abiding cycle of night and day, perfectly aligning with the artist’s profound notion that “it is the now that is eternal.”

Hockney concludes the exhibition with his latest self-portrait, a deliberate choice that felt like the perfect finale to such a comprehensive, personal exhibition. In this portrait, he portrays himself drawing outdoors, holding a cigarette, adorned in colorful attire and his signature framed glasses, gazing directly at the viewer. It can be viewed like his own personal valediction, a way of saying goodbye and a heartfelt “thank you for being here, and I hope you understood.”

 

David Hockney
"May Blossom on the Roman Road" 2009
Oil on 8 canvases (36 x 48" each)
182.88 x 487.7 x 0 cm (72 x 192 x 0 Inches)
© David Hockney
Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

 

David Hockney 25 is on view through August 31 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation 8, Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi Bois de Boulogne, 75116

Read Our Interview of Ireland Wisdom On the Erotic Gaze & the Art of Looking →

Portrait by Austin Sandhaus

In this intimate conversation between gallerist Carlye Packer and painter Ireland Wisdom, what begins as a reflection on their creative partnership unfolds into a meditation on intimacy, eroticism, play, and mortality. Wisdom, whose portraits are painted from live models in prolonged silence are charged with a psychic intensity. She speaks with Packer candidly about her relationship to the body, desire, and the mythic tradition of being seen—and of seeing. As they revisit their early collaborations and look closer at Wisdom’s new Dance Macabre series, the dialogue dances between the sacred and the scandalous, from Goya to Dorian Gray to Georges Bataille. As friends and colleagues, they muse about works that are made like someone chasing the moment before it is lost. Whether you are a sitter or simply a viewer, you are invited to enter that entanglement with her. Read more.

Inside Five Must-See New York Gallery Shows This Spring

Find everything from queer intimacy to infinity rooms to domestic Americana on paper this season in New York’s galleries.

 

Jim Shaw
Study for “The Bride Stripped Bare” (2016)
Pencil on paper

 

text by Kim Shveka

Jim Shaw, Drawings
Gagosian
On view through June 14

For over thirty years, American artist Jim Shaw has mined the depths of Americana, popular culture, personal memory, and dream logic to create a body of work as chaotic as it is compelling. Now on view at Gagosian, Drawings is an exhibition of works on paper made between 2012 and 2024, showing Shaw’s intellectual inspirations in his artistic journey. Known for his ability to weave together the threads of America’s subconscious through surreal and symbolic visual language, Shaw here turns to the intimacy of graphite and ink, using sketch-like drawings to offer a direct window into his thinking; raw and unfiltered. These drawings are freely associated with references drawn from the artist’s mind and memory, as he imagines and recalls scenes from his own life and the collective American memory, translating the images in his mind’s eye onto paper. Jim Shaw’s “Drawings” is a deeply personal and evocative exploration of identity, nostalgia, and American culture.

 

Sam Moyer
Boca (2025)
Marble, acrylic on plaster-coated canvas

 

Sam Moyer, Subject to Change
Sean Kelly
On view through June 14

Multidisciplinary artist Sam Moyer is known for her distinctive approach to merging abstraction and materiality, often redefining conventional sculptural forms through her innovative use of natural elements. Her work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, creating wall-mounted pieces that highlight variations in surface and light.
Now showing at Sean Kelly Gallery, Sam Moyer’s fourth solo exhibition features a dynamic body of new work. The exhibition showcases Moyer's fondness for inconsistency and contradictions across a variety of artworks. Featuring Moyer’s latest stone paintings from 2024, which combine reclaimed stone and painted canvas, alongside oil on panel paintings and handmade paper. In these new works, Moyer meditates on life's inherent dualities; decay and growth, loss and perspective, endings and emergent beginnings; capturing a moment of balance during trying times. The palette draws inspiration from Claude Monet’s late paintings, interpreting his shift towards purity of color and light as an investigation of essential visual language, ultimately reflecting Moyer's continued exploration of color and light as the core building blocks of abstraction.

 

Salman Toor
Cross Street (2025)
Oil on panel
© Salman Toor; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York. Photo: Farwad Owrang

 

Salman Toor, Wish Maker
Luhring Augustine
On view through June 21

Salman Toor is renowned for his evocative figurative works that explore vulnerability within contemporary public and private life, particularly in the context of queer, diasporic identity. His paintings delve into the opportunities, anxieties, and humor inherent in the search for selfhood and the immigrant experience. Now showing at Luhring Augustine, Wish Maker, Toor’s first major New York presentation since his pivotal 2020 Whitney Museum show, spans both gallery locations, featuring paintings at Luhring Augustine Chelsea and a dedicated presentation of works on paper at Luhring Augustine Tribeca. Toor's new paintings, drawings, and etchings place imaginary yet relatable figures in diverse settings, examining the complexities of our paradoxical times. His work vibrates between heartening and harrowing, often employing a distinctive viridescent palette that illuminates both beauty and violence, liberation and entrapment, reflecting how perception shifts with perspective. Toor skillfully fuses art historical references with contemporary concerns, creating a rich compilation of traditions, popular culture, and lived experience.

Installation view, Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 8 - June 14, 2025.
Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Photo: Steven Probert.

Atsuko Tanaka and Yayoi Kusama
Paula Cooper Gallery
On view through June 14

Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, is an exhibition that brings together the groundbreaking works of two of Japan’s most innovative and influential artists. The exhibition presents a diverse selection of Tanaka’s works on canvas and paper, alongside early pieces by Kusama in various media, highlighting the parallel yet distinct artistic concerns of these pioneering figures.

Both Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005) and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) matured in post-World War II Japan, a period of profound societal transformation that spurred radical shifts in the arts. Tanaka, a key female member of the Gutai movement, is known for vibrant works like her iconic “Electric Dress” (1956), where circles and lines dynamically interact. Kusama, active in 1960s New York, explored hypnotic repetition, creating immersive works evoking hallucination and boundlessness. Both shared a broadened approach to artmaking, incorporating textiles, sensory environments, and performance, developing personal abstract languages with repeated motifs in large, enveloping scales. The exhibition includes Tanaka's early drawings and paintings, Kusama’s pioneering “Infinity Nets,” rare collages, photographs, and historical films.


Dozie Kanu. Chair [ iii ] (Dark), 2022
Poured concrete, steel, rims
35.9 x 16.5 x 20.5 in. 91.4 x 41.9 x 52.1 cm.
Courtesy of anonymous gallery, New York, NY

the chair by the window is an old friend featuring work from Jane Dickson, Kamil Dossar, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dozie Kanu, Mike Kelley, Carolyn Lazard, Klara Liden, Elliot Reed, Josef Strau
Anonymous Gallery
On view through June 14

The chair by the window is an old friend explores the emotional layers of domestic space. It focuses on how our homes can feel safe and familiar, but also confining or heavy with memory. The objects we live with become more than decoration, they carry personal meaning, reflecting who we are, who we were, and who we might want to be. Some artworks, such as Nan Goldin’s My Bed, Hotel La Louisiane, seem to capture the trace of a moment that has just passed, preserving an atmosphere of intimacy and lingering presence. Others, like Elliot Reed’s leaning umbrellas, convey a sense of stillness and resistance to functionality, evoking suspension rather than resolution. Across the exhibition, everyday materials such as wires, fabric, and furniture are reimagined as vessels of emotion and meaning. Through these transformations, the works articulate themes of care, closeness, imbalance, and quiet shifts, drawing attention to the subtle psychological states embedded within domestic objects and spaces. In this way, the exhibition invites us to think about what ‘home’ really means. Is it a space where we can rest, or does it sometimes hold us back? As life outside moves faster and becomes more overwhelming, our interiors can become places where comfort and loneliness exist at the same time. They are both a retreat and a mirror of our inner world.

Islands Within: Read Our Interview of Kilo Kish On the Occasion of Her New EP 'Negotiations' →

Despite the ever-shifting expectations of digital culture, American artist of sound and screen Kilo Kish continues to carve out a space entirely her own—one that defies genre, challenges structure, and insists on emotional honesty. With her latest EP Negotiations, Kish turns her gaze inward and outward, interrogating the increasingly blurred boundaries between human and machine, performance and authenticity, burnout and resilience. Through textured soundscapes, fragmented narratives, and a visual aesthetic that’s both nostalgic and hypothetical, she invites us into a world where self-care is a form of resistance.

How do we nourish the spirit while navigating systems that rarely pause for breath? Kish speaks candidly about the emotional labor behind her output, the philosophies that anchor her worldview, and the freedom she’s found in embracing multiplicity—of identity, of media, and of meaning. What emerges is a portrait of an artist in motion: reflective, adaptive, and uncompromising in her pursuit of truth through art. Read more.

The Weight of Lightness: Miya Ando’s “Mono no aware” at Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Los Angeles

In a city so often obsessed with permanence—ageless faces, endless summers, architecture designed to defy time—Mono no aware, Miya Ando’s luminous exhibition at Saint Laurent Rive Droite in Los Angeles, arrives like a soft exhale. Curated with elegant restraint by Anthony Vaccarello, the exhibition runs from April 8 through May 28, 2025, and offers visitors a meditative encounter with the ineffable: beauty that doesn’t last, and thus becomes more precious.

Ando, a Japanese-American artist based in New York, brings to Los Angeles a body of work that is both austere and poetic. Her materials—steel, redwood, washi paper, glass—are not chosen for comfort or ease. These are tough, elemental substances, but in her hands, they seem to sigh. Steel oxidizes. Wood is scorched. Silver nitrate glistens briefly before tarnishing into shadow. Every piece seems to exist in the act of becoming something else, caught in a slow dance between creation and decay.

It is this delicate tension—between the enduring and the fleeting, the seen and the sensed—that defines Mono no aware. The title, a Japanese philosophical term, loosely translates to “the pathos of things.” But it's not sorrow in the Western sense; it’s a tender, almost reverent awareness of the impermanence of all things. The falling cherry blossom, the shifting moonlight, the flicker of memory—Ando translates these moments not as loss but as sublime presence.

This exhibition is less a gallery show than a sensorial field. Ando’s paintings, with their subtle gradations and vaporous textures, resemble atmospheres more than images. One large piece—steel treated with silver nitrate—glows as if lit from within, a silver dusk caught in mid-fade. Stand before it long enough and you may find yourself breathing slower, drawn into its quietude. The light changes as you move. It is not just the painting that shimmers, but your own perception, altered.

Nearby, sculptures made of redwood anchor the space with a different kind of gravity. Ando uses the traditional Japanese shou-sugi-ban technique to char the surface of the wood, preserving it through fire. The result is a deep, inky black that isn’t void but presence. The carbonized surface absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Touch, were it allowed, would surely reveal unexpected warmth beneath the charcoal. These works feel ancient and future-facing at once—artifacts of a time out of time.

Silkscreen prints—subtler, perhaps quieter still—offer a more intimate scale, drawing viewers close. They echo the motifs of moonlight, fog, and celestial transience that recur throughout Ando’s work. There is a consistent language at play, not in symbols or icons, but in atmosphere. What binds the pieces together is not a narrative, but a rhythm, a kind of visual breath.

Ando’s training is as multidisciplinary as her art. With a background in East Asian calligraphy and metal patination, she bridges traditions with innovation. Her American upbringing meets her Japanese lineage in a hybrid that never feels forced. Instead, her work pulses with the complexity of in-between identities—cultural, material, temporal. The result is a deeply personal, spiritual vision, one that invites viewers not just to look, but to dwell in a different register of time.

Vaccarello’s curatorial touch is light but essential. The space at Saint Laurent Rive Droite—typically known for its sleek fashion displays and curated chaos—has been transformed into a vessel for contemplation. The works are given room to breathe, and the minimalist setting amplifies their quiet power. The collaboration between the house of Saint Laurent and Ando is more than aesthetic alignment—it’s an act of mutual recognition. Both traffic in forms of elegance that resist explanation, both seek out the sacred in style and silence.

It is tempting to categorize Mono no aware as environmental art or spiritual abstraction. But to do so would be to contain it too tightly. What Ando offers here isn’t doctrine—it’s sensation. It’s the way silver catches dusk. The scent of scorched wood. The hush that falls when you realize something beautiful is slipping away. And yet, Mono no aware does not mourn. It honors. In every oxidized panel, every blackened beam, every fading gradient, there is a kind of stillness that feels like acceptance. Not resignation, but reverence.

In a world constantly refreshing itself, where we swipe and scroll in pursuit of the next, the now, the new, Miya Ando’s work asks us to pause. To notice. To feel, just for a moment, the immensity of impermanence. And maybe, in doing so, to find a strange and fragile peace.

Mother Daughter Holy Spirit Throws a Star-Studded Trans Rights Fundraiser

photography by Fernando Palafox
text by Karly Quadros

Last weekend, Mother Daughter Holy Spirit closed out their three-part fundraiser for the Trans Justice Funding Project with a celebrity-filled bash at Gitano NYC. The party was a veritable who’s who of New York City’s queer underground and nightlife royalty, brining together everyone from film stars Chloë Sevigny and Naomi Watts (and her daughter, model Kai Schreiber) to cult favorites Julio Torres and Richie Shazam to art world darling Tourmaline and supermodel Alex Consani.

“It’s funny, we called Holy Spirit the final event, and that’s how we planned it. But being there, in the energy of it all, it didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like a beginning,” said co-founder John Mollet.

The night’s events rounded out a flurry of fundraising events as trans rights are increasingly under attack under this administration. Mother Daughter Holy Spirit, which was co-founded by John Mollet and Bobbi Salvör Menuez, began with a runway show featuring Alex Consani, Richie Shazam, and more stomping the runway in clothing from the likes of Vaquera, Willie Chavaria, and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen. Next came a pop-up boutique and online store stocked with garments donated from celebrities like Chloë Sevigny and Hari Nef, with some custom artist t-shirts peppered in for good measure.

Holy Spirit was the group’s largest event yet, scaling up from 200 attendees to over 600 dancing the night away in view of the East River. The crowd was largely trans, a mishmash of underground art legends, it girls, theater kids, and militant leftists all dancing under glittering chandeliers and palm trees. Christeene confronted the crowd with her raw, transgressive drag, while Juliana Huxtable and Fashion bumped pounding dance tunes all night long.

“[Gitano] was an unexpected choice for a crowd that often piles into dark and dank Brooklyn warehouses, but we wanted it to feel glamorous, elevated, even a bit reminiscent of the days when the queers and the artists and the yuppies all partied together at Studio 54 — a New York Moment, but this time, with a special focus on celebrating trans people as culture makers, change makers, and invaluable members of our world,” said head of production Lio Mehil.

So far, Mother Daughter Holy Spirit has raised over $50,000 in funds for trans-led grassroots organizations across the country, with additional closet and t-shirt sales scheduled in the coming weeks. In a time when the need for resources and material support for the trans community is more essential than ever, trans joy and self-expression were front and center at Holy Spirit.

“I’m not a trans person, and maybe this sounds selfish, but I truly believe my world, our world, becomes better when trans people have full equality. The trans people I’ve known throughout my life have brought forward a kind of strength, empathy, and clarity that the world desperately needs… I envision a society that seeks trans wisdom more deliberately and more often. I feel so deeply grateful to be part of a project that says to trans people: you are seen, appreciated, and loved,” said Mollet.

Explore the party with exclusive photography from Fernando Palafox.

High Fashion Goes Hi-Fi With L'Atelier Sonore by Valentino and Terraforma In New York

Lea Bertucci at L’Atelier Sonore at Valentino’s Midtown Manhattan location

text by Karly Quadros

In his 2012 book How Music Works, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne argues that over time, music and its technologies evolve to suit the spaces where people do their listening: the church organ’s bellows fill the cavernous chapel, the finely tuned bedroom pop of the 2010s nestles comfortably in one’s headphones. 

Lately, the fashion world has been dabbling in its own new experiments with music, style, and space, enlisting the help of sonic curators that inspire their own fervent devotion across the globe, like Terraforma and NTS Radio. 

Fashion and music have always been tightly bonded from the songs that soundtrack runway shows to the musicians sporting the latest collections. Early hints to the trend came when pioneering LA radio station Dublab released a capsule collection with Carhartt for their twenty-five year anniversary last year. Similarly, Crocs and the ominously lit Hör Berlin released a collaborative shoe in 2022; Adidas announced a collaboration with the collective the year after, featuring a broadcast from Adidas’ flagship store in Berlin with DJs Soyklo, Carmen Electro, Baugruppe90, and DJ Soulseek. Krakow’s own avant music festival Unsound has designed shirts in collaboration with Polish streetwear brand MISBHV and hosted a party with them in an abandoned railway station last year.

As the ways audiences discover music together continues to evolve in the digital age, so does the fashion world’s flirtation with musical communities and experiences that are more specific, intimate, and curated. 

On May 15, Valentino unveiled an intimate listening room at their Madison Avenue location in Midtown Manhattan, dubbed L’Atelier Sonore. The heavily curtained room lit with oranges and pinks was outfitted with sloping couches and an impressive sound system in the front, constructed by Francesco Lupia in collaboration with Terraforma, a collective that runs the cult classive Milanese experimental music festival of the same name. Lupia worked with impiallacciatura, a wood technique historically associated with Renaissance-era interiors. The result was something that felt opulent but modern.

“The idea was to build a sonic living room — intimate, soft, intentionally domestic. We were inspired by the Parisian salons of the early 20th century, spaces where literature, art, music, and conversation naturally converged,” said Ruggero Pietromarchi, one of Terraforma’s founders.

Over the course of the day, a small but impressive lineup of selectors took to the decks, spinning records The Loft-style, unmixed, from start to finish. There was downtown icon and New Age pioneer Laraaji, DJ and archival tape label Minimal Wave founder Veronica Vasicka, and Queens-based Nowadays resident Physical Therapy. Vibes were lush and meditative while not taking itself too seriously. Case and point? At one point, a “Careless Whisper” cover from unsung jazz hero Nancy Wilson was trotted out.

“Given the constant acceleration in our society, there’s a growing need for contemplative spaces and shared rituals. Listening requires stillness — it’s a focused, reflective act. The space was designed with that in mind: small, intimate, and free of distraction, to support attention and presence,” said Lupia.

Meanwhile in London, another fashion world plunge into hi-fi sounds was unfolding. Golden Sounds, a joint effort from Ugg and beloved Internet radio station NTS, filled two full days with programming. Panels, led by Saffron Records on Friday May 16 and NTS Radio on Saturday May 17, focused on everything from the basics of how to DJ to building your own sound system. Deep listening sets were curated, largely around South London’s jazz, R&B, and electronic scenes and featured artists like Goya Gumbani, dexter in the newsagent, Errol, and Alex Rita. There was a particular focus on sounds from London’s African and Caribbean diaspora communities: baile funk, hip hop, and soul.

For those used to going to the club for a specific producer for a particular energy, the historic importance of sound systems might not be readily apparent. Sound systems were a central feature of early dance music culture in Jamaica and the UK – often, the sound system itself was more of a draw than any one DJ or emcee. In ‘90s rave culture too, collectives and promotions would advertise on flyers the truly awesome power of their custom sound systems, often with flashy technobabble that had little to do with the actual mechanics of audio technology itself. For those that know and care about the cultural lineage of people dancing together in space, a sound system is the mothership, a monument to hedonistic release but also to the care, intention, and work that goes into bringing people together.

“It’s not just about what you hear, but how you inhabit the space while listening,” said Pietromarchi.

Golden Sounds’ events, held in an open air stone courtyard, were less cloistered than L’Atelier Sonore at Valentino but sought to capture a similar audience and atmosphere. After all, what else inspires the same devotion, obsession, and sense of exclusivity than underground music? DJs guard their rare white labels with a fervence verging on feverishness. In-the-know music fans are happy that artist broke into the mainstream but also know they used to be better (but really, how i’m feeling now will always be superior to brat.) The status, the symbols, the devotion to the archive – it’s attractive for fashion brands like Valentino and Ugg to seek out the kinds of audiences cultivated by Terraforma and NTS Radio particularly for their discerning taste and dedication.

Hi-fi spaces like these split the difference between deep listening on one’s headphones and a dance night out on the town. The question is, is having the time and access to such spaces becoming a luxury in and of itself? Like the historic sound systems from decades past, communities centered around music will persevere sometimes in resistance to and sometimes in tandem with larger cultural forces like fashion. In the meantime, it’s clear that, in a time like ours, the need for spaces that encourage deep, active listening are greater than ever before.

When asked if time and space to pause and listen had become a luxury, Pietromarchi answered honestly: “Yes — unfortunately, it often is. But I don’t believe it should be. Listening is a basic, vital act. That’s what spaces like L’Atelier Sonore try to offer: a kind of pause that isn’t passive, but active. A moment to re-centre.”

L'Atelier Sonore, an immersive listening room, is open daily through August at Valentino Madison Avenue.

The turntable at Valentino’s L’Atelier Sonore

Everything Has to Come At the Right Moment: Read Our Interview of Designer Francisco Costa →

From Calvin Klein to sustainable skincare, the maternal gaze is a guiding principle for Brazil’s prodigal son.

 
 

Francisco Costa’s path from the rarefied world of high fashion to the heart of the Amazon is a story of return—both to his geographical roots and to a practice that prioritizes community care by design. Born in the small town of Guarani, Brazil, Costa was raised by a visionary mother who ran a garment factory that empowered hundreds of local women and modeled what would now be considered a quietly radical form of sustainability.

Shortly after losing his mother during his adolescence, the budding young designer moved to New York to study fashion at FIT. An early and formative experience working for a Seventh Avenue garment manufacturer who held licenses for major designers, including Oscar de la Renta, led to Costa eventually working directly under de la Renta, becoming part of his atelier and learning the foundations of luxury design and craftsmanship. This apprenticeship was pivotal—it exposed Costa to the world of refined, couture-level design and helped him develop the precision and discipline that would later define his own minimalist aesthetic.

In the late 1990s, Costa moved to Gucci, where he worked under Tom Ford. This period helped sharpen his sense of modernity, sex appeal, and branding. Best known for his decade-long tenure as the Women’s Creative Director at Calvin Klein, Costa became a defining voice in modern reductionism—an editor of excess, who found beauty in restraint. But even then, his instinct was to reuse, reimagine, and reconnect with materials in deeply personal ways. All along the way, his mother’s ethics of care and resourcefulness continue to shape Costa’s worldview.

With the founding of Costa Brazil, he turned his attention from clothing the body to nurturing it. A pivotal trip to the western Amazon introduced him to Indigenous communities and powerful natural ingredients like breu, a sacred resin with antimicrobial and spiritual properties. Guided by partnerships with organizations like Conservation International, Costa built a brand that honors the land, its protectors, and the rituals that sustain both.

In every sense, Costa Brazil is an extension of its founder’s ethos: pure, considered, and deeply connected to place. Read more.

A Conversation with Artist Karice Mitchell →

Karice Mitchell
Sensation (Diptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass

“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.

Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.

After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer. Read more.

Walk a Mile in Women's History Museum's Shoes →

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stiletto. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City. Read more.

It's a Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios.

The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades. Read more.

Fondazione Prada Announces Film Fund To Sustain The Future Of Independent Cinema

Fondazione Prada is launching the Fondazione Prada Film Fund—a bold, €1.5 million annual commitment to champion the future of independent cinema. Debuting in Fall 2025 with an open call for submissions, the Fund is designed to support films of exceptional artistic ambition, deepening the institution’s two-decade engagement with the moving image.

Each year, a jury of seasoned professionals will select 10 to 12 feature films for support—regardless of origin, language, or genre. The only benchmarks: quality, originality, and a singular vision. The Fund’s purpose is clear—to offer meaningful support at key stages of filmmaking, from early development through post-production.

“Cinema is a laboratory of ideas and a site of cultural education,” says Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada. “That’s why we’re committed to helping bring new works into the world—works that demand something of the viewer and open up new ways of seeing. This Fund continues our long-standing dialogue with the radical, the visionary, and the free.”

Rooted in editorial independence, the Fondazione Prada Film Fund works closely with an evolving team of producers, curators, and internationally recognized cinema experts. Its rigorous curatorial framework reflects the broader mission of Fondazione Prada: to generate unexpected encounters between disciplines and foster new creative languages.

With an eye toward inclusivity, the initiative is structured to embrace a wide range of filmmakers—from established auteurs to emerging voices to those working in experimental or research-based modes. By doing so, the Fund aims to enrich the vibrant, pluralistic landscape of contemporary cinema, not just with resources, but with faith in the power of the cinematic imagination.

Fondazione Prada Film Fund is a project developed by Paolo Moretti—curator of Fondazione Prada’s Cinema Godard program, director of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival from 2018 to 2022, head of the Cinema department at ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne), and Director of Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva—in collaboration with Rebecca De Pas, a member of the selection committee at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, art consultant for the Viennale, and co-director of FiDLab—an international coproduction platform—from 2009 to 2019.

A Peek Inside Miu Miu’s Exclusive NYC Installation

Tales and Tellers explored the state of modern femininity for Frieze New York 2025.

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemi/Miu Miu


text by Karly Quadros


Last Friday during Frieze, New York, Miu Miu convened a who’s who of the international fashion and art worlds for the second edition of Tales and Tellers, an immersive performance and installation exploring modern femininity through style, performance, and film. 

Partygoers ducked out of the rain and bluster into Chelsea’s Terminal Warehouse, a cavernous late-19th-century industrial space teeming with New York City history. It was once home to the infamous Tunnel Nightclub, founded by Peter Gatien who also owned the Limelight and Palladium, and was a beloved haunt of the Club Kids as well as New York’s iconic 90’s hip hop scene. Back in the day, the side rooms of the hangar were lavishly decorated according to theme – a Victorian library in one, an S&M dungeon in another – so it was fitting that Tales and Tellers, which brought Miu Miu’s fashion to life through staged tableauxs, found its home here.

Drawing on her longstanding collaboration with Miu Miu, Polish-born interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga used Miu Miu’s archive of short films by female directors as inspiration for the piece. Since 2011, the films – which have included the work of Janicza Bravo, Miranda July, Ava Duvernay, and Mati Diop, and have sometimes accompanied Miu Miu’s runway shows – have explored the authentic lives of women worldwide; mothers, daughters, performers, dreamers, lovers, skaters, and rebels buck social convention in their searches for identity. Miuccia Prada and Macuga first united all the films for Art Basel Paris in October 2024. The show was an unexpected hit, drawing 11,000 visitors over just five days. 

This second edition, convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA in Barcelona, was indebted to Miu Miu’s rich archive of fashion and curatorial efforts. The dim tunnel-like space was outfitted with screens from tiny mounted smartphones to hefty LED plinths, all playing one of the three dozen female-directed films commissioned by the fashion house. Guests trickled in, sipping champagne and leafing through the Truthless Times newspaper, a remnant from Macuga’s last installation with Miu Miu, Salt Looks like Sugar, which served as the backdrop for their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. Notable attendees included Alexa Chung, Sara Paulson, Chase Sui Wonders, Paloma Elsesser, Ella Emhoff, Kiki Layne, Pauline Chalamet, and Cazzie David.

One by one, performers outfitted in archival Miu Miu began to roam the space as well. One performer shadow boxed in bejeweled tap shorts. Another in a red dress haltingly performed a standup comedy routine about, what else, but failed love, Plan B, and thoughts of death (one waiter carrying a tray of empty champagne flutes giggled, despite himself.) Several performers sang and danced, while yet another sculpted with Play-Doh in front of a stop motion animation, yet not every tableaux felt so joyous. One woman in a bell-shaped yellow coat, crept along the sidelines, a gas mask strapped to her face. Another in a grey wool skirt suit stared longingly at her screen from a cage. The entire performance culminated in an ecstatic dance party in the center of the room: women, moving and playing freely in a space once known as a haven for self-expression.

The dark, moody atmosphere of surveillance, punctuated by roving spotlights, evoked the troubled times we live in. After all, what feels more true to 2025 then trying to just go about your daily life – putting on makeup, working at the office, playing dress up – while something more sinister presses in? As one performer brandished newspapers and called out, fruitlessly, about “disrupting reality” and “digital malfunction,” the others continued their rituals of self, care, and creativity. This is the state of modern womanhood, after all. What else is there to do?

Image courtesy of Daniel Salemni/Miu Miu

Holy Cow: A Shocking Subtlety

text by Maisie McDermid


Following the sunburned back of an older man carrying a beer keg towards a crowd of thirsty teenagers in a field, French director and part-time farmer Louise Courvoisier introduces the audience to Jura—a low mountainous region in eastern France. The sweaty group gathered around a makeshift bar begins cheering and yelling a local chant as Holy Cow’s central character, Totoné (Jura local, Clément Faveau), lifts himself onto the wooden bar table. One second, he’s red-cheeked, smoking, and smiling, and the next, he follows orders from below: to strip off his clothes. So he does, and we meet Totoné—a character who simultaneously makes you want to chuckle and cry.

Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in May 2024, the small independent film raked up two César Awards, including Best First Film, and is now touring globally. In its simplest form, 18-year-old Totoné navigates a forcibly rushed entry into adulthood. He pivots from mourning his dead father to committing to a regional cheese-making competition. In doing so, he finds and loses love, tries and fails at being a friend, and clumsily raises his seven-year-old sister, Claire.

In her debut feature film, Courvoisier, a native to the Jura region, attends to the environment as she does to her non-professional cast of characters. She dresses many of them in red, drawing out the surrounding greenery, and documents the film primarily outdoors. Amidst it all—long bathtime stills, winding motorbike clips, flashed scenes of drunken, loose dancing, and kicks and punches—you see Totoné, a character who seeks to be unseen. Up-close shots of his expressive face bring you up-close to his inner thinking. After a while, you realize he really does not know how to act when other characters really look at him; on the rare occasion, he drops his eyes and somewhat sways. In this way, Courvoisier gives you access to a character who others find inaccessible. From seeing him in the initial scene, butt-naked, to the final scene, smiling with a tear in his eye, you develop an unmatched empathy. It's Faveau’s inexperience in acting that makes this film shockingly honest.

While Courvoisier and cinematographer Elio Balézeaux clearly demonstrate their distinct filming techniques—framing many shots in car-window rectangles, behind dusty window panes, and amidst the repeated circular shapes of cheese wheels—the film slips through subtle scenes. It’s the deeply considered yet casual air to each shot that exposes the utter beauty of dirty and dusty farmlife. Courvoisier builds suspense with picked guitar chords and slows scenes with soft, strumming instrumentals, creating a raw world for complex yet relatable relationships to move through an unpredictable plot. Although the falling-outs and mendings between Totoné and his first love, Marie Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy) and his two best friends, Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis  (Dimitry Baudry) arise from peculiar scenarios, they encapsulate a widely known and remembered youthful temper. 

Courvoisier stages Totoné’s make-out scenes with Marie in unmade, dirty beds and piles of hay, drawing on the young lovers’ desperation for discovery. She spins us around a kitchen table littered with liquor from three guy friends awkwardly dancing side-by-side to blasting Bad Bunny, glimpsing into small-town drinking culture. And invites us into the in-between moments—Totoné and Claire asleep on a tired couch with Claire’s small bowl of spaghetti balanced on her leg or Totoné walking down a narrow hallway fixing his hair, his signature habit. 

Not every scene has an objective purpose, but this is perfectly fine. The drawn-out scenes of Totoné laying out on his bed mid-day or of Claire playing with Totoné’s hair prove how in-between moments define life, not milestones. Holy Cow is not about moving past a relative’s death, reconciling lost friendships, or winning a competition; it’s about the ongoing nature of grief, loss, and disappointment. The unfinished aspects of the film—from cut-off conversations to incomplete plot points—actually make this film true. 

Watch the Holy Cow trailer here.

Read Our Interview of Marianna Simnett on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition 'Charades' @ SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin →

Marianna Simnett
Leda Was a Swan (production still), 2024.
Courtesy the Artist and Société, Berlin.
Photo/ Leander Ott

How we present ourselves and what we aspire to project is in an everchanging relationship with those around us. It is a story we’re telling about ourselves, to ourselves. In Marianna Simnett’s Charades, her second solo exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ, the inherent masquerade of existing in a society is examined from the ancient allegories that undergird our collective worldview to the personal histories we replay in our minds. It is a power play where nothing is ever fixed. Undermining the very foundation of Greek mythology’s Leda and the Swan, she contends that the swan was never Zeus in disguise, it was actually just a hand puppet. The subject of the story thus shifts from that of rape to masturbation when the subjects of the story exchange their masks. Persistent obfuscation is an everpresent quality within the work. In this way, she is asking you to decide whether the charade is just a playful game amongst friends, or if it is indeed an act of mockery. Read more.

Zipora Fried's Inaugural Solo Exhibition @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles Is Felt Before It Is Seen

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is an emotional polygraph that let’s you see through the eyes of a newborn.

Zipora Fried
Let Them Talk, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 80 inches (152.4 x 203.2 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 81 5/16 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 206.5 x 4.4 cm)

text by Summer Bowie

At the moment of every human’s birth, our field of vision is best at about twelve inches, or roughly the distance between a mother’s eyes and her breast. This is about how close you want to get to the work of Zipora Fried once you’ve seen it from a distance. It is like looking at life through the lens of a baby who is feeling and sensing the world wholly with their right brain. In Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s debut solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Los Angeles, the artist continues to refine her ability to conceal just enough of the scrutable so that you can properly feel the work before you know how to think about it. These works blur the lines between figurative and abstract, portrait and landscape, monumental scale and unsettling fragility. It is ultimately performance as a form of conceptual practice. 

Although it is a practice of interminable repetition, each time an idea is revisited, it is done so from a novel perspective. Playing off of her ’09 exhibition at On Stellar Rays called Trust me, be careful, which itself was taken from the text of a “drawing” in that exhibition which read: “The stammering of history, trust me, be careful, who has the sickest shoes, trust me, be careful,” it is a story of marching through the cyclical passage of time with an acute awareness of how each new step is unique to the last.

Zipora Fried
The Glass Octopus, 2024
signed by artist, verso
colored pencil on archival museum board
paper: 60 x 96 inches (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
framed: 61 5/16 x 97 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (155.7 x 247 x 4.4 cm)

From a distance, tiny individual lines of color blur together into one fluid, unending stroke, which makes for an experience that is as philosophical as it is emotional. It feels Hegelian in both the interconnected idealism that it exemplifies, as well as in the synthesis of opposing perspectives that are resolved in the precision of their balance. Then again, at close proximity, they are Kierkegaardian in their boundless detail; millions of individual strokes existing and intersecting on their own discrete paths. There is certainly something divine in these details.

It is this tension that beckons the viewer to adjust their vantage point multiple times. If you stand and observe people engaging with the work, you start to see interesting patterns emerge. Each piece is initially experienced from a generous distance, moving from one side to the next. As you approach, new details began to emerge with each successive step forward. And from as close as common courtesy will allow, people tend to again start scanning from one side to the next before they back up to see it anew. If one were to trace the footsteps of all who attended the opening reception, I imagine one might find a sequence of marks that resemble the second half of a coherent dialogue between the floor and the walls. 

These are works that must be experienced in person. They float in their frames unmediated by glass, allowing the viewer to get in close enough to be visually enveloped by fields of color. From here we can see the gritty texture of the colored pencil. We can see just how these tightly-controlled strokes of equal length and exacting proximity start to slowly and delicately unfold into loose, sweeping strokes that breathe easy and intersect with other colors freely. These are the moments that allow for the character of each piece to express itself, which is ultimately only scrutable from a distance. 

 
 

The titles of her pieces often convey an oscillation of contradicting thoughts and feelings. There are the colored pencil drawings A Sad Parade (2025), I Was Perfect, I Was Wrong (2025), as well as the massive sculptural drawing on paper titled All I Thought and Forgot # 3 (deep cobalt green) (2016). One can’t help but wonder how such a thin and sweeping scroll of paper could ever support the imposing weight of such densely layered marks. These are the contradictions that typify the human experience and Fried is a master mark maker with an acute understanding of the affecting power of color. Her hand paces back and forth like the needle of a polygraph test, communicating an inner truth that is not necessarily involuntary, but it is perhaps articulated more clearly this way than in words. 

 

Zipora Fried
All I Thought and Forgot #3 (deep cobalt green), 2016
colored pencil on paper
312 x 53 1/2 inches (792.5 x 135.9 cm)

 

This is visual art that encourages you to look closer and alludes to the possibility that you are overly dependent on your eyes. As if to suggest that seeing less allows you to feel a lot more. On either side of the gallery we find two of Fried’s ceramic sculptures. They are inspired by ink drawings that are not on view. They are also inspired by kokeshi dolls; a Japanese tradition of wooden figurines that features a head with painted face, and a body without arms or legs. However, with these sculptures, even their faces are obscured by a crown of dripping hair. A singular, unending moment that reveals nothing but ambivalence. Again, the artist is choreographing our movement around an object without beginning or end. Seen from the other side, we might consider that when we allow ourselves to feel more, it’s often easier to see things more clearly.

 

Zipora Fried
Miron, 2025
glazed ceramic
51 x 16 3/4 inches (129.5 x 42.5 cm)

 

Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes is on view through May 3 @ Sean Kelly Los Angeles 1357 N Highland Avenue

Time Travel in Sound: Manchester Collective’s 'Refractions' at the Southbank Centre

Refractions invites the audience to suspend their perceptions of time and reality

Image Credit Alma Haser

text by Lara Monro

This Saturday, April 26, the Queen Elizabeth Hall transforms into a temporal vortex as Manchester Collective presents Refractions, a ninety-minute, uninterrupted performance that melds a millennium of music with contemporary dance and electronic innovation. Under the creative direction of violinist Rakhi Singh, the ensemble collaborates with electronic musician Clark and choreographer Melanie Lane to challenge the linearity of time and the boundaries of classical music. 

Singh, co-founder of Manchester Collective, has consistently sought to dissolve traditional concert formalities, bringing classical music into unconventional spaces and contexts. In Refractions, she curates a program that juxtaposes medieval chants and baroque compositions with modern electronic soundscapes, creating a continuous aural and visual experience that traverses planes of emotion—from explosive drama to moments of calm, disorder to joyous rapture. 

Clark, known for his evolution from classical violinist to electronic music innovator, joins the ensemble live, blending hard-hitting techno with ambient textures. His collaboration with Manchester Collective reveals the classical undercurrents in his work, creating a soundscape that is both ancient and futuristic. ​

Melanie Lane's choreography complements this sonic journey, with dancers embodying themes of chaos and harmony, darkness and light. Their movements, inspired by rituals from both ancient and imagined civilizations, add a visceral layer to the performance, transforming the stage into a living tableau of sound and motion. ​

Refractions is an immersive experience that invites the audience to suspend their perceptions of time and reality. The performance space is transformed with moody lighting and amplified sound. It’s a relaxed atmosphere where traditional concert etiquette is set aside in favor of personal connection with the music. ​

This innovative collaboration is co-commissioned by the Southbank Centre and The Bridgewater Hall, with support from Jonathan and Ariella Green.

I Like the Party Life: Malick Sidibé at Jack Shainman Gallery

A new exhibit at the New York gallery features never-before-seen images from the Malian photographer.

 
 



text by Karly Quadros


Best known for his exuberant photographs of discos and house parties in Bamako, Mali the ‘60s and ‘70s, Malick Sidibé defined a post-colonial visual aesthetic of joyful resistance. The people in Sidibé’s photos put their best foot forward, literally. They pose in their Sunday best in Sidibé’s studio, located in the Bagadaji neighborhood, which in its heyday was a hub for photographic culture. They twist and shout. They ride motorcycles and wrap their arms around their friends in homes, courtyards, and beaches. 

From April 17 to May 31, Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City will be showcasing a selection of Sidibé’s photography, including some never before seen images, in a new show, Regardez-moi. In an era of surveillance and digitally mediated experiences, Sidibé’s photography is a reminder of the potency of seeing, being, and celebrating together. Sidibé’s lens is always amidst rather than apart. In the spirit of play, texture takes center stage, from sharp polyester suits to dusty dance floors to woven bags and patterned dresses. 

Alongside the photographs, Loose Joints Publishing is releasing a monograph on Sidibé’s painted frame photographs. Centering the traditional art of reverse glass paintings, Sidibé collaborated with local Malian artists. His black and white images are surrounded by right pops of lime, pink, and tangerine, decorated with vines, leaves, and tiled motifs. The monograph also includes an essay from writer and collector-archivist Amy Sall.

“Malick Sidibé was witness to, and preserver of, a nascent, burgeoning postcolonial society in which a new modernity was being constructed by way of transcultural osmosis. From his studio to the soirées, and even to the banks of the Niger River, Sidibé and his camera were at the center of it all. He was not only chronicling Malian history and culture, but making pivotal contributions to it,” she writes.