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E D I T I O N
Editor’s Letter
SLEEK 65
2-5 ApRIL 2020 PIER 94 NEW YORK
MAIN SECTOR
and stylist Jamie-Maree Shipton took the theme of glamour and interpreted it in six beauty looks. In Just a Girl, poet and Sour Heart (2017) author Jenny Zhang reflects on what glamour meant to her as a young girl, inspired by pop stars like Gwen Stefani and the Spice Girls. “Reading a long caption about how beauty standards are harmful and bullshit from a conventionally beautiful woman creates the same cognitive dissonance I felt when I was a teen: that yes, everyone is suffering,” she says. In her interview After the Male Gaze, Laura Mulvey’s comments on the ‘female gaze’ are a revelation. Having coined the phrase in 1973 and became somewhat of a superstar after it hit the mainstream, Mulvey tells writer Chloe Stead: “I definitely take the position that there is no binary opposite ‘female gaze’. The critique of the male gaze was that it was a position of power and that the object of the gaze was oppressed by the power that was imposed on it.” A fitting and fresh viewpoint to explore glamour from in 2020. Grace Banks Editor-in-Chief 14
Photo: Nhu Xuan Hua
In her 73 Questions video interview for Vogue last year, Cardi B takes viewers through a tour of her home and settles on the sofa in a tight shiny blue suit. Flicking her hair with her two-inch acrylic red nails while holding her baby, she chats about everything from her nail preference (“Long, always long”) to what excites her (“I like to debate about trending popular topics”). It feels normal now to see a glamorous woman in fake nails and fashion that doesn’t attempt to look ‘dressed down’ talk about grooming and current affairs in the same breath on a platform such a Vogue, but a decade ago, it wasn’t a combination of characteristics that many mainstream fashion publications endorsed. If you were born in the mid-Eighties, there was a real feeling that dressing up and indulging in glamour made you frivolous – something that negated intellect. Over the last few years, behaviours have changed and a new generation has transformed our attitudes to glamour: now, people see it as an attribute, a platform or just something to enjoy for the sake of it. That’s something we wanted to explore in this issue, so we’ve selected a group of artists, photographers and writers who are picking glamour apart. A perfect example of this is Victoria Sin, the London-based artist who uses Western standards of beauty and glamour – e.g. detachable fake silicone breasts and make-up that completely transforms their face, the remnants of which they leave on a blotting paper as part of their art practice – to show how outdated white cis beauty standards are. “Recently, I’ve been moving away from trying to be this perfect embodiment of Western femininity. I’ve done that. What do I want to do now?” they tell journalist Lola Olufemi in their interview. In Clifford Prince King’s series Orange Grove, which looks at modern masculinity largely within his own friendship group, the photographer wanted to spotlight glamour in a positive light. “A lot of the time we don’t really see black bodies – black gay men – in a glamourous viewpoint,” he says in his opening essay to the story. “I try to put my lens towards that, or highlight those moments that seem very glamorous on people who don’t really get that light very often.” New York-based cult performance artist Narcissister choreographs stripteases in which she flips the idea of glamour on its head, while never quite writing it off: “I wanted to make work that was overtly erotic,” she explains, “and the mask protects me while I am doing that work that would otherwise leave me feeling very vulnerable, afraid or exposed.” In Ruth Ossai’s second shoot for SLEEK, Glamour Girls, she throws her distinctive aesthetic onto this season’s spring looks, shot in London and styled by Theo White. Meanwhile in Softcore, creative director
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22 Chris Kraus Column
68 Victoria Sin: “I’m trying to break down the binary of thinking and feeling”
18 Imprint
74 Narcissister
19 Contributors
Face Value
88
26 This is Not an Exit 28 Hussein Chalayan Returns
FASHION
30 A Critical Tbilisi LGBTQ+ Fashion Voice
34 Incoming
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Jenna Sutela: Soul, Meat and Pattern
“I guess it’s the way that we try to make ourselves feel good”
46 Ed Atkins
60 Laura Mulvey:
“I’ve never been good at joining in”
After the Male Gaze 16
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Softcore 106 Glamour Girls
120 Off Duty
Photography by Ruth Ginika Ossai, Styling by Theo White
Photography by Kuba Ryniewicz, Styling by Malcolm Mammone
CABINET
134 Atlantic Burnout
Photo: Bananas Clarke
FEATURES
80 Clifford Prince King
Photography by Bananas Clarke Beauty direction and styling by Jamie-Maree Shipton Make-up by Lynski
Photo: Jenna Sutela
32 Nodaleto: Almost Famous
40 High Style
GLAMOUR
Eliza Douglas “My art is not distinct from my life”
24 Just a Girl
Tommy Kha, Cassie McQuater, Cajsa von Zeipel
RESEARCH
Photo: Nadine Fraczkowski
SLEEK 65 Spring 2020
BEGINNINGS
COVER: Victoria Sin is shot by Nhu Xuan Hua with styling by Lorena Maza. Victoria wears shirt by Jacquemus, trousers Comme des Garçons Homme Plus
Contents
14 Editor’s Letter
Photography by Céline Bischoff Styling by Florentin Glémarec SLEEK 65
17
195 Paul Kooiker
Business of Fashion
Imprint CEO!/!Group Editorial Director/Publisher Christian Bracht (V.i.S.d.P.) cb@sleekmag.com
Editor-in-Chief Grace Banks grace@sleekmag.com
Art Direction and Design Lorenzo L Pradelli design@sleekmag.com
Creative Editor (Maternity Leave) Victoria GisborneLand victoria@sleekmag.com
Acting Creative Editor Marta Wilkosz marta.w@sleekmag.com
Fashion Editor Lorena Maza
lorena@sleekmag.com
Digital Editor Kathryn O’Regan
kathryn@sleekmag.com
Senior Writer Angela Waters
angela@sleekmag.com
Designer Keano Anton Intern Luka Terihaj
Advertising and Marketing Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing Shawn Thomson shawn@sleekmag.com
Creative Producers Emma Hughes emma@sleekmag.com
Staff Copy Editor Huw Nesbitt Proofreader Redfern Jon Barett Publisher’s Assistant Franziska Rutkowski
franziska@sleekmag.com
Contributing Editors Chris Kraus Francesca Gavin Annie Collinge Arvida Byström Micaiah Carter Jeni Fulton
Contributors Réda Ait Ruth Bartlett Céline Bischoff Joe Burwin Lucas Christiansen Bananas Clarke Alexander Coggin Ed Cumming Remi Felipe Nadine Fraczkowski
Charlotte Gindreau Florentin Glémarec Bre Graham Diane Guais Manuel Haring Patricia Heck Kathrine Hempel Ériver Hijano Yumiko Hikage Anh Hoang Nhu Hua Xuan Seiya Iibuchi Hettie Judah Clifford Prince King Paul Kooiker Kathin Leisch Flora Maclean Malcolm Mammone Lola Martinez Lisa Michalik Lynski Nadia Morozewicz Alexis Ong Jorge Ortiz Perez Ruth Ginika Ossai Dushan Petrovich Paulina Piiponen Issac Poleon Victoria Reuter Tomomi Roppongi Chloe Rosolek Raúl Ruz Kuba Ryniewicz Kyla Selway Jamie-Maree Shipton Chloe Stead Anne Timper Leonie Volk Theo White Jenny Zhang Gary Zhexi Zhang
Special Thanks CoCulture Kino International Marko Bahor Museus de Sitges Noemi Maza
SLEEK accepts no liability for any unsolicited material whatsoever. Opinions contained in the editorial content are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the publishers of SLEEK. Any reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. SLEEK magazine and sleekmag.com are published by H&B Publishing GmbH, Alexanderstrasse 7, 10178 Berlin, Germany, info@sleekmag.com
SLEEK 65
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Contributors JENNY ZHANG
JAMIE-MAREE SHIPTON Jamie-Maree Shipton is a Melbourne-born stylist and creative director based in London. In between styling for the likes of i-D, Interview and Vogue Italia, she also runs the Instagram account @airtomyearth, which functions as an online archive for avantgarde clothing. To see her handiwork, turn to our beauty section, where she subverts traditional ideas of glamour to create images that are captivating and haunting.
HETTIE JUDAH
Hettie Judah is senior art critic for the British newspaper, The I. She is also a contributor to Frieze, The Guardian, Vogue, The New York Times, Art Quarterly and Numéro Art. Her most recent book, Art London: A Guide to Places, Events and Artists, came out in September 2019, and her next book, a biography of Frida Kahlo, will be published by Laurence King in June 2020. Hettie interviewed Eliza Douglas for this issue, where they discussed how to navigate the divide between art and fashion.
NADINE FRACZKOWSKI Nadine Fraczkowski is a Berlin-based photographer whose enigmatic photography conveys meaning without need for captions or written context. For SLEEK 65, she shot artist Eliza Douglas, a frequent collaborator of hers, in the arcades, casinos and conference rooms of Atlantic City. Fraczkowski has worked on a wide spectrum of projects, from a photo series documenting refugees in Calais, to high-production fashion editorials for the likes of W Magazine, American Vogue and 032c.
ED CUMMING
KUBA RYNIEWICZ
Jenny Zhang is a Brooklynbased writer, poet and essayist whose debut work of fiction, the short story collection Sour Heart (2017), was received with critical acclaim, earning her both the 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, as well as the 2017 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award. For SLEEK 65, she has written an essay on the unique relationship between teenage girlhood and the art of getting dressed.
Ed Cumming is a Londonbased freelance journalist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. He has also worked as a TV and restaurant critic for The Independent, and as a commissioning editor for The Observer Magazine. Here, with British artist Ed Atkins, he reflects on ideas concerning personal image, technology and how to resist trends. SLEEK 65
For the current volume, Polish-born, Newcastlebased artist Kuba Ryniewicz shot our menswear editorial, inspired by gay vintage sailor erotica and set in the staircases of an old apartment building near Grands Boulevard in Paris. Using photography to disrupt preconceived social, historical and cultural contexts, his images have been featured in Fantastic Man, Interview and Dazed. 19
22 24 26 28 30 32 34
CHRIS KRAUS COLUMN JUST A GIRL THIS IS NOT AN EXIT HUSSEIN CHALAYAN RETURNS A CRITICAL LGBTQ+ FASHION VOICE NODALETO: ALMOST FAMOUS INCOMING: TOMMY KHA, CASSIE MCQUATER CAJSA VON ZEIPEL 20
Carl Andre: Aluminum Sum Ten (2003), Art Basel in Basel, 2015 [Top]; César: Un mois de lecture des Bâlois (1996), ART 27 in Basel, 1996, by Kurt Wyss [Bottom]
BEGINNINGS
June 18 – 21, 2020 BEGINNINGS
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on Glamour and Sleaze Chris Kraus column:
THIS PAGE Reynaldo Rivera, Gaby, La Plaza, 1994 Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles
RIGHT PAGE Reynaldo Rivera, Ms Alex, 1993 Courtesy of the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York/Los Angeles
Text by Chris Kraus
It’s the third Saturday in January and I’m book on his work, Reynaldo Rivera at Reynaldo Rivera’s house looking at – Provisional Notes For A Disappeared pictures of the long-disappeared worlds City. Reynaldo took these photos of Los Angeles drag bars … dank clubs three decades ago for himself and his with names like La Plaza, the Silverlake friends, but soon other people will look Lounge, Little Joy and Mugy’s that at them, too. He’s planning shows at offered live shows between the late Gaga & Reena Spaulings Fine Art Seventies and early Nineties. gallery and Centro Estatal de las Artes These clubs, Reynaldo tells me, in Mexicali, Mexico, and his work will were mostly frequented by LA’s gay be shown early this summer at the male Latino community at the time. Hammer Museum’s biennial show, Reynaldo and I have been friends for Made in LA (7 June to 30 August). a long time and I’ve seen these All of Rivera’s silvery black-andpictures before. Many of them are white prints evoke an impossible burned into my brain because I’ve glamour made even more potent by written about them for a forthcoming its aspiration. Glamour and danger…
the makeshift stage of a dive bar becomes a conduit for an illusion of perfect beauty. In Yoshi Mugy’s (1995), a middle-aged Japanese man wearing a blonde wig and tiered floorlength taffeta dress poses in front of an unseen audience on the dirty black-and-white checkerboard floor of the Mugy’s stage. The club is clearly a tiny hole in the wall, with small cluster wood tables and chairs around the makeshift stage. Oblivious to the cheap cascade of white Christmas lights and the tattered New Year’s banner hung over the stage long after New Year’s, Yoshi channels
BEGINNINGS
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some kind of Southern Gothic American beauty, the Civil War South as depicted in David O. Selznick’s Gone With The Wind (1939). All of these different eras collide, and Yoshi tilts her head back to bathe the left side of her face in the light. (The other side of her face, hidden in darkness, has a terrible scar that she got when a trick sliced her cheek with a knife.) Glamour, Reynaldo tells me, has to do with the perception of danger. There couldn’t be glamour without restrictions. And what is allure without danger? It’s something you want to have but you can’t… In his new book, Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories and Essays (2020), the co-founder of the New Narrative movement (a fiction trend which began in the Seventies, striving to represent subjective experience), writer Bruce Boone, talks about glamour and sleaze as "masochist doors that open onto another world". He asks: could they be the world of the spirit? “Think about it,” he writes. “For whatever reasons – environmental catastrophe, political decay, infrastructure collapse – don’t you really want to identify with some kind of FAILURE more and more often these days, and in the process turn your back on stupid images of SUCCESS? … The ghetto serves as a place of refuge from exterior violence directed against gay people, a place of relaxation.” Unlike La Plaza and the Silverlake Lounge, most of the Mugy’s performers were Asian. The club, Rivera recalls, “was very low budget. You can see that in the photos. There was just a little stage. But unlike the Latino drag bars where everyone was trying to look real and pass, the girls at Mugy’s were more about pushing boundaries. They had a very different way of viewing themselves and what they did. The La Plaza girls, a lot of them came from these small Mexican towns where on Sundays, the girls from the rancho would come down with their white patent leather shoes. The polka dots and loud mismatched colours … the flashier the better.
These are the ways they were deluxe or glamorous. I know this because I come from one of these small towns. I saw this with a new filter when I came to LA, but you can’t run away from your own culture. “The Asian girls saw themselves more as performers. It was a whole different ball game, much more about art and illusion. Once, I asked one of the Mugy’s performers what he thought the difference was between them and the La Plaza performers, and he said: We don’t want to be housewives. The Asian performers took a lot more liberty in how they did drag, and they had so many influences. Yoshi would come onstage with Kabuki makeup and hair, wearing a flamenco dress and singing a Japanese song from the Fifties. It was a mishmash of culture. “When you look at the images now, the Mugy’s photos read as a much more recognisable form of glamour. And then I add my own layer, of course. I’m from LA, which is, for better or worse, the movie capital of the world. I think we grow up with a movie language inside our brain that can translate everything into something cinematic. It’s like, when you look at Cindy Sherman’s early work – those
images are completely invented, but they look like stills from movies you’ve already seen.” Glamour and melancholy. We talk about what’s become of some of these performers since he took these great photos of them. Drugs and street life took their toll. Many of them are no longer alive and some of them disappeared with shocking speed. Reynaldo remembers the words of a song, Arráncame la Vida (Spanish: ‘tear this heart out’), by the Afro-Mexican singer Toña la Negra: Arráncame la vida Con el último beso de amor, Arráncala, toma mi corazón, Arráncame la vida Y si acaso te hiere el dolor Ha de ser de no verme Porque al fin tus ojos Me los llevo yo.
On LA photographer Reynaldo Rivera, whose images captured the inside of LA’s drag scene in the Eighties and Nineties BEGINNINGS
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The New York-based poet and Sour Heart author Jenny Zhang recalls growing up as an outsider in the Nineties and her attempts to channel the constructed glamour of her childhood pop icons I learned about ‘girl power’ before I knew what power was. It was like a candy necklace – meant to adorn, not to actually consume. My family couldn’t afford cable so I had my best friend, who was Taiwanese and lived an hour away, record three hours of MTV on a VHS tape for me. Everything I knew about pop culture was relegated to this one afternoon of programming that aired one day in 1996. The first music video I saw was of the Spice Girls’ Wannabe. I loved the archetypes – the innocent one, the glamorous one, the sexy one, the sporty one, the wild one – all the ideal categories of womanhood in one super-girl group. It wasn’t exactly empowering, but it was energising. I wanted to wear glittery hot pants and babydoll dresses and platform boots and stilettos and, most of all, I wanted to be someone who got invited to the kinds of places where I could show up dressed like that and be stared at in the good kind of way. I had been stared at plenty of times, but it was always in the bad way. My first year of high school, I was boyish and underdeveloped. Most people I passed in the hallways at school made a point to let me know I was ugly – obscenely so. It didn’t help that I was Chinese in a mostly white neighbourhood and wore vintage dresses from my mother’s closet. Like many outcasts living in the suburbs in the late Nineties, I got into alternative music. Later, I would renounce all mainstream music and declare myself a Punk, but in 1997, my attempts at impudence were confined to listening to a cassette tape of No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom (1995). I especially liked that song where Gwen Stefani dressed up like a boy and sang, “I’m just a girl / all pretty and petite”, because it was something to aspire to. It was meant to be a feminist anthem in the vein of girl power, but I listened to it longingly. Wouldn’t it be nice to be the kind of girl men wanted to take care of? To be possessed by love, I thought, was to be free. Long before she sang about badly wanting to be a wife, Gwen’s signature style was a cropped ‘wifebeater’ with her name stitched out in rhinestones. She often wore her platinum dyed hair in victory rolls, a hairstyle that resembled the exhaust rolls World War Two fighter planes left behind in the sky. In the Forties, this look was popularised by Hollywood pinups as a show of patriotism, as well as by women who had to enter the workforce during the war and needed a practical way to keep their hair away from their faces. She often paired her throwback victory rolls with Sporty Spice-style track pants. A girly-girl who could throw down with the guys – the ultimate pinnacle of femininity. At some point, I roped my best (and only) friend – who lived an hour away – to make an MTV-style variety show. I wanted to call it We’re Just Girls!. It would air weekly and feature skits centered on the trials and travails of two outrageous girls navigating
BEGINNINGS
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BEGINNINGS
the world of boys, fashion and school. Our theme song was, naturally, No Doubt’s I’m Just a Girl. We set-up my father’s camcorder on a tripod and danced hyperactively while wearing virginal little girl white undershirts that revealed our soft bellies, and lowslung baggy cargo pants that only emphasised how unfit we were for physical combat. I tried to stitch my name, ‘JENNY’, with pink thread on my white tank, but ran out of space at ‘JEN’. It was better, I reasoned, to rhyme with ‘Gwen’. We were going to do a whole bit about why people called these white tank tops 'wifebeaters', but quickly got more invested in this sketch about a teenage girl with terrible eyesight who mistakes a literal toddler for a teen heart-throb and is so lovestruck that she absent-mindedly crashes a truck on her way to prom with her best friend in the passenger seat. As the two girls lie in a ditch, slowly dying, the girl with the terrible eyesight reveals that she can die happy because she met her soulmate. Her best friend informs her that he was, in fact, a three-year-old boy. This was what made us laugh. We had nowhere to go with it. When I was a teen, I just assumed Gwen Stefani was five years older than me, but looking her up now, I see, in fact, that she’s a whole decade and a half older than me. All that time … a woman in girly drag. She was then what I am now. Nowadays, it’s easier for young people to record themselves, to channel all that sublimated creative energy into a product for consumption and share it immediately with the world. Scrolling through Instagram now, I see nothing has changed. Reading a long caption about how beauty standards are harmful and bullshit from a conventionally beautiful woman creates the same cognitive dissonance I felt when I was a teen: that yes, everyone is suffering… but still, it is received differently coming from a woman so pretty and petite.
Jenny Zhang’s new book of poetry, My Baby First Birthday is forthcoming from Tin House Books in May 2020.
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OPPOSITE PAGE Video stills: Diane Guais, courtesy the artist
Just a Girl
Text by Jenny Zhang
As the German artist’s latest flight-inspired sculptural exhibition opens in London this spring, writer Laura Havlin explores Isa Genzken’s decades-long obsession with the relationship between leisure, travel, commerce and the inertia of modern life
This Is Not An Exit
Text by Laura Havlin
Although it may seem like it today, Instagram did not invent the vacation travel brag. People have arguably been using photography to show off about their holidays since the invention of the camera. The work of the late American photographer Slim Aarons typifies this. His iconic images captured aspiring mid-20th century celebutantes reclining on white yachts and by the poolsides of mansions for LIFE Magazine, way before individuals self-published their similarly-themed snaps on the grid. Nevertheless, the photo-sharing app has democratised the phenomenon and given rise to ‘flex culture’, the currency gained on social media via other people’s views and likes. Today, flex culture has introduced a new factor into the consumer choices of millions: outfits chosen based on how they pop in the feed, vacations selected on their photogenic backdrops. Subsequently – and as if it barely mattered where you went at all – your holiday transportation became something to #humblebrag about, too. If you don’t have private jet money, there are companies you can pay to take photos aboard a grounded plane, or you could, as one UK reality TV star is rumoured to have done, simply push through the curtain to first class for a quick snap before moving to your allocated place in economy. By the turn of the last decade, a sea-change in public attitudes to luxury lifestyles began challenging the moral compassses of people dropping geotags from five-star resorts, festivals, skiing trips and biennales like breadcrumbs. Last year, while Greta ThunBEGINNINGS
berg sailed the Atlantic, celebrities were periodically ‘cancelled’ for their international flights, especially less energy-efficient private jets, indicating a shift in thinking around travel. As a result, American economist Thorstein Veblen’s influential 1924 “leisure class” theory – the idea that under capitalism, status is attained through conspicuous consumption – seems less able to explain the relationship between power and wealth in today’s society. Although German artist Isa Genzken has spent the last five decades exploring travel, commerce and the architecture of global society through sculpture (especially assemblage), her latest exhibition, Window – currently on show until 2 May in London at Hauser & Wirth – feels especially timely. The central piece of the show is an installation featuring elements of an airplane’s interior. The untitled work is a model, not a readymade – but it might as well have been. “I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a readymade, it could be one,” the artist told Wolfgang Tillmans in conversation in 2012. “That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality.” In Genzken’s sculpture, the set-up is not luxury; it is plain, unbranded standard-class seating. But even in its most budget iterations, air travel is an elite activity, undertaken most regularly by the world’s most affluent people. The windows, mostly closed, offer no real view outside. Here, focus is drawn inward to the mode of travel; where we’re 26
headed or what we might see is unknown. Despite the show’s title, this scene feels intentionally oblivious to what lies beyond the grey portals. The idea of ‘mode of travel as destination’ is present throughout Genzken’s work. Her 2000 show at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Urlaub, (German: ‘vacation’, a reference to the holidays taken by 19th-century white-collar workers), featured photographs onboard the luxury yacht of a well-known publisher, as well as images from inside a plane looking out through the window, this time onto an indistinguishable cloudlike space. In a catalogue essay for Urlaub entitled ‘Longing for Other Places’, German art historian and curator Vanessa Joan Müller discusses the liminal spaces that exist en route to a holiday destination, remarking: “The trip out of the city to the longed-for journey’s destination first often leads to places such as train stations and airports, which are diametrically opposed to this goal: urban non-locations that function like transit zones reduced to directional vectors. In addition, the journey often goes through anonymous transit zones that embody a certain ‘elsewhere’.” This sentiment seems to encapsulate much of the German artist’s output. Windows are a repeating motif, which often literally frame Genzken’s ideas. The very title of her latest show, for example, also echoes the artist’s 1992 Chicago exhibition, Everybody Needs At least One Window, a show comprising free-standing concrete structures suggesting various openings and interiors. BEGINNINGS
Travel and commerce have also long been in dialogue throughout Genzken’s work. A previous London Hauser & Wirth show in 2015, Geldbilder (German: ‘money pictures’), featured foreign currencies, tourist maps and lifestyle magazines. Elsewhere – and true to her assemblage approach – the three collage-based scrapbooks that make up her artbook I Love New York, Crazy City (1996) are pieced together from photographs, flyers and other found objects, assembled into a kind of personal, impressionistic, DIY city guide. Channelling lived periods of intense cultural significance in Germany and New York, Genzken has always presented the porous messiness of personal experience alongside cleaner sculptural work that seems to give form to more universal ideas. Images in photos and collages gain momentum and take three-dimensional shape. Like the architectural structures that punctuate her work, it is as if the rumination upon an idea expands into the clarity of consciousness and becomes concrete. The focal point of Window manifests in precisely this way, while its origins, which can be traced like familial DNA throughout the decades that Genzken has been making art, gesture to something more omnipresent. Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2018 Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galerie Buchholz Cologne / Berlin / New York. Photo: Todd White
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Text by Angela Waters Interview by Salma Haidrani
Hussein Chalayan, AW2000 Photo: Chris Moore
Hussein Chalayan Returns
After 27 years of combining technology and fashion, the designer who gave the world coffee table dresses, LED skirts and collections made from decomposing fabric is teaching the next generation of garment makers how to make sustainable clothing BEGINNINGS
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When it comes to fashion, it’s fair to “We have a long way to go to say Hussein Chalayan is an expert. His make fashion more sustainable than it 1993 graduate collection, ‘The Tangent is now,” Chalayan says. “The damage Flows’ – which alluded to the it is having on the environment and trigonometry concept of curvature the speed at which we are producing and featured silk garments that had it at is problematic. Do we need all of been oxidised and decomposed from this clothing? Shouldn’t we be designmonths of being buried in a garden – ing longer-lasting clothing? Timeless sold in its entirety to London design would increase sustainability. department store Browns, and There are ways of designing that remains an important part of fashion could be better, not just in the produchistory. Building on the success of his tion of fabrics or the use of sustainaunusual fabric processing technique, ble fabrics.” the British/Turkish-Cypriot designer While transforming the garment has established a name for himself in industry from being one of the world’s fashion over the last 27 years by biggest polluters – creating approxiintegrating technology and offbeat mately 13 million tonnes of waste per concepts into his designs. Now, he’s year – to an ecologically sustainable challenging traditional approaches to business is something the fashion garment making to teach a new industry is desperately grappling with, generation of fashion students at Chalayan is a strong believer in Berlin’s Hochschule für Technik und setting lofty goals where even a Wirtschaft (HTW), AKA the University partial realisation can be a huge of Applied Technology . success. “A lot of the time I tried to go “People may look at the technifor the impossible and make it cal side of HTW and think it is not possible,” he says. “The ideas are creative, but the course is really about often starting with unachievable how technology and creativity go things, but if there is a percentage of hand in hand,” Chalayan says. The success within that idea, it can still be three-year posting will be his second worth it.” teaching position after a five-year stint Chalayan recognises that his at the Institute of Design Vienna, students are faced with different where he headed up the fashion hurdles than the ones he faced when department. The idea of teaching starting his career. “You could count design at a university with a reputathe brands showing at London tion for excellence in engineering and fashion week on two hands,” he says. computing feels natural to Chalayan, “There was much more room for who studied at London’s Central Saint designers. I was part of a group of Martins in the early Nineties, an creatives, alongside the Young British institution famous for its diverse Artists like Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin teaching and methods. and Damien Hirst – they started Following this, Chalayan swept around that time as well. In hindsight, the industry off its feet with his runway it had a lot to do with the recession combinations that combined style after the Eighties that made room for and tailoring with technology and big this – people were excited.” ideas. Both his Autumn/Winter 2000 The ubiquitous presence of coffee table skirt and the LED-lit social media is another crucial Swarovski crystal dresses he sent difference between now and the mid down the runway in Autumn/Winter Nineties. While it’s been credited for 2007 earned him fame as one the democratising fashion by making it most original and innovative designeasier for smaller designers to reach ers going. Nevertheless, today his an audience, Chalayan feels the main interest is in helping his students instant feedback people receive can follow in his footsteps to make the sometimes hamper creativity. Albusiness more sustainable. And while though he recognises its potential he believes that fashion does not when used correctly, he often sees it have to be political, the 2.3 trillion euro dominating people’s happiness. industry that surrounds garment “We live in a very conformist era,” he production makes it exactly that. says. “The younger generation is very
concerned about fitting in, being liked or noticed. Social media can be a bit boring, because people are not happy if they are not followed enough.” Growing up in a Cypriot household, Chalayan learned to value the humour and humility that comes with close family bonds, cherishing the contrast between being a celebrated designer in London and the strong structure of Mediterranean family. It is part of the reason he looked forward to working as part of the team at HTW, where every faculty member brings a different expertise. “It is not only about me, but the team that I am a part of,” he says. “It is very nice that the students voted to have me as part of their course – there is a mutual interest. The position is very much about how I could help them and how to work as part of a broader team, because they are all specialists.”
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Hussein Chalayan SS2020 Photo by Guillaume Roujas
A critical Tbilisi LGBTQ+ fashion voice
OPPOSITE PAGE Photo: Tornike Aivazishvili
Grace Banks: The inspiration for your Spring/Summer 2020 show was Marylin Monroe, why her? Akà Prodiàshvili: The collection itself featured Eighties-inspired formal wear, it had very dramatic shapes. It was very poetic and strong, but sad at the same time. This was inspired by the death of Marilyn Monroe at home in Los Angeles. [Her] death was mysterious for me and I was always interested in her. Also, for many, she is a gay idol. GB: Your shows often feature a marriage scene, why? AP: Marriage is a political statement in my collections. I’m saying that everyone should have the right to marry, not just straight people. My second show was all about gay marriage.
The Georgian designer Akà Prodiàshvili on Marilyn Monroe, drag queens, same-sex weddings and how he is combating homophobia in Tbilisi with fashion Text by Grace Banks
Akà Prodiàshvili has a special place in his heart for Marylin Monroe. “Marilyn Monroe's death always felt very mysterious for me and I’ve always been interested in her,” the Georgian artist and fashion designer told me during our meeting last October at fashion week in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. “At the same time, she is a gay idol,” he says. The intersection of glamour and LGBTQ+ identities plays an important role in Prodiàshvili’s creativity. Since he started presenting his collections at Tbilisi Fashion Week in 2018 – an event renowned for nurturing new designers – he’s BEGINNINGS
become one of the most outspoken fashion designers for LGBTQ+ rights, famously showing drag looks on the catwalk to make new connections between gender, politics and identity. This is particularly brave considering attitudes to homosexuality in Georgia are still sometimes extremely hostile. Despite the country’s progressive laws – since 2014, it has been illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of gender or sexual orientation – in November last year, hundreds of people gathered in Tbilisi to protest the opening of And Then We Danced
(2019), a critically acclaimed Swedish-Georgian film about a gay love affair. None of this, however, has stopped Prodiàshvili. His Spring/ Summer 2020 collection in Tbilisi Fashion Week featured a tribute to Marylin Monroe and took a critical look at ideas of gender, taking apart what we’ve previously seen as male and female, even hosting a samesex wedding as the crux of the show. A key player in the Tbilisi fashion scene, Prodiàshvili is working towards one mantra: “I believe that change will happen.”
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GB: In what way can fashion be part of the resistance against attacks on LGBTQ+ people in Tbilisi? AP: What I’m doing in my country nowadays is related to certain difficulties – part of society is still thinking in a Soviet mentality, and you cannot introduce new ideas to people so quickly. Change takes time, and it is crucial to watch and observe the public, how they change, how open they are with new things. The receptiveness must be slowly with love, kindness and not with aggression and violence. The Georgian LGBTQ+ community has a great deal of work to get people out there. At the moment it is very hard, people are beaten, assaulted, LGBTQ+ people are having problems in everyday work life, in the hospital, at work, in the bank … I believe that change will happen, but undoubtedly it will take some years. GB: I have heard your clothes described as ‘drag’. What does this word mean to you? AP: While people were oppressed on homophobic grounds, the drag queens were the ones who always supported them, and generally they have contributed a lot to raising the visibility of LGBTQ+ rights. For me, topics such as human rights and minority rights are very important. I like the visual aesthetics of drag queens, and it tells me a lot. Drag queens are all about expressing their desires and experiences. BEGINNINGS
GB: Which drag queens do you admire? And why? AP: I love Violet Chachki, I admire her charisma and uniqueness, and we both love Dita Von Teese :) GB: I noticed one of the models at your show was carrying a gun on a tray. I also saw a lot of shops selling handguns in Tbilisi. Are there many gun owners there? AP: Actually, we do see a lot of people carrying guns in the city, we hear a lot of people killing themselves or shooting, which is very sad. A gun is a demonstration of power for some people and a signal of ‘I am stronger than you’. GB: What were you trying to say by including a gun? AP: The main requisite of this show was a gun, the character of a maid brings the clean gun from a fictional hotel room and we will never understand who was the killer, they will tell whatever story they want us to believe. Is it not what happens in real life? GB: Lady Gaga wore your dress last June, how did that feel? AP: Lady Gaga has been always my idol, I admire everything she does, so it was amazing to see someone you’ve admired for years wearing the piece you created. GB: Is it easy to run a fashion business in Tbilisi? AP: The fashion business is very new in this country, and thanks to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi and [its director] Sofia Tchkonia, the visibility of Georgian designers has grown, and buyers and the foreign press are more interested in us. Some brands are already very commercialised, and we see Georgian brands on top retail platforms such as Net-aPorter, Browns Fashion, Dover Street Market, and so on.
there should be a place where you will learn it, at least theoretically.
GB: What would you like to see in the Tbilisi fashion scene in the next five years? AP: A lot of talented young designers have become popular in Georgia already, and I would be happy to see someone as a creative director of some famous fashion house. After Demna Gvasalia, Georgia has become a melting pot for the press and buyers. It is also important to note that Georgian models are highly active during the fashion weeks worldwide, and we see them walking for the famous fashion brands, which is great for our industry. GB: What was the last thing that had a big impact on your design process? AP: This is hard to explain, I have met a lot of people and undoubtedly they have inspired me. Every time I create a collection there are different inspirations. For example, the Spring/ Summer 2019 collection inspiration was a butterfly, the Vanessa atalanta [English: ‘the red admiral’], it reminds me of my childhood. But mostly, I take inspiration from the gay and drag queen scene, as you can see in all the collections. Also, a lot of mystics and romantic books and movies for sure. GB: What inspires the aesthetics in your shows, the tailoring, the approach to gender... AP: A lot of observation on people and impressions, living without family and the past, everyone I met during this life, love and complications are forming my aesthetics. I am still on the way to finding myself. It is the protest against the society I live in and everything I went through that has helped me to form something concrete and provided the way to finding myself.
GB: What do you think would help you to make fashion production more successful in Tbilisi? AP: Good education first of all, there should be good schools in Georgia where professionals will graduate and help businesses become more successful. Fashion is very new in Georgia and we have learned everything from our experiences, but 31
Nodaleto: Almost Famous The cult shoe brand founded by designer Julia Toledano and creative director Olivier Leone, inspired by high modernist principles, Legally Blonde and Monica Geller
Text by Angela Waters
Even if you don’t know the brand by name, you’ve probably seen them around – their tapered square toe platform and distinctive trapeze block heel make them hard to miss. At first glance, the boots look like they could be vintage pieces from Twiggy or Jane Birkin’s closets in the Sixties or Seventies, but they’re actually from Nodaleto, with the shoe created by 26-year-old Julia Toledano. Although the footwear designer – who previously studied law in Paris – wasn’t even born before the closing party of Studio 54, she founded the label in 2018, influenced by two things: firstly, her nostalgia for mid-20th-century art like abstract Israeli sculptor Yaacov Agam and Danish interior designer Verner Panton, and secondly a shameless appreciation for the pop culture media that defined her adolescence. “I am a huge, huge fan of Friends,” Toledano BEGINNINGS
gushes. “You can’t even imagine how many times I’ve seen it. I also grew up watching every episode of Sex and the City. All of these TV shows are in my blood.” While she may have an encyclopedic knowledge of Nineties and Aughts teen movies – including scenes featuring her favourite Prada and Jil Sander moments – she is unwilling to let herself, or her collection, be defined as shallow. If you ask her, she’ll tell you with the same joy and admiration about the reference points she takes from modernist architects such as Pierre Koenig, who built the iconic Stahl House overlooking the Hollywood Hills. So while some of her creations, such as those boasting burnt orange velvet and lavender satin, reflect the style of Toledano’s screen idols, the clean minimalist lines and balanced geometric shapes are inspired by her taste in architecture. Much like Reese Witherspoon’s 32
fashion-fixated Harvard Law school student, Elle Woods, in Legally Blonde (2001) – one of Toledano’s favorite films – despite the boxes society likes to put people in, an appreciation for pop culture does not preclude a person from also possessing intellect. You can recount exactly what happened on yesterday’s episode of the American soap Days of Our Lives (1965) and be comfortable with legal jargon, so to speak. “You have a right to like Friends,” her business partner Olivier Leone says. “Just because you like these TV shows doesn’t mean that you can’t also like the edgiest artist from the latest exhibition at MoMA. These days we feel that fashion divides the world too much into two parts. You can be both.” It isn’t surprising that a generation that is bucking antiquated labels and stereotypes gravitates to this type of thinking. This versatile philosophy is also fitting for a shoe brand that walks the line between creating distinctive footwear and everyday shoes – a chord they seem to be striking as their trapeze heels have already become a favourite of fashion’s tastemakers, such as influencers Camille Charrière and Blanca Miró Scrimieri. “It happened at the right moment,” Leone explains. “Girls these days wear a lot of sneakers. They are looking for a shoe that feels good. This is an idea that we always tried to keep in mind.” To create a heel with streetwear comfort, the team turned to a production facility in Italy that specialises in heel construction. As for the idea to emphasise comfort, he credits this to Toledano, who started her career as a fashion journalist running between interviews and shows, longing for a shoe that she could wear all day. “It was a selfish project in the beginning,” Leone adds. Toledano grew up on fashion. Her father, Sidney Toledano, is now the CEO of the luxury group LVMH, but while Julia was young, he worked for Christian Dior, a time in which her family acquired an impressive personal collection of items from the maison. Although the block-heeled Mary Janes Toledano affectionately refers to as her “babies” are a far cry from her mother, Katia Assous’ lace-up stiletto Dior boots, they instilled a love of footwear in Toledano. “The only sad part is that I never got to inherit any of my mother’s shoes because she’s a size 40 and I’ve always been a 36,” the designer says. While going into the same industry as her family comes with high expectations, Toledano makes no secret of the privilege that growing up in a fashion household has had on her extremely quick success. Having learned a thing or two about the business as a young adult, she made the choice to enter the market with a statement shoe. “Nowadays, when you have so many designers, you either go statement or you don’t make anything at all,” she says. “You can recognise our babies from a distance.” Whether it is because they bring to mind a nostalgic reference you can’t quite put your finger on, or because you’re familiar with Nodaleto’s sharp lines – they’re hard to miss.
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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE Photo: Valentin Giacobetti
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TOMMY KHA
Tommy Kha, Boyz, Williamsburg, 2018 Courtesy the artist
Text by Kathryn O’Regan “If there’s pathos there also has to be humour in order to understand basic human experiences,” says Memphis-born and New York-based photographer Tommy Kha on the themes at play in his work. This tragicomic dynamic, with its roots in Greek drama, is present in much of the Yale-educated photographer’s work to date. His photographs, which deal with themes related to family, trauma, intimacy and representation, are closely connected to his family’s immigrant status (his family are originally from China; his mother was born in Saigon), and work as an artistic practice because this playfulness more often than not operates as a segway into dark or melancholic ideas. This tension between sadness and comedy can be seen in his ongoing series Return to Sender (2010–), which was exhibited last autumn at New York’s LMAKgallery. The photographs show Kha being kissed by a string of strangers (over 140 at the time of publication), and draw forth a stream of ideas all tied to the act of kissing, including desire, visibility, intimacy and vulnerability. “The idea of kissing is a very defined image – it is a specific image in one’s mind. I guess I really challenged myself. Having other people kiss me, and then having them see the series altogether and how differently people kissed me, motivated me to keep going,” says Kha. The series is strange and stoic, beautiful and sad, lonely and funny, all at once. Through the humble act of the kiss and the accompanying hand and body gestures of Kha’s collaborators, the individual’s relationship with intimacy and desire are exposed; all the
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Tommy Kha, Sheepshead II, Los Angeles, 2018 Courtesy the artist
THE PHOTOGRAPHER INSERTING HIMSELF INTO DOMINANT SOCIAL NARRATIVES THROUGH CUT-OUTS, FAMILY PHOTOS AND AN ENDLESS STREAM OF KISSES
while Kha is blank and cooly receptive to their tender touches, dramatic grasps and passionate squeezes. “I didn’t want to react in the images because I didn’t want desire placed on my body. I wanted the kisser to be in charge of how they want to look,” explains Kha, with regard to his intentionally detached demeanour in Return to Sender. In this way, both the kisser (the strangers) and the kissed (Kha) maintain their own sense of agency. This exercise in power and control is an ongoing issue within Kha’s work in general. While Return to Sender received
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some criticism for perpetuating Asian stereotypes – namely, that in Western cinema, Asian men are rarely given a chance to be romantic or sensual – Kha, acknowledging that these critics “weren’t wrong necessarily”, says for him it was “enough” to be the director, photographer and to continuously work on this series over a long period of time. As a queer Asian man growing up in the American South, the representation of marginalised communities has always been at the front and centre of Kha’s work. “In America right now, the conversation is very much about expanding ‘the narrative’ so that people are creating these kind of stories with people who look like me or people of colour or queer people or everyone who has been marginalised or hasn’t been heard. It’s starting to change very slowly,” he says. As a child and adolescent, Kha remarks that he didn’t see many people who looked like him, which was isolating. Resultantly, a response to this lack of community and representation has understandably found its way into his work. His latest series, Facades (2019–), for example, involves the insertion of a cardboard cut-out of his own face positioned over other people’s bodies. “When I’m photographing my cut-out image, it’s a way to control the way I’m depicted,” he says. For Kha, perhaps the most poetic and powerful of all his subjects is the one in his recent book, Soft Murders (2019). Deriving its name from a Susan Sontag quote, “to photograph someone is a subliminal murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad,
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frightened time”, the tome is a personal photographic investigation into family trauma. In 1998, Kha’s aunt was murdered, and Soft Murders employs the model of a family photo album in order to unravel the inherited impact of this disturbing event. Kha was initially inspired by his mother’s photography after she gifted him a photo album three years ago. “I was really astounded by her straightforward and funny self-portrait work, even though the images had the quality of a family album. I felt like there was something about them that made me want to know more about my mother and at the back of my mind, my aunt’s murder, too,” he explains. The book contains a repurposed selection of his mother’s work alongside photographs that they made together, many featuring cut-outs of his face, as in Facades. By recreating his own version of a family photo album, albeit one heavy with a distressing backstory, Kha was able to work through aspects of his personal history for himself. “I didn’t have a lot of photos of myself as a child and I think that of my family members also. So, I’m trying to collect [their photos] and maintain the imagery of them through my own hands.”
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AN ‘EXTREMELY ONLINE’ OUTSIDER AND INTERNET ARTIST, MCQUATER EXCAVATES THE ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL MEDIA TO TELL PERSONAL STORIES CHALLENGING THE MALE-DOMINATED CULTURE OF VIDEO GAMES
Text by Alexis Ong Cassie McQuater makes video game art about memory which, through her fervent reinventions of old console material, creates fresh new visions focused on the portrayal of women. “I’m very interested in both fantasy and memory and specifically, the place where they intersect inside of ourselves,” the Detroit-born, LA-based artist explains. “We tend to remember things how we want to remember them, especially if we are talking about generational memories, family stories. Facts and fictions blur after a while, creating lore.” Lore is the backbone of McQuater’s best-known work to date, the 2019 Nuovo award-winning Black Room (2018), in which the player explores shifting states of sleep and insomnia in the form of a pointand-click dungeon crawler. Using old video game sprites (2D images or animations) from beloved titles like Secret of Mana (1993) and the Legend of Zelda (1986), along with
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a slew of fighting games and point-andclick adventures, Black Room – which is presented as part of First Look: New Art Online (2012–), an online exhibition series by Rhizome and the New Museum – is a surreal dreamscape of endless rooms, quasi-biographical thoughts and sensory delights. Mixed sound effects and surgically-precise loops of music work together to mirror the unearthly feeling of insomnia. With Black Room’s lack of combat and male gaze, it makes sense that McQuater’s approach to surrealism is nourished by a long line of women creatives. “Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Silvina Ocampo, Gertrude Abercrombie are some of my favorites,” the 32-year-old says. “Science fiction writers Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler are constantly by my side, too.” This women-centric theme shines through in Black Room, with various rooms focused on female characters. A room with
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THIS PAGE AND OPPOSITE Cassie McQuater, Black Room, 2018. Video game still. Duration variable. Courtesy the artist
CASSIE MCQUATER
the URL extension “lilith.html” features Darkstalkers’ (1986–) iconic succubus Morrigan, whose sister-like clone is named after the biblical character. Other rooms are dotted with alien combinations of objects, animations, backgrounds and more women – Cammy from Street Fighter (1987–), Babette from Beauty and the Beast (1991) or the X-Men’s Psylocke – that nudge the player to explore, self-soothe and reflect rather than command and conquer. “It’s not necessary for the player to be able to place every single character or sprite in order to feel [nostalgia],” explains McQuater. Simply wandering through Black Room is a temporally transportative experience. Her own story involved playing late-night console games with her grandmother, who suffered from insomnia. Black Room embodies how she deals with her own sleeplessness. “I often think of this type of work as collage… playing with the inherent emotional or physical qualities of those materials. It’s a memory game, a medium that can allow access into other parts of ourselves that we may have forgotten or overlooked, through recognition of the materials.” Carrington remains a key inspiration behind McQuater’s latest ongoing project, an idea “so far only visual in nature”, she clarifies. “They are videos and installations, not playable games yet, but made in video game software.” Like her muse, McQuater’s works feel made for an audience of one, creating intimacy and empathy with the player. And, like Carrington, McQuater is also interested in the intersectional link between gender, economics and production. The games industry, which overlaps with the worst excesses of chauvinistic, male-oriented tech culture, can be an oppressive place. Reinvention – a significant theme in McQuater’s work and philosophy – is a big concept in virtual reality, namely because of how the technology allows play-
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ers to inhabit another body or experience another world. But McQuater is understandably hesitant about exploring her work with new technology, especially given the cost of VR hardware in addition to the long, intensive production requirements. “If these resources don’t make it to the right hands, if they stay primarily in able, white, male hands, for example, who will be reinventing what?” she asks, highlighting a greater need for empathy over the fetishisation of new hardware. “Tech is skewed towards male users because most of it was designed by men, for men, but on the backs of women, I am always aware that this object in front of me, this computer, wasn’t made with me in mind, this video game wasn’t made with me in mind, the story in the machine is not concerned with me. And that’s where all of my work starts, from there I imagine what it would be like if it was somehow different,” says McQuater. On the upside, McQuater believes that the art world has softened when it comes to video games. “I only started making video games in 2014, so I am late to the cultural narrative around this,” she admits. Despite this, she is encouraged by the increasing popularity of non-violent, non-combative games that help push the artform. Treating video games as art comes at a price, however, namely when it comes to commodification and promotion. “Mainstream art galleries generally only care about showing work they know they can sell,” she says. “It’s going to become necessary to talk about this, about what that means for the distribution of the medium, about what that means as far as what the value of a game is. The art world is predatory, I want there to be another way for games to make it out into the non-gamer world.”
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CAJSA VON ZEIPEL
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Though she’s based in New York, von Zeipel is currently working from a makeshift studio in a garage about an hour outside of Miami, Florida. “It’s horse country, and we’re here because my wife rides horses. It’s also a really good working environment because I have basically nothing to do because I’m not at all a horse girl. I’m working on the next show in New York at Company Gallery, and it’s the best environment as I basically have no distractions.” So far, she has had two solo exhibitions at London’s Arcadia Missa (The Gossips [2019] and Insulting the Archive [2017]) and her work, including Seconds in Ecstasy, is part of the Gothenburg Museum of Art’s permanent collec-
tion, too. Her most recent exhibition, Furturistic Lesbian (2019), held last autumn at Stockholm’s Andréhn-Schiptjenko gallery, marked a shift from her signature figures in bright white plaster with a new infatuation: silicone. “I’ve always had it around the studio to cast stuff but one day I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is it.’ I love that it’s also a material that is basically the same as what people put in their bodies for real physical manipula-
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tion. It’s such a babe of a material, you can put pigments in it easily and it has a translucent, skin-like quality that I’m obsessed with,” she says. This use of colour marks a dramatic change in her practice. “I feel like colour is something that I really have been searching for. I liked how the white sculptures felt classical, but since moving to New York, I wanted something different.” Something that is still consistent is the mood of her new sculptures. “They are always fierce, there’s no fear in them, and all my sculptures are lesbians, of course,” she says of her female figures. “I feel like a lot of queer art is not on the femme side of the spectrum, and so I want to fill a hole there. What you’re allowed to do as a woman to be taken seriously, what youth means, what beauty means, and how that could be combined with standing up for yourself or feeling like a sexual being, is what interests me.” Futuristic Lesbian also includes work that incorporates found objects like clothing and jewellery from city streets, something that von Zeipel is keen to explore. After six years of living in New York, the place itself is finding a way into her practice. “I get a lot of inspiration from RuPaul’s Drag Race, and I always have my eyes open when I’m out – America is so visually different from Sweden,” she says. “I’m obsessed with shopping, and a lot of the things that are happening in my work nowadays is because I collect stuff like that. I’m fortunate enough to walk through the Lower East Side and Chinatown on the way to my studio, so I start my day bringing in objects that I could fit into my sculptures. I can’t wait to see what I
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find in Florida, I’ll be a nightmare for the TSA [the US Transportation Security Administration] with what I bring back in my suitcase.” Before she has to get back to setting up her new studio where she’ll be working for the next few months, she concludes, “Sculpture comes naturally to me, I’m very hands-on, and somehow it just, like, makes me understand things better. I’ve had a few times when I’m trying to make something within a square, trying to paint doesn’t make sense to me at all. All my work is done with a little wink, I’m happy with what I’m doing at the moment. I hope it lasts.”
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Cajsa von Zeipel, A girl is a gun, 2019 Courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko
As Cajsa von Zeipel’s sculpture Seconds in Ecstasy (2010) turns, you almost feel like you can see the monolithically-sized woman’s muscles twitch. This sculpture of a woman’s body made of white polystyrene and plaster is in constant movement: the figure grips a pole and silently spins, hair, legs and heels hanging. And at eight metres tall, it’s not just her size that commands attention; this sculpture – like all of von Zeipel’s women – is fearless. Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and now based in New York City, the 36-year-old is one of the most exciting sculptors working today, combining the stylistic notes of classical sculpture with ideas from contemporary debates on gender and identity politics. “When I started making my white plaster sculptures over 10 years ago, I felt like there was something that was missing. I wanted these fierce female figures to be seen in public. Before that, I used to work on large-scale installations, so the only limits were the dimensions of the room. For me sculpture is a really contained form of that,” explains the artist.
Cajsa von Zeipel, Après-Ski (detail), 2019 Courtesy the artist and Company Gallery, New York
Text by Bre Graham
Cajsa von Zeipel, I'm taking the kids, 2019 Courtesy the artist and Andréhn-Schiptjenko
CREATING FEMALE FIGURES USING PLASTER, SILICONE AND FOUND OBJECTS, THE SCULPTOR COMBINES CLASSICAL FORMS WITH GENDER THEORY
JEANS: Y/Project available at PARK Concept Store JEWELLERY: Model's own SHOES: Rani Bageria's
After a century of being sidelined for trainers and low-key footwear, heeled shoes made for men are enjoying a return to style - by way of Gucci, Dries Van Noten, Maison Margiela and more
TOP: Petar Petrov available at PARK Concept Store JEWELLERY: Stylist's own SHOES: Rombaut
HIGH STYLE
Photography: Manuel Haring Styling: Lorena Maza
SHOES: Gucci
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TOP: Dries Van Noten JEANS: LOEWE Both available at PARK Concept Store BELT: Louise Streissler available at Wolfmich SUNGLASSES AND JEWELLERY: Model's own
Text by Angela Waters
SHOES: Petar Petrov
High heels have drifted in and out of men’s fashion for hundreds of years – and now they’re back. From the calf-emphasising pumps of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, to the platform glam rock boots worn by Kiss frontman Gene Simmons, the heel is having a renaissance. Starting with footwear in 2018 collections by Rick Owens and Yves Saint Laurent, Damien Paul, head of menswear for luxury online retailer, Matches Fashion, has seen a “distinctive” increase in heel heights. Following nearly a century of flat-soled dominance promoted by the accessibility of sportswear, many men are returning to elevated shoes. The current iteration of the trend comes on the heels of the gender-fluid liberation of menswear courtesy of the trailblazers who weren’t afraid to reach across to the women’s section for pieces that suited their self-expression. When former Yves Saint Laurent creative director, Stefano Pilati, was snapped around the 2017 Pitti Uomo menswear fair in Florence wearing Maison Margiela’s split-toe eight centimetre Tabi boots, it was almost two years before the Spanish house made its six centimetre heeled men’s version. Pilati has since come out with his own range of heeled Worker Boots under his Berlin-based label, Random Identities. In fact, a growing number of menswear designers are adding centimeters to their shoes to meet the current demand. Whether it is a return to classic men’s styles like the stacked Cuban heel of Gucci loafers and Y/Project shoes, or the towering silhouette of the Rick Owens Kiss boot, it's safe to say, heeled shoes are here to stay.
SHOES: Rani Bageria's
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT: Kardelen Ari CASTING: Manuel Haring MODELS: Stane Aurel Banhi and Wirat Tengchiang HAIR STYLISTS: Vanessa Sitoe and Gilbert
TOP AND SHORTS: Raf Simons available at PARK Concept Store
SHOES: Maison Margiela
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FEATURES 46 ED ATKINS “I’VE “I’VE NEVER NEVER BEEN BEEN GOOD GOODAT AT JOINING JOINING IN” IN” 54 JENNA JENNASUTELA SUTELA SOUL, SOUL,MEAT MEATAND AND PATTERN PATTERN 50 LAURA LAURAMULVEY: MULVEY: AFTER THE MALE MALE GAZE GAZE 44
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Ed Atkins
He hates telephones, has a fixation for words and bases the disembodied men that populate his films on aspects of himself despite disliking his appearance. The enigmatic British video artist and writer Ed Atkins discusses the riddles and contradictions in his life and work following the publication of Old Food, his second collection of fiction
Ed Atkins, Old Food, 2017 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin
Text by Ed Cumming
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Ed Atkins prefers not to be interviewed on the phone, for many of the same reasons journalists prefer not to conduct interviews by email. “I hate the phone,” he says, by email. “Something about it feels mean, like a parody of presence. I also tend to say anything, I get nervous, will just say whatever to make it stop or make the person talking to me happy. It feels like duress. Email I get to shape it a little. Or not – I get to choose. I get to better mediate. Be less leaky.” Given his work, it is not a complete surprise Atkins is wary of phone interviews, anxious of what he might inadvertently reveal, even if it leads to brisk written answers and the occasional point of confusion. He is articulate about the art, more muted on anything personal, occasionally to the point of fragmentation or bluntness. (Sample question: “To what extent do you consider yourself a political artist?” Answer: “Yes”.) Many artists who insist on email do so to guard against misquotation or to give themselves time to express things as elegantly as possible, but Atkins’ responses are peppered with ums and ahs, a kind of half-conversational tone.
I’ve never really liked British stuff, being from BRITAIN, supporting anything BRITISH. I really like living somewhere I’m not from
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ABOVE Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin
LEFT Ed Atkins, Old Food, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin
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It is in part Atkin’s exploitation of this kind of tension – between what is personal and what simply has the appearance of confession – that has established the 39-yearold as one of Europe’s most influential video artists. In less than a decade, he has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, MoMA PS1, the Serpentine Galleries, Palais de Tokyo and Zürich’s Kunsthalle, among others. Most of his pieces feature CGI renditions of human heads – not unrealistic but not hyper-realistic – uttering mysterious sentences. Or, as Art News’ Alex Greenberger put it in 2016, Atkins’ videos feature “almost solely sad, babbling computer-generated men”. They are unsettling, melancholic works, imbued with the sense of something missing, but there is a romance to them, too, a kind of nameless longing. To what extent is human connection possible when it’s mediated by computers? Is this new, or simply a fresh expression of old ideas? “Help me communicate without debasement, darling,” says a floating head called ‘Dave’ in Ribbons (2014), a CGI cigarette hanging out of his mouth; empty CGI pint glasses behind him; “ass hole” written backwards, as if mirrored, on his forehead. Atkins writes a lot, too. He has published two collections of what could be described as short or ‘flash’ fiction, A Primer for Cadavers (2016) and Old Food (2019) (also the title of his 2017 exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau), both printed by London’s Fitzcarraldo Editions. The written word is inextricably bound to his CGI pieces, which often evolve with pieces of writing. While stopping short of being poetry, the language in the videos isn’t traditional narrative prose, either. Lyrical passages end abruptly. Both forms ‘show the bones’ of their creation, meaning the viewer is always aware of their artificiality. “Building up an animation for me is not that different from building up a sentence,” he told Global Investigations in 2018. Atkins was born and raised in Stonesfield, a small village in north Oxfordshire, his mother an art teacher, his father a graphic designer. He studied in London at Central Saint Martins and Slade, but now lives in Denmark with his partner and child. Misled by his Wikipedia page and a number of other gallery sources, I thought he lived in Berlin. “I don’t live in Berlin,” he explains. “I never really ‘got’ Berlin. That’s just me. I’m not particularly social or scene-oriented; I’ve never been good at joining in. I now live in Copenhagen, and that suits me and my partner and our child well, for now. I can’t currently imagine coming back to Britain. There’s a lot of other places I’d rather next land than home. It’s a pretty extraordinary privilege, to be able to kind of choose. I’ve never really liked British stuff, being from BRITAIN, supporting anything BRITISH. I really like living somewhere I’m not from.” There’s the echo of a Brexit anxiety in his capitalisation, but he doesn’t elaborate further, and in general shies away from specific political statements.
I never really ‘got’ Berlin. That’s just me. I’m not particularly social or scene-oriented; I’ve never been good at joining in
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Although his work has evolved, certain themes recur. He has acknowledged his debt to Sixties avant-garde American filmmaker, Hollis Frampton, but traditional visual art seems like the least important of his influences, especially compared to music, literature and even video games, which were part of his childhood. Indeed, video games have been responsible for the development of the CGI renditions Atkins has made central to his career. He says he still plays Hearthstone (2014–), the Warcraft-esque online game, one of his main sources of online distraction. (He also admits he pirates things, looks at the same websites “over and over and over” and searches his mentions for horrid comments.) Does he use strategies to spend less time online? “Ah, I used to use many more,” he says. “I’m lax, now. I guess I try to leave my phone out of the bedroom, read Jenny Odell, etc – but I used to use softwares to curb my access to the internet. Of course I want to be better.” His own body lurks behind the representations in his videos. Although his avatars are sometimes old men, sometimes young men, in different guises, they are always white and male; last year, he told SSENSE that “I am privilege.” I wonder about the extent to which his fascination with these representations, implicitly naked in his pieces, is related to a sense of disgust at his own appearance. In a 2017 interview with Dazed, he confessed that “the figures are sort of me, the moves are sort of mine”. The obvious development in the time Atkins has been working is the rise of the smartphone, through which images of our faces and bodies, and those of millions of others, are only ever a few seconds of scrolling away. “[My body] has always been a source of profound anxiety for me,” he explains. “I do not love my body, I do not love how I look. I don’t think smartphones and all that has affected this feeling particularly, except for the chance to encounter a photo of myself online more easily. Rather, my long-standing anxiety has found its contemporary techno-social corollary.” One consequence of working so closely with technology is that the Atkins has become hostage to its transformations. His pieces have often looked crude compared to the lifelike renditions we are used to in computer games or, for example, the reanimated late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). As CGI approaches photo-perfection, is there a risk that the work starts to feel too crude for the emotional subtleties it currently evokes? “A photograph is pretty easy [to achieve with CGI], I think. And sure, there’ll be some moment of a moving image being indistinguishable, too. Again, we’re probably already there. I’ve no idea what it means for my work. My work isn’t really that public or attempting such unanimity. I know the work will date very quickly / is already dated. That’s totally fine. I’m not really into thinking of my work lasting. That feels a bit nebulous, ambivalent. I think it’ll be attached to a moment and a person and psychology that’s always pretty specific.”
I know the work will date very quickly / is already dated. That’s totally fine. I’m not really into thinking of my work lasting
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Ed Atkins, Old Food, 2017 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin
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LEFT AND BELOW Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Berlin
He describes his relationship to the art world as, “Sullied, repulsed, wary, grateful, exhausted, alienated, professional”, which acknowledges that, for all its difficulties, it has been good for him. He has said that it was the only place that would let him explore his various interests in the way he has, and it has been generous to him. Hans-Ulrich Obrist called him “one of the great artists and writers of our time” in the blurb to A Primer for Cadavers. The impression one gets is that he finds the contemporary art world frustrating, but is also astute enough to realise that an Obrist quote might sell a few books, and that the contemporary art market has provided him with a platform for challenging work, and greater rewards than he might have received elsewhere. He is “currently working on pieces for a show at the New Museum in June. But I can’t really say more than that. Long distance, another book, this one about going down. A feature film, I hope.” I wonder what has become more important to him as he’s grown older. “Ah, um. Longer forms? Literature? Concision, of a sort, in some places. It’s become a little more important to ’fess up to employing intelligible discourse predominantly to afford the space – secret, protected – to conduct more occult practices.” Watching Ed Atkins pieces, the viewer is assailed by what’s not there: the sense of unspecified loss and yearning, the lack of a real face despite the lyrical language. It makes sense that the artist, sitting behind his computer, would try to make space for himself, too.
It’s become a little more important to ’fess up to employing intelligible discourse predominantly to afford the space – secret, protected – to conduct more occult practices
Ed Atkins, Neoteny in Humans, 2017. Videostill. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
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Jenna Sutela, Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language), video still, 2017. Courtesy the artist Jenna Sutela, A Many-Headed Reading, 2016. Courtesy the artist
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Working across film, performance and installation, the Berlin-based Finnish artist incorporates shapeshifting slime moulds, algae blooms and machine learning algorithms into her practice to foster a new understanding of the world, where humans, cellular forms and the spiritual interconnect
Text by Gary Zhexi Zhang
Jenna Sutela:
Soul, Meat
and Pattern
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The work of Berlin-based Finnish artist Jenna Sutela could best be described as a quivering blob of molten chrome, cellular matter and cyborgian detritus, its random convulsions threatening to burst at any moment. Epitomising this is her 2018 sculpture, Neither A Thing Nor An Organism. Apparently named after a passage on metallurgy from Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s French philosophical magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the 36-year-old describes the reclining lump of ectoplasmic metal as “polymimetic alloy pond brain, two chrome amorphous blobs with a head and a gut emerging from them”. Her forms recall the T-1000 of James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi classic, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, a shapeshifting android assassin which adopts the form of things it touches by replicating their molecular structure. In ‘Biophilosophy for the 21st Century’, American contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker argues that “there have only ever been three approaches to thinking about life: soul, meat and pattern”, a view Sutela’s work seems to share. Combining lively matter with ghostly machines, her films, sculptures and installations examine the increasingly porous boundaries between all three. This proximity between head and gut, a recurring motif in the artist’s projects, also recalls the writings of Georges Bataille, the Gallic post-war philosopher of l’informe (formlessness), whose surrealist cult, the Acéphale (from Greek, akephalos, headless) was symbolised by a decapitated man with his guts on display. Another example is Sutela’s video Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language) (2017), which alludes to the origins of life on Earth (and therefore culture) in mulch and germs. The piece uses the fermentation of a kombucha ‘scoby’ (a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) as a random number generator. In turn, this process creates Sutela’s nam-shub, a poetic text inspired by an ancient Sumerian incantation (which prominently featured in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, a possible source of inspiration). The result is a sputtering of alien vocals accompanying diaphanous letters floating around a bacterial soup. Like Bataille, who argued that humanity’s essence is defined by its big toe, not its brain,
BOTH IMAGES Jenna Sutela, Neither A Thing, Nor An Organism, 2018. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Damian Griffiths
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Sutela’s generative poetry suggests that consciousness is formed deep in the humus. This mix of the spiritual and the biological is typical of Sutela’s work. An upcoming exhibition opening in April at Tank Shanghai, More More More (摸摸摸), uses living moss and edible algae to ‘write’ on the gallery’s walls using a ‘Martian’ language invented in the 19th century. Originally, this supposedly alien script was ‘channelled’ by the French medium Hélène Smith, but here it is generated by a machine learning algorithm. In a related video, nimiia cétiï, installed at Somerset House in 2018, Sutela interprets Smith’s Martian tongue using her own voice, as well as the movements of Bacilus subtilis, a bacteria that scientists believe has the potential to survive on Mars. The artist speaks of “making art that surpasses the human realm, and thinking about the bacterial realm as an audience”. Indeed, her subjects and interlocutors are more often single-celled than mammalian, and have so far included slime moulds, algae blooms and water bears. Inspired by science fiction and often working with laboratory researchers (she is currently working with microbiologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), her artworks feature a diverse cast of microfauna that emerged aeons before us, and will continue to inhabit the planet long after human beings are gone. As the boundaries between ‘things and organisms’ blur – particularly in the age of synthetic biology, with programmable cells and advanced forms of artificial intelligence – it increasingly seems as though we exist ‘outside’ of ourselves, peering in. Recent novels and films preoccupied with the ‘xeno’ – the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider – have begun to address this. These include: the alien visitors of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) starring Scarlett Johansson; Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) – based on Ted Chiang’s sci-fi novella ‘Story of Your Life’ (1998) – and Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 Southern Reach trilogy of novels, the first of which, Annihilation, was adapted as a film directed by Alex Garland in 2018. These disturbing narratives tend to displace the centrality of their human protagonists, undermining our belief in rational order and natural selection – stories from our hard-earned Enlightenment that have long consoled us. Sutela, too, is interested in channelling the language of the idea of the Other in her work. Until 10 May, she will be participating in Genders: Shaping and Breaking the Binary, a group exhibition at Science Gallery London. Following this, she will be showing at the Liverpool Biennial (11 July to 25 October), this year dedicated to the body and its relationship with the world. Moreover, her art arguably enacts a critical function, questioning the fragile foundations of human rationality, observing that we have neither a monopoly over intelligence nor consciousness. Her practice is poetic and often playful, foregrounding ethical questions of how to live, not only with other human beings but with other ecosystems. Referencing what the American art historian Caroline A Jones calls ‘symbiontics’ – the need for a more interconnected understanding of being – Sutela says she is interested in “developing a culture that’s based on interspecies symbiosis rather than the ‘survival of the fittest’ narrative”. In a series of work beginning with From Hierarchy to Holarchy in 2015, Sutela staged exhibitions and performances using the ‘many-headed’ slime mould Physarum polycephalum as her agent and guide. Physarum is a yel57
low slime that has long beguiled biological researchers with its ability to make complex decisions and solve spatial problems. As Sutela says, “I am fascinated by Physarum polycephalum because of its amorphous body and collective mind – it has been called a natural computer.” Resolutely single-celled and brainless, it is nonetheless able to self-organise through the decentralised interactions of its many nuclei. While it lacks neural matter, its slimy trace acts as an externalised memory, a figurative kind of ‘autobiography’. In From Hierarchy to Holarchy, Sutela placed Physarum inside a plexiglass labyrinth in the shape of an organisational diagram which the mould navigated in order to find food. Sutela’s interest in the organism has led her to researchers from Turku to Tokyo, spored across exhibition spaces in London and Berlin, and, at times, performed ‘through’ her in ‘many-headed readings’ prior to which she ingested a little Physarum. “I imagine that its hive-like behaviour is programming my own,” she says. For Sutela, Physarum offers a stark contrast to the problems of organisation, both technical and sociological, which have plagued human history. With a little less hubris, Sutela seems to suggest, there is much that we could learn from slime. In I Magma (2019), a multimedia project co-commissioned by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and London’s Serpentine Galleries that closed in January, Sutela created a series of glass lava lamps in the form of her own head (her upcoming exhibition, No No Nse Nse, 4 March to 3 May at Kunsthall Trondheim, will present photograms based on this series). Glowing globules of molten wax drift through them, creating totemic energies. The lava’s movement is used to generate fragments of premonitions in a corresponding mobile app of the same name. Reminiscent of the popular personalised horoscope app Co-Star, Sutela describes the I Magma app, created in collaboration with the American poet and programmer Allison Parrish and the Turkish artist Memo Akten, as a “machine oracle” which generates daily divinations using AI trained on literature from the Internet Sacred Texts Archive. While the app by itself can feel a little ephemeral, the cryptic daily premonitions it delivers are surprisingly affecting, casting their own ambient spells on the day. Examples include: “You are not a one”; “Our veins have been the different channels”; “It is written from the mooned net”; and “Early reign, the lunar goddess”. ‘Lava’ was famously first used as a random number generator in Silicon Valley in the Nineties, and later developed by the San Franciscan online security firm Cloudflare in 2017, who designed the Wall of Entropy, an FEATURES
assembly of 100 lava lamps whose unique molten forms are employed to model unbreakable internet encryption codes. While Cloudflare used its lamps as a source of mathematical unpredictability, Sutela says she is “looking for signs of pattern and meaning in the randomness”. It is poignant to note, in an era of ubiquitous computation, that true randomness – a ‘language beyond language’, so to speak, here embodied in the movement of one liquid inside another – remains one of nature’s most potent resources. Chaos theory emerged via the image of pollen grains dancing on a droplet of water. That molecular ‘noise’ – the random movement of particles in liquids or gases – was first observed by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827. Deemed unfathomable until later developments in thermodynamics, it seems a useful way to consider Sutela’s work, too. As a system of order and disorder, her art is comparable to Brown’s chaotic idea of noise. By channelling patterns of fluid single-cell forms and the spiritual presence of artificial intelligence, she opens up the possibility of an encounter with other beings who have been ‘in the room’ all along: our cohabitants, symbiotes and other ghosts in the machine. In conversation, she says that the urgent concerns of climate change and her new baby have bolstered a desire to address her work to non-human forms of community: “I’m feeling very human animal right now ... I want to represent a certain era and a certain species in the best possible manner.”
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LEFT Jenna Sutela, From Hierarchy to Holarchy, 2015. Photo: Mikko Gaestel
THIS PAGE Jenna Sutela, I Magma, 2019. Courtesy the artist
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Laura Mulvey Text by Chloe Stead
After the Male Gaze Photography by Alexander Coggin
Nearly half a century after coining the ‘male gaze’, British feminist theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey returns with a new book tackling trends in women’s cinema – and why critics of her influential term have often missed the point FEATURES
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“If you’d have asked me in 1975 if I would ever become an academic I would have looked at you in total amazement,” says Laura Mulvey. Her modesty, however endearing, is misplaced. As the UK’s pre-eminent voice on women in cinema, the 78-year-old film theorist and experimental filmmaker has more than earned her status as one of the country’s most important feminist writers, directors and speakers. It’s been 45 years since Mulvey first made a name for herself with the publication of her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in which she famously coined the term ‘the male gaze’, a concept which argued that female characters in mainstream cinema were almost exclusively presented from a male perspective. It’s also been 14 years since the release of her last book, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. While the latter essay collection largely moved away from an early interest in the representation and sexualisation of women on screen to examine how spectatorship changed with the advent of digital technology, Mulvey’s newest collection, After Images: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times, published last October, returns, according to the book’s introduction, to her “longstanding preoccupation with women in film, their histories, their stories, their images”. It couldn’t come at a better time. From Greta Gerwig and Melina Matsoukas to Patty Jenkins and Olivia Wilde, in the past few years there’s been a surge in films by female directors that prioritise the lives of girls and women. “Female filmmakers have recently been emerging as a real presence and force in film culture,” says Mulvey, speaking over the phone from London. Although her tastes skew in the direction of art house cinema – Mulvey herself co-directed numerous influential experimental films between 1974 to 2014 – After Images isn’t intended for a strictly cinephile audience. “The main thing I wanted was for it not to be restricted to a kind of ‘textbooky’ academic audience,” Mulvey explains. Although she discusses female directors throughout After Images, they come to the forefront in a section entitled ‘Time Reborn – Women’s Stories, Women’s Film’. Here, in essays dedicated to legendary directors such as Chantal Akerman and Julie Dash, Mulvey eloquently writes that “when women make films, cinema mutates in their hands and through their eyes”, an inclusive view which suggests not that there is an essential ‘woman’s cinema’ per se, but that “‘women-inflected cinema’ can take up topics or perspectives hitherto neglected or simply not imaginable by a male-dominated culture,” as she argues in the book’s introduction. Some might understand this as tacit support for the ‘female gaze’, a term championed by a younger generation of feminists as a response to the male gaze, but Mulvey is dubious of the expression that she has come to be associated with. “I think it’s important that artists in society are going to take [my work] on,” she says. “But I definitely take the position that there is no binary opposite ‘female gaze’. The critique of the male gaze was that it was a position of power and that the object of the gaze was oppressed by the power that was imposed on it. I don’t see why any feminist position should just be the inverse of that.” Instead, Mulvey says she is interested in finding “stories and experiences that resist being told through that rather simple lens”. Part of the problem, according to Mulvey, is that the essay in which she first raised the issue of the male
gaze – originally written in 1973 during the height of second-wave feminism – was only ever intended as a single-issue manifesto. As such, at times it strikes a polemical and sometimes reductive tone. One of the biggest issues with the essay was that Mulvey, unable to resist writing something that “people would be rather shocked by”, ignored the role of the female spectator in cinema completely. “Calling the spectator ‘he’ and not explaining why was a key concept, but I never thought it would get me in so much trouble,” she jokes. “It still comes back to haunt me after nearly 50 years!” Her solution to this and other issues that have come up since she wrote the essay – ‘Visual Pleasure’ is also criticised for ignoring the role that race plays when talking about women in film – has been to include an afterword in After Images that takes the form of a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ segment. Highly readable, the FAQs update Mulvey’s writing for millennial and Generation Z feminists. In an age of so-called ‘cancel culture’, they also offer a way of looking at problematic classics written far before the invention of the internet, which can now be shared, read and reacted to at a pace their authors could never have imagined. Much has changed since Mulvey first invented the term male gaze – a term, she points out, that only appeared once in the essay – and for younger readers like myself, the most exciting parts of After Images are the ones that show the ways the original concept has been deemed null and void by progress made by intersectional feminist activists over the years. “Certainly,” she writes in response to a question about the impact of new technology, “the spectator of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ has given way to infinitely more complex, and ultimately playful, ways of relating to the screen. And on the screen gender images are now, in some kind of synchronicity, also more complex, more flexible and more playful than the spectatorial straightjacket I wrote about in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.” The initial idea for the FAQs actually came from conversations with a couple of younger readers of Mulvey’s work, her son and granddaughter. “[They] were quite keen for me to do something like that and I thought it was a really good idea,” she explains. “It’s a way of bringing a conceptual pattern [to the book], and also a way of recognising one’s own history, but recognising
I actually don’t know how to use Instagram. It’s only when I have someone in their mid-teens near me that I say, ‘oh, could you put this picture up for me’ that I manage to do it
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I just think this obsession with self-image is another way in which the society of the spectacle can actually take over and infect people’s imaginations and their daily lives … All of these things contain a kind of illusion of self-empowerment because they’re all part of these enormously powerful and complex industrial systems the society of the spectacle can actually take over and infect people’s imaginations and their daily lives,” she says, referring to the concept by French philosopher Guy Debord critiquing our image-saturated media culture. She is also sceptical of how radical any act can be that takes place on an app owned and run by huge multinational companies like Facebook. “All of these things contain a kind of illusion of self-empowerment because they’re all part of these enormously powerful and complex industrial systems,” she tells me towards the end of our conversation. Her assertion mirrors a similar statement in the FAQ section of After Images, where she warns that during a time of “rapidly advancing commodification of the digital” our attempts at self-empowerment are akin to “supping with the Devil”. Rather than simply reappropriating the male gaze to our own ends, Mulvey suggests that women have a second option. “I was particularly interested in how women’s ways of looking could be seen as curiosity rather than eroticism, and wanting to know and wanting to see with the mind’s eye rather than just the eye,” she says on her writing about female filmmakers. Despite Mulvey’s harsh words on social media usage among younger generations, After Images ultimately strikes a conciliatory tone, offering an olive branch to the feminists and film lovers who have grown up picking holes in – but also gaining inspiration from – her early work. Cinema, when told through the eyes of women, Mulvey suggests, can unite us. As she writes in the book’s preface: “The ‘afterimage’, evoking the lasting nature of the image left on the eye by the impact of the real, is in After Images a metaphor for women’s use of cinema to offer, not simply to women but to everyone, stories and images thought through this poetic and political film-making.”
that it’s a past history and it’s not going to continue ticking over forever.” In that vein, Mulvey sees the book as a new beginning; something that draws a line under her decades-long work on the representation of women, exemplified by characters played by actors such as Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly in Hollywood films of the Fifties and Sixties. “I just felt that I’d finished with the topic,” she says. “It couldn’t go on.” As well as film, the male gaze – and its inverse, the female gaze – are also trending on Instagram. Mulvey herself uses the app, but much like grandmothers everywhere, her actions are limited to communicating with her family. “I actually don’t know how to use Instagram,” she laughs, “It’s only when I have someone in their midteens near me that I say, ‘oh, could you put this picture up for me’ that I manage to do it.” Seeing the widespread popularity of these apps has caused her to worry about the “pernicious” effects of phone use on her family, and young people in general. “[There are] teenagers who just hold onto their phones and a look of total panic comes over their faces if they’re separated from them for just a moment. I sometimes wonder if it’s a new form of phallic panic or phallic substitute or something like that,” she says with an uneasy laugh. While admitting that her age might colour her attitude to social media (“It’s just another world,” the theorist confesses), Mulvey doesn’t buy the suggestion that selfies can be a form of empowerment. “I just think this obsession with self-image is another way in which FEATURES
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p68 Victoria Sin p74 Narcis sister A new generation have completley changed their attitude to glamour. No one cares if you dress up now or thinks it negates your intellect and status. Glamour is a tool for some, a way to be a person that you cannot yet articulate with words, for others it’s another way to express intellect. For many, it’s still an unwanted expectation; for others, it’s used to expose the double standards in contemporary beauty and for a few, it’s art. RESEARCH
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p80 Clifford Prince King p 88 Eliza Douglas RESEARCH
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Victoria
Sin “I’m trying to break down the binary of thin king and fe eling”
Photography by Nhu Xuan Hua
Styling by Lorena Maza
Text by Lola Olufemi
The multimedia, multifaceted artist exploding the artifice of white femininity and critiquing established notions of language and identity using film, photography, drag, sci-fi, fanzines and Cantonese opera RESEARCH
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SHIRT AND NECKLACE: Christian Dior UNDERWEAR: La Perla SHOES: Western Affair
Victoria Sin is trying something new. I meet the 29-year-old Canadian-born artist – known for their use of performance, film and speculative fiction to deconstruct the limits of the body – at the studio they share with their partner and collaborator, Shy One. They make their living as an artist in London, widely recognised for their distinctive approach to questions of identification. In recent years, they have exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada, the Hayward Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, the 2019 Venice Biennale, Palais de Tokyo, the Serpentine Galleries, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Art Basel Hong Kong, the ICA, Block Universe and the Tate Modern, among others. For Sin, queer kinship and community birthed their practice; it offered a myriad of alternative possibilities and new ways of being. At 18, they moved to Lon-
don, attempting to escape the naming and policing of their body, a theme that recurs throughout their work. “Drag shows were the first time I saw this empowered embodiment of queer femininity … I used to live across the street from Vogue Fabrics in Dalston, London. The community there allowed drag to be whatever you wanted it to be. That was new for me, I was used to more traditional drag shows dominated by cis white men performing an idea of womanhood back in Toronto. When I moved to London, suddenly drag was dressing up like a green monster, or a bin bag.” Queer nightlife in London provided the opportunity to play, a space where ‘weirdos’ could experiment. Having been obsessed with the artifice of Western femininity, Sin sought to burst it open by using drag to pick apart the fantasy image of femininity that dictates gendered social scripts. “If you were assigned female at JACKET: Versace JEWELLERY: Artist's own
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birth, or you present as feminine now, you’ve been measured against an ideal image of femininity … Growing up, every image of femininity was skinny, white, cookie cutter. I was obsessed with that and old Hollywood versions of it. A lot of my early drag was trying to attain this ‘moving goalpost’ ideal of Western femininity. I was trying to embody and explode this image of white femininity, to say, ‘Look, I can do it and it’s not real.’” Sin’s art is seductive. Their fantasy images – contained in works such as Preface/Looking Without Touching (2017) and She Postures in Context (2018) – invite you in, exposing the mechanisms that shame and police non-normative desire. Their work explores the failure of heterosexuality: the audience is made aware that what they are viewing is an elaborate construction, but Sin demands they grapple with their attraction to fantasy. “The sexuality in my work didn’t occur to me until people started pointing it out. There is something that has to do with the fact that I am a person who was socialised as a woman, who is also attracted to femininity. Do I want to be this image or do I want to fuck this image? That’s a big question in dyke culture, and a complex relationship to navigate.” But the fantasy also had very real consequences for how Sin moved through the world, demonstrating further that the body is merely a way to be read, providing safety and disguise for some, and proximity to violence for others. “In a Western context, the way I am sexualised is also racialised. That’s a disgusting feeling. For me, it was eye-opening to be able to become this fantasy embodiment because suddenly people didn’t know what was underneath. People would assume I was a cis white guy and they started treating me differently. I was in clubs and people would move out of my way.” In an increasingly reactionary and hostile environment in which gender binaries are being reinscribed and trans life presented as a threat, Sin’s work helps us understand the fluidity of gender and the elaborate ruse of identity, illustrating how easily the body is able to morph and transform. The defining quality of Sin’s work is constant reinvention. In line with their intention to disrupt and confuse normative processes, they refuse singular and categorical approaches to their practice. Their interests have always been multiple, and this is demonstrated in the breadth of their artwork. They are many things at once: a visual and moving image artist, a drag performer, a curator, a zine editor and a speculative fiction writer. The interdiscipliary nature of their work is evidenced by the fact that it can be found in DIY nightclubs (Sin has performed at many queer and lesbian nights as a drag queen), emerging feminist literary festivals such as London’s New Suns festival, as well as immersive live performance pieces in established art contexts – the Venice Biennale, the Tate and Sotheby’s, for example. Sin is a shapeshifter and as their artistic practice has developed, so have their interests. “Recently, I’ve been moving away from trying to be this perfect embodiment of Western femininity. I’ve done that. What do I want to do now? I’ve been exploring the way drag exists in Catonese opera, reimagining the visual language and aesthetics of what a queer sci-fi Catonese opera would look and feel like.” Intensely aware of their audience, they refuse to “perform ethRESEARCH
In a Western context, the way I am sexualised is also racialised. That’s a disgusting feeling
HAIR STYLIST: Tomomi Roppongi @ Saint Luke Artists using EVO Hair SET DESIGNER: Paulina Piiponen PHOTOGRAPHER ASSISTANT: Anna Sophia John STYLIST ASSISTANT: Pierre Alexandre Fillaire HAIR STYLIST ASSISTANT: Charles Stanley
TOP AND SHORTS: Prada SHOES: Artist's own
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nicity” for a white-dominated art world, seeking instead to denaturalise the language of identity, revealing it for what it is, a pattern, a code. In If I had the words to tell you we wouldn’t be here now (2019), an extended performance staged at the Venice Biennale as well as Tapei’s Chi-Wen gallery, Sin lip syncs to their own musings on the limits of linguistic expression (they call language and naming “an act of mastery”). “I keep on coming back to langage in my performances and in my writing, I’m running in circles with it a little bit. There’s an impossibility of deconstructing language using language, but what other tools do we have? Our brains function through pattern recognition, so categorisation is inherent in language. I’m trying to figure out the ways we can transcend how language makes us think of ourselves in the world.” We agree that the density of the English language and its violent histories make it impossible to articulate the process they are trying to describe. In order to describe it, we’d need to invent new methods of communication. For Sin, in the absence of that articulation, feeling serves as a means of conveying what could be. Feeling is evoked in their elaborate creation of immersive environments. In And at the pinnacle the foot of a mountain (2019), a 23-minute soundscape presented last autumn at Sheffield’s Site Gallery, Sin attempts to rewrite the future through the use of futuristic storytelling animated by atmospheric sound. “Sound has its own kind of language. It’s a language that doesn’t need words and that rubs against categorisation. It’s able to express emotion more fluently than language can. I’m trying to break down the binary of thinking and feeling.” Sin’s desire to help their audience escape reality is a result of their interest in science fiction as well as their desire to unravel the dominant narratives that define the way we live. “People like Ursula le Guin, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler … They are the people I always come back to. The most important thing for me is that science fiction can ask the question, ‘What if?’. What if things were different? What if I was different? What if things don’t change? That science fiction can
do this and also immerse you in an experience of what it would feel like to live in that world is vital when we’re living in a world where man-made narratives are altering our minds every day in really violent ways.” They consider their practice to be a continuation of a science fiction legacy. This interest led them to edit science fiction zines Dream Babes 1 and 2.0, inviting authors and artists Samuel Delany and Shu Lea Cheang, Xia Jia and Sophia Al-Maria to contribute. Critical science fiction allowed them to develop new ideas, defining the purpose of performance. “These performances where there are costumes and narratives and sound design and lighting design … I’m trying to use every theatrical device at my disposal to try and give you an idea of what it feels like in this world that I want to make and be in.” Sin believes that science fiction can also help us talk about and think through sex. Inspired by the work of director Eric Pussyboy and artist Shu Lea Cheang, whose 2017 film, Fluidø, imagined a post-HIV/AIDS future, Sin sees the potential for science fiction to combat and abolish the biological essentialism that plagues our understandings of gender, nature, pornography and desire. What’s next? Sin is busy preparing for a performance at the Guggenheim in New York later this year, and is excited about the new direction their work is taking. Whether drag performance, moving image, soundscaping or science fiction storytelling, their work demands to be witnessed. “It becomes incredibly important to understand the process of narrative-building as it exists around us in history, religion, science, the news, and then to write new narratives. Writing speculative fiction is that one extra step, I know that all of this isn’t real. So I’m just going to write the narratives that I want to be in.” They invite us to recognise the narratives that shape our lives, and begin to unravel them.
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FaceVal ue
Narcissister:
Text by Kathryn O'Regan
In 2011, the American performance artist who goes by the name of Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent before a judging panel comprised of Piers Morgan, Sharon Osbourne and Canadian comic Howie Mandel. Grainy YouTube footage shows the artist emerging onstage in a fairy princess-type cobalt-coloured cloak to the formidable opening chords of Beethoven’s 'Fifth
Symphony'. She swings and spins around the stage, unclips the cloak, gracefully falls to the floor and pulls her body upwards into a handstand. Beethoven somehow segues into Diana Ross’ disco classic, 'Upside Down'. Her clothes transform into a frilly tumble of petticoats and bloomers, both sides of her head bizarrely concealed by an eerie Barbie-style mask. As the performance comes
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ALL IMAGES: Narcissister, Marilyn, 2016. Digital Video Still. Courtesy the artist
A member of New York’s underground performance circuit for over a decade, masked Californian artist Narcissister stages visceral and subversive stripteases, challenging ideas concerning femininity, race and glamour
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to an end, she glances towards the floor, her fringe coquettishly falling into her eyes. And in that instance, doll mask or not, her coy expression looks real. For a performance artist whose work is built around the premise of wearing this uncanny mask (ordinarily just concealing her eyes, nose and cheekbones), the question of what is real and what is illusory is of major significance. A member of the underground New York performance art circuit since the late Aughts, Narcissister (whose real name is Isabelle, although she prefers to remain anonymous) started to wear the mask in 2007 as a means to create art that could communicate ideas of what it means to be a woman, an artist and a person of colour, without commenting on what she refers to as the “narrow confines” of her own personal experience. Working first as a dancer in New York, she started to support herself with commercial projects, styling window displays. “I realised I could combine my work life with my visual art which was about identity and exploring womanhood and the body and race,” she explains. Meanwhile, the name ‘Narcissister’ (an obvious reference to perhaps contemporary culture’s greatest flaw – narcissism – but also to her being a woman of colour, or a “sister”, as she says) derived from a similar impulse. “I needed to move away from dealing with my own personal experience and my own faith, and so I knew if I picked a different name and wore a mask, I could make statements that were much more broad,” she explains. “For me, wearing a mask makes the work surreal.” In an epoch defined by the phenomenon of what Jia Tolentino referred to in The New Yorker last December as ‘The Age of Instagram Face’ – the ubiquity of a technologically-engineered (through apps like FaceTune and ultimately, plastic surgery), uniform and cyborgian beauty among women – the idea of a woman wearing a mask as part of her professional artistic persona is not all that different, or even strange, by comparison. One is a mask in a literal form, and the other, just a mask by other means – fillers and injections or gleaming filters, a sheer veil of digitally-rendered, poreless skin. Narcissister’s shape-shifting performance art orbits around the artifice of identity, particularly femininity. While she assumes a mask to conceal her face, her body is mostly naked apart from the addition of garters, suspenders and a merkin. A number of her performances involve the motion of pulling clothing items and objects from her orifices, and take the form of a visceral re-interpretation of striptease or burlesque. Her work frequently encompasses the tropes and signifiers of a typically feminine form of glamour, one with its roots in old Hollywood: pearl necklaces, fur stoles, long hair, high heels and lingerie. In this case, it is a stirring DIY juxtaposition
One of the first posters I acquired to decorate the walls of my bedroom as a young teenager was of Marilyn Monroe ... I recall being struck by what my mother told me at the time about the truth of her beauty – how fabricated it was
between socially-prescribed feminine pageantry and a sort of gross-out, carnal spectacle. For her, the erotic aspect of her work allows her and her audiences to “access boldness and personal freedoms in whatever forms that might take”. One of her signature performances, Marilyn (2016), operates on this strangely abject plane. Wearing an icewhite, peroxide-blonde wig in reference to the Hollywood siren, Narcissister enacts a reverse strip tease by gradually dressing herself through garments pulled out of her vagina. The performance illustrates many of the defining concerns of her practice, of femininity and beauty, glamour and artifice. “One of the first posters I acquired to decorate the walls of my bedroom as a young teenager was of Marilyn Monroe, even though I knew virtually nothing about her or her work. I just found her to be so glamorous,” she remembers. “She was beautiful in ways I certainly was not, but aspired to be. I recall being struck by what my mother told me at the time about the truth of her beauty – how fabricated it was – and also how troubled she had been. None of this was conveyed in the beautiful image of her in the poster! It’s no surprise she came up in my work both as someone to revere and to complicate.” The same premise of reverse striptease is seen in the performance I’m Every Woman (2009–), where she dances naked to Chaka Khan’s titular track. Amusingly, the performance cropped up in a 2012 episode of the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, with Jennifer Saunders’ hedonistic Edina suggesting that she and her friend – the even more off-the-rails Patsy, played by Joanna Lumley – go and see one of Narcissister’s shows. “She’s a kind of crazy disco performance artist; she pulls things out of her pussy on a rotating platform singing ‘I’m Every Woman’,” explains Edina. But while Edina’s description emphasises the outlandish humour that is no doubt an element of the performance artist’s work, it’s not the full story. In fact, Narcissister’s practice has emerged out of a rich history of performance art and photography. This heritage arguably begins with figures like French Surrealist Claude Cahun, who Narcissister refers to as a “heroine” of hers, continued in the Sixties and Seventies through the work of radical feminist artists such as the late Carolee Schneemann (who died last year, and whose work was the subject of a panel discussion featuring Narcissister at Art Basel Miami in December). Later, in the Eighties and Nineties, this combination of practices found its highest articulation in the staged photography of Cindy Sherman. Narcissister – who is set to perform at the Centre Pompidou in March, and has a residency at Artport gallery in Tel Aviv in the summer – considers her work to be
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a “homage” to these artists. “I would like to think that I’m a modern-day version of that kind of work. I’m an heir to that lineage,” she says. Narcissister references Schneemann’s Interior Scroll performance in particular as a longstanding inspiration of hers. The influence is obvious: in the 1975 performance, held as part of the group show Women Here and Now in East Hampton, New York, a naked Schneemann extracted a derogatory review of her work by a male critic from her vagina. Narcissister does, however, ackowledge that historically the feminist art canon was “overwhelmingly white” – “I take on their mantle but make it more relevant for today and also more relevant to me as a woman of colour.” The daughter of a Sephardic Jewish mother from Morocco and an African-American father, Narcissister – who grew up in La Jolla, California and studied Afro-American studies at Brown University before earning a scholarship to study modern dance at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre in New York – says she has “always been aware of the malleability of gender and race”. In a performance like Upside Down on America’s Got Talent, the metamorphosis of identity is explored through dramatic costume switches and playful theatrics, but this is just one example of a constant desire to investigate the fluidity of identity and the possibilities allowed by that in her work. “To me, there’s something that’s very freeing about not staying fixed in any one identity,” she says. “And I think I understand this very much from my own experience – feeling the complexity of identity within me … I can tear away this identity that I’m embodying in costume-form so quickly, so swiftly and then suddenly I am someone else. I can be a man and I can really feel the power of that, and then I can be a beautiful blonde woman – the kind that I felt oppressed by growing up in Southern California – and I can revel in that, in feeling what it’s like to be this beautiful blonde woman and then I can tear her away. For me, it’s just very liberating.” The assumption of multiple, changing identities has a long history within feminist art, with artists like Cahun and Sherman probing the artifice of femininity through masquarade. But Narcissister’s work, following this lineage, illuminates how the donning of masks and the appropriating of archetypes is not just a way to emphasise the set of socially-constructed codes and visual spectacles that constitute femininity. On the contrary, it also
shows how masquerade can be a source of subversive power for those who identify as female. In her autobiographical 2018 film, Narcissister: Organ Player, the artist states, “[I could look] at myself more deeply as a character with a mask than I could without it”. For her, the reasons for wearing the mask are twofold. On the one hand, it operates as a mirror: “Whatever the audience’s thoughts or projections are about her [Narcissister] are reflected right back at them. It is a strategic tool,” she says. And on the other, the mask has provided her with a shield with which to protect herself and to create the sort of provocative, charged art she has always wanted to. “I knew from the beginning I wanted to make work that was overtly erotic, and the mask protects me while I am doing that work that would otherwise leave me feeling very vulnerable, afraid or exposed.” Narcissister: Organ Player, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival (this year, the artist presented a short called Breast Work at the event), untangles how her complex family history, and particularly her intense relationship with her mother (whose death in 2012 the film poignantly describes), compelled her to create the character of Narcissister. While she knew that her alter ego allowed her to explore spectacle, humour and eroticism, the artist was surprised to learn what a comfort the character of Narcissister would be through times of grief and loss. “There are no limits to what I can explore as that character … Through her, I can also embody some of life’s heavier themes and moments. That’s what ‘no limits’ means to me in my work.” At the end of the film, Narcissister swims naked underwater to scatter her mother’s ashes. As the credits roll, Candanian musician and fellow performance artist, Peaches, sings over a glittering electro beat: “I’ve got light in places you didn’t know I could shine” – a poetic reminder of everything that Narcissister is about.
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FAR LEFT COLUMN: Narcissister, Man Woman, 2007 Photo: Tony Stamolis COLLAGES: Studies For Participatory Sculptures, 2018 Collage Selections, 2015 FAR RIGHT COLUMN: Narcissister, Marilyn, 2016 Digital Video Still All images courtesy the artist
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Clifford Prince King
OPPOSITE PAGE Clifford Prince King, Haircut, 2019 All images courtesy the artist
“I guess it’s the way that we try to make ourselves feel good”
Text by Clifford Prince King
Casting his lens on his close friends to express tender moments of blackness, queerness and beauty, the self-taught LA artist and photographer gives his personal take on glamour RESEARCH
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Boys in Pearls, 2019
Communion, 2019
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A lot of my inspiration comes from films, cinematography and the quietness of moments that you don’t really take note of that are beautiful. City of God (2002) is a really beautiful film that really changed my perspective in terms of cinematography and storytelling. Kerry James Marshall is a really great painter who I love. He tells stories that are within the black community often within poor apartment complexes, and uplifts black experience to make it glamourised but with notes of poverty and struggle within the art itself. I think glamour is a kind of idea that we have in our heads, that makes something that we do everyday which doesn’t seem glamorous, but from the outside looking in it is something that we do to make ourselves feel better. And when we see it outside of ourselves, it is the little things that we do everyday to make ourselves feel like we are beautifying ourselves in the best way we know how, whether that’s
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applying a layer of shea butter onto our skin or, you know, the gloss on our lips, the pearl on our earring. I guess it’s the way that we try to make ourselves feel good. I hope my photos convey the feeling of being seen, like an idea that there is a lot of beauty surrounding us, and just to take a minute to really invest in the people that are around us, and the things that we do daily to make ourselves feel better. Just little things that we don’t see that other people do see, and that is beautiful, I suppose. A lot of the things that I am taking photos of are things that we see all the time, but once you highlight it and boost up that specific image and pinpoint it with people that we want to see in it – with people that we do admire versus people that we see in the magazines – that in itself can be self-validating and create something that is of more importance within your community and within yourself. 84
Untitled (Heels), 2020
Poster Boys, 2019
Most of my work is about expressing sexuality and furthering my understanding of blackness within people my age in the US, and about queerness – this kind of navigating and figuring out our place in the world through a visual diary of the everyday. Most of it is pretty ongoing. It’s almost documentary style. I capture moments from within and they progress as I progress within life. The majority of the people in my photos are friends, pretty close friends. Depending on the photograph, some of them are strangers that I’ve met through one-time interactions, but mostly close friends, or people that I’ve reached out to, and we’ve talked about blackness and try to create images that we wish to see that we don’t often see. My favourite of these images is probably the one with the boys under the blanket. I was shooting a film and then I took a photo as well. They are two really good friends that are in a relationship, and it was just really beautiful to capture that image because it’s not really traditional as far as portraiture. I feel like I tried something a little different. A lot of those photos are very special in their own way. A lot of the time we don’t really see black bodies – black gay men – in a glamourous viewpoint, so I try to put my lens towards that, or highlight those moments that seem very glamourous on people who don’t really get that light very often. With Boys in Pearls (2019), it’s very contrasting – I’ve done the same thing with milk: the white of the milk and the pearls against dark skin. I think that in itself tells a story as far as what is allowed for us to hold as a race. I piece together things that are around my room that seem striking to me visually. I try to place some things that have historic context, like in the still life – there are some pearls and I think there is an image of Richard Bruce Nugent, who was a very famous gay poet and he often had a very glamourous visual aesthetic. I put together things that revolve around blackness and queerness, and put them together in pieces to tell the story of that time, but also to make it relevant to the time now, and that’s what I kind of deal with a lot in my photographs. There are kinds of codes or nods to blackness like hair grease that our parents would have used, or a bottle of rush, commonly seen amongst the gay community – just little things that we can relate to, put together to make a grander kind of ceremonious altar, if you will.
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Eliza Douglas
Photography by Nadine Fraczkowski Styling by Eliza Douglas
"My art is not distinct from my life"
Text by Hettie Judah
From treading the catwalk for Balenciaga to featuring models and designer items in her images, the painter, performer, musician and muse Eliza Douglas is tearing down the walls between art and fashion RESEARCH
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I last saw Eliza Douglas in March last year, getting chased around the doomy subterranean Tanks of the Tate Modern by disoriented hoards wielding camera phones. She was leading the cast in her partner Anne Imhof’s last performance, Sex (2019): playing guitar; alternately moving through slow choreography and marching at speed through the interlinked postindustrial spaces; exuding disenchantment, ennui and detached cool. Having become a familiar figure as a result of her collaborations with Imhof (including the Angst trilogy [2016–], the Golden Lion-winning Faust [2017] and Sex), Douglas’ solo work has also attracted attention. Having coupled up with Imhof the year of Angst, the artist held her debut exhibition, I am All Soul (2016), at Air de Paris: largely paintings in which commissioned portraits of hands and feet were joined by more loosely painted gestural zigzags, as if describing bodies reduced to their sensitive extremities. More recently, she has played with ideas of authorship in a series of paintings, first shown at My Gleaming Soul / I am Fireball (2017) in Kunstverein Wiesbaden, depicting young male models in idealised settings. Douglas purchased photographs of interiors from a stock image site, then outsourced the final paintings to the Dafen artist village in southern China – with uncanny results. In 2016, Douglas was scouted for Balenciaga. Demna Gvasalia had become the brand’s creative director the year before, and the artist’s angular, androgynous beauty matched the knowing awkwardness of the newly reimagined house under its new chief. Since then, the worlds of art and fashion have overlapped in her life: Balenciaga garb featured in Sex, as well as at a recent show alongside Puppies Puppies (AKA Jade Kuriki Olivo) at Basel’s Galerie Francesca Pia, which closed in November last year. In general, however, this convergence between the two spheres has resulted from the way Douglas refuses to discriminate between them. “I think the boundaries between these things are only imaginary,” she says. Whether striding through the Tate or along a runway, posing for photographer Charlie White (as she did for his Autumn/Winter 2018 Balenciaga campaign) or in the smog of Angst at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, her presence is constant, steady and magnetic.
Hettie Judah: The last show I saw you in was a collaboration with Puppies Puppies. How did that come about? Eliza Douglas: I invited Puppies Puppies to do the show with me at Galerie Francesca Pia. In the end, we didn’t work very collaboratively, it was more that we had a very basic theme for the show and then made our own separate works within that. RESEARCH
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HJ: You showed video works using material from The Walking Dead (2010–). What interests you about zombies, or to put that another way, what interests you in the wider cultural fascination with zombies? ED: I am not particularly interested in zombies per se. I go through phases of watching quite a bit of TV, and something that interests me is the
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increasing presence of violence in television. I watched The Walking Dead, and there are so many seasons – 139 episodes! – which means they constantly had to cook up new zombie scenes, which is a somewhat limited motif. So within the show there are hours of zombies either killing or being killed. I wanted to see what it would be like if all the humans were removed, and only zombies remained. 91
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"I think the boundaries between these things are only imaginary"
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And so, there is a video of seemingly endless zombie scenes, which stands alone as an artwork but also worked in conjunction with a performance I based around it. For the performance, I made this tattered and stained costume for myself. I used a Balenciaga shirt because I thought that was the easiest way to parody myself. I also had zombie makeup – fake rotten teeth, white contact lenses. During the performance I mostly just lay in front of the video and watched it. Partially it was about representing the media fixation and narcissism that’s so prevalent today. I also sometimes got up and walked like a zombie through the crowd. This also was comedic to me, stumbling through this context in which people are often hyper self- and socially-conscious.
HJ: In the past, you’ve shown painting. Are you moving into new areas in your work, or was this a direct result of the collaboration? ED: No, it wasn’t the result of the collaboration. Throughout my life, I have worked in a bunch of different mediums, but just haven’t shown much besides painting yet. Since I have only been making art professionally for four years, and within that time I have also been performing and making music, I have only just begun to make all the art I want to make. I’m quite sure, in the long run, I’ll make work with a variety of mediums. HJ: You are an enthusiastic collaborator, it seems. Do you feel it brings something particular to your work? ED: I actually find collaboration pretty difficult, generally. It feels most productive and natural to me in the realm of music. When it comes to art, Anne is the main person I have worked with and the only person I really feel I have truly collaborated with. Though, it depends on what aspects. We did a collaborative painting show at Galerie Buchholz a few years ago; that was an explicit collaboration. And we often work together to make the music for the shows. I also style her work, which I think significantly impacts the images that are created in the pieces, and I am generally quite involved in the process of making the work, so sometimes I have conceived of scenes that happen in the performances, and so on. When it comes to my performance, almost everything I do in the work stems from RESEARCH
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my own decisions and psyche. I am not performing a character. So although it is under the umbrella of someone else’s art, the songs I sing, the way I perform, and my general aesthetic contributions are natural extensions of my development, experiences and emotional landscape.
HJ: How did you meet Anne? ED: We met in 2016. We had heard about each other because we were both living in Frankfurt and knew some people in common. We first spoke to each other at an event in Berlin though. Soon after that we got together. HJ: When did you start working together? ED: Pretty much right away. HJ: How do you balance your solo work as an artist with your work with Anne? The time involved in one of the big performance residencies seems overwhelming. ED: Sometimes I can struggle with carving out enough space for my own work. But I like working on multiple things at once. I also have developed ways to work on my art practice while travelling.
the intensity of that situation, night after night? ED: Like most other humans, I find just being alive to be really intense; I think it requires an evolving system of coping mechanisms. When it comes to performing, there have definitely been some times when it has felt very exhausting or frustrating, but overall there is something interesting and fulfilling about it, and it feels worth it in the end. It really helps if I write down pretty specifically where I have to be and when, and I also feel way more confident if I have memorised my lyrics or am well acquainted with my guitar parts. HJ: Which projects are you looking forward to this year – are you busy? ED: I will have my second show at Air de Paris in early April. It will be a painting show and possibly I will add a performative element. Also, Anne’s next show is at the Palais de Tokyo in the autumn, so I am already starting to work on music for that and some of my own work will be featured in it as well. And as usual, I will be performing in it.
HJ: I was really interested – surprised, even – to see you incorporating references to Balenciaga into your painting. It seems like a very contemporary way of seeing things – not creating false divisions. How do you view the relationship between these different aspects of what you do? ED: Yes, I think the boundaries between these things are only imaginary. So of course, what I end up doing and seeing in my life affects my art. As far as I can remember, the only reference I have made to them is to put a pair of their sneakers in a painting. This was mostly because I thought they would work well in that specific painting, it wasn’t super conceptually driven. With the hands and feet series, I have mostly used my own hands and feet, and so often my own clothing items and objects around me end up in the paintings. My art is not distinct from my life. HJ: The atmosphere at Sex was crazy – the audience seemed very invasive, constantly holding cameras in their faces and so on. How do you prepare for those long performances? How do you cope with
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STYLING AND CASTING: Malcolm Mammone MODELS: Wenli Duvauchelle @ The Claw Models, Francois Delacroix @ The Claw Models, Filip Vujic @ Next Management, Basil Ekang @ Next Managemnt, Thibault Gonnord and Antoine Larrera
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SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART GÖTZ SCHRAMM To inquire about the artworks, contact sleek-mag.com or call +49 30288867516 GÖTZ SCHRAMM, Candy II 2017, 50 × 40cm €1200,00
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Combining home fitness with tech, indoor cycling brand Peloton is revolutionising fitness by connecting its network of riders with worldclass workouts
Photo: Nadia Morozewicz
It’s said that the only true luxury we have in life is time. And when it comes to making excuses for why we fail to stick to fitness plans, we often prefer to believe that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Attempting to address this common modern-day dilemma, Peloton, founded in 2012, began by trying to establish what made group and studio-based fitness classes into success stories. The brand subsequently began to modify this model, accounting for the fact that our lives are
getting busier. They saw that if you could participate in a group studio session from the convenience of your own home, you could eradicate the time issue. In order to create this vision, the company would not only have to provide premium indoor cycling equipment, but find a way to create a group workout atmosphere at home, too. The Peloton carbon steel bike caters to this modern demand with myriad features. These include: a touch screen providing a gateway to their global interactive fit-
ness platform; the option to join online classes alongside other members via video; the ability to keep track of your performance through personalised metrics; and the opportunity to rise up the real-time leaderboard alongside two million other members. Designed to maximise efficiency, Peloton is the premier fitness option for people with hectic schedules.
www.onepeloton.de
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Photographer Jorge Perez Ortiz captures the earth shades of Giorgio Armani’s Spring/Summer 2020 collection on the Spanish beaches of Sitges
ALL LOOKS: Giorgio Armani SS20
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Following the opening of Berlin’s adidas XCHANGE Space in February, participating artists describe their practice and explain how the project is providing exposure for female creativity
Text by Luka Terihaj
In-line with the Change is a Team Sport campaign, adidas Originals is opening up the XCHANGE Space to provide a collaborative platform for young female artists to work together in a studio. The project is an attempt to start a dialogue
concerning the underrepresentation of women in the art industry. SLEEK spoke to a selection of the artists to discuss the background, inspirations and significance of the enterprise.
ATUSA JAFARI I’m an oil painter, and for me the canvas is where my brain and heart can meet and I can release my feelings and emotions. My friends, and particularly my family, play a significant role in my artwork because of how they inspire me. Representation and being able to give an authentic platform to my art is very important for me, art has nothing to do with how good you are or whether you get attention or not. There are so many artists who are literally bubbling with talent, but lack the space to show it to the world. Projects like this make these hurdles disappear and create new opportunities. I haven’t had a lot of female painters around me before, and having the opportunity to work with so many interesting artists is key part of growing creatively — I’m excited to have a creative environment where we can inspire each other.
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Photography by Lucas Christiansen Styling by Leonie Volk
SNEAKERS: adidas Originals Superstar
FELINE GRUB & MARIE GRUB Our projects don’t attempt to be taken too seriously, which is why we are drawn to the works of KAWS, JR and Joakim Ojanan. They are individuals who often present art in a way which interacts with the surrounding urban landscapes. There is an element of surprise to art like this, and we believe that we can inspire others while showing that a light-hearted approach to art is possible. Our parents are architects, and have created several art installations to accompany their projects. They encouraged us beyond the ordinary, and this is something that we attempt to do with our art. Spaces like XCHANGE are very important, but it must be said that it is vital to reach a point in
society where the artwork of men and women are treated equally. The gender of an artist should be completely irrelevant to the validity of the artwork. The community aspect of XCHANGE is refreshing, and something which is exciting to be a part of. In a way, it’s like a more focused version of Berlin: this city is geared towards exchanging information with people from all over the world, often of different cultural backgrounds, in order to gain a new perspective.
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JOHANNA DUMET I’ve identified as an artist since I was very young. I moved to Berlin in 2012, but I originally come from La Creuse in France. The environment I grew up in as a child, surrounded by nature, made me feel very free, and it is this luxury of freedom that my work often yearns for. I also related a lot to folk art from America, Africa and Asia, so this has influenced my paintings. I am inspired by other artists who make me want to try new techniques and exercise my freedom with oil painting. I also believe in exploring the belief that beauty is everywhere in my work
– after all Berlin isn’t a beautiful city at first glance, but there is beauty that exists in this ugliness. Berlin is now full of emerging contemporary artists, which is great, and the brilliant thing about the XCHANGE project is that it gives us a voice, a place to work and a studio where we can learn from each other. The work I’m going to be presenting is a series of portraits of endangered animals, the aim being to make people aware that our actions are impacting the animal kingdom.
KRISTINA SUVOROVA I’m originally from Lithuania where I grew up around nature and life moved at a slower pace. I could describe my art, but mostly not in words. I have developed my artistic signature so that you can recognise my characters and elements in my work. My artwork can be influenced by whatever I am mostly sensitive to at the time. This can range from existentialism to solitude. I’m excited about the XCHANGE female platform because the collective goal and togetherness of the project displays an understanding
that everyone needs to be involved, which is crucial. When surrounded by others, we can exchange knowledge, and the sentiment of ‘you are not alone’ becomes a very tangible reality. I am still getting to know Berlin, but what I have been struck by is the openness here to new input – it’s the attitude which is fundamental to creating new material.
HAIR AND MAKE-UP: Victoria Reuter PHOTOGRAPHER ASSISTANT: Max Zimmermann
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Photography by Raúl Ruz
Styling by Kathrine Hempel
Photographer Raúl Ruz shoots the blooming Carl von Linné SS20 collection from Tiger of Sweden against the brutalist architecture of Berlin as temperatures start to thaw
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Photography by Ériver Hijano
Styling by Charlotte Gindreau
Award-winning film star and lead of the hit Netflix sci-fi series Altered Carbon, Torben Liebrecht takes a cruise through Berlin’s worldfamous film locations in the new Audi e-tron
Text by Luka Terihaj
Originally from Reinbek, located in the northern district of Hamburg, 42-year-old actor Torben Liebrecht now calls Berlin home. Long before he was the lead of the Netflix sci-fi smash Altered Carbon (2018–), he found himself drawn to the energy of the German capital. As an aspiring actor in Hamburg, he regularly visited Berlin, and vividly recalls the kinetic energy he felt as he made those first steps off the bus, mesmerised by the snappy rhythm of life in the metropolis. For him, the sheer pace of
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the city is one of the reasons it has become a creative hotbed. Now an accomplished actor, Liebrecht has travelled worldwide but feels that the capital’s support and infrastructure for film sets it apart. For him, the city’s film funding body, Medienboard, as well as Berlin’s proximity to the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, Studio Babelsberg, offer unparalleled opportunities. The ability to shoot in locations which are all a drive away from each other is a boon, too, making the shooting experience effortless and streamlined.
Whilst being in the city during Berlinale time, Torben took the opportunity to escape the busy festival for a private ride, using the Audi e-tron for touring the capital as Audi provided a full-electric shuttle service for the event. Driving through Berlin and having a chat in the car, SLEEK and Liebrecht explore five of his favourite film locations.
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STRAUSBERGER PLATZ Liebrecht vividly remembers growing up in West Germany and watching Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) for the first time – a German film shot around Strausberger Platz, a prestige development of apartments in Friedrichshain built during the DDR. As he drives us around the Strausberger Platz fountain, he says the detail which the film’s director, Wolfgang Becker, employed in recreating the divided Cold War world was “incredible”, and recalls scenes from the movie in which the protagonist Alex cruises along the very same roads. Film is at its most touching, he says, when it finds a way to tap into your inner emotional world.
THE WESTIN GRAND HOTEL Searching for a classic setting with a sophisticated aura, Liebrecht took us to the Westin Grand Hotel in Berlin’s buzzing central district, Mitte. Filming here is difficult, as its abundance of magnificent architectural features makes it feel criminal to risk losing a moment of its beauty by cutting a single shot. The actor remarks that the symmetry of the hotel’s interior court is primed for a Wes Anderson set. For a close-up of the hotel’s full grandeur, see Victoria (2015), a German crime thriller created using one continuous take.
BLAZER AND SWEATER: Paul Smith TRENCH COAT: Bally TROUSERS: Salvatore Ferragamo BOOTS: Prada
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CLÄRCHENS BALLHAUS
OBERBAUMBRÜCKE
The plush, blue velvet seats are one of the many highlights of Kino International, an establishment that feels like a celebration of elegant Sixties decor. Cinemas are homes away from home to Liebrecht, who was too impatient to wait for films to be released on VHS, resulting in him spending an ample portion of his youth with eyes glued to the silver screen. He says that Kino International feels like an ode to a departed era, one where cinema was at its pinnacle.
Shooting locations are vital backdrops for actors delivering immersive portrayals. Liebrecht recounts a moment from his role in Homeland (2011–), where the set was so believable that it made him completely forget where he was. To him, the aim of a film set is to make you feel like you are in another world. And when we arrive at the Clärchens Ballhaus it becomes apparent exactly what he means. The setting for a tense scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009), this vintagemirrored hall and ballroom instantly transports us to Tarantino’s cinematic universe – and beyond.
Given its role in uniting Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg – Berlin boroughs that had been divided by the Berlin Wall – the Oberbaumbrücke is a tangible piece of history. Liebrecht suggests that when landmarks of history like this appear on screen, audiences form stronger levels of affinity with the narrative. He argues that, even though a film like The Bourne Supremacy (2004) is not entirely set in Berlin, the scene featuring the bridge reminds audiences that the fictional world and the real world can indeed be married together.
GROOMING: Patricia Heck @ Nina Klein TALENT: Torben Liebrecht SPECIAL THANKS: The Westin Grand Hotel, Kino International
ABOVE BLAZER AND SWEATER: Paul Smith TRENCH COAT: Bally TROUSERS: Salvatore Ferragamo BOOTS: Prada
LEFT BLAZER: Versace SHIRT: Alexander McQueen TROUSERS: Versace SHOES: Jimmy Choo
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FRESH PAINT
Graffiti artist Stohead took his colourful, dripping pieces from the walls of Germany to studio canvases. Now his murals cover the special edition leather goods from Berlin’s Liebeskind. We spoke to the veteran artist about Berlin, Hamburg and the difference between graffiti and urban art
Image courtesy of Liebeskind Berlin
What was your first Berlin graffiti piece? My history somehow starts in Berlin, because I did my third graffiti piece on the Berlin Wall in Kreuzberg when I was 15, in 1989, right before the Wall fell. I took advantage of my youth club, which travelled to Berlin almost every year. It was a classic graffiti piece; it said “LOSE”, with some political quotes next to it against apartheid.
‘street art’ came up. Before that there was only the term ‘graffiti’, based on the way that it was invented in New York in the Seventies.
How have you seen the German graffiti scene change over the last 31 years? I have seen a big change, because in the beginning there were a lot of self-imposed restrictions on the scenes. You couldn’t paint with a roller, you had to use spray cans, and you had to write your name. At the end of the Nineties, in my Hamburg years, I was getting tired of this, and decided to work in the studio and joined an atelier community called getting-up with DAIM, Tasek and Daddy Cool. We started this big series of exhibitions from 2000 to 2002 called Urban Discipline. We wanted to show the public that there is so much more than throwing up your style in public for your piece. At the beginning of the Aughts, the term ‘urban art’ and
SLEEK likes LIEBESKIND BERLIN
Is there a good place to see old graffiti in Berlin? It is hard to find something really old. There are a few places on the train tracks that are really respected, along the S-Bahn; these were done by the first generation of writers. The city is changing so fast, which is also the story of Berlin. My piece from the Berlin Wall is long gone because it was in the part of Kreuzberg where the wall got torn down. How does your experience with fine art and painting influence your graffiti? It depends, sometimes I still do the simple graffiti styles just for fun, but other times I translate the things that I invented in the studio into murals, for example. You can see in the Liebeskind Berlin design patterns from pieces I did in the early-Aughts in the studio, the repetitions of one word and the dissolving techniques. The new styles started in the studio, but then I took them back to the street.
What are the key elements of your style that can be seen in the Liebeskind Berlin collection? The design is in one of my classic styles. I like to use English terms that you can interpret in different ways. ‘Move’ is written in my classic round-tip style. I like to arrange these letters in a square with the same amount of letters in one line and in one row. It is a bit difficult to read, but that is okay because I wanted to create letter pieces and not show easily readable quotes. I want the audience to get the meaning on the second look. I have always seen my calligraphy style as more like painting than classic calligraphy. I’ve always loved the graffiti aspect of it, with the drippings – quite raw.
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BABY, WE ARE LIMITED!
SLEEK ART, the Online Gallery & Publisher VogelART, the Gallery KNUST KUNZ and the ERGO art insurance company open a POP-UP GALLERY in Berlin together - BABY, WE ARE LIMITED! We are in Berlin for 4 days for the Gallery Weekend Berlin from 30 April . 3 May 2020 at Linienstrasse 221, Berlin. SLEEK ART, VogelART and KNUST KUNZ will show great limited editions. We are connected by art and we want to share our passion for art with as many people as possible. Our mission is to make art collecting easier and more accessible to a bigger community. Our currency is the love for art. Therefore we show
CLOCKWISE: Christto & Andrew, National Pride Friedrich Kunath, My Fault, Your Fault Jenny Brosinski, Here She Comes
limited editions by artists from all over the world. Originals, but different. Because in the end only one thing counts: art must touch - so much so that we can’t get enough of it. Goosebumps. Tears of joy. Smiles. Art can trigger all this and much more in us. That’s why we are showing rare and unique editions for only 4 days by Jan Albers, André Butzer, Jenny Brosinski, Christto & Andrew, Carsten Fock, Sébastien de Ganay, John Giorno, Eberhard Havekost, Gregor Hildebrandt, Benedikt Hipp, Andy Hope 1930, Paul Hutchinson, Martin Klimas, Friedrich Kunath Brigitte Kowanz, Simon Lohmeyer, Christian Mader, Philipp Messner, Takashi Muraka-
mi, Cihan Öncu, Lonneke van der Palen, Jack Pierson, Daniel Richter, Thomas Ruff, Pola Sieverding, Chris Succo, Regine Schumann, Christian Werner... and more! OPENING PARTY Thursday 30 April 18-22 h SLEEK ART PARTY Friday 1 May 18-22 h POP-UP Gallery Friday 1 May 13-22 h POP-UP Gallery Saturday 2 May 11-18 h POP-UP Gallery Sunday 3 May 12-16 h More info at vogelARTedition.com
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SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART SLEEK ART LONNEKE VAN DER PALEN To inquire about the artworks, contact sleek-mag.com or call +49 30288867516
LONNEKE VAN DER PALEN, Bernard Buffet #4 2016, 30 × 40cm €490,00
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GO WEST
Frankfurt’s newly-opened Gekko House offers winter-weary weekend travellers the chance to sample the best of the city’s food, culture and accomodation
Image courtesy of Gekko Group
The city of Frankfurt has long been associated with the financial services of its central business district of Bankenviertel, but with a buzzing cultural scene that includes the bustling Museumsufer quarter, people are heading to the city for art, too. THE WEEKEND GETAWAY If you have been cooped up in Berlin all winter, the city can admittedly begin to feel a little stuffy. But as any local knows, the best remedy for this cabin fever is a weekend getaway to rejuvenate your energy levels. And with Frankfurt just over an hour’s flight away, and train journeys clocking in at just over four hours, more and more Berliners are heading to Frankfurt for a weekend break. FRANKFURT ART AND CULTURE Despite having a reputation for being a European banking centre, Frankfurt is rich with art and culture. The city’s Museum-
sufer is an area overlooking the river Main, where several museums and galleries line the riverbank. Lovers of classical European art should head to the Städel Museum, the district’s centrepiece, where you will find works by Botticelli and Vermeer, among many others. For a taste of modern and contemporary art – including works from Warhol, Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg – head to the Museum für Moderne Kunst (English: ‘Museum of Modern Art’), home to aesthetic objects dating from the Sixties to the present day. ACCOMODATION Situated in the Gallus district west of the city centre, Gekko House, which opened in January, is the perfect place to rest after a day of exploration. The warmly-coloured decor and custom furnishings mean that you will be able to relax in style from the comfort of your hotel room. The location of Gekko House also allows you
to admire Frankfurt’s captivating skyscrapers. Every room comes with the luxury of floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as supernatural bath amenities from Grown Alchemist. FOOD The food options at Gekko House come from none other than Berlin’s Chicago Williams BBQ restaurant, a specialist in cured meats and German beer – the perfect culinary combination on a weekend away. Whether you wish to eat by the bar or in the restaurant, you can be rest assured you won’t even have to leave the comfort of your accommodation to discover its sought-after delights.
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SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE SUBSCRIBE Subscribe to SLEEK for just €32 (€56 outside of Germany) and you’ll receive four issues annually. To say thank you, we’ll also send you a pair of oval-framed YUN sunglasses, one of the Korean brand’s bestsellers. Produced in the heart of Berlin, YUN is an innovative Korean eyewear brand that specialise in combining high concept design together
with innovative technology to create modern, minimalistic and elegant sunglasses. Choose between lens shades of serene sky blue or alternatively opt for a deep cool green to shield your eyes from beaming sun rays. Subscribe now to receive yours. While stocks last. Subscribe through the SLEEK store at sleek-mag.com
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Fashion Index
A Acne Studios Adriana Hot Couture Akà Prodiàshvili Alan Crocetti Alexander McQueen Amina Muaddi Anastasia Beverly Hills Audi adidas Originals B Balenciaga Bally Benefit BOSS C Calzedonia Chanel Charlotte Knowles Charlotte Tilbury Christian Dior Clarins Claropsyche Comme des Garçons Homme Plus D D’heygere Dries van Noten DROMe E EGONlab Elissa Poppy Eve Lom
F FALKE Fendi G Giorgio Armani Givenchy GmbH Gucci H Hugo Boss J Jacquemus Jimmy Choo Juun.J JS by Julia Skergeth JW Anderson K KALDA Kalissi Kenzo L La Perla Lanvin Laura Mercier Liebeskind Berlin LOEWE Louis Vuitton Louise Streissler M MAC Maison Margiela Marni Matchesfashion.com Melissa
Miló Maria MUTEMUSE N Nodaleto NUXE O Oceanus Swimwear OUR LEGACY Ottolinger P PARK Concept Store Paul Smith Peloton Per Gotesson Petar Petrov PHIPPS Pixi Prada R Raf Simons Rani Bageria Richard Malone Rombaut S Sankaunz Salvatore Ferragamo Sies Marjan SLEEK Art T Tétier Bijoux Tiger of Sweden Tom Ford
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V Valentino Versace VICKISARGE Vivienne Westwood Y Y/ Project YUN Berlin W WESTERNAFFAIR WOLFMICH W WEER Z Zimmerli
194 PAUL KOOIKER
210 LAST WORD ISABELLE MALZ
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The images by Paul Kooiker seen here are from the book Business of Fashion published by TBW Books as part of its four book Annual Series No. 7.
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Paul Kooiker
Business of Fashion
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Paul Kooiker was invited by Michèle Lamy to create an art performance at Voices 2018 in Oxfordshire, England. VOICES is an annual summit that brings together people from multiple facets of the fashion industry, bringing them together with big thinkers, entrepreneurs and inspiring people who are creating dynamic conversations across the wider world. During the event, Kooiker photographed guests in a gender-neutral pose. Through his lens, they became headless mannequins reminiscent of mail order catalogues from the 1950s, the photographs show the ‘business of fashion’ their clothes.
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The Last Word
Lee Lozano, I'm Not A Nice Girl! (1930–1999). Copyright Kunstsammlung NRW
Isabelle Malz, curator of a major German exhibition this spring detailing the discrimination experienced by female conceptual artists, on why art’s sexism problem still hasn’t gone away
When you think of the lives of the conceptual artists Eleanor Antin, Lee Lozano, Adrian Piper and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, they are success stories. All four women started their careers in the Sixties and early Seventies at the birth of the conceptual art movement and, with the exception of Lozano, who died in 1999, are still working today. But this doesn’t mean that they had it easy. In I’m Not A Nice Girl!, an exhibition at Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum, curator Isabelle Malz presents previously unseen correspondences from Antin, Lozano, Piper and Ukeles (currently held by the archive of renowned German gallerists, the late Dorothee and Konrad Fischer), showing the type of institutional discrimination these women faced. Placed alongside work by the artists, these documents illustrate their significant contributions to the movement. Discussing the exhibition, Malz explains how a 1969 notebook entry from Lozano concerning an interaction with German curator Kasper König, in which he calls her a “good painter and a nice girl”, inspired the show’s title. “I would never speak about myself as a ‘nice girl’, there is something provocative about that term, especially when used on a female artist,” says the CABINET
curator and art historian. “It’s a way in which people speak about younger women that is almost derogatory. I very much like how Lozano, who was a very strong and radical artist, gave König radical feedback when he called her that. In a way it is still relevant today for women to say, ‘I’m not a nice girl. I’m a strong woman or a good artist.’” “This is the underlying subtext of the entire exhibit,” she continues. “All of the materials I found in the archive raised similar questions, like why was Hanne Darboven one of the only women exhibited by Konrad Fischer? Why didn’t gallerists go to the studios of these women or look at their works? These were artists working at the end of the Sixties and Seventies, pioneering conceptual art, but dealing with topics that are still very much relevant today, like xenophobia, institutional critique and ecological issues. Maybe it is subtler today, but this type of discrimination is still present. Women artists are still underrepresented in collections and solo exhibitions, and they still have to fight for representation. Some things have changed, but not so much.”
I’m Not A Nice Girl! runs from 18 January to 17 May 2020 at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. 210
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