Bursting with contemporary art, fashion, music, literature, videos, and other uncategorizable materials…
Welcome to (Year 2: Month 1: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
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Now then, without further ado…
Mostaff Muchawaya “(b. 1981, Zimbabwe) is one of the most innovative painters of his generation. Through the medium of paint, Muchawaya creates multi-layered landscapes and portraits of people drawn from memories of his upbringing in the mountainous Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe.”
One night, you are sitting by your mother’s feet and fingering the ridges of a scar on her ankle when she tells you that as a child she’d been tied to a kitchen table. Left on a stoop by her mother, her drunk father lost in Arecibo, she was raised by light-skinned relatives who called her dirty, made her kneel on raw grains of white rice. She survived all this and more, lived to pass this pain on to you.
When someone at school asks, “Where are you from?” what they mean is, “Are you from the wet side or the dry side?” You are from the wet side, the side more prone to damage.
— frm “The Wet Side” by Jerilynn Aquino, via Gulf Coast
“Nyashadzashe Tanyaradzwa Marovatsanga (b.1997, Zimbabwe) is a young painter who lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.”
“Born in 1997 in Maroua, a city in northern Cameroon, Moustapha Baidi Oumarou worked in a silkscreen workshop before he began focusing on painting.”
But the dibia stops in front of me. He raises the machete I failed to notice. I am finished, so I think.
The spray of warm blood hits my face, going into my eyes and up my nose causing me to double over gasping for air as a cheer goes up.
— from “Initiation” by Chidi Onyia, via Black Warrior Review
Inga Danysz, born 1990 in Warsaw, is an artist based in Frankfurt/Main.
San Laurentino - Forbidden Fruit
Video by Inga Danysz. Model: Nha-Dan Tran
Ron Ewert lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Oloruntobi Aina is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Kinke Kooi “was born in 1961 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, and attended the Academy for the Visual Arts in Arnhem.”
Immolation in the sea. Men and women, young and old, roped with muscle—beautiful. They gather nakedly on driftwood or floes and root flame in their flesh. The smoke furls out, the light stripes saltwater orange. This is sacrifice, and also indulgence. This is one brief blaze in a blazing world.
— from “THE CLIMATE SUICIDES” by ALYSSA QUINN, via Copper Nickel
John Zorn's Naked City
Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland (July 19 1990)
John Zorn: alto sax, vocals
Bill Frisell: guitar
Wayne Horvitz: keyboards, piano
Fred Frith: bass
Joey Baron: drums
Hamish Chapman “(b.1993, UK) lives and work in Glasgow, Scotland.”
Earlier this year, I watched anti-Asian sentiments morph from social media rants into rabid flesh, as Asian Americans were beaten on streets as empty as 19th century backroads. No wonder so many are still numb to landmarks like the Chinese Hanging Tree. As the spring passed, we stopped calling the hornets “Asian” at all, labelling them instead “murder hornets,” as if the racial rhetoric didn’t still swarm around them like ghosts.
— from “Am I an invasive species?: How COVID-19 and ‘murder hornets’ compelled a writer to rethink invasions.” by Jenny Liou, via High Country News
Josh Faught “is a San Francisco-based fiber artist who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history.”
In 1995 Tracey Emin created a piece, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995.” Some people thought she was bragging. But the names listed include her grandmother, her twin brother Paul, and two aborted fetuses.
What does it mean to sleep with someone? What is sleep? What is with?
I thought being an artist meant making sense of these questions.
It was okay, too, if in the process you mostly made unsense of yourself.
— “I HAD SOME IDEAS ABOUT ART” by Becky Tuch, via Atticus Review
Simon Lässig (*1992) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Alicja Rogalska is an artist based in London. Her practice is interdisciplinary and encompasses both research and production with a focus on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday. She mostly works in context on projects that involve participation, creating situations and collaboration with others, brought to the project for their particular skill or expertise. These events and ephemeral moments act as catalysts for collective questioning, imagining, reflecting and testing different ways of being together. Being both rooted in a context and speculative, her projects aim to occupy the space between what already exists and what is possible.
Alicja graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw.
The slightest touch from a cuticle tip generates an electrical impulse coinciding with the tambor sounding from within the ribcage, impairing the harmonious entrance and exit of air through the lungs, causing loss of control of one’s facial pigmentation, and provoking an excess of moisture from the sudoriferous glands.
— from “Maps To Nowhere” by Nara Vidal, translated from Portuguese by Emyr Humphreys, via Joyland
Daichi Takagi was born in 1982 in Gifu, Japan.
Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕 with Tiffany Sia and Virgil B/G Taylor
a launch with Tiffany Sia of Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, the book-length sequel to Salty Wet 咸濕. This program will feature a reading and performance of text that reveals the invisible bibliography, followed by a discussion with Virgil B/G Taylor (Fag Tips) on the book design.
Shiho Kagabu is a Japanese contemporary artist currently lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.
Anything can turn into a material for artists: pure light (James Turell), an expanse of desert (Michael Heizer), living with a coyote (Joseph Beyus) or with an immigrant family (Tania Bruguera), the human body (Ana Mendieta, Marina Abramovic, Geta Brătescu, Paul Neagu, etc.), the human voice (Susan Philipsz, Lina Lapelytė), data flows such as human DNA sequences or the structure of various particles (Ryoji Ikeda), as well as opressive economic, political or social/cultural systems denounced by activists such as Guerilla Girls, Mathieu Laurette, David Medalla, Pussy Riot, and Nan Goldin to name a few. But nothing is more concrete yet elusive than time. Time is intrinsic to matter and artistic practices alike; form unfolds and creation as a philosophy of process.
Ioana Maria Sisea’s exhibition Harvest Time at Kunsthalle Bega in Timisoara (Romania) is such a reflection on the information and memory of matter (organic and inorganic), a repository of traces of the human body and subjectivity in the world.
— “A Little Stardust Caught, a Segment of the Rainbow” by Simona Nastac, via Blok Magazine
Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude (b. 1988, Zimbabwe) lives and works in Harare.
The bus smelled like a hundred sweating bodies, and it was the first thing that struck Isioma as she lowered her head and intertwined her fingers behind her neck. A few of the other passengers had begun to beg.
The armed men shouted obscenities.
“Na my time you dey fucking waste,” Isioma heard one man shout. Then another gruff voice, “Fuck your Jesus,” in response to a woman’s pleading.
— from “Supernova” by Kosiso Ugwueze, via New England Review
Azuki Furuya was orn in Sapporo, Japan, she lives and works in Tokyo and New York.
Jean David Nkot was born in Douala (Cameroon) where he lives and works.
“Kelechi Nwaneri's idiosyncratic paintings blend traditional West African iconography with elements of Western art history, resulting in fantastical worlds…”
Tiff was most ashamed that she was born soft, and that softness was construed as weakness, and cultivated as weakness, and for the first eighteen years, like a fucking flower, no one saw that she was on a dark shelf and simply moved her into the daylight.
— from “how far you can get on an empty tank of gas” by christa romanosky, via New Sinews
Konstantina Krikzoni is a Greek, London-based artist.
When I need a second face on top of mine, will you lend me yours? Sorry. But my legs might suddenly fuse like a mermaid’s.
— from “Two Poems from 생물성 (Biologicity)’ by SHIN HAE-UK (TR. SPENCER LEE-LENFIELD), via The Dial
Merzbow - Pulse Demon (full album)
Matthew Eguavoen “(born 1988), is a rising contemporary artist from Edo State, currently living in the city of Lagos, Nigeria.”
Ballet has always known, that is, that gender is performance. It’s easy to assume or even to dismiss the word—performance—when it comes at you in a theory of culture. In ballet, it comes at you with the power of art. Femininity is something to be perfected and made beautiful. A hard, endless, noble kind of work. That’s why ballet can seem, to the young women practicing it—to me, for example—like an honest and subtle thing, even if its artifice is obvious—more than obvious, pretty embarrassing, really—and its relevance waning. Here’s the ideal, it says. Here’s the effort. Here’s the distance between the two.
— from “Beauty Work: Lessons in Ballet” by Siobhan Phillips, via The Toast
“Hi Ren” by Ren
Song written, performed, directed by Ren
Cinamatographer - Samuel Perry-Falvey
Ryan Cosbert “(b. 1999 Brooklyn, NY) is an African-American (of Haitian & Guyanese descent) conceptual artist who’s work approaches and focuses on her own humanistic experiences, self-expression, political issues and historical narratives.”
a newlywed securing her updo with grenade pins a wall cleared of nails for the ghosts to walk through
— from “Vulnerability Study” by SOLMAZ SHARIF, via Poetry