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The Amnesia Scanner project began online as cryptic videos and enigmatic songs sung by ‘oracle’ and produced by the ‘xperienz designers’. Now after almost a decade of building their labyrinth they’re knocking down the walls to reveal a harmonious exchange of ideas where even the crustiest sample plays a part in their audiovisual puzzle. The frictions of their past LPs have given way to something more rounded and smooth.

Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video, photography, and opera; directing Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg. Her artwork focuses on the notion of opposites between the East vs. West, femininity vs. masculinity, spirituality vs. violence and the beautiful vs. the disturbing; highlighting the contradictions between these subjects, through the lens of her personal experiences of exile and finding a sense of belonging.

Shirin Neshat

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NR Sound Mix 050 Truxx

01.47.31

Watch

NR and MUBI Partner to Offer 30 Days of Free Cinema

Sick of Myself, Kristoffer Borgli (2022)

Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant (2007)

Sweet Sixteen, Ken Loach (2002)

Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki (2004)

Medicine for Melancholy, Barry Jenkins (2008)

Voyage of Time: an IMAX documentary, Terrence Malick (2016)

The Man Without a Past, Aki Kaurismäki (2002)

Architecture

Studio MK27

2050+

Norm Architects

Makoto Yamaguchi

Nicolas Schuybroek

PPAA

Monika Gogl

Husband Wife

Anne Holtrop

Paul Cournet

Sophie Hicks

John Pawson

FormaFantasma

Counterspace

DGN Studio

Ludwig Godefroy

Nicholas Préaud

Studio Hagen Hall

Muda Architects

Sanchos Madridejos

The Ranch Mine

Art

Art and poker. If life’s a gamble, then the two must have more in common than it might appear at first glance; American artist Parker Ito is pretty sure of it. On one of the busy days leading to his show […] NR conversed with him on the similarities between the career of a poker player and that of an artist, the notion of value, and markets vs communities to retrace his past production as an artist, and figure out his next moves. Expect also: a detour on sartorial matters and the importance of personal style, the story of a night out in San Francisco leading to a disappointing encounter with impressionist painting, and an exploration of the notion of the Sublime filtered through the LED screens of our computers and the Vegas Sphere.

Parker Ito

Born 1982 in Lucerne, Switzerland, Tobias Spichtig lives and works in Berlin. Spichtig draws inspiration from the world of fashion, theater and music, and works in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation and photography. His practice reflects upon the role of the icon in contemporary society, the idea of idolatry, as well as the gaze. Using everyday items such as sunglasses or depicting popular figures from the fashion world, Spichtig explores the intersection between the private and the public, the intimate and the glamorous, inquiring how society and the individual engage with the idea of seeing - and being seen.

Tobias Spichtig

In the realm of contemporary art, Miles Greenberg stands as a Canadian-born artist and sculptor whose work unfolds as a dynamic exploration of space, movement, and the intricate interplay between the physical body and its surroundings. Unraveling his history, we progressively revealed the intricacies of his artistic approach, prompting a more profound question: who is Miles Greenberg in the present moment? As we journey through his narrative, we seamlessly move between the Amsterdam and Paris presentations of "TRUTH" and the impending showcase at the Venice Biennale.

Miles Greenberg

Ai Weiwei is undoubtedly one of the most influential and fearless voices of our time. In a world where the right to express oneself is often taken for granted, Ai Weiwei’s unwavering commitment to this cause emerges as a clarion call to create inclusive spaces where every voice is respected and cherished. “Expressing oneself is a part of being human. To be deprived of a voice is to be told you are not a participant in society; ultimately it is a denial of humanity”. A statement followed through by the immense outspoken nature of what Ai Weiwei’s body of work testifies to be.

Ai Weiwei

Claire Barrow’s work balances in between worlds of pop culture, politics and ethereal creatures. With a combination of the media she consumes and the topics she’s passionate about, the result is an unexpected display of these themes colliding into different disciplines. Whether it’s paintings, sculptures or illustrations she has dreamed up and then translated onto clothing, her art is boundless and unpredictable. Born in Yarm, a town in Northern England, Barrow grew up watching Disney films on repeat and listening to bands like Slayer and Sonic Youth.

Claire Barrow

Vanessa Beecroft discusses how her work serves as a form of therapy, exploring personal conflicts and universal issues within a group. Her exploration of body image and gender politics has influenced her perception of herself and society. Her performances are known for their powerful portrayal of vulnerability and invulnerability, creating a unique interaction between the audience and the performers.The intentional discomfort provoked in her performances pushes boundaries and stimulates thought-provoking reactions.

Vanessa Beecroft

Santiago Sierra is a contemporary conceptual and performance Spanish artist whose oeuvre continues to be widely recognised and exhibited in major art institutions around the world. Known for his provocative and politically charged artwork that often addresses issues of social and economic inequality, labour exploitation, and human rights, Santiago Sierra’s work serves as an outlet for critical thoughts surrounding the forms of violence imposed by the socio-political conditions of our time, engaging with marginalised groups, highlighting their struggles and drawing attention to their plight through his art. Sierra also often pushes the limits of what is considered acceptable, highlighting the presence of societal rules and limits.

Santiago Sierra

Rae Klein is tough. She has built a body of work that has received considerable praise. She was born in Michigan and is still there, working with a rhythm is respectable and representative of her success in recent years. Today, her role in this relationship is simple: she keeps producing. However, there is nothing desultory about this method. What Klein does is focus on the essential element of her life. Klein has always drawn but hasn’t always worked in oils. Before attaining her BFA, she planned to become a nurse. Before covering gallery walls, she shipped paintings out of her garage. Now, she has a studio. Oh, and she paints.

Rae Klein

The aura of displacement rocked the beginnings of artist Jingze Du when he first arrived in Dublin, Ireland from Yantai, China at the age of 13. With his mother’s belief in his artistry keeping him on his feet, he sought after refining his communication skills in English, a prerequisite of survival in an English-language-dominated country. As soon as he fed his mind with vocabulary, those used in the arts field as well, he set off his artistic endeavors until he gave birth to portraits and approaches that explore the extremes of his identity: strength and weakness; fast and slow; masculine and feminine; validation and rejection; external and internal; conformity and independence; and the space in between his Chinese and Irish self.

Jingze Du

Julia Kowalska lives and works in Warsaw, Poland, where she graduated with an MFA from the Painting Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in in 2022. Her work intensely interrogates the importance of figuration: beginning by looking inward, she produces paintings that exctract the physical from the subconscious, in delicately devised dreamscapes. The result is a simulated subconscious from which ephemeral performances present themselves in the foreground, before fading again into the recesses of a restful or restless psyche.

Julia Kowalska

In the midst of a changing world, Isaac Chong Wai brings his unique artistic vision to the Venice Biennale. Born in 1990 and working between Berlin and Hong Kong, Chong’s art transcends borders, exploring themes of power and human vulnerability. Through various mediums like performance and photography, he captures the essence of our interconnected world. As he prepares for the Biennale Arte 2024, curated under “Foreigners Everywhere,” Chong’s work promises to inspire reflection and unite us in our shared humanity.

Isaac Chong Wai

Born in the eternal city in 1980, Tosatti indeed faces the art industry with the deep knowledge and critical consciousness of a historian, or to put it in his own words as someone whose first, priceless schooling was the daily stroll to school across the decaying and majestic beauty of the Imperial Fora. However, Tosatti has succeeded in escaping the academic redundancy that often defines those too knowledgeable about their own field, by giving birth to a distinctive and globally-acclaimed body of work. His visual art focuses on long-term, often site-specific projects that question the state of our society and identity, equally touching upon politics and spirituality.

Gian Maria Tosatti

Miriam Cahn started her career in the 1970s and initiated painting at the age of 45 in the 1990s in Switzerland. Awarded the 14th Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen (previously obtained by Cy Twombly and Francis Bacon) on June, 26th, 2022, an honour combined with a solo exhibition at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Cahn is one of the most highly regarded artists in Switzerland. Having her work exhibited in numerous international shows and exhibitions, including documenta 7 and 14, Kassel (1982 and 2017), the Venice Biennale (1984), Kunsthalle Basel (1983), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984), Fundación La Caixa, Madrid (2003), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2004), Badischer Kunstverein (2014) and Kunsthalle zu Kiel (2016) and many diverse exhibitions across Europe in 2019.

Miriam Cahn

Female Pentimento summons liminal portals to apocalyptic ecstasy, fairytale daydreams and irreversible escapism. They blast saturated white beams more powerful than a spotlight; more sacred than a burst of sunlight at the end of the rain. They draw from human experiences, seemingly projecting the artist’s personal encounters at times, and lend support to viewers by digitally opening new doors for their worries and fantasies. Female Pentimento’s nurturing principles have harvested a tight-knit community whose eyes for art are satiated, ears for wise words quenched, and minds for optimism fed.

Female Pentimento

Grotesque bodies writhing in pain, catharsis, and even brief relief emerge in the artworks of Elsa Rouy. She is fascinated by the way bodies behave as vessels as if the form humans inhabit were once empty containers now filled with external impurities. In her paintings, the young British artist dissects women figuratively and literally. Blood and flesh intertwine, and their vivid shock and detailed stupor are brought out by every brush stroke. Eyes far apart, wet hair, dripping fluids, a cut-up chest, an eye coming out of the labia, entangled bodies, and complex, undefined, and intricate emotions to be unpacked and explored. These paintings unravel the mystic center of all kinds of emotions, anatomizing them until their influential power and how they come to play in daily life seep through and become known.

Elsa Rouy

The Seventeenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that history unfolded in cycles, with every period of decay being succeeded by one of growth. According to his view such transitions were guided by the hand of God. Fast forward 300 and counting years and, despite the latter statement sounding rather outdated, this conversation still sparks when contemplating the works of Jon Rafman. Although the Canadian-born artist, videographer and essayist is an illustrious face of what, since 2009, has been labelled as Post-Internet art, his works retain a powerful Medieval aura.

Jon Rafman

Bambou Gili’s paintings are world-building projects, sprawling in narrative and unified by rich, tight colour palettes. Throughout her body of work, fantastical landscapes activate the feminine figures inside them, allowing for nature to become an ally, a co-conspirator, a unique character in and of itself. In each series, the artist — whose inspirations range from the animation of Hayao Miyazaki to the French Impressionists — dives into a singular colour spectrum to experiment freely and tap into possibility. Oil drippings in green, blue or purple produce a textural, eerie stillness that moves across tableaux like an omniscient spectre.

Bambou Gili

Have you ever seen a fat car? Maybe a thin house? It sounds like the start of a joke but for Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, who has spent much of his career exploring sculpture, space and the human form, it is a way to gain a new perspective or understanding of the world around us. While Wurm uses humour as a tool to get peoples attention, ultimately his work is intended to prompt people to look at things more carefully. Wurm states that “I am interested in the everyday life. All the materials that surrounded me could be useful, as well as the objects, topics involved in contemporary society. My work speaks about the whole entity of a human being: the physical, the spiritual, the psychological and the political.” NR Magazine joined the artist in conversation.

Erwin Wurm

Elizabeth Glaessner Inspired by heroes of symbolism such as Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, personal memories and art history, Glaessner places the visible at the service of the subconscious and re-contextualise mythological elements in her dream-like paintings. With her distinct use of colour, such as the recurrent visceral acid green as well as her technique of dispersing pure pigments with acrylics, oil and water, Glaessner creates visually striking works that tap into our primordial unconscious, opening a world where surroundings and people are intuitively blurred. There is a sense of fluidity and openness in Glaessner’s work, inspired from her childhood memories and an understanding that the world as it is today cannot be limited by binary thinking. Glaessner thus pushes the conventional societal boundaries and moral codes, and uncovers the realms of her psyche conjuring up a surreal universe in a constant state of metamorphosis.

Elizabeth Glaessner

Jasper Johns once said, ‘Hollywood is forever young, forever sexy and forever swollen with abundance.’ This makes sense when looking at the figures in Kate Ahn’s paintings. However, abundance in these works is qualified by searing faces and billowing forms stretching across the image and twisting in the frame. They are abundant in mixed yet meaningful messages, pained and charmed. Painting in series, Ahn depicts herself in varying stages of movement. Nearly always nude. The relevance of this nudity is open to interpretation. Still, Ahn’s subjects bring to life the late critic John Berger’s words, ‘Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.’

Kate Ahn

Bianca Fields is a contemporary artist from Cleveland, currently based in Kansas City, Missouri. Fields is one to watch in the contemporary at world scene as she strikes with her highly charged paintings. NR had the pleasure of conversing with Fields, delving further into the influences behind her deeply-emotional body of work, the process supporting her craft as well as her future endeavours in Seoul and London. What inspires Fields to create at this time is finding a way to articulate the nature of noise in America.

Bianca Fields

Amanda Ba’s work is influenced by critical race and queer theory. By utilising these frameworks, she aims to explore more nuanced understandings of identity and examine themes such as post-humanism, Otherness and diasporic memory. Through her art, Ba challenges traditional notions of identity and representation, and creates works that are thought-provoking and impactful. The feeling of attachment and nostalgia and a desire to reconnect to China are influential in Ba’s work. Her goal is not to flatten identity, but to challenge the notion of what it looks like and formulate a more complex way of understanding identity, which creates a tension in her work. Her scenes astray from a larger hypothetical world visualised through her personal narrative imbued of a specific colour code intertwining between red and green. Ba’s use of various mediums, including sculpture and installation, allows her to experiment with different forms of expression.

Amanda Ba

I speak to Rebecca Ackroyd via Zoom from her studio in Berlin in late August, not long before her solo exhibition, Fertile Ground, opens at Peres Projects in Seoul (until 13TH October). She will also be exhibiting at this year’s Frieze London and in December at Art Basel Miami Beach. Fertile Ground, like much of Ackroyd’s practice, delves into the surreal whilst being grounded in the monotony of the everyday. In playing alone, for example, a cast of the artist’s hands in a sink is at once familiar and strange; the hands are disconnected from the body, whilst a blade – bloodied? – lies conspicuously in the basin. Those familiar with Ackroyd will know that epoxy resin casts of the body, often in lurid, sometimes grotesque colours, are a central part of her work. And oftentimes, fragments of these casts reappear in different bodies of work.

Rebecca Ackroyd

As the recipient of the 2018 Icelandic Art Prize as Visual Artist of the Year for his 2017 exhibition, Inlight, and the selected artist who will represent Iceland at the 59th Venice Biennale to be held in 2022, Sigurdur is a master of the senses. Utilizing moving imagery, synchronized soundscapes and installation, the viewer is dropped into an emotional fragment, engineered through layers and loops that create an immersive world numbed by specificity where feeling is not a derivative of direct experience. . Having installed his projections in locations like morgues and churches, Sigurdur first sets the scene by taking the viewer out of his or her respectively normal settings and then transports them into his projections where the metaphysical becomes an invitation to surrender.

Sigurdur Gudjonsson

Ayşe Erkmen is one of Turkey’s most important visual artists. Her practice has long examined the social and political implications of physical space including infrastructure, urban planning and architecture. Currently based between Istanbul and Berlin, Erkmen transcends the world of architecture and spatial design and pushes the boundaries when it comes to the transformation of both indoor and outdoor sites. On Water, 2017, a beautiful installation that debuted at the international open-air exhibition, Sculpture Projects, in Münster, Germany, is one example of Erkmen’s visually striking site-specific installations and demonstrates the importance of the audience in the completion of some of her artworks.

Ayşe Erkmen

Have you ever stood in the rain and not gotten wet? If you ever visit Rain Room created by Random International, a collaborative studio founded by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, then this is something you can experience for yourself. Rain Room is an interactive art work that uses motion sensors to allow visitors to walk through an artificial downpour without getting wet and is the work that thrust the art collective into the public eye in 2005. Since then Random International has continued to create work that invites the viewer to actively participate and questions “aspects of identity and autonomy in the post-digital age.”

Random International

You would think that someone who invented some of the most iconic and instantly recognisable jewellery of the last few decades would be a household name by now, but Eddie Plein is only just getting the recognition he deserves for inventing grills. Born in Suriname, Plein moved to New York with the rest of his family in his early teens. He was an aspiring soccer player, but watching his father hustle to provide for his family in a new country Plein knew he was never destined for a traditional nine to five. It was the eighties and in Brooklyn Plein was surrounded by the budding hip hop scene.

Eddie Plein

VALIE EXPORT’s work is a negotiation, nay confrontation, of the patriarchal ways through which a woman’s experience is constructed. Crucial to this, is the artist’s navigation of space. VALIE EXPORT’s early work came at a time when Austrian society was still deeply conservative. In the series Body Configurations from the 1970s, for example, the artist is photographed contorting and morphing her body to complement the built environment of Vienna. Yet no matter how far VALIE EXPORT adapts her body in sculptural ways, she remains unable to fully replicate the cold, patriarchal surfaces of her architectural surroundings. The series is, nonetheless, a reclamation of space – as is the fact that the screenprints of the Aktionshose series were pasted up in public spaces around the city.

Valie Export

Quite often when scrolling social media you come across videos of robots that scientists are working on, some humanoid, some not. However one thing is constant, and that is somewhere in the comments people are joking that these robots will one day turn on us, and ‘the robot wars’ will become reality. This sentiment is unsurprising, especially from a generation brought up on media such as Black Mirror. But what if they didn’t turn on us? What if the ‘robots’ or the ‘machines’ become part of the ecosystem, benign artificial beings that live in the wild and evolve on their own? Anicka Yi’s installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall explores such a possibility. As you enter the space you spot them, flying high above the crowds of visitors, like strange sea creatures with gently waving tentacles and whirring propellers.

Anicka Yi

Ghostly white flowers float gently against a sea of black. Delicate pale fish weave their way through the waving fronds of these transparent florae. Luna Ikuta creates these mystical aquatic landscapes by stripping away the colour and chlorophyll from living plants. This process involves “extracting the living cells from plants while leaving the ECM (extracellular tissue matrix) intact.” The flowers are then submerged underwater which causes them to sway softly mimicking the movement caused by light breezes in the natural world. Ikuta’s aim was to de-sensationalise peoples perception of the outside world by showing them the wonders that could be found in their immediate surroundings.

Luna Ikuta

It’s difficult to summarise the art of Georgina Starr. Since the early 1990s, the artist has made use of the array of tools (video, sound, written word and live performance) at her disposal to create a rich and varied body of work. In early works, Starr engaged a cast of miniature paper figures as stand-ins for real life conversations the artist would covertly record in public spaces. Later, Starr appears in her work – though the extent to which she was performing as herself is itself part of her practice. In The Party (1995), a 25-minute video installation, Starr takes on the role of Liz (a character whose advances are rejected by another character in a previous film). As Starr tells NR below, though the role was fictional, the process of making the film instils it with autobiographic elements.

Georgina Starr

Adébayo Bolaji is a self-taught painter. Having come to this point via law and acting, his practise has eschewed all the standard points of reference that the art world gravitates towards. Bolaji has, nonetheless, taken the art world by storm, so to speak. It is not difficult to see why; visually, his multi-media works are captivating, intricate, yet bold. There is no doubt that colour plays a central role in his paintings, and whilst it is difficult not the get lost in the depth of colour, texture and shape, Bolaji pushes the viewer to go further. Speaking to Bolaji, it is clear that, through his work, he seeks to resist the conventional – be that, conventional constructions of narrative and what we expect from its linearity, or the conventions of art practise and the ways in which we engage with exhibition spaces.

Adebayo Bolaji

Nothing is left to chance in Yoann Bourgeois’ work – not the choice of the four figures in grey who, from, from a certain angle, seem indistinguishable from Sicard’s figures, nor the precision of each movement. For Bourgeois, who was trained in circus art at the prestigious Centre national des arts du cirque, it is our relationship with time, space and the physical forces that is central to his practice. His performances unsettle the equilibrium and, often, induce a sense of vertigo, but it is through this process of exploring the constraints of the physical forces that our humanity is brought to the fore. Though it can be almost reassuringly soothing to watch as a figure repeatedly falls and rises on a rotating structure, it also brings to mind an endless stream of questions.

Yoann Bourgeois

The lack of contentment governs the persistence of Amia Yokoyama to unfold the transaction between permanence and impermanence, fragility and strength. She tells NR about the void she desires to fill with whatever gnaws at her at the time she falls under its spell. She always seeks something, always on the hunt to uncover more, the reason she keeps sculpting and producing videos and animations. Somewhere between these works of art, she finds the depth of herself, the truth she owns that lies within the realms of her material and immaterial creativity. When she describes her practice, she lends her audience a piece of herself, and they soon realize the fidelity she upholds, questioning the elements of the Earth, the states of matter, the spaces that live within the physical and the memories, and the existence of layers in the digital world.

Amia Yokoyama

There is a calming serenity in the sculptures of Mari-Ruth Oda, and the importance of the natural world is made abundantly clear in the organic surfaces, shapes and curves that can be found in her work. This makes sense, given the influence of the Japanese principles of Shintoism on her practice – that there is something inherently divine about nature. Having been based in Manchester for a number of years, Mari has recently left the city that was rapidly changing for the worst behind her, opting for a new way of living, ‘in the middle of nowhere on the Llŷn Peninsula of North Wales’. The move, which Mari explains she had been considering for a number of years without never quite making the leap, makes sense for someone so invested in the beauty of our surroundings.

Mari-Ruth Oda

Over the course of twenty-three days, Italian artist Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?) climbed into the body of a giant octopus sculpture, which took up the entirety of a drained swimming pool, and stayed there for eight hours every day until the exhibition was over. For Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?) the start of the exhibition was also the start of her transition from the gender she was assigned at birth. However, she also considers herself trans-species, stating that her “dysphoria is not only gender-related but of species too. I wish I could find a hormone that allows me to become an octopus.” The sea plays a big part in Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?)’ work, she grew up on her father’s boat and being underwater is a comforting experience for her, which she has likened to returning to the womb. NR Magazine joins the artist in conversation.

Agnes Questionmark

“Ah rabbit holes, I know them” texts Mark Leckey, after I ask if we can delay our interview. I have a list of questions I could put to the artist, but I’ve lost myself in the matrix of his work. And where do you start? Perhaps with Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, the 1999 video that put Leckey on the art world map. But that isn’t the beginning of the artist’s story, something the artist himself has subsequently explored. Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port, a town used as an overspill for Liverpool in the late 1960s that looks back towards the city on the other side (the wrong side, Leckey would say) of the River Mersey. Leckey studied art in Newcastle, moved to London and, having not found success, decamped to the States for a while. Leckey has spoken previously about how, in the mid-to-late 1990s, he was interested in the music videos that were coming out at the time.

Mark Leckey

Design

Vincenzo De Cotiis, an architect and artist from Milan, Italy, has built a career that blends the past and future through his unique design philosophy. After studying at the Politecnico di Milano, he founded his studio in Milan, which serves as both his home and the center of his creative work. De Cotiis' designs result from continuous analysis and experimentation, merging space and time, cultural layers, and unexpected leaps. His projects, though complex, are powerfully expressed through their materials.

Vincenzo De Cotiis

In the heart of Milan’s Central Station area, the modern charm of rationalist architecture is experiencing a renaissance under the touch of studioutte. Led by the dynamic duo of Guglielmo Giagnotti and Patrizio Gola, who established the studio in 2020, studioutte is not just about architecture—it’s a multifaceted practice that delves into interior design, decoration, and the creation of collectible designs. Deriving its name from ‘hütte’, a term that evokes images of huts, cabins, and shelters, studioutte’s ethos is rooted in a blend of distinct Italian tradition and harmonious, integrated design principles.

studioutte

They believe in keeping things simple, using materials like oak plywood and sheet metal to create thoughtful furniture and lighting. They focus on clarity and proportions, avoiding unnecessary complexity. Now based in Lisbon, their work is recognised worldwide, and they're represented by galleries in major cities like Paris, New York, and London. Sophie Gelinet and Cédric Gepner didn't have formal training in furniture design, but they shared a passion that led them to create their first lamp. That lamp became the foundation for a collection, and in 2017, Studio HAOS was born.

Studio HAOS

The seamless blend of wood and aluminium spoke volumes of the meticulous craftsmanship behind each piece. Specialising in bespoke furniture and interior installations, MOCK Studio boasts a diverse portfolio that spans from individual items to entire interior environments.

MOCK Studio

What does designing space mean when the human perception of its living environments is experiencing an unprecedented moment of transition? The profound change we are witnessing, unlike in the past, is no longer simply aesthetic, but gnoseological and psychological too. As the walls between factual and simulated reality are collapsing, such a reflection no longer seems to gravitate around stylistic issues but calls for a rethinking of the role of the interior designer themselves, as well as of their platforms of expression.

Tom Hancocks

Frederik Fialin, a designer hailing from Denmark but based in Berlin, specialises in crafting bold yet whimsical minimalist furniture using durable, frequently recycled materials. He enjoys playing with contrasts, blending elements like sturdy construction steel with vibrant velour upholstery. Despite his traditional training as a cabinet maker, Fialin consistently challenges conventions and explores new possibilities in his work.

Frederik Fialin

We recently met Hsin-Ying Ho and Kai-Ming Tung, the creative minds behind Yellow Nose Studio, a Berlin-based design venture founded in 2017. With backgrounds in architecture and a shared passion for handmade objects, this Taiwanese duo embarked on a journey to explore the intersection of space, materiality, and emotion. Inspired by a desire to infuse raw materials with new life, they craft organic forms from typically inorganic elements, guided by an intuitive logic rooted in emotional processes. Through their work, they seek to capture the essence of slow living, offering living tools that invite us to savour and appreciate the spaces we inhabit each day.

Yellow Nose Studio

The first three-dimensional, physical object that multidisciplinary artist Illya Goldman Gubin made comments on the everyday obstacles creatives face in a world dominated by consumerist logic. From the descriptions, several images may come up – glitching computer screens, broken doors, burned bridges, thrashed rooms, or maxed out credits cards – but Gubin built his storyline around an object famed for the hierarchy metaphor: a ladder. “The sculpture is a physical manifestation of the internalized struggle to climb the proverbial social ladder, our personal hopes, dreams, and challenges manifesting in a sculpture of rough materiality,” says the artist. Soon, viewers will find out the interconnectedness of everything Gubin works on.

Illya Goldman Gubin

Testing the limits of the boundaries communities and self impose shapes the utopia Andrés Reisinger aspires to manifest. His visual artistry intersects art, design, music, architecture, fashion, and beyond, always moving along the waves of culture and never settling for anything marked as conventional. The results give birth to the manifestation of a hybrid reality, one where the intangible becomes tangible. The duality of the physical and digital realms, the fruition and transition from a blueprint to reality, the faces of strangeness and their unearthly appeal, and the celebration of a newborn: everything moves in and out of Reisinger’s creative ethos.

Andrés Reisinger

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, Superflux calls itself a boundary-defying design and experiential futures company whose research and art practice range from climate change to algorithmic autonomy, from future of work to more-than-human politics. The installation above testifies to this statement. Its title, Invocation for Hope, overviews a slice of the bigger picture the practice paints. “How do we move forward in this shattered landscape?” they ask. Rather than just posing questions, they turn to art and philosophy to fuel the minds of their viewers, pulling them into their works to start acting.

Superflux

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, a Nigerian designer based in Lagos, specializes in product, furniture, and experience design. Celebrated for his talent in crafting sustainable products that originate from local ecosystems while making waves in international projects, Nifemi is the creative force behind nmbello Studio. He is at the forefront of shaping Africa’s design landscape with his innovative and unconventional designs. His work seamlessly blends historical perspectives with contemporary influences, resulting in conceptual products that marry artistic expression with practical functionality. Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s approach to design aligns with the emerging trend that explores the intersection between producing individual pieces and small series. His creations are deeply rooted in culture and often serve as vessels for profound meanings.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello

Based in Mexico City, EWE is a design studio that celebrates the country’s rich history of artisanal practice. Tradition is interwoven with new ideas, combining innovation with heritage. The studio was started in 2017 by the Estonian curator, Age Salajõ, Mexican designer Héctor Esrawe, and Spanish industrial designer, Manu Bañó, whose varied backgrounds and expertise allow for their creative approach. Their work falls somewhere between furniture and sculpture; beautifully-crafted objects that are also technically functional. By amplifying the skill of craftsmanship and the craftsman, their work is inherently collaborative – working with Mexican specialists to create ornate, yet organic, objects. The forms, shapes, colours and textures of their pieces recall the natural elements, something that is reflected in the studio’s approach to using four main processes – glass, stone, foundry work and wood.

Ewe Studio

Rods of light twirl and twist, a line of hula hoops loop around each other in a mesmerisingly technical dance, a gallery space is transformed into a kinetic universe of projected images, all to hypnotic soundtracks of electronic and classical music. Collectif Scale is a group of artists and technicians based in Paris who pool their respective knowledge and experience to create cutting-edge augmented installations. Since their beginning, they have “questioned the links between music and the visual, light and architectural design, entertainment and contemporary art, nature and the future, man and machine.” They seek to provide the answers to these questions through their installations. NR Magazine spoke to the collective about their practice.

Collectif Scale

Joe Mortell is a 3D designer based in London, whose work combines the efforts of creative direction, animation and illustration to construct elegantly rendered interiors and landscapes. Often merging into one another, Mortell’s interiors and exteriors integrate to form a unique and surreal aesthetic, crafted with a high level of detail. Mortell’s 3D rendered environments have a comfortingly familiar, dreamlike quality to them. With their carefully stylised compositions and polished imagery, it is as though we’ve been given a glimpse into a digital utopia. With ambient lighting, inventive furnishings and alluring textures, Mortell’s work transfigures the digital realm into something almost tangible.

Joe Mortell

Fashion

Nina Raasch

Rita Lino

Sara Pavan

Yudo Kurita

Andrea Lamedica

Alessandro Mannelli

Tommaso Posch

Max Holl

Antonino Cafiero

Nicolò Parsenziani

Xavier Casanueva

Bottega Veneta Special

Anastasia Korolkova

Shauna Summers

Jurga Ramonaite

Charlotte Lapalus

Film

‘Silt’ a 35 minute documentary film produced by Iida Jonsson, Ssi Saarinen and Ona Julija Lukas Steponaityte, is an exploration into the post-soviet landscape following the formation of rapidly occurring lakes in Lithuania, one of which, rests on Lukas’ family land in Likanciai. The newfound body of water is a by-product of a failed multi-decade soviet drainage project, aimed at making wetlands more suitable for agriculture. Following the collapse of the regime, the Lithuanian municipality gained responsibility of such drainage systems, but high maintenance costs resulted in the prioritisation of farmland and infrastructure. As time passed, the drainage systems started to clog and what was once a drainage pipe, became a vessel for a lake to emerge on the family’s backyard.

Silt

Unpacking Yuri Ancarani's extensive body of work means tackling a plethora of themes: from the idea of reality and imagination to the concept of truth, from language, symbols and the importance of sound to the overall theorization on aesthetics and the genre of the documentary.

Yuri Ancarani

Tension. Building. The forces at work are pulled taught, the feeling of potential flexes itself and finds relief in the ensuing moment almost effortlessly, the open palm closes. Final form is evasive because purpose is always readjusting itself, writhing, stretching to capacity but never beyond. The shapes we find ourselves in become mirrors for empathy when we understand the rubberband.

Rubberband

Sharing one’s history is a challenging task. Yet, German photographer and filmmaker Luca Werner has skillfully and sensitively unveiled fragments of his past, capturing fleeting moments of youth, delving into the intricacies of relationships, and exploring the depths of his inner being. Transitioning seamlessly between photography and video, he showcases his expertise in both technical precision and narrative storytelling. With his recent project, “Pools,” garnering widespread attention, we were curious to interview him, not only to delve into the details of this latest endeavour but also to trace the roots and progression of his career.

Luca Werner

Every few years, an ‘it-girl’ arises and claims her throne, crowned as such by loyal fans and social media enthusiasts alike. The contemporary it-girl is not only defined by her looks, but possesses the intelligence and self-assertiveness to back it up. Chloe Cherry is all of these things. After leaving her rural hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania to pursue the adult film industry, she shed her inhibitions and opened herself up to the world. But it wasn’t until a few years down the line that Chloe would realise just how much that fortitude would pay off.

Chloe Cherry

Filippo Scotti started out as a theater actor in Naples at the age of 16, and even before that, his mother had encouraged him to try his hand out at acting when he was 11. While on tour with his theater group for shows, an agency signed him, the gradual shift of the young actor from theater to cinema. His new lineup brimmed with auditions where he would prepare each day to spew out his memorized lines with depth to match his character’s emotions, almost melding with his own.

Filippo Scotti

Sweeping shots of golden arid landscapes, wild salty Pacific bays, and the rise of the rocky Andean mountains serve to juxtapose the modern architecture nestled in the wilderness. This is one of the documentaries by Kliwadenko Novas, an audiovisual production company formed by Katerina Kliwadenko, a Chilean journalist, and Mario Novas, a Spanish architect. Since 2015 the duo has been developing an investigation into architecture and urbanism in Latin America, a region they have a special interest in due to its state of “constant crisis that forces it to reinvent itself.” In addition to this, they also focus their projects on “people capable of redrawing the limits of their disciplines and questioning what they do”.

Kliwadenko Novas

Like water through a closed fist, success seeps before permeating, so often we are only left with a feeling. Uncurling his wet fingers to peer down at the traces left to puddle in the creases of his fissured palms, Jonas Åkerlund yields a single flick of the wrist, scattering droplets skyward before running it through the tresses of his long, greased, black hair. It’s hot, midday in Los Angeles after all and sweat begins to bead as abstraction is traded for sensation. The Grammy-award winning director oscillates between fatherhood, soggy cereal and a full-house in the face of COVID-19 and chatty meetings surrounding the debut of Clark, a new, Netflix show he co-wrote about a Swedish libertine whose crimes forged the spine of the term Stockholm Syndrome before carving out some time to chat.

Jonas Åkerlund

When she was younger, Rina Yang would keep in contact with her best friend in London by making, editing and sending ‘video letters’ from her hometown in Japan. Rina later moved to London to study and while there, saw an ad for a film school. The course was mostly theory with very little practical work, she told Lecture in Progress in 2017, but nonetheless gave her a reason to remain in the UK. Rina’s first roles in the industry involved working as a camera assistant on short projects. ‘I only did it properly for a couple of years,’ because as she tells me over the phone, it was a stressful role. But she did find common ground talking to directors during breaks about the creative processes behind the work. ‘I was better at that, than looking after the camera.’ And so, she pivoted – cutting her teeth in music video and short films jobs that her friends would ask her to work on. ‘One thing led to another,’ Rina adds – and she was able to carve out a space for herself as a director of photography (DP), a notoriously difficult role to break into and succeed in.

Rina Yang

Logan Rice is a photographer, filmmaker and cinematographer based in Los Angeles, California. The young artist has established himself in the creative industry as one to watch, with an impressive body of work that includes cinematic and light-hearted collaborations with high profile clients, alongside more impassioned and personal projects. Growing up filming skateboarding, it is only natural that the artist would make the move to Los Angeles, where his inspiration from day-to-day culture, music and fashion has now come to inform his eclectic and ever-growing practice.

Logan Rice

Willem Dafoe connects to Zoom from Rome, where he lives with his wife, Giada Colagrande. The actor has just returned from filming in Budapest – where last week, the shoot for NR took place. For the shoot, Dafoe wore exclusively Prada, a brand he says he likes very much. “There were some crazy colours, but I like to stick out my neck a little bit. Sometimes I put on clothes I wouldn’t normally wear in life, but I enjoy doing it to shoot with.” As one of the most prolific actors in cinema for some forty years, the actor must have some familiarity with stepping into clothes he might not otherwise. “That’s the idea, and that’s the pleasure,” he says. Whether he steps into Prada attire for a magazine or spends countless hours in make-up to embody the legendary Nosferatu in 2000’s The Shadow of the Vampire, Willem Dafoe is a master of using costume and his surroundings to capture the emotional profile of a character.

Willem Dafoe

For Neels Castillon, authenticity is integral to his role as a film director and photographer, especially, as he explains on the phone from Paris, in an age of fake news. The dissemination of falsified and fabricated news reportage may not have a direct connection to Castillon but his contention lies with the prevalence of artifice. He sees his role as navigating a balance between capturing the feeling that cinematic visuals can provoke, whilst simultaneously resisting the artificiality those same visuals can carry.

Neels Castillon

Music

What is a feeling? neither us nor Shane Lavers from Chanel Beads might have a correct answer for it. That being said, NR spoke with him about navigating fleeting emotions through music, internal contradictions, and what drove —and bothered— him one week prior the NYC band’s debut album Your Day Will Come would see the light.

Chanel Beads

When some people hear the name “Denzel Curry,” they think of the explosive chorus of his high-octane hit “Ultimate.” Others may think of his viral music video for “Ricky”––which recreates the backyard brawls Curry attended in his hometown of Miami––or the fact that he toured with superstar Billie Eilish, who has proclaimed Curry to be one of her favorite artists. The rapid conclusion that can be drawn from his flashiest achievements––that Denzel Curry is a great rapper––pales in comparison to the one drawn by those who have dug deeper into his complete body of work. When you truly connect the dots of his career, you are confronted with a portrait of an artist who has made a truly massive contribution to the development of hip hop in the past decade.

Denzel Curry

Like for Andy on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965, silence is sexy for Snow Strippers. NR explores the US band’s universe, one made of sound, images, and few words.

Snow Strippers

Tom Heyes, also known by his artistic moniker Blackhaine is a rapper, poet and choreographer from Lancashire, UK. Known by many for his projects with Kanye West (Donda 1 and 2) and more, the multidisciplinary artist has forged for himself a solid path, establishing his own unique artistry. Chicago drill, industrial, ambient, experimental hip hop are some of the genres combined within Heyes’ unique soundscapes. With producer Rainy Miller, Heyes worked on delivering visceral releases first Armour, then And Salford Falls Apart. Released in June 2022, Armour II follows the trail of the two earlier bleak releases, perhaps an ending, nonetheless part of the bigger journey the audience embarks on when listening to Heyes. Re-contextualising his anger, Heyes delivers poetic yet brutal narratives which juxtaposed with cinematographic visuals, immerse the viewer into Heyes’ inner world.

Blackhaine

On the eve of Sunset Violent’s release, Mount Kimbie’s fourth studio album, the first one featuring Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell to join the band, founding members Dominic Maker and Kai Campos discussed with NR new beginnings, shared languages, rediscovering ways of being artistically together, and The Sunset Violent’s genesis.

Mount Kimbie

Back in June, Kevin Saunderson of Inner City made headlines when he claimed, in an interview with Billboard, that the music industry had failed Black artists. And he’s got personal anecdotes to back that up – recalling, over the phone to NR, the time himself and fellow Detroiter, Derrick May, played a festival in Australia almost ten years ago. The pair found themselves playing a stage with around 200 capacity; the Canadian EDM producer, Deadmau5, was on the main stage, playing to an audience maybe 20, 30, 40 times the size. It’s a story that captures dance music perfectly in a nutshell. Back in the 1980s, it was Kevin, Derrick and their high school peer, Juan Atkins, who pioneered and popularised techno in Detroit; young, Black producers making music for people like them. ‘Our crowd was 90% Black,’ Kevin explains – sure, the crowds were smaller than they are now, but that’s because EDM music exploded into a billion-dollar industry. An industry whose most well-known faces are male and white; Deadmau5, Skrillex, Diplo, David Guetta, and so on.

Kevin Saunderson

Paris Texas as a group, as a sound, is unbridled, an act of distortion perceived. Fans have likened them to delivering the unexpected, they’re “different” and hence, “refreshing” – unzipping musical genres while asking us to let go as part of the experience. As they gear up to release their full-length debut album Mid Air this August, they crank the steering wheels to the left, beckoning us towards the godforsaken – vulnerability, singularity, and self-awareness. Though the guys see themselves as “silly,” through the intersections they’ve built between sound and visuals, reality and delusion, id and ego, it becomes glaringly evident that they aren’t just on the map, but are making it.

Paris Texas

Entering into Cruel Santino’s world is no easy feat. An analysis of his work is cumbersome and tiring. It almost feels like walking into a packed gallery with great artwork but not enough walls. In this case, there is a word limit. Looking at Santi’s work is difficult because, no matter what area is observed – whether it is his video-game production, filmmaking, graphic designs or music, it makes no difference – there is a level of quality and intimate love that has been squeezed through the medium. Since he released Mandy & The Jungle (2019), Santi has been seen as a musician. This box has various conditions that assist and obstruct an artist’s ability to create. He has since outstretched his wings and engulfed a wider array of mediums, a decision that has allowed him to reach a diverse range of audiences and express his entirety to the world.

Cruel Santino

With the release of her 2020 EP, Ache of Victory, the singer Zsela was able to satiate an audience who had been waiting for this moment. Her voice – deep, sultry, smooth – breezily carrying the introspective five-track record along, from start to finish. Ache of Victory was a while in the making, with the artist taking her time to make it. She collaborated with the producer Daniel Aged, who’s worked with the likes of Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs and Kelala – a strong indication of the kind of sound that shapes Zsela’s EP. But Zsela’s voice is distinctively its own. If Ache of Victory fits within the current realm of R&B, it’s worth noting that the singer has previously supported the likes of Angel Olsen and Cat Power – and Zsela’s voice exudes a real soulfulness. In 2020, she joined Porches for a cover of ‘Porcelain’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers as part of the synth-pop band’s virtual tour on Instagram. And as a native of New York, Zsela’s become something of a glittering presence in the city’s fashion and art circuits.

Zsela

mar Apollo appears, shoulders upward, in the bottom corner of his screen connecting to our Zoom call from his phone. Behind and above him is what appears to be a vast, vaulted wood ceiling. The twenty-four-year-old singer is calling from the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California, where he’s currently holed up. “I went on this hike yesterday,” he enthuses, “we were super high up to the point where you felt kind of high – it was really weird because the oxygen was different up there. I got a little scared, but it was great.” At the top, he met an eighty-something year old man called Bjorn who hikes up the mountain a few times a week on the lookout for fires nearby.

Omar Apollo

Pan Daijing is an artist and composer whose work defies easy categorisation. Earlier this year, Daijing released her third album, Tissues – an hour-long record taken from the artist’s performance piece of the same name that was shown at the Tate Modern back in 2019. The work was conceived as an opera in five acts, combining Daijing’s long-standing exploration of electronic music. In a Zoom call from Berlin where Daijing lives, the artist jokes that Tissues almost predicted the pandemic – not least because of its title, but also as a performance about hopelessness and a pervading sense of despair that seems to categorise the world we live in now.

Pan Daijing

July is usually a transitional month when one handles the last matters at hand headed for the summer break. For British-French songwriter Lauren Auder, July was a month particularly charged with meaning, as she was about to release her first LP, The Infinite Spine, crowning a 5 years process of exploration and experimentation whereby the London-based songwriter broods her distinctive sound. NR spoke with her during the last days leading to the album’s release for its Personal Investigation Issueto retrace the influences and processes behind the record and her approach to music, art, and creativity. A conversation that, much like her music, uses a given particularity to paint a not necessarily bigger, but surely broader, picture.

Lauren Auder

Overmono are a UK electronic music duo made up of brothers Ed and Tom Russell. Raised in Wales, the siblings had individual success as producers before joining forces as Overmono. Wanting to reduce the influence of their individual pasts from the mix, they isolated themselves in a cottage and started to develop the foundation behind their music. Now, through a standing relationship with pioneering British label XL Recordings, they have released a series of layered and boundary-pushing work that define their distinctive sound today.

Overmono

Photography

When Joshua Gordon went to Thailand, he followed a gang of teenage bikers and witnessed their fraternity. He saw how the young boys had each other’s backs and would die for one another. He directed the film about this along with the country’s occultism and witchcraft culture that religious people might completely exile in their belief systems, but that other people base their spirituality and faith on. After a while, he wanted to investigate the drag landscape in Cuba. Armed with his lens, he was hoping to capture the tight-knit drag community in a country that might not yet be open to the queer scene. He ended up meeting twin trans sisters and peered into their intimate life.

Joshua Gordon

The Italian-born Gabriele Galimberti is an internationally renowned photographer and visual storyteller. With a committed gaze, he observes and recounts scenes of being with a practice that is as creative as it is concrete. Entering his subject’s private world, he captures images of people at their jobs and in their homes, with their belongings, families or certain possessions to research and align intra-human patterns across the world. His lens is nearly within touching distance of subjects, and the product is an analogue of involved intimacy and exposed vulnerabilities.

Gabriele Galimberti

Richard Kern, the iconic photographer and counterculture figure, has been capturing the gritty, unapologetic essence of downtown New York City for over four decades. His work explores themes of sexuality, fetishism, and power dynamics, pushing boundaries and challenging societal norms. Kern’s photographs are a raw and honest reflection of his subjects, capturing their vulnerability and strength in equal measure.

Richard Kern

Andres Serrano (born 1950 in New York, United States) has been recognised for his thought-provoking photographs and installations. Although the public might mostly recognise his famed Piss Christ, 1987 installation, featuring a small figurine of crucified Christ immersed in the artist’s own urine, the photographer has created an archive of series reflecting on societal themes ranging from death, religion to torture, racism and more. The scenes and subjects of Serrano’s painting-like photographs provoke the mind exactly like one would hope art does. Trained in sculpture and painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art school and inspired by Baroque and Italian Renaissance art, rituals and religious iconography infused by his Roman catholic upbringing, Serrano’s transgressive art is timeless.

Andres Serrano

A respected cult figure in skateboarding culture, Ed Templeton’s photography takes inspiration from the subculture he is a part of and its suburban roots. Templeton started his professional skating career in the early 90s, and soon ventured into the world of photography, documenting his friends, surroundings, and the antics that followed the subculture. In the mid to late 90s, Templeton found himself on the frontline of a cutting-edge mixture of personal expression and social documentary. Developing this into a vast and distinct body of work, Templeton has become a household name in the world of contemporary street photography, with his most notable work ‘Wires Crossed’ being part memoir, part documentation of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding as it blossomed between the 90s and early noughties.

Ed Templeton

The Barbican’s latest exhibition explores the work of Claudia Andujar, a Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and activist who has spent her life documenting and defending the Yanomami, one of Brazil’s largest indigenous peoples. Through a collection of over 200 photographs, an audio-visual installation, and a series of drawings by the Yanomami, the exhibition explores Andujar’s relationship with the Yanomami that spanned five decades, and details periods of direct activism amongst the indigenous communities.

Claudia Andujar

Yolanda Andrade is a Mexican photographer and one of the most prominent figures in the artistic landscape of Latin America. After graduating from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, in 1977, Andrade developed a career as a street photographer, experimenting with both analogue and digital photography, gaining international recognition as one of the few artists capable to capture the identity of a specific city and culture.

Yolanda Andrade

Last year, Alain Levitt started sharing his archive of photography on a dedicated Instagram account. As a photographer in New York in the aughts, Levitt had turned his back on photography by the time the decade was out. In the intervening years, Levitt’s photographs gathered dust, whilst film photography was supplanted by the rise of social media. From the perspective of 2022, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that, since its launch twelve years ago, Instagram has changed our relationship to photography. In its early days, the photo-sharing app was characterised by a limited choice of filters and corresponding borders to boot; the more vintage an Instagram post looked and seemed, the better it was. But what happens when photographs – real 35mm photographs – taken in the years just before Instagram’s launch reach an age where they become ‘vintage’ themselves?

Alain Levitt

New-York based photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti often explores through her work, changes, experiences and feelings in society. Sanguinetti’s photography is infused with a certain serenity and a beautiful melancholia showing a certain level of trust between her and her subjects. Her decade long project The Adventures of Guille and Belinda captures two cousins growing up together in the rural province of Buenos Aires, in Argentina. It is a testimony of family, a study of love, tracing the girls’ lives between every day and imagination from the ages of 14 to 24 and their passage from girlhood to young womanhood. The series which began in 1998 is the subject of two booksThe Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams (Nazraeli) and ten years later,The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Illusion of an Everlasting Summer(Mack).

Alessandra Sanguinetti

Though Photographer Hal takes his moniker from the artificial intelligence character of the same name in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are not too many similarities between them. Whereas the sentient HAL 9000 becomes wholly untrusting of his human peers, ‘trust’ is a fundamental component of Hal, the photographer’s, work. Over the course of his career, Hal has dedicated his time to photographing couples – couples he often approaches in bars in his hometown, Tokyo – with the aim of capturing a sense of their love for one another. In his early series, Pinky & Killer DX, Hal invited couples to pose as if they’re inside a purikura (a Japanese photo booth in which the photos are printed onto stickers with effects added over the top).

Photographer Hal

The photographer Jenevieve Aken is a storyteller. Though Aken often turns to self-portraiture, her work is never merely autobiographical. Rather, she takes on the role of both subject and photographer to tell stories that others recognise and see themselves in. As well as using her own experiences as the basis of her projects, Aken also reinterprets the stories of others, fictional (in Great Expectations, she fashions herself as ‘Miss Aken’, a play on Dickens’s Miss Havisham) and real. Her series, Sanctuary (2017), for example, sees Aken delve into the story of Elvira Orlandini who was raped and murdered in her home village of Palaia, Italy, in 1947. As Aken explains in her interview with NR, she was taking part in an artist residency in the village when she learned of the brutal tragedy of Elvira. Through a series of black and white images, Aken conjures up the spirit of the murdered woman, granting her a second chance at life.

Jenevieve Aken

A wallet is stolen from a gallery in San Fransisco, just over a year later a woman receives a summons to appear in court for a petty crime she did not commit. It sounds like the beginning of a movie but for artist Jessamyn Lovell it was reality. She learned that her identity had been stolen by a woman named Erin Hart, who had been using her name to check into hotels, hire cars and to shoplift. As a way to help deal with the trauma of the situation, Lovell began the Dear Erin Hart project where she documented the process of tracking down and surveilling the woman who had stolen her identity. Unable to find Erin Hart on her own Lovell hired a private detective and soon discovered that Hart was already in jail for a previous misdemeanour. However, upon Hart’s release Lovell and the P.I she had hired followed Hart around the city, photographing her.

Jessamyn Lovell

Jo Ann Walters has been photographing towns like the one she grew up in for a while – since the 1980s in fact. Growing up in Alton, a ‘small town along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois’, she was as committed to leaving her hometown, as she was to returning there, in order to document what life is like for those who live there. Walters won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 to photograph along the river and was soon drawn to depicting the livelihoods of the town’s population of women. This series was made into a book, Wood River Blue Pool, last year. Yet, if focussing on the women of Alton, and towns like it, was familiar to Walters, the DOG Town series explores a side of her upbringing that was both familiar and alien to her.

Jo Ann Walters

Experimenting with the traditional methodology of portraiture, Andrzej Steinbach examines how cultural habits and impressions are transposed and communicated through different postures, movements, and clothing. Also intrigued by the political and revolutionary potential in commonplace objects, Steinbach observes that through appreciating the formal aspects of everyday items and images, artistic practice can be transformed and elevated. Steinbach often creates a unique sense of disorientation with his figurative work, as his models resist strict interpretations and serve to remind us of the transience and inconsistent nature of relationships and the human condition. His work boldly asks us to confront our performative selves, and to consider how we connect to ourselves and those around us.

Andrzej Steinbach

In GT Nergaard’s photographic practice, the intersection between fiction and reality offers the grand gesture of self-portraiture. Every photograph reflects his journey towards discovering personal narratives that have shaped his background, artistry, and thoughts. As he builds his themes around these philosophies, he creates photographs based on his imagination and observes a situation through his lens, all while forming a bond of who he is and how he wants himself to be. Through a monochromatic palette, the Norwegian photographer includes his viewers as he fuses self with nature.

GT Nergaard

What it is to be ‘American’ is, particularly within the context of current affairs, inherently political. Linguistically, ‘American’ is the demonym of ‘America’ – referring to the noun used to denote the natives or inhabitants of a place. But it is also a term that has found itself being actively, and sometimes violently, reclaimed in the interests of a particular form of nationalistic ideology, one that seeks to control who can and cannot be ‘American’. Within this context, the photographer Marie Tomanova presents Young American, a series of portraits of young people in New York – in which their attitude, youthful fearlessness and ambition trumps established connections to the United States.

Marie Tomanova