A national identity? in this economy? On the eve of his first large scale exhibition at Spazio Maiocchi in collaboration with Slam Jam, NR spoke with British artist Corbin Shaw (b. 1998) of new and old monuments, and taking, conceptually, the piss, diving deep in the global-local dichotomy and the meaning of nostalgia and complexity in the economy of a gen Z artist seeking sustainable form of expression. A conversation on Shaw’s practice framed through his new body of work developed exclusively for Eurotrash, an exploration of identity and contemporary stigmas, with the occasional detour on Mod’s “live clean in difficult circumstances” motto and a touch of Baudrillard mixed with Simon Reynolds subcultural commentary —best served cold at an airport.
Corbin Shaw
Meriem Bennani (Morocco, 1988) explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of fantastical imagery and humor, juxtaposing and mixing the language of YouTube videos, reality TV, documentaries, animation, and high-production aesthetics. Throughout her career, she has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues, and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. For My Best Family”, a new exhibition project conceived by artist Meriem Bennani and commissioned by Fondazione Prada, on view until 24 February 2025, presents a site-specific installation and a new art film, on the social and cultural dimensions of coexisting, on the intimate and complex aspects of one’s identity, and on the dialogue between the individual self and the community. Bennani’s works are immersive and irreverent, and call into question various aspects of contemporary life, its conflicts and contradictions.
Meriem Bennani
Renowned American artist and designer Simone Bodmer-Turner, known primarily for her work in ceramics, has embarked on an innovative exploration into new mediums, showcasing collectible design objects crafted from bronze, wood, lacquer, and silk at the Emma Scully Gallery in New York. In a captivating discussion, Bodmer-Turner and Gallerist Emma Scully delve into the intricate interplay between design and art, reflecting on the evolving landscape of creativity. At the heart of their conversation lies the focal point of their recent collaboration—the exhibition “A Year Without a Kiln.” running until June 22, 2024.
Simone Bodmer-Turner – Emma Scully
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
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
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