Hollywood Superstar wants to know when the London millennial gallery circuit is going to catch up with the stylish, curatorially erudite and munificent women of Hamburg’s art world?

Presenting reportage from Hamburg from local writer Eva Paden. Chess Club, a Superstar-favourite gallery and wunderkind, invited several Londoners to participate in a 96-hour-long festival alongside other international artists. Amanda, Chess Club’s grand dame, has a curatorial strategy that is as much about enmeshing scenes as it is about strategically positioning works within a space. The festival was organised alongside duo-run AKA studios, another curatorial off-space in the city.

Both AKA and Chess Club aim to foster new connections, including this Anglo-German alliance, which saw a highly specific selection from the UK underground’s writers, performers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers. This was a group of people - a cohort (?) - already familiar with each others’ practices, flown out to reap the delights of European art funding.

While the rest of the art world takes its summer break, 96 hours provides a platform. The festival avoided the drabness of most not-for-profit events (bad techno-DJ empty dancehall filled with serious inauthenticity and a distinct lack of appeal to any artistic participants) by sampling directly from London’s subcultural petri-dish. 96 Hours was filled with live cultures as opposed to culturally disparate artists flown in to fill a bland, identitarian quota. This is not a reference to Kissick’s Harper’s lament but instead a product of direct experience with satellite fairs and off-spaces at Art Basel and Frieze.

96 hours” demonstrates a willingness on behalf of the state-funded Hamburg milieu. A desire to invest in the non-commercial, non-aligned, un-represented art emerging from London that the privately funded (demonstrably by the looks of HMRC tax reports) small-gallery world always ignores to their detriment. Publicly funded institutions, too. Except Raven Row. We love you Raven Row.

Critic Eva Paden reports on the curation, vibe and general atmosphere of this artworld novelty: a non-commercial festival. As Paden writes: “Hosting is the new mode of curating”.

In chess, the move known as “pawn promotion” elevates a pawn which reaches the opposite end of the board to a queen, the most powerful figure of the game.

“96 hours of summer” is a new initiative of Hamburg it-girl collaboration: Chess Club x AKA studios. Chess Club, a downtown gallery run by Amanda Charlott Weimer, and AKA studios, a rave-ready exhibition space/studio housed in a warehouse, run by the two local artists, Noemi Liv Nicolaisen and Mia Lotta Joedecke. Both venues know how to host and are notorious for turning exhibitions into full-blown happenings, each having previously been invited by the Kunstverein in Hamburg to co-host their afterparties. Both venues were given generous city funding for the festival; this allowed the contingent be to opened up, an international cohort was invited, including a large UK contingent, to prop up the 4-day long program:

Thursday: Exhibition Opening at Chess club, with music by Loi

Friday: Exhibition Opening at AKA studios, followed by three performances (Clara Schmidt, Alex Thake (as Hope Slattery), Sasha Lukashenkova and an afterparty with 20Stitches, Speckman, Cielo.mp3, Europa and Schuu.

Saturday: Decompressurization Act II, a play by Emma Bombail and Layo Mussi. Listening room with Soli City, back at Chess Club.

Sunday: Closing day! Summer party at AKA studios with a BBQ. “An informal wedding“ reading program by Charlotte Masha Bialas and concerts by Iku and Charlie Osborne.

I arrive at Chess Club. It’s already day three - around the 40th hour of the 96-hour festival. We’re in the heart of Hamburg’s shopping district. A paved street surrounded by restaurants, the opera nearby and Alsterhaus around the corner. I spot a group of people outside Chess Club, still awake and glowing from the party the night before. Some dart into one of the neighbouring restaurants for takeaway, and there’s an amicable nod from the staff, who are, after a year and a half of the gallery, familiar with Amanda and her crew.

I spot Pauline Schey and Theresa Weisheit outside, friends of Amanda who run Frankfurt-based experimental listening bar “score__”. We sit down on Chess Club’s kitschy, deep-red carpet, a remnant of the buildings former life as a 1980s cowboy boot store, to watch Soli City’s set. Surrounded by dried flowers, humming into his e-flute saxophone, Soli looks like a woodland fairy in an urbane, folk-revivalist Midsummer Night’s Dream. The scene feels melancholic. I’m hit with a strange nostalgia. For what, I’m not sure, but the feeling is sensible: Chess is soon closing its current iteration at Colonnaden. During it’s run, the gallery became a place for artistic hangouts, fostered a community. It has hosted shows, catalogue launches and performances alongside live music events. I usually avoid goodbyes, but as my friend S. once said, they’re meant to be celebrated with friends. That’s what this feels like: an informal, sentimental farewell.

Alex Thake, a Frankfurt based artist, is sat beside me. She explains how her reading, which took place at the AKA opening, was a “Don Quijote story told through Candy Darling”. It reminds me of a TikTok reel I saw about “5 books where you can’t trust the narrator”. She explains her idea of the unreliable narrator. It sticks with me - how we reconstruct events through fragments, memory and second-hand impressions. Nozomi Ngceni’s sculpture HCC² (2025) captures a similar subjectivity. Her xerox black-and-white prints rest on a flat surface, supported by staircase-like structures on both sides. Reflected in the space by the idiosyncratic mirrored ceiling, and loosely balancing on another mirror, the sculpture is endlessly repeated: “A mirrored image that exists in a multitude of dimensions“ Nozomi writes in her artist statement. It’s an homage to the space; the end is the beginning is the end. This is not a final goodbye though - Amanda will continue to do shows elsewhere. Still, there's something about this particular red-carpeted place which will be hard to replicate.

Hung on the conrete wall, I spot Portrait of Lydia (2025) by Callum Hansen, a London-based photographer. The work plays on the black-and-white motif, depicting a woman lying in her underwear, hands crossed almost protectively in front of her while meeting the camera’s gaze. Hansen captures the tension between the openness in her eyes and her defensive posture: a negotiation of intimacy one could only allow from lovers, intimates. “This is Lydia!” Amanda points out, a mutual friend from London, and I take a step closer. She tells me that the artist re-photographed the original plate many times. Through a layering process involving various types of paper, the surface has taken on a dream-like texture, textured by soft scratches and abrasions. These marks are almost distracting. It gives the image a falsely engineered “vintage” feel - a quiet nod to the nature of the medium, it’s tendency to age and how that dilutes or exacerbates the physicality of memory. While it’s conceptually introspective, it carries a strikingly expressive dedication to emotion. If I’m being totally honest, I would say it’s the kind of photo someone would take with them to war.

On Sunday, I arrive at AKA’s courtyard. It’s nestled between the former halls of a 19th-century listed electricity station. Like the aftermath of a Baroque Bacchanale, people lie sprawled, entangled upon huge pillows. It smells of hot dogs, and I assume somebody's parents are managing the barbecue. I want to see the show, so I head inside.

In Aka’s vast warehouse space, every work is either BIG or made of many small pieces. First, I gravitate towards the work of Clara Schmidt, a recent graduate of HFBK (University of Fine Arts Hamburg). Her retail-esque Gossip Harbour (2025) is a sculptural composition made of hundreds of tiny collectables, neatly found together on the shelves for a brief moment. Other works also have stage-like or display-ish qualities, like British-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Rose Stewart’s Bench Stage (2025) which is used later as a stage for Iku’s and a London-based performance artist Charlie Osbourne’s concert. Instead of building a post-industrial-white-cube-art-space, AKA invites their guests to have fun with the vast halls. Artworks function as props, setting AKA up as the auto-fiction-party girl’s version of Warhol’s factory. Rosa Lüder’s enlarged-early-2000s-flip-phone-gemstones that embellish the windows of the space complete this aesthetic of celebration and playfulness.

A beam of llight emerges from one of AKA’s smaller backrooms. Callum Hansen’s film Memorial Rounds (2024) is projected onto cracked walls. The film shows a camera vlog in first person. Skull bong, car drifting, play-fights; raw emotion and diy-material produce a film of highly intense, adolescent feeling. It fits the space. His quasi-coming-of-age-music video is a rebellious, romanticized non-conformative image of an anti-hero aesthetic. The film is fragmented by two pianists performing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”. Beethoven died long before youth culture became a thing, but I assume he was something like a proto-rockstar of his times, which makes me wonder what the coke of the 17th century was like.

Amidst all this century-spanning teenage chaos, I sense that the works by Loerdy Wesely and Floss Crossley & Theo Mackenzie offer a more conceptual (ironically or otherwise) counterpoint. One wall works formal and structural discipline form a quiet, calming geometrical rhythm. I look at the title: Señor Hunter Bidens Collection of Victorian Literatuur an unlikely combination of words. The artwork uses paper, and its materiality, as its prime communicator. Paper represents two facets of the artists’ lives. For Crossley, it bears the notation of customer’s orders - her artist bio details that she is a small plates waitress - and is printed with the words of her vocational reading, taken on shift breaks Nabokov’s Lolita.

Passing Australian artist Zach Rockman’s painting of punk-looking-1970’s-like-mugshots, I head back down the stairs to join the Informal Wedding. “You & Me” by Disclosure plays. Two people walk down the make-shift aisle, and the seated crowd starts clapping. They wear soft cotton dresses made in the early 2000s, fringy light brown Patrizia Pepe Vinted finds, polka dots and stripes. Both the romantic sentiment and specific styling contrast the upstairs works, like with sculptor and painter Nicolai Olesen‘s black, sharp, angular sculpture. Flora Lenzmann’s pronunciation of “Lavender Lady“ stays with me for days.

Ozzy Osborne died during the installation of 96 hours of summer. Amanda and I spoke about his passing and how his death set a certain tone. At first, I didn’t understand why (“Millennial low IQ“ - Robin Ogunmuyiwa) but I believe the hippie-heavy metal Peter Pan, Ozzy, became something of a spiritual guide for the extended weekend: Nobody here wants, or can, be alone.

I can’t help but wonder if hosting has become the new mode of curating/exhibiting. While Amanda says the festival is about “making memories together“ Noemi (Aka studios) speaks of the event as “a cultural handshake“ (a more pragmatic interpretation). Either way, it feels like a stage for the kind of community it seeks to create:

“Oh no! No one who was great in this world will be forgotten; but each was great here in their own special way, and each was great in relation to the greatness of what they loved.”

-Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death from Sasha Lukashenkova’s performance on Friday at AKA studios

–
Starring: Tobias Bartenschlager, Charlotte Masha Bialas, Emma Bombail, Floss Crossley, Callum Hansen, Iku, Mia Lotta Joedecke, Sem Lala, Flora Lenzmann, Sasha Lukashenkova, Rosa Lüders, Theo Mackenzie, Nozomi Ngceni, Noemi Liv Nicolaisen, Nicolai Olesen, Charlie Osborne, Zach Rockman, Roberto Ronzani, Clara Schmidt, Hannah Stewart, Alex Thake, Lilli Thiessen, Amanda Weimer and Loerdy Wesely.

https://chessclubspace.com/
https://www.instagram.com/aka_akastudios/

Worldpeace DMT is not a solo project or a collective. It's a shapeshifting acoustic project. A brass band. A performance that manifests in differing forms in a variety of venues; a solo acoustic project at Gonzo’s NYC, a seven-person instrumental band at EU; RE at the Cause, and a live brass band at Ormside.

Hollywood Superstar met up with Worldpeace DMT on the eve of their first album release: The Velvet Underground & Rowan. The new album has a happy-go-lucky sound, straight out of the early noughties, repackaged into a self-reflective cacophony of positivity alongside 60s, folky inflections. Hollywood Superstar first saw Rowan Miles - one half of duo The Femcels - perform at The Cause as part of the seven person Worldpeace DMT ensemble. Looking like Michelle Philips of the Mamas and Papas she added a whimsy to the set, a magically careering, sweetened melody that balanced out the night's headliners, EesDeeKid, FakeMink and Bassvictim. Listening to The Velvet Underground & Rowan simulates a serotonin level forgotten in the mire of the post-2016 drainer epidemic. One-and-a-half minute songs like Hey Marshmellow featuring electronic adventure time sounds with screamo vocals - it's post-hyperpop poptimism, or indiepop revival.

In May, Hollywood Superstar saw Worldpeace DMT perform a solo acoustic set at Gonzo's, NYC, a recording studio turned events space in St. Marks Square. The night was a beatnik, new-age, eccentric come absurdist mix of performance, poetry and live music curated by Cormac Mac. It featured performances by Charlie Osborne, Skjold Rambo, Born Weekend and Worldpeace DMT. Before his set, Hollywood Superstar found Worldpeace DMT busking in the badly lit, leopard print carpeted green room to an audience of Londoners and New Yorkers. He bought a welcome aura of 70's cult-leader (I feel like there were girls at his feet?) meets 00s bushwick hipster, or brit-pop frontman, in a time of indiesleaze electro and sadboi bedroom pop.

This interview was conducted at the Worldpeace DMT headquarters - a bedroom in "East Road" - filled by music equipment and a single Beastie Boys poster. The interview started at 11pm after Worldpeace DMT, played a rap song that he and his housemates had mixed earlier that day. It’s a half-uplifting, half-comedic rap song about how their friend should quit stripping and believe in herself. The lyrics of the song, X's Defiance ft. Friendo x Soldierr x heavy rain… have a kind of nïave sweetness and an uplifting melody that matches, or balances, the ethos of happiness at the core of World peace DMT.

Phoenix rising from the ashes
but she loves to shake her ass
shake that ass for some cash
throw a stone and break that glass

East Road is a house-come-recording studio, which makes sense, because World peace DMT is way more than a solo project. It’s a collaboration within a scene that lives together, plays together and informs each other's production. Ike Clateman, producer and one-half of Bassvictim joins us mid-interview, coming up the stairs from the bedroom/studio directly below. He tells me that World peace DMT is a conductor, more than anything, he controls the cacophagny.

Rowan Miles and World peace DMT (2025)

Across two hours, Worldpeace DMT tells Hollywood Superstar about his lore, resistance to the Radio 6 Music pipeline and the need for optimistic major chords.

Hollywood Superstar

Do you mind just recapping the last hour? My headphones were recording Aidan and Thomas playing GTA downstairs.

WPDMT

Yeah, that's ok. I really enjoy talking about myself.

The Beach Boys play

HS

You mentioned that the music you used to make was sadder and that now you’ve started making more upbeat stuff - why?

WPDMT

Meeting Rowan gave me permission to make a different kind of music to what I ws usually drawn toward. A lot of the music we both loved and grew up on I’d kept shelved for a long time. She gave it a new context, which helped me find a way to approach it. When I was younger everything had to be moody. Songs come out much brighter now.

HS

You said that Worldpeace DMT is like a wedding band for hire, adaptable, happy to do anything.

WPDMT

It is - it’s a gun for hire. I wouldn’t do anything - but if someone proposed an idea like writing library music, an orchestral performance or a Bassvictim acoustic album, as Worldpeace DMT, then you know - I’d be happy to help facilitate.

HS

To generalise pop music is often seen as more optimistic and upbeat while music coming from the underground proportionally feels darker and more aggressive. Your music is fun and bright but a far cry from the mainstream.

Worldpeace DMT

I’m not trying to whitewash everything with happy clappy music. I like dark music. I just think that at this point, in this scene, for whatever reason, Worldpeace DMT caught people off guard.

HS

I know people were caught off guard at the cause - they weren't expecting the aesthetic of Worldpeace DMT - it didn’t match what the crowd was looking for after FakeMink and Eesdeekid.

IKE CLATEMAN

It’s just a melodic sensibility that's very foreign to contemporary ears. Right now, Leo’s sound is happy dub reggae mixed with weird space sounds. He uses cowboy chords and Rolling Stones, like, major rock chords that people don’t do nowadays. I don’t know why that sensibility went out.

Charlie Osborne and Worldpeace DMT performing at Gonzo's, NYC. (2025)

HS

You said you and Rowan would always be the only ones playing retro music at parties, and everyone hated it.

WPDMT

Rowan bought me back to enjoying music I hadn’t thought about for a while. I first met her at Ormside with Ike when I was less confident. I thought she was really cool. Like, someone who wouldn't want to talk to me. Eventually, we got to working together and created this weird universe of our own. While it sounded traditional, it felt exciting and fresh, diferent from the other sounds being out out.

The way in which we work is that if somethings funny then its good - if we laugh, then we use it. Whether its a vocal take, an idea for a song or a lyric or a cover or whatever. We are always just trying to make each other laugh - once we’ve done that we’re like, lets do it.

• Worldpeace DMT performing with Rowan Miles* (2025)

IC

I guess you could imagine it as a meme in the beginning. They were making music and if it made them smile, it was good. It doesn’t mean its comedy rock. It’s honestly surprising your able to do this as a British person. I feel as though its a sense of sincere irony that i've only ever seen americans be able to do.

IC

Anyone in LDN making music right now you wanna flame?

WPDMT

Well, I exist in a complete microcosm of my own friends and right now I’m happy there.

HS

Worldpeace DMT is a product of its environment - the way it was created was from everyone around you, right? You guys are always working on each others projects, producing etc.

WPDMT

Yeah well it came about from a last minute name I decided on for a show we did in Glasgow. I made some songs and Ike was hyped about it and suddenly people were into it also - there was a collection of ten or so people who really helped. I do the work, write most the songs and do my best to make it happen. But for some reason everyone -

IC

Rallied around it. Decided it was a thing that needed to happen.

WPDMT

Sometimes i feel like i’m just a conductor, for others. I’ve got one album coming out with Rowan, and we’re working on a second at the moment. Who knows what will happen. I want to do film scores and live action brass performances. I’d like to do everything.

WorldPeace DMT performing with 300skullsandcounting (2025)

HS

How did that play into the album - that mentality?

WPDMT

I'd always been a musician since I was young, but starting Worldpeace DMT I got more confident. It’s almost like a Pack-a-Punch on Nazi zombies in COD, the gates were open and I just could make whatever music I wanted. Finishing it was hard 'cause I had to mix it, but once I found the root of it’s identity it more or less wrote itself. I knew the character, I just had to play him.

You know, there are so many fucking projects, like ** REDACTED* like, can you tell me what ** REDACTED’s fucking identity is? I feel like Worldpeace DMT has an identity, I’m proud of that.

HS

Well, can you tell me what Worldpeace DMT identity is?

WPDMT

I can tell you what it isn’t. I don’t want to be part of the landfill of BBC 6 Music. Like the thumbs up, verified, whatever. I live in a house with three American people. I have few English friends and an irrational disdain for the music scene in the UK right now. Worldpeace DMT is a crusade against that. I can see them coming for me from a mile off. They're like "Oh, this guy". He should join the crew. Fuck that. Fuck all that. Fuck it. I’m speaking like that to ward myself off because that's the stream, the kind of road that is most likely to try absorb me and I’d rather be out on my own.

HS

What do you want your music to be? How do you want people to feel when they listen to it? If not BBC Radio 6 coded - then what is it?

WPDMT

If I can make music which has a function in people's lives, so that they can listen to it when they have a bath, or wake up in the morning, on the bus home or with their friends. Then, I'm happy.

Worldpeace DMT’s debut album The Velvet Underground & Rowan made with Rowan Please was released earlier this month.

Entering the Brixton venue to see Nettspend, arguably the most prolific artist in the underground scene, a smell hits my face like a suckerpunch. It’s disgustingly bad. I’ve known about Nettspend since the Triller edits showcasing snippets of his music in 2023. Today, he sells out high-capacity venues filled with 14-year-old children. As hundreds of teenagers swarm the venue, I realise my guest and I are the only people over twenty.

The Merch stand has UK exclusive Early Life Crisis goods, the name of Nettspend’s new album. T-shirts were £45, and hoodies were priced at £90. Not too bad for merch, but I know I could also buy a pair of Balmain jeans aftermarket for that price. Nevertheless, I left the show with a t-shirt and a hoodie, flexing on all the teens. Call it exposure therapy.

An Unknown DJ opened for Nett. His name sounded similar to the greatest ever names in hip hop - KillerKam - he also happens to be the worst DJ I’ve ever seen live, constantly pausing songs to calm the 13-year-olds in the crowd. The mixing was terrible, but this doesn’t bother me too much, as I’m still trying to get over the fact that I'm inside a literal NettSpend sweatbox.

The music stops, and the DJ utters the words, “I have a couple of special guests for you.”

A WRAITH000 Beat starts playing and out comes EsDeekid for his hit song Phantom featuring Rico Ace. The crowd erupts for a median time of 1 minute. Following this, they stand still, like awkward emo kids, until the next bass drop. The audience was really the most experimental thing about this whole event… they felt almost trained by a higher power, hypnotised, hyper-responsive. Nettspend is that power, I guess.

The next song plays - it’s every TikTok fashion head's no.1 played anthem: LV SANDALS featuring Fakemink/9090Gate, EsDeekid and Rico Ace. The crowd once again erupts when they see a dripped-out Fakemink pop up with some of the loudest vocals I’ve ever heard. It was blistering. I was standing at the back, and a kid who I’d say was around 16 wearing a Motley Crue T-shirt screamed “FAKEMINKKKK" at the top of his lungs.

Realistically, I wasn’t expecting anyone there to have even heard a song by Motley Crue beyond OSBATT chains and “Is Coraline good?” feng coded Instagram stories. The cultural significance behind this is truly beautiful to me…it shows that the underground coalesces with dadrock. The likes of Nettspend, Nine Vicious, Che, Fakemink, Leakionn and prior names such as Polo Perks using old Rock samples or even Crystal Castles has really bridged the gap for teens in the 2020’s as the likes of Young Thug bridged the gap for Country & western music and trap for me in 2017 with Family Don’t Matter featuring Millie Go Lightly.

After the smoke settles, the crowd listens to 30 minutes of pure classical music. Random choice, but it has a calming effect. Nettspend comes out to his song “Stressed” produced by Ice Spice’s right-hand man, RIOT. He’s dressed in a tatted up T-shirt with the word “codependent” (each letter rendered in a different brand logo ) made by @questionable.life.decisions, black pants which were probs Celine or smth and snakeskin boots. Cool as anything, he controls the crowd in waves by bass drops and vocal tone changes. It was mesmerising. He stops the concert for about 3 minutes to make sure the crowd aren’t crushing the people at the barrier, and that’s when I hear someone utter the words “The way he checks if everyone is okay is so tuff bro 🥀”. The crowd was so internet-savvy that I felt, even as an internet addict myself (posting 2-3 TikToks a day, a keyboard warrior) I was already behind the younger generation.

Fakemink makes his second appearance. He plays songs Mink & Easter Pink. I’ve seen Fakemink about 5 times, and every time he seems more unclear about how he wants to perform: shouting every other lyric, catching his breath for the next 2 lines. Unpopular opinion, but I like the way he performs. Compared to the Lo-Fi designer rap he makes, it's full of energy.

Fakemink finishes his two songs, and Nettspend shoots “I love you, Mink” into his autotuned mic. It’s like he wants to make sure the crowd know he affiliates himself with people like Fakemink. It seems with the underground scene that if something isn’t said explicitly, it will become salacious, as underground fans love Drama. They’ll hear one thing and run with it, and next thing you know, Mazzy & Nettspend breakup lore is the only thing showing up on my for you page.

The mindless self-indulgence hit Shut Me Up starts playing through the speaker, followed by Nettspend's biggest song off the album BAD ASS FCKING KID. The crowd gains life. Ending his set with DRANKDRANKDRANK and That One Song that Deftones took down for the sample. I felt it was a fitting end to leave on. DRANKDRANKDRANK* was the first Nettspend song I heard, off the famous Triller video that made him pop off. I found it first, though, as always.

This wave of underground is unstoppable, and even if you try not to pay attention, you’ll have Fakemink come out as support for Drake at Wireless…

Artist Take with Günseli Yalcinkaya

HIGH WEIRDNESS, ERIK DAVIS

I don't believe in gatekeeping so, in case you ever need a comprehensive history of weirdness, Erik Davis is your guy. He's the same author who wrote Tech Gnosis, another one of my favourite books of all time, but this book in particular really hits for reasons that will begin to feel self-explanatory the further down you get in this list. I love ED because he gives off major oracle energy in his writing, but his physical vibe is giving Californian pothead. I like this juxtaposition when it comes to writers, anyone who's too polished clearly hasn't lived. Besides, I love a freak who's done their research.

PAREIDOLIA (aka seeing faces in inanimate objects)

Me and my friend Dan have a running chat where we will send each other random objects that appear to have faces, because they're funny. I read somewhere that pareidolia was once considered a symptom of madness, but that doesn't really work in the digital age when most of us find it easier to tap away at little screens than to have a normal human conversation. Also, the tendency to find patterns in random data makes us adopt a similar role to the shaman way back when people observed symbols to better infer the spirit realm, which I enjoy because it forces you into an animist pov. With AI and robots, we're coming back full circle, it seems.

THE DARK CRYSTAL (1982) JIM HENSON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--0xBC0SotY

Anyone who knows me knows that I fucking love puppets, they're magical as hell. I particularly like The Dark Crystal because I read somewhere that Jim Henson spent his entire career making Sesame Street and The Muppets so he could make enough money to fund his first feature length film. When he finally did it, some of the executives walked out of the screening room, which I find very sad. Sometimes, I think about how the same guy who dreamed up The Dark Crystal was also behind Kermit's 'It's Not Easy Being Green' solo in Sesame Street... Anyway, I rewatched TDC a few months back and I don't really get what's going on, but that's not the point. The animatronics go hard, so do Brian Froud's character designs. According to co-director Frank Oz, Henson's intention was to "get back to the darkness of the original Grimms' Fairy Tales", as he believed that it was unhealthy for children to never be afraid. Makes you think.

THE HEDGEHOG SONG (1967) THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bogz2xZy-bo

Love this song. It's about a guy who doesn't have a girl to love and feels all depressed when suddenly he meets a funny little hedgehog, who sings him a song – it all sounds very happy, but it's a bit sad, too, and timeless.

THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997) LUC BESSON

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnTE2h0ZY74

One of the best films on (or off) this planet. I have a weird nostalgic connection to this film, which extends to memories of being a child visiting family in Istanbul and staying up late, being transfixed by the sight of the alien singing opera on the space cruise. Now that I think about it, Milla Jovovich as Leeloo was probably one of my biggest influences growing up, along with Brian Molko from Placebo. Plus, the John Paul Gautier fashion is insane, I love all the costumes with a passion.

CRYPTIDS

Image of the Loveland Frogman

Trevor Paglen once told me that cryptids are to me what aliens are to him and he's totally right. I've written about cryptids more than probably anything else, so I'll spare you the details here. To me, they're the perfect gateway to exploring some of my favourite research topics – fictioning, reality constructs, government disinformation, control systems, medieval bestiaries... all the good stuff. My favourite cryptid is the Loveland Frogman for no reason other than the fact that he looks all tiny and pixelated in most of the 'sightings', it's very cute. Besides, I used to be a people pleaser until I realised that being a cryptid is way better.

Dispatch from the opening of New Cult-Like Images or Come il patto tra adulti diventa un trattato di strategia affettiva, the Fifteen figures tableaux a show by the Italo-Lebanese duo, Desirée Nakouzi De Monte and Andrea Parenti, A.K.A Collezione Nancy Delroi and Wilhelmina Merante and Leyla Riggio.

New Cult-Like Images saw a staged scene, or tableaux, by Nancy Delroi alongside a series of debut sculptural installations by Merante and Riggio. The staged scene was the centrepiece, doubling as the set for a series of documented neo-realistist filmed moments involving the audience, premiering throughout the following week on a four-monitor CRT display. These unscripted films expand the ongoing film cycle of episodes, scenes, frames and dialogues launched recently by the duo, including You Kill Me Second & Anna Smoking Cigarettes.

On view by appointment until 9 July, it represents a pact between (four) adults, un trattato di strategia affettiva (a treatise on emotional strategy) a New Cult founded on the rhythm of wood, metal, FRP material and plywood. Today, as always, we celebrate despair by painting crosses and drinking red wine.

—

June 23 2025, 8 O’clock: Usual Monday evening, Milan is deserted. When walking down the streets, from the barely illuminated shop windows, mannequins dressed to the nines wink at passers-by; a couple of them look for a cigarette. I can't help but stop for a chat: a woman in military uniform and another individual in gauze, “Future”, insist on accompanying me towards the opening. I long for company - I also need a lighter.

Once there, beyond a wooden gate, a closed metal gate. Beyond that metal gate, more gates and wooden windows, and then, a room filled with undressed to the nines mannequins seated at a banquet table. Too busy alcohol-sinking, they do not turn around as I enter; their desolate body fat percentages are floating in a kind of ED arrogance permeating everyone’s pores and sanity.

The space is staggered by some cheap plywood furniture pieces, arranged as if there is something to hide: a body, a love affair, the true and ultimate meaning of Contemporary Art... for sure not the pornographic side of it, everyone in there is naked and careless.

On the walls, the works of Merante and Riggio, so-called “Metal Paintings”. Full and empty spaces signalling where to hold and where to release the breath: Greek Cross, Red Cross, Medium Shot of a Skeleton, A Rectified Rib Cage, Geometric idol, Rampant bird…

I need the lighter again, but, turning around, I no longer find my two friends: it seems the diners have grown in number, from 15 to 17; I read on the furnished paper sheet: Tableaux of fifteen figures, Every third thought shall be my grave...

I count up to three and Désirée appears, introducing me to the boudoir, specifying that in an hour there would be a performance where something would happen…finally. The Fiber Reinforced Polymer mannequin table seems now a bit inactive, plagued by appetite loss, the hunger drowned with previously overflowing glasses of wine and the lungs stuffed with too many smokes. Forks are lined up along the surface, untouched, like an obstacle course. Or a pew line.

A round, yellowish atmosphere sickens the room, sources of light are a resembling Bauhaus chandelier and a bunch of spotlights burning the air - I later notice a small rectangular skylight in the ceiling - perhaps where the Rampant bird entered from. 20 feathers counted, intact. Despite its flapping of wings, there is no breathing in there. Smells like Mephedrone.

In the previous room I had skipped initially four adults in black shake hands and prepare drinks blended with ice and berries. I wonder if they have agreed on it or it’s just mandatory for artists to wear total black outfits.

A row of unlit televisions reflects guests talking. A girl eating blueberries, then Andrea smoking a cigarette at the door. From the dark screens, the room multiplies, making me think about Borges' Labyrinth – I hope no one tries to enter the television looking for meanings.

After an indefinite period (punctuated only by the emptying of the wildberries tray on the central table), some real-life actors animate the inanimate room: dirty looks, bad words, and gratuitous violence towards those who arrived first and occupy the stage. Forks fly. It's cheesy.

The Ikea furniture of the early 2000s begins to exude squalor: we are all involved, but no one is there. We have lost our hunger and desire, too. No one feels like it but everyone crowds in, it's a feast of empty plates. An orgy of wet cigarette butts. The Rampant Bird gets a wing wound and flies away. The other sculptural paintings remain stoically unbothered,o not moving a muscle except for their tongues, with which they climaxingly spit out “pathetic yet deliberate compositions”.

The four adults are no longer taking part in the action: one for each corner they film the scene, silently sticking to their black clothes choice.

We are harming no one but ourselves; no difference between what was happening previously in the first and the second room: drinking, smoking, and talking about the guests on the opposite side of the wall. We sink together.

If I had not come with someone, I would, having being exposed, feel uncomfortable. LuckilyI recognise Militancy and Future, bending over the table, being bullied.

The latter is now missing an arm.

Images Courtesy of the Gallery, Author and Aitana Blasco

Mandy Warhole is a stand-up comedian in London.

"Edna (Sevigny) is like an empty bat signal for a girlboss or successful cultural self."

Amalia Ulman been knew. Her sophomore venture, Magic Farm (2025), plays like a 360-view of a devoutly organised trousseau box, flat-packed with everything a girl needs to become a woman: bridal linens, family heirloom jewels, and heavily diarised secrets. Ulman's bridal package consists of nylon tablecloths, camera equipment, and surgically constructed arguments in ethno-nihilism. The same starter-pack that prepares a woman for marriage is what I imagine prepared Magic Farm to be the final word on the collapse of Western multiculturalism.

Which is fine, I guess. It makes sense - even. Ulman is an Argentine-Spanish filmmaker and an immigrant artist living and working in New York. I was once, too, an Argentine-Spanish immigrant artist living in the city. Except, I am actually Russian and barely made any art. I am certain, however, that we would have had many of the same run-ins with the insidious “creative” that the film portrays. Simon Rex plays Dave "a creative" twat pushing 40-something whose narcissism spawns an eerie vitalist force, capable of turning tricks on the dirty streets of the algorithm using even the slimiest offcuts from the content farm. A group of these men, born of VICE, are called “an agency." In a profoundly meta-textual casting choice, the agency is spearheaded by girlboss Chloe Sevigny, styled and poised like late-stage Man Repeller. Supporting her is famed gay-looking straight actor Alex Wolff, who plays Jeff, Chloe Sevigny’s incapably horny Gen-Z producer. An incompetent, chlamydia-ridden, narcissist stoner of the visibly-ex-skater variety is an inspired character from Ulman, lifted from a taxonomy of the Verminous Male Sexual Types of New York City. Wolff’s Jeff is a generationally-pathological personality, more common than deli e.coli lettuce. I am confident in my certification of Ulman’s satire - of a creative agency making YouTube mid-form content - as spot on.

Of course these Americans are going to come to an anonymised Latin-American countryside and breakdance vaguely Spanish words with their huge, open mouths. They will impose their own, completely inaccurate portrait on the periphery in order to then get clout in the bi-coastal metropoles. Like the trousseau box, they will compartmentalise every thought and trinket into a space that makes sense for them. There is more cultural analysis than ever before, and it's super Neo-neo Colonial. Ulman drives that point home through her CapCut-esque content-forward editing. The go-pro is an obvious visual symbol of the 2010s performative obsession with putting oneself in the shoes of the Other as a means to a political end. Strapping Go-Pro cameras to the dogs and cats of St Cristobal pokes fun at the idea that this kind of universalist slapdash empathy is possible. The tumble-dryer match cuts, too, remind us of the early days of YouTube vlogging.

Not to mention, the bastardised neon grade or the Dolls Kill-era wardrobe for the models. Every vestibule needs a centrepiece, and every barnyard needs a horse that you can stroke like a stress ball in between filming grueling outfit videos. Here, Edna (Sevigny), is like an empty bat signal for a girlboss or successful cultural self. A veteran it-girl playing a veteran it-girl, she comes with emotional baggage in the form of suitcases full of spotless tabis, old Isobel Marant and an image of tortured womanhood she cannot shake. With a #metooed husband, Dave, who makes her strap into her blazer like horse in its plough in a quest for those YouTube bucks, Sevigny plays a character whose former sub-cultural clairvoyance has clearly been reiterated to the point of becoming a trend report powerpoint. Her performance is delightfully morbid, a bit telenovela, compared to the hyper-naturalistic Brooklyn mumblecore shit the rest of the cast was on.

The cracks start to show when Ulman self-inserts as Elena, the only character that speaks Spanish, and acts as the sole bridge between “the Americans” and "the locals”. She is supposed to be literally and linguistically stuck between the two worlds, existing at the standard level of cognitive dissonance required to “succeed” at immigration. Yet, we do not really see that in the script or the performance. All she confesses to seems to be that she is the real girlboss to Sevigny’s mythologized one, thugging it out for production credits.

Ulman wants so badly to paralyse the world in a doomist, punitive verdict about globalisation and its discontents. That, maybe, makes for great conversation fodder in a setting where 40 of your “closest” terminally bicoastal friends exchange deadpan remarks about how deluded everyone else is. Lines are delivered to muted ICA laughs and natural wine burps. To the rest of us, in a sort of Russian doll turn of events, Ulman and her crew came to a small village in a country significantly affected by its power imbalance-relationship with the US, they filmed their nuanced post-colonial takes, and they left the people with the absurd. Who’s gonna tell the dogs it was satire?

This is the Hollywood Superstar's perspective-heavy appraisal of visual trends which emerged at Art Basel. Also included: The Swiss Art Awards, Liste, Basel Social Club and Maison Clearing. Many of the takes in the below article are reductive and potentially false. Viewed individually, these formal categorisations do not do justice to the work, time and thought that artists have imbued into their practice. And yet...! Identifying broad curatorial trends feels the most appropriate way of describing the clusterfuck of visual culture Basel produces. Culture that is, inevitably, recylced across Instagram feeds via curated and largely unwarranted magazine selections/highlights/carousels. The Superstar has curated this overarching narrative as a response to the phenomena of viewing art across two vectors; the in person fair and the online fair - the latter legitimising the former.

The Superstar is inclined to cherry-pick form and do neologisms.

Starting with the best: Basel Social Club (BSC) is a not-for-profit art fair that platforms young galleries (those under five years old) alongside major, avant-gardist and conceptual-focused galleries. The theme this year was "Bank" - heavy handed irony intended. The Social Club sets the trend for younger happenings across the city, The Swiss Art Awards included, demonstrating that art can still posesss a politically critical, tastefully subversive jouissance. At the younger fairs - visual trends manifested with no-holds-barred experimentation: "Rabelesian Grotesque", "Font Fetish", "Dolls", "Cafe Art Imitation", "Haunted House Immersive"...

One step up in the fair hierarchy is Liste. Liste presented a refined, far more marketable iteration of themes established at smaller fairs. If BSC was childlike, nïave, and optimistic - the larger scale and economic sacrifice required for Liste generated a curatorially adolescent atmosphere. Like a teenage girl, the galleries at Liste permeated a latent anxiety and a nihilistic pre-occupation with self-image. Their booths were good, no doubt, but self-conscious. None of the Da-Da ist abandonment and experimentation at Social Club. The Superstar wonders if the success of the non-mainstream, free fairs will have effect in coming years upon the neat Loosian floor-plan of Liste.

At Art Basel - the behemoth- any oscillations of aesthetic trends were far subtler. There was a very slight curatorial angle amongst the Blue Chips - a nod or gesture to something real. Between the household names on display; Rothko, Picasso, Hockney, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al, were artworks whose inclusion and content mirrored the zeitgeist of satellite fairs; Isa Genzken’s Neo-junk sculptures or Sylvie Fleury’s Lacanian pop-collages, Miriam Cahn’s amorphous flayed bodies or Picabia’s leering Americana; the pornographic displays of Cosi Fanni Tutti and Kara Walker; the Tromp l’oeil de-constructions of Jorg Immendorff or the braided canvases of Rosemarie Trockel. Most non-boring art could be found on the second floor. Names whose theoretical rigour and post-modernist attitude, not to mention fiscal success, act as a needed exemplar for (disillusioned) younger artists.

These groupings reflect a broader taste for art that is irreverent and satirical. This year the art which struck the Superstar resembled William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. A works salience was grounded by a tangible, off-kilter beauty.

1 Dolls, or, The Return To Figurative Sculpture

The doll has become a major trope. The emptiness embodied by the maquette, the puppet and the doll in contemporary art is related to its form or function outside of the art space. She has come to embody dissatisfaction or emptiness alongside a semi-erotic appearance and ludic personality.

Figurative sculpture's return is signalled by the influx of doll-type artistic forms - the doll sits halfway between ready-made and full-blown, Grecian verisimilitude. Like prometheus, man creates something in his image to disperse his isolation. A doll, or avatar, has always been a source of transcendental comfort. Its resurgence today signals our need for re-assurance; a humanist symbol in the face of techno-pesssimism. Mannequins are both disruptive and irreverent. In the digital realm, they have achieved the status of uncanny combatants of silicon valley.

A recent suite of exhibitions includes; Gisele Vienne at George Kolbe Museum, Lucy Mackenzie at Atelier E.B., Maya Man’s digital series “Ugly Bitches”, Isabelle Frances Maguire at The Renaissance Society, Pam Hogg at Emalin Gallery, Diego Macron at Kunsthalle Wein, Pierre Hyugher in Venice, Kara Walker’s Fortuna, Sveta Mordovskaya at King’s Leap. Not to mention the greats: Soshiro Matsubara at Croy Nielsen, Pierre Klossowski, Rosemarie Trockel and, of course, Iza Genzken. Documentaries include Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s “Maintenance”, which focuses on the maintenance of sex dolls at a German brothel, and its forerunner, Love Me, Love My Doll (2007), about a group of men whose lives revolve around post-human interaction.

i) Children’s Dolls (humorous, found object play, relates to post-modern fatigue and consumerism)

Alex Bag (Galerie Oskar Weiss & Todd von Ammon) BSC
Ana Viktoria Dzinic (Nicoletti Contemporary) Liste

ii) Shop Mannequins (dated signifier, Surrealism)

Sylvie Fleury, (Karma International) Basel
Karolin Braegar (City Galerie Wein)
Sophie Jung (Spielzug) BSC

iii) The Craft Mannequin (a doll made more fetishistic by her materiality - Oskar Kokoschka’s doll, Alma, made of human hair)

Madeline Roger Lacan (galerie_eigenart) Basel
Asma_asma_asma_asma_asma_asma (LA house of Gaga) Basel
Mannequins in the cupboard at the Basel Social Club (artist unknown)

iii) The disturbed

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, The 48 Hours of Kwik & Kwak (Isabella Bortolozzi) Basel

2 Font Fetish or Logo Worship

Artists have become fascinated with the seductive tyranny of the everyday as visualised by the conglomerate logo. Meme branding has pushed us into Post-Luxury, we can look to Helvetica Black revivalism: the American Apparel font.

Sarah Staunton (Galerina) Liste
Bedros Yeretzia (Diana Gallery) Liste
Georgie Netell (Reena Spailings) Basel
Monica Bonvicini (Galleria Reffaella) Basel
Jasmine gregory (Karma international) and (Clearing)
Mohamed Almusibli, Loucia Carlier and Sylvie Fleury (Stick and Poke curated by Alana Alireza) BSC
Georgie Nettel (denitment_zh) BSC

3 “Cafe Art” Imitation

Art which consciously mimics “low” or “amateur” painting styles. The kind once described as hobbyist, usually found on the walls cafés, whose interior has not been updated since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Taste, hierarchy etc. Actually, usually very well painted.

Rita Siegfried (Clearing LA)
Sam Creasey (Andrew Reed Gallery) BSC
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste

4 Fascist Kitsch Return Figuration (non-defamatory)

Realist figurative painting. Everyone loves the figurative! In the peri-menopausal space between Post Woke and Woke 2 we still need it to be slightly subversive or horizontal to the out-right representational. Veering into the kitsch, this style of painting mimics the first and second faculties of what Umberto Eco calls "Ur-Fascism" : the rejection of modernity in favour of tradition and the perpetual re-interpretation of the past.

Jean Nipon (Clearing LA) Maison Clearing
Bill Coulthurst (Plymouth Rock) BSC
Francis Picabia (Galerie Isabella Bertolozzi) Basel

5 Childlike Regression Figurative

Works in which the formal style is childlike. The use of an nïave formal language throughout multiple works acts as a world-building exercise. It’s another indicator of figuration’s traditional language being diluted. What better way to deconstruct hierarchies than to appeal to their antithesis; innocence.

Maya Hewitt (Theta) BSC
Exquisite Corpse (Unknown Gallery) BSC
Gabor Pinter (longtermhandstand) BSC
Reba Maybury (Company Gallery) Liste
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains)Liste

6 Modern Gothic (Domestic Cruelness is a sub-section of this)

Already defined by Contemporary Art Writing as follows:

“Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires and impulses. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history.”

Jenny Holzer (Spruth Magers)
Franz Burkhardt’s “Bus Stop” (Littmann Kulturprojekte) BSC
Paul Levack’s images of the interiors of Venice Casinos, exacerbated by the presence of a large casino table in the room (Hans Goodrich) BSC
Mia Sanchez (Swiss Art Awards)
Cedric Eisenring (Drei Gallery) BSC

7 Domestic Cruelness

Defined by Connor Crawford in his Liste booth. As a genre, Domestic Cruelness is preoccupied with how domestic space can reflect, trigger or embody psychic disturbance. Objects which should be comforting due to their association with the private realm - the sofa, the bed, the childhood home - appear in the guise of the mass-produced object devoid of auratic presence. As with Modern Gothic, the trope reflects tenets of alienation in relation to mass-individuality.

Mia Sanchez (Sentiment) BSC
Connor Crawford (Shore Gallery) Liste
Gillian Carnegie (Cabinet) Basel

8 Haunted House Immersive

Objects that could be haunted due to their antique effect are shown as animistic, shattered representations of universalist flaws. These are often containers of sorts whose hollowed-out interior spaces have a metabolic significance. Visually, they could be lifted from the decor of a Disneyland Horror house, they are a camp affectation appealing to pop culture.

Also includes the notorious wallpapered accent.

Alexandra Metcalf at (Ginny on Fedrick) Basel
Sophie Jung (Spielzug) BSC
Shamiran Istifan (Swiss Art Awards Winner)

9 The Phantasmagoric-Pop-Pysch Collage

This trend is an artistic investigation of the archive. How our minds archive time spent in domestic or urban spaces - projections of emotion time, place and longing. Found urban objects appear in mounted wall sculpture alongside disposable early 2000s family photographs, or ephemera one might discover, covered in dust, underneath a now-grown-up child's bed. Post-American dream aesthetics collaged with bits from estate sales.

The photograph is often contrasted with the found, unrefined object. Like Sveta Mordovskaya’s photographs, taken from 2005-2008. As Margaret Kross writes of Gregory's work, the pop-psych collage is “hot mess conceptualism”.

It makes use of the ephemera desired by the aspirational middle class; the glimpse of unrealised captialist desire is phantasmagoric. One experiences it as a child, yearning for the boxed barbie behind a plastic screen, only to become dissatisfied once it is unpackaged - the idea is merely a frightenening projection.

Jasmine Gregory (Swiss Art Awards)
Sveta Mordovskaya (Swiss Art Awards)
Sarah Benslimane (Clearing)
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)
Samuel Haitz (Triangolo)

10 Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil, Tromp L’eoil

Self explanatory, probably the trend that will define painting most (if not already) in the next year. Something about false promise, failure and the seduction of illusion.

Lucy Mckenzie (Cabinet) and (Buchloch) Basel
Karolin Braegar (City Galerie Wein) Liste
Issy Wood (Michael Werner) Basel
Matt Keegan (Magenta Plains) Liste

11 Glitch-Romanticism

Taking the digital glitch and pairing it with a longing for sublimity, human connection and the romantic. Digital referents are contained within a emotional, deeply moving practice. Formally, artists make use of the glitch or blur: a shift, movement or break in the system - as a way of transforming ordinary subject matter. In other instances, artists use dated or nostalgic technology (glitch-tech) as a medium in their practice.

A fairytale tale told on a heavy set monitor or a painting with italicised, equally spaced font floating on the picture plane, as if placed by a text-box.

Ana Vik (Nicoletti) Liste
Matthias Groebel, (Mai 36 Galerie) Basel
Mathis Altman (Fitzpatrick gallery) BSC

12 Effervescent Grotesquerie

Abject subject matter depicted in effervescent hues. Paint seems to “evaporate” from the canvas as it is applied in washed out layers. The trauma of an abortion is exacerbated by the genre’s stylistic softness.

Evangeline Turner (A.Squire) Liste
Miriam Cahn (Meyer Riegger) Basel

13 Formally Rabelaisian

Gargantuan distortion. Rabelaisian means “to display earthy humour, Bawdy”. Formally, this manifests in rounded forms and cartoon-like human presentation. Style tends to fear towards kitschiness, commonality or “low” styles akin to Breughal’s representation of the bacchnicalic lower classes. Human figures convey joviality, but this happiness is filled with mirth.

Witt Fetter (Derosia) BSC
Hans Schärer (Galerie Mueller) BSC
Francis Picabia (Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery) Basel
Cosima von Bonin (La houseofgaga) Basel Unlimited

14 Brain Rot Carnivalesque Entertainment

Taking inspiration from the circus where freaks, oddities and societal outcasts are celebrated. Instead, presented to the crowd for amusement are the multifarious “brain rot” functions of the internet. The entertainment of the online masses is translated for the public.

Foreign/domestic mannequins by Jeffrey Dalessandro. Handmade mannequin of Luigi Mangione replete with gun and backpack. (Foreign and Domestic), BSC
South Park/Lacan by Marc Kokopeli (King of Venmo) ( Reena Spaulings) BSC
Urs fischer (The Modern institute) Basel
Noemi Pfister (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards
Paul Fritz and Virginie Sistek (Forspace) Swiss Art Awards

15 Fine Graphic Fetish

Fantastical illustration, usually fetish imagery, elevated by the artists attention to detail and skill with graphite shading.

Sybille Ruppert (Blue Velvet Prokects) BSC
HR Giger (Lovay Fine Arts)
Seiji Inagaki (Tenko Presents) Basel w/ Reena Spaulings

16 The Semiotic Screenshot

Painting the context of one’s camera roll. Using the image juxtaposition of John Berger with meme-like screenshotted images.

Al Freeman (56 Henry) Liste

17 Ready Made Shapes

Cookie cutter Shapes. It’s unclear whether the vogue for incorporating patterns or ready made shapes into art directly reflects similar trends in fashion. One reason these shapes have been incorporated is for their immediacy, their cheapness is seductive, but, increasingly repetitive.

A classic high/low motif that sometimes pays off and sometimes appears like an art school interpretation of early 2010’s Word Art Shapes.

The abstract polka dot oscillates between a 2003 prada skirt pattern and a cheerful zombie formalist canvas.

Jutta Koether
Gritli Faulhaber (Maison Clearing)
Jim Lambie (The Modern Institute) Basel
Zoe Baranek (Swiss Art Awards)

18 The Self-Conscious Abstract Painter

Why paint with semi-cubist forms today? What does it mean? What is the point? Is the artist using these modernist forms as a self-conscious reflection on the shifting nature of the avant-garde?

These works are often successful for two reasons: 1) They utilise the succesful moniker of modernist abstraction while 2) The self-mockery contained in using said modernist forms creates an erudite "inside joke" for the connoisseur viewer. "Ha, Ha" the buyer says "This is a very clever commentary on dated notions of abstraction in painting - the gun is a substitute for modernism's brusque machismo energy...

Matthias Noggler (Drei Gallery) Liste

Vintage at Galerie Tenko Presents, Tokyo, 15.05.25-29.05.25

In a hut tucked between Shibuya and Ebisu is a new gallery space which opened last month. Well - ‘new’ isn’t quite accurate - but - ‘hut’ is no exaggeration. Since 2022, Tenko Nakajima has been running Galerie Tenko Presents as a nomadic space. These intuitive and nichely curated shows have occurred in locations cleverly orientated for each artists work; these range from a love hotel in Kabukicho for a Louis Backhouse exhibit, or the Hysteric Glamour shop hosting the installations of Argentinian director Amalia Ulman. Now, Tenko has got the keys to her first permanent space. It’s a hut that used to be a bar, that, as Tenko recalls, she had visited as a teenager circa 2015 on electro-swing nights, which, “already, during its peak was considered a bad genre.”

The inaugural exhibit in the space Vintage features installation work by English artist Merlin Carpenter. Tenko describes how she shared a taxi with Carpenter in Busan last year, how they discussed his Marx and Trier drawings - Trier being Marx’s birthplace. Carpenter made these works during a residency in Beijing (perfect) - they struck Tenko as both relevant and vintage. Boom, she goes off about how Tokyo is actually the capital of vintage and preserving the past:

“Vintage stores are treated like museums here, each item is repaired, cleaned and so-curated. I love the thought of the buyers frequenting a suburban Goodwill or Humana once a year, filling up boxes with weathered reunion t-shirts and college jumpers and restoring them to Japanese standards. Then re-selling them at prices surpassing their original tags.”

My first impression of Galerie Tenko Presents caught me standing between a Denny’s and a Starbucks - no Galerie or art kids in sight. I called Greta, a close friend of Tenko’s and I, who had invited me to go with her to the vernissage of Vintage - I’d hopped into a cab straight after my 9-5. She put Tenko on the phone, who apologized and chuckled,

“Of course, I put it wrong in the IG bio - sorry!”. She passed me the right address and I rode another ten minutes in an uber that smelled like citrus Febreeze. The vernissage was supposed to be over in five minutes - but, of course, there was no rush among the group of bright young things mingling and smoking right outside.

Before I could even set foot inside, I was stopped by my dear friends, Yoma (big scar through right eye, even bigger heart) and Carlos (mysterious guy, youtube connoisseur) who took my heavy Longchamp X Jeremy Scott bag off me and handed me a beer. We chatted about everything but art while a cute girl kept on staring at us. I wanted to include her in the conversation, because I felt awkward for her - she seemed to just want to be part of something and so clearly was not. After, I realised she was actually there with Carlos, he introduced her to me, in front of her, as follows: “She’s a Louis Vuitton bag customizer and one time she was commissioned to paint a father kissing his kid on the lips, so she painted this image on the LV trunk, but then LV did not approve of this image and now because of this incident LV only offers selective pre designed customisation.” She nodded her head. I didn’t get her name.

I squeezed past the people, said 'hi' to Tenko who just come back from LA and recieved a quick debrief of all that happened, could have happened, but did not, on her trip. She was wearing a cute beige matching set and was serving beer behind the bar with her mom, Hanayo an acclaimed experimental artist. Finally, I find Greta, she is chatting to a guy called Alex (never met him before, celine vintage bag, skinny pants, is offended about me asking if he works an office job) about her new loaded Glock 19 tattoo on her thigh. It’s big and sore and dope. “It’s the first gun I shot.” she says. She had gotten it to cover a tattoo she’d grown tired of.

I escape the conversation by climbing up the wobbly wooden ladder to the top floor of the gallery (I shall not be able to wear any of my outrageous heels to the next show). The uppermost floor looks like an abandoned Japanese bedroom. Partly falling apart; quite charming. Carpenter has painted his black, thick-stroke faces not on canvases, but on the gallery’s walls. Sprawling, with no boundaries, over the wood and metal inserts. Open Territory. It will be interesting to see how it interacts with the work of following exhibitors, like the second intervention in the space, by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, **Hanshan Shide.

A selection of Carpenter’s 2006 pencil sketches on paper lean against the walls in glass frames. My favourite, Trier (Beijing) 2 (2006) depicts a group of Karl Marx busts. They all look mad. It makes me think of when Beijing gifted the city of Trier a statue of Marx for his 200th birth year anniversary in 2018, and Trier was reluctant to accept the offer. Now, the statue stands, a 4.4-metre bronze statue, just off the main street.

Merlin Carpenter glided past the crowd like a wizard, his long hair flashing white-grey-brown as he snapped photos of us with a tiny camera. Carpenter’s entire career hums with political tension. Grounded in Marxist materialism, his work tears through the illusion of artistic autonomy, laying bare the art world’s unavoidable entanglement with capitalism. He doesn’t soothe; he sabotages. One of my favourites? Communism Time for a Bath (2003), a repurposed BlackBerry Alpen cereal box.

I climbed back down. The vernissage was over. We all walked off together to find an izakaya big enough to hold us all. I was overwhelmed, and Greta was overwhelmed, so she suggested we should Irish exit. We did so. Then she changed her mind, “Wait, let’s say bye,” so there we went back and said bye. The weakest Irish exit ever. I lit a cigarette on my way home with my new Tenko Presents lighter. It has a quote on the back, which I’d forgotten. I just looked it up on Tenko’s webshop. It says: “I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this and I am not.” I don’t know who you are, Georgie, but thanks.

Matt Gess’s Maiden Crimes 1 (2025) and Militia (2025) were shown at Récréations a show by Gnossienne Gallery alongside work by Nayan Patel, Sasha Miasnikova and Jordan Derrien. View the project on Instagram here.

There’s something that can only be brought out by being locked away: this is the tension that suspends Maiden Crimes. "It’s about yin and yang", said [legendary erotic photographer] Eric Kroll to Matt Gess, who had tracked him down to his kitchen table in Arizona. Balance is a notion that applies just as much to the climbing of chain-link fences as it does to the ecstasy of constrained compositions; these are all driving forces behind Gess's work.

Coming across a Maiden is a revelation that makes the word casting appear sanitised and crass. “You know what Eileen? I think [NAME] might be a Maiden…” We cock our heads, squint our eyes and pout our lips at each other, considering the idea like we just tasted something new. What’s your taste? Matt describes things like trespassing as ‘delicious’. Maidens are discovered, they walk out of the water of their past dripping with becoming; like every crime, they are unique. For example: Maiden Kirsten was sitting on the pavement of Kingsland road, “parked outside Greggs, lipstick defiant”, “she styled herself, quickly stuffing a circus flyer in her bra”. Charlie Osbourne emerged to Matt in another way: the theatricality of her rigid and heartfelt musical performances. These are subjects Matt observes from the anonymous position of an audience member or passerby- Maidens emerge having built their own kinds of stages: Kirsten with her pile of street cardboard, or Charlie at the ICA... Maiden is a project that poses seductively in the field of surveillance, anonymity and consent; no wonder Matt calls it a ‘license to voyeurism’.

His spare captions under his instagram posts are tantalisingly partial origin stories: “​​I saw Vivi working behind an Irish bar in Helsinki two hours before my flight back home. I asked her if she wanted to come back to my room and play dress-up.” Matt turns to me, “She works in KFC,” he says, breathlessly, “it’s perfect.”

And this is the key to understanding why the pictures have the effect that they do: it is a fetishistic approach to the details of living, of being, that makes Maiden Crimes the realest. The fetish is not the black patent heels, the velvet mask or the nipple cover; it’s not the leather glove, or the absence of a lower arm, it’s not the top of a flesh coloured stocking or the 1930s girdle, or any of the objects Matt plays with - it is none of these things in and of themselves. It’s the focus of an eye on a singular point, it is the tension of bodily concentration until one’s mind empties: not falling from the platforms; the explosion of a stepped-on grape; the expression of breath into an instrument and its contortion into sound, it is the narrowing in on a target until it is the right moment to squeeze the trigger… “you know when you shoot someone you say: I’m going to shoot this person. And it’s like what? With a camera or a gun? It’s the same thing.” This violent metaphor is appropriate for an artist whose alter ego Claudia Speed comes from the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto II.

Perhaps it is enough for now, to simply say that the fetish look invests objects with a magical coercive power over individual subjectivity. Matt’s work recognises the addictive determinism generated by Fetish. Careful arrangement of objects set in motion a sequence of events: female clothes on a male body creates certain life-situations. Cross-dressing in West Hollywood, Matt says, “I would find myself climbing over chain-link fences”. L.A plays itself, life seduces itself, one thing leads to another…

“When I was cross dressing and going to these strip clubs I’d literally be getting into these cars with these men and climbing these fences. It wasn’t always sexual. I love iron gates and what it represents of being locked away, and I think that kind of came from growing up in South Africa- the gated compounds with security and it was always just like quite fascinating and really beautiful because you’ve kind of got like these illuminated swimming pools and these big like chunky gates that have, like, electricity going through them.”

Apart from the strip clubs of Hollywood, there is another cinematic influence on the project. In his room in East London, Matt’s nameless Canary likes to perch on his stack of Alan Clarke DVDs. The Yorkshire-born director (1935-1990), whose later minimalist works on topics such as the miner’s strike, Road (1988); childhood heroin use, Christine (1987) and the Troubles in Ireland Elephant(1989) gave the violence of British Social Realist Cinema the Bressonian purity, precision and appeal of a finger dragged across skin, the sound of a dress being unzipped. The video of Osbourne in a prim buttercup-yellow dress spinning and playing her harmonica iconica, is a performance that would not have been amiss from the legendary party scene in Road. There is a clear fascination in Crimes not just with the acting in Clarke’s films, but the social-psychological aura emitted through the stripped-back nature of the sets. Their cheap plain kitchens and unplastered walls, like the pale, rail-thin bodies of Maidens, captivate in their austerity. There is a tension of set and character; history and choice: between the purple pub carpet and aubergine hair; neglected linoleum and patent heels, of weathered junkie skin against orange brick. Clarke’s protagonists and Matt’s Maidens are aesthetic creations that both tenderly embody and fiercely rebel against their surroundings.

We are in a borrowed mansion in Epping Forest, surrounded by chintz and framed photographs of an English family where the mothers wear pearls. Matt is preparing the room, where, in two hours’ time, he will shoot Maiden Rafe. Elusin’s song, silhouette, fills up with the room alongside the smoke machine- the shoegaze haze activates the power of the objects thrown on the bed: Mickey Mouse mask; Eric Stanton Book; black caged hoop skirt; patent heels size 10; a single white gym sock (photographer’s own). Ignoring the still life he had been arranging on the floor, Matt turns to the assemblage on the bed: “accidents are the whole point.” Whilst the shoots are planned carefully, there is a refreshing lack of career-calculation to Maiden Crimes, “I have to hide my phone after I post.” Matt tells me, “quite a few stylists have got in contact, which is nice of them, but a certain part of me is just like… fuck off?”.

This is why Matt’s photos stand out from the scroll; as we are inundated with digital pornography, the analogue fetish adventure endures…

Can fiction ever be art criticism? How did the merger between the art world and advertising occur? Where is the reward in critical distance?

Natasha Stagg admires art, but would not call herself an art critic. Her book, Artless (Stories 2019-2023) documents the fashion, art and nightlife scenes of New York city. A follow up to Sleeveless (2011-2019), Artless comprises dispatches from NYC’s artistic “scene”- with essays featured in Spike, Artforum, Buffalo Zine and Gagosian Quarterly. Always self-effacing, the author pleads with us not to take things too seriously by describing her new book as “What I think sometimes, some days, about some things”.

You could mistake Stagg’s writing for autofiction (with titles like “Is Anyone Listening to Me? I Love It” and “Social Suicide”) but the star of Artless is Stagg’s foray into pithy, non-autobiographical shorts. Her upcoming fiction work, Grand Rapids, tells the tale of fifteen year-old Tess and her titular Michigan hometown. Published in September through Semiotext(e), its cover features one of Issy Wood’s painted Fiat interiors. Wood’s work is an apt choice - her painted veneration of stagnant objects reflects Stagg’s writing, which transforms Grand Rapids into a collection of architecture and emblems.

Here, Stagg speaks with Hollywood Superstar editor Sydney Sweeney about the moral grey area of her profession, the mythical creature that is the objective art critic and her high school reunion in Michigan.

Sydney Sweeney

Tell us about the title Artless? We know, and love, Sleeveless. Each of your collection titles feels super specific.

Natasha Stagg

My editor Chris Kraus suggested adding date range as as a way of establishing it as a series of essays born from a certain time. The name ‘Sleeveless’ is fairly enigmatic. You don’t necessarily know what you’re going to get from its title, so you add a subtitle : ‘Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019’ and people know it’s a book of essays. Artless is a word often used to describe prose, as in ungainly, naive, imprecise. While I like art, I'm not an expert. A lot of the stories were assignments or press releases, but I call them “stories” because that’s what they all are, even if they were also musings, or reviews, or diaries.

SS

One of my favorite chapters in Sleeveless talks about the microtrend and the micro influencer. Do you think we have micro trends in contemporary art right now?

NS

The NYC scene, which is the only one I would know right now, does feel increasingly niche.It does feel a little bit oversaturated with micro- influencers - that thing of everybody knowing everybody. Is there such a thing as there being too many, or not enough, personalities?

SS

There’s a photo of Charli XCX wearing a t-shirt with - “They don’t build statues of critics” on it. Where is the reward in having critical distance?

NS

I respect critics more than I respect my own profession, probably. I think I'm trying to be as honest as possible about my involvement in the scene, in my writing. Almost all critics have some kind of involvement with what they write on, but serious critics get basically nothing from it, not even good pay, and they work because they are just passionate about unbiased commentary needing to exist. The art world is so circle jerky, and corrupt, and objective critics are so rare at this point, maybe there should be statues of them.

SS

Art speak can be incredibly alienating, it’s a way of excluding certain people from the art world.

NS

I am interested in the way that art can work its way into fashion or marketing - there is a lot of cross pollination. People get tired of the same words, so you have to find synonyms. Sometimes these come from slang, or memes or whatever, but people can see through the application of viral language to marketing really quickly - it’s so painfully obvious when advertising adapts the language of the internet.

SS

A lot of Artless is fiction, moving away from the cultural critique towards a short story format that recalls Mary Gaitskill.

NS

I have always been happier writing fiction. It provides a kind of freedom. In non-fiction you are making a claim, even when you state clearly you’re not an authority on whatever the subject is. In the introduction to Artless I tell the reader not to listen to any of these claims. My favourite story is maybe the one I wrote as a press release for the artist Alex Carver. He did a show of paintings that used a process of layering prints with an intricate stamping process. His research ended up inspiring ‘Transplant’, which follows a family whose patriarch has a transplanted heart.

SS

The combination of fictional writing and the display of art has formed a new kind of art criticism, maybe without the critical element. I think it’s exciting.

NS

I am so inundated with cultural criticism at this point, writing more of it can feel like throwing fuel onto a fire. Or pointless. My goal has always been to focus on language, so that it is the writing that moves, rather than the content. And anyway, there is no such thing as fiction and non-fiction, really. Nothing can be proven to be either or the other. There's also no such thing as critical distance. Whatever lines exist, they can always be blurred.

SS

Do you see yourself as a writer more than, let's say, an art or scene critic? Or are you a mixture of both, like Cookie Mueller, who wrote Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black?

NS

I always go back to Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote so much criticism and commentary, but also one of the best novels, Sleepless Nights, when she was 63. I feel really good about having written four books. It means I am actually a writer. My first book could have been a one-off; I wrote it in grad school. The second and third were collections of shorter pieces I’d mostly already written as assignments. So it feels good that I’m publishing another novel, even if it’s ten years after the first one.

SS

It feels as if the time period in which Artless is set, the years of Covid, fuelled the transition in your writing practice from cultural critiques to fictional storytelling.

NS

I think you’re right. Covid was an online overload. Many of us experienced a collective media fatigue. To pivot after this time is only natural - there was so much reflection on reality, maybe too much, and life became miserable. Everyone was looking for a way to escape; fiction writing feels like an extension of that desire.

SS

How long have you been working on Grand Rapids?

NS

It’s hard to say. I started it right after publishing my last novel, Surveys, in 2016, but I didn’t do anything with it for a long time and then came back to it recently. I’m sure a lot of people have had this feeling - of coming back to something and recognising any of the words. I feel that way with my Substack, even. I will often re-read something I’ve published to make sure I’m not repeating myself, but it will feel foreign even two days later. It’s all a balancing act. You want to write away from what you have already written, but you don’t want to think so much about it that it inhibits your natural flow.

SS

Natural flow is kind of my worst enemy. I wait until it reaches me to start a piece. Can you tell me a bit about the plot of Grand Rapids?

NS

It’s a kind of coming-of-age story set in the city where I lived during high school. When I finished writing Grand Rapids, I actually went back to Grand Rapids for my high school reunion. It felt like I was doing reconnaissance for the book. When you grow up somewhere, things feel differently sized when you go back. The city felt bigger, not smaller, than I remembered. It has grown, but that wasn’t it. The buildings downtown felt bigger.

SS

I know it’s fiction, but, did you tap into your own autobiography?

NS

Of course. That’s always the easy in for me. I wanted to start with something I had a lot of emotional knowledge of. My high school days were my own and still are, but I was interested in whether revisiting that time and place could get me to a character arc, something more universal. I love talking to people who are younger or older than me who find something to relate to in my writing. It’s cool to know that my stories are not necessarily tethered to a generation. You always hear that millennials are so different from zoomers or whoever else, but I have had an opportunity to see what is similar between us, the opportunity being that I can publish stories and know from the response that non-millennials read them, too.

SS

I mean, it’s the mark of a good writer if your work unconsciously speaks to a group of people, even if that wasn’t the intention.

NS

Definitely. I have a lot of trouble with a specific type of Gen X writer I used to like more when they lately take a defensive stance on their generation. It’s different for each generation but, I don’t think you see the signs until it’s too late.

Grand Rapids is published by Semiotexte. Available to pre order now