A Question Of Lust / Shannon Cartier Lucy
“Painting allows me to stay with things that are contradictory, unresolved, or difficult to explain.” In a time when the bizarre has become almost ordinary, what does it mean to remain genuinely other? A conversation that moves through the layers of normality and the authenticity of the absurd. Together with the artist, we question whether art can interrupt our habits of perception.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyThe Brief Unseen / Anri Sala
For Sala, the experience of entering a world that had once been inaccessible became inseparable from the question of how we perceive and understand it. Growing up in Albania under communism and later arriving in Paris, he encountered a plethora of unfamiliar artistic forms, as well as an entirely different set of lenses through which to make sense of the world. That tension between the known and the newly imaginable continues to run through his practice. Across sound, image, language, material and time, Sala explores the spaces between perception and intuition, intention and accident, the tangible and the immaterial. His works ask us to question and dissolve the reality of what we see and hear, and what might exist in the interval between them.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyInto The Night / Barbara Hoogeweegen
London, a 19th-century townhouse, ambiguity and abstraction. The artist presents her exhibition as an escape from reality, or perhaps as a gateway to the forget land of emotion. Everything is allowed: a lucid dream immersed in half-light. On view until September 23 ((open daily 12 – 6pm or by appointment).
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor NastyAgainst The Delusion / Mikhail Borzykin
Forbidden pages, passed hand to hand, with only days to read before they moved on. Borzykin has been writing that way ever since. What follows is his own account of how the bleakest record he ever made turned out to work as medicine, not poison.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyWhere Is My Home? / Anatoly Shabalin K.
There is a wooden box inside artist’s Berlin studio, built to the exact measurements of a seated body. What began as a purely functional structure has become, perhaps, an answer to a generational need: to find a place to settle when the rest of the world no longer seems to hold. We spoke about disorientation, about a low-grade anxiety that never fully switches off, and about the relentless pressure of images and information that accumulate without ever resolving into meaning. In this vortex of sensations, artistic practice becomes a refuge. Perhaps the only safe harbor left.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyWhat Excess Actually Sounds Like
Just club posters, from the airport all the way to the road that leads onto the island. That was the first sign of what I was in for. In Ibiza, from May to October, the real sightseeing is clubbing, a party that never really stops, it just changes rooms. I was there for my first time for one of the rarest nights of the season at Pacha: the one where Solomun plays alone, from open to close, no second name next to his. What follows is the account of twenty-four hours, a hotel, a restaurant, a dancefloor, in which I stopped being a tourist.
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor NastyWitnesses To The Raw / Vitalii Akimov
Akimov pursues the moment when reality reveals itself through the body, when a face dissolves beneath the light, losing its contours until it becomes something else. Raised in the Russian provinces and now immersed in the chaos of Paris, he describes his work as a wound that reopens every time he turns on the camera: an act of subtraction where colour disappears, leaving only the raw essence of the image. His subjects become witnesses to the real; he digs beneath the surface to reveal what remains.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyIdentity Is a Shared Hallucination / Caia Hagel
Caia Hagel’s memoir ANON turns an intimate AI companion experiment into an investigation of identity. When another intelligence reflects us perfectly, are we discovering ourselves or becoming someone else?
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyEcho Chamber
No ropes. No restraints. Just a voice. A body and a mind that no longer know the difference between belief and reality. Words and images by Pedro Soenen.
Art&Culture | Words
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/by Editor NastyBalkan Erotic Epic / Marina Abramovic
More than a retrospective, Marina Abramović return to Berlin reads like an invocation. Gropius Bau becomes a site of repetition, sacrifice and desire, bringing together fifty years of performances, sound works, photographs, films and live reperformances that continue to unsettle the limits between artist, witness and participant. Her first major solo exhibition in Berlin since the 1990s. Extended due to overwhelming public demand, the exhibition closes permanently on 30 August 2026, curated by Agnes Gryczkowska and Jenny Schlenzka with Elena Franziska Setzer and Savannah Thümler.
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor NastyImagine That In A House Fire / Jack Laver
The room begins white. By the second it has already burned into something darker, a cocoon, and Jack Laver’s landscapes shift with whatever light hits them, refusing to stay finished. The materials do the same: inks that bleed past their intended edge, resin that sets when it wants to. In this interview, the artist is asked what he was actually trying to hold onto while making it.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor Nasty0100101110101101 / Eva & Franco Mattes
A chatbot trained on real suicide helpline transcripts can produce what feels like warmth, turning the coldest possible source into a convincing simulation of care. Their latest work unfolds around this paradox, exposing how the distinction between human and machine is becoming increasingly engineered. We speak with them about fabrication, manipulation, and what remains of trust once belief and artificial intelligence become indistinguishable.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyParto Artifex / The Contemporary Life of Historical Forms
At LIS10 Gallery in Arezzo, Parto Artifex: The Contemporary Life of Historical Forms, curated by Maria Abramenko, brings Veronica Smirnoff and Bary X Ball into a dialogue where Renaissance memory, digital precision, and contemporary art collide. Between Smirnoff’s veiled metaphysical paintings and Ball’s trembling mineral sculptures, history refuses to stay still: it cracks, breathes, mutates, and returns as something alive.
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor NastyOn Stones and Immortality / Michèle Lamy and Barry X Ball
When Barry and Michèle first crossed paths in the quiet surrealism of Venice, a wordless connection sparked between sculptor and collector; rooted in observation, curiosity and creation. After a Milan morning spent wandering potential exhibition spaces to exhibit the bust Barry sculpted of Michèle Lamy and the Rick Owens boutique –like ghosts casing a temple– we sat down to speak. About monolithic stones. About machines. About art as resistance; against time, against meaninglessness, against death itself.
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor NastyWhat Remains Behind / Helmut Lang
A rare conversation with Helmut Lang for our latest Art cover story.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by adminThe Son of Northern Darkness / Nico Vascellari
Navigating the immaterial space of “trust and friction” that the underground represents, Nico Vascellari is a prismatic figure in the arts, defined by urgencies rather than by a medium of election. Between prison letters, visceral sounds, and memories of his own land, in this interview we dissect his unpredictable practice.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by adminFire Of Her Mind / Nazy Nazhand
How do you create a cultural experience the audience can’t simply scroll past and forget? Nazy Nazhand has built her entire practice around that question. Years ago, no one believed fashion, music, art, nightlife and activism could share the same exhibition space without diluting each other. She proceeded anyway. In this conversation, we talk about friction, trust, and why her curatorial practice always begins with discomfort rather than consensus.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyBitter Sweet Bite / Nickie Zimov
The taste of the first summer fruit never changes, says the artist, and it isn’t nostalgia, it’s something more primitive, more cutting. The figures grow from the same logic, strong colours that conceal a discomfort, quiet surfaces that betray a subconscious pull. A bitter sweet bite, where the sweetness is the lure and leaves behind something sharper.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyResistance To Perfection / Elsa Rouy
The flesh is already laid open, forming a genuine passage towards an inner core. The body becomes the material manifestation of an emotional spectrum: rendered from within outwards, it refuses the constraints of idealisation and stasis. The viscera rise to the surface because that is where they belong; because the skin has always been nothing more than a provisional membrane.
These figures embody a discomfort shared by all, stretched into permanence upon the canvas: at once an embrace and a black hole. They offer a representation of the tangled mass that each of us carries beneath the epidermis.
These figures embody a discomfort shared by all, stretched into permanence upon the canvas: at once an embrace and a black hole. They offer a representation of the tangled mass that each of us carries beneath the epidermis.
Art&Culture | Interview
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/by Editor NastyThe Goth-Loli Sea-Snack Calamity
She was visualizing herself as a GIF. The beach was suddenly there but didn’t smell like salt. It smelled of burning plastic and cheap cotton candy. The sand was a neon-pink dust that stained everything it touched, and right in the middle of it sat lovely/lonely Penelope, looking like a high-fashion action figure that someone had forgotten in a vice-grip.
Art&Culture | Words
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/by Editor NastyWhat Venice Got Right / Biennale 2026
We moved through Venice between whispers and broken spirituality, looking for what stays and refuses to resolve. Perturbation as sensory overload. Disgust made beautiful. Dystopia made familiar because we never left it. What NASTY brought back from the lagoon: ten encounters that leave something behind. A frequency you cannot shake.
Art&Culture | Spotlight
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/by Editor Nasty