Tag Archive for: contemporary arts

Beyond Frieze / London

Art&Culture | Spotlight
As Frieze takes over London, we look beyond the fair to the exhibitions and ideas shaping the city’s cultural landscape. Through ten selected exhibitions and artistic projects, we follow the NASTY instinct for the unexpected work that sparks curiosity, unsettles the familiar and stays with you long after you leave.

A Question Of Lust / Shannon Cartier Lucy

Art&Culture | Interview
“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.

The Brief Unseen / Anri Sala

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

Where Is My Home? / Anatoly Shabalin K.

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

Witnesses To The Raw / Vitalii Akimov

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

Kapor / Nothing Deep

Private |
“Nothing is more real than nothing.” — Samuel Beckett. The West feared emptiness while the East held the void as fullness. Malevich, Klein and Fontana made it a destination. At London’s Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor turns darkness inward, toward the body, making absence dense with meaning.

Imagine That In A House Fire / Jack Laver

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

0100101110101101 / Eva & Franco Mattes

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

The Son of Northern Darkness / Nico Vascellari

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

Fire Of Her Mind / Nazy Nazhand

Art&Culture | Interview
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.

Bitter Sweet Bite / Nickie Zimov

Art&Culture | Interview
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.