We are delighted to announce the release of KALEIDOSCOPE’s new issue #33 (fall/winter 2018/19), premiering in London during Frieze Art Fair with launches to follow in Milan, Shanghai and Miami. Today’s most innovative magazine of contemporary art and visual culture, KALEIDOSCOPE reaffirms its distinctly curatorial and interdisciplinary approach with a bold new issue, coming with a set of four collectible covers:
In an exclusive photo story by Richard Anderson, two landmark buildings by modernist architect Mies van der Rohe provide the setting for the Chicago-native designer Virgil Abloh to state his manifesto for “streetwear as the next global art movement”—a sentiment among young people, a way of making across disciplines, and ultimately a new Renaissance foregrounding collaboration and breaking the barrier between high culture and real life. This major cover story is completed by an interview by Alessio Ascari, an essay by Kimberly Drew, and a “catalogue raisonné” of the designer’s works and collaborations to date.
Nick Sethi’s portrait introduces an extensive monographic File—comprising an essay by Adriana Blidaru and an interview by Andrea Lissoni—dedicated to Korakrit Arunanondchai. With characters and symbols borrowed from Buddhist myth, the Thai-born, New York-based artist reflects on the duality of animism and technology, activating collective emotions through a ceremonial togetherness.
The cover story on Arunanondchai is also part of a theme survey, NEW NEW AGE, taking stock of different threads of inquiry, across the work of contemporary artists, into spiritual and esoteric dimensions. From underground cults, digital utopianism and cyber-religion, to a reconsideration of traditional iconography or the mystical possibilities of abstraction, artists continue to express an interest in mythological symbols, ritualized spaces, transcendence, and the sublime. Featuring interviews with artists Lucy Dodd (by Ruba Katrib), Camille Henrot (by Stuart Comer), Julien Nguyen (by Franklin Melendez), and Timur Si-Qin (by Ben Vickers).
Having grown up within the underground Bronx punk community, and gaining a public stage at a time when transgender and gender-nonconforming people are fighting to see their rights acknowledged, Elle Pérez talks with Jagdeep Raina about the process of making a portrait—an open conversation with the subject, carrying the traces of the artist’s diasporic experience.
A downtown NYC legend who moved from L.A. in the early 1980s, Kembra Pfahler fronts a death punk metal band in blue body paint and a bouffant black wig, and makes her own art by the tenet of “Availabilism” to use whatever’s around. Here, she talks to Jeffrey Deitch about her inspirations, from beach culture to Japanese Noh theater, and her main impetus: a different paradigm of female beauty.
Specially commissioned contributions by artists and creators, this issue’s VISTAS also include: Francesca Gavin looking into Metahaven’s visually and conceptually savvy commentary on the digital landscape and the infrastructures of power; HEADZ, the improv drawing jam turned radical community experiment, as recounted by its initiators Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney; Mahfuz Sultan’s essay on the art of Eric Mack, in which painterly gestures are sublimated into a ballad of the black mundane; Collier Schorr, one of today’s biggest photographers and one of the very few who can credibly walk the line between fashion and art, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist about the idea itself of looking, and looking back; Puerto Rican-born, New York-based artist Jonny Negron, whose voluptuous drawings are described by Franklin Melendez as synthesizing satire, fan fervor and socio-political critique; and finally L.A.-based photographer Buck Ellison, telling Myriam Ben Salah how his pictures negotiate a hazy line between attraction and repulsion towards the privileged realities they depict.
SEASON, the magazine’s opening section, accounts for the best of this fall/winter with profiles and interviews: Veit Laurent Kurz by Lennart Wolff; DeSe Escobar by Taylor Trabulus; Brujas by Jonathan Olivares; MOSS: Please do not touch by Alice Bucknell; Young Girl Reading Group by Federico Sargentone; CFGNY by Carissa Rodriguez; Lucile Littot by Jennifer Piejko; NAAR by Myriam Ben Salah; Passageways at Kunsthalle Bern by Jeppe Ugelvig; Patrick Frey Editions by Valentina Ehnimb; Sophie by Mike Egan; Boot Boyz by Calum Gordon; Reza Abdoh by Sohrab Mohebbi; When Études Become Form by Christopher Schreck; Franz West by Alex Bennett; Maurizio Cattelan: The Artist is Present by Cloé Perrone; Cassi A. Namoda by Hunter Braithwaite; Oneohtrix Point Never by Federico Sargentone; LUAR by Jeppe Ugelvig; and Dan Mitchell by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Little English Drug, Nostalgia, a think piece by Calum Gordon, closes the issue with a tale on Brexit, Britishness and Brit Pop.