In a three-sided tent backstage at a music festival in woodland on the eastern outskirts of Paris, a pair of radio DJs are gassing up, live on air across France, one of the headliners.

It’s not We Love Green’s opening night top draw, Nigerian Afrobeats superstar Burna Boy. Nor the Saturday night bill-toppers, returning French dance legends Justice. And it’s not Sunday’s main-stage closer, American R&B heavyweight SZA, warming up for her show in the same slot at Glastonbury later this month.

Non, c’est un chef.

‘We’d like to introduce Alain Ducasse,’ begin Marie Misset and Marine Baousson, French-speaking hosts of a daily drivetime show on France Inter, a BBC Radio 1-like station that is ‘left wing and very cultural and [for] young people’, according to one of the team overseeing this outside broadcast.

Then, turning to address their 67-year-old guest, a man shod in festival-unfriendly white Armani trainers and topped with a designer baseball cap that says ‘Capitaine’: ‘You own 34 restaurants in nine countries and have 19 Michelin stars. You have fed numerous presidents, kings and queens. And [now] you are co-president of the We Love Green food committee. It’s very classy to have a food committee with Alain Ducasse. What are you doing here at a music festival where it’s more usual to eat merguez [sausage] than Michelin-starred food?’

What indeed. Music festivals, certainly in the UK, historically offer both kinds of food: fried and greasy. With booze on their brains and (not unusually) mud on their feet, that’s what gig-goers want and that’s what they get. For all the culinary revolution catalysed by the spread of ‘street-food’ culture and the concomitant wider provision of alternative cuisines at Glastonbury et al, their grubby grub backbone remains the same: murder-burgers, sloppy noodles, all-dough pizzas, slug-like chips.

Chef Ducasse, chair of a jury of French food experts who have chosen some 50 ‘proper’ restaurants and pop-ups to cater We Love Green, is here to change that mindset and that reality.

‘I’m trying to bring my vision of food diversity, accessible to everyone,’ he tells the DJs. ‘Simple and efficient food that is going to satisfy every palate… I think the public has to taste everything, and you have to be flexible [in your tastes]. You can’t be an idiot [sic] when you eat – when you eat, you have to know and be interested in what you eat. Every dish is telling a story of the man and woman who prepared it. There should be a lot of patience, because when you have patience, you have pleasure [in what you’re eating].’

We Love Green is a three-day, five-stages event in Bois de Vincennes that is built, from its name upwards, on principles of sustainability. True to that ethos, it’s also intent on revolutionising festival food, one Bao bun and rice-patty aubergine burger at a time. As Time Out Paris wrote last year, on the occasion of the event entirely forswearing meat onsite: ‘Végé dream à We Love Green! Révolution! Pour ses stands food, le festival bascule en 100% végétarien. Une première en France.’

Explaining that bascule – shift or pivot – Thomas Grünberg, We Love Green’s Head of Food Selection and Curation, says that ‘we’ve been thinking about this for years now. But we were a bit scared. Maybe we thought we were not ready, the public were not ready, the restaurants we’re working with were not ready. But last year we thought: OK, this is the right time.’

Grünberg is talking to me at the end of a tour we’ve taken with Ducasse of some of stallholders chosen by the superchef’s jury: the African Street Food of BMK, the artistan baguettes of Les Pimpains, the plant-based kebabs of Sezondo (‘pour les viandardes’ – meat-lovers – ‘aussi’).

‘The main thing was, we didn’t want to use fake meat or fake cheese, and still have burgers and hotdogs [using those products],’ continues Grünberg. ‘That is fake vegetarian food. The trick was: how do we do an original, proper, French vegetarian food at the festival using local, seasonal produce? And still have sexy food – the food you want at a festival, not little salads with blah blah blah,’ he says witheringly. ‘So it was complex.’

Part of that ‘trick’ for We Love Green 2024 was collaborating with Chef Ducasse.

‘J’adore Wallpaper*,’ begins the possessor of the most Michelin stars in the world (beating Gordon Ramsay into second place) when we meet at lunchtime, three days before the festival. We’re talking in Le Dalí, one of two suitably fabulous restaurants Ducasse operates in the historic, five-star Le Meurice, part of the Dorchester Collection of hotels. Having had the privilege during my visit of eating in both of those temples of gastronomy, I can wholeheartedly say that Wallpaper* reciprocates that adoration.

I ask what this culinary icon knew, 50 years into his gastronomic career, of music festival food prior to his involvement with We Love Green.

‘I knew it was greasy, fried, with a lot of sugar,’ he tells me in English before switching to French, via a translator. ‘So we wanted to go another way. We wanted to change perceptions about this kind of proposal – more seeds, more grains, more greens, more vegetables. More health. Not too many additives, or fat, or salt.’

As he will say on-air to the France Inter team, diversity was equally important. ‘The festival food is a chilled but serious and modern proposition. It’s about freedom, and here in 2024 we want to represent how people eat all different things. We have food from Asia, Greece, South Africa – a real mix, representing society now.’

For the successful kitchen teams, culinary skills had to be backed by logistical capability. With the festival attracting some 100,000 music-lovers over three days, approximately 150,000 dishes would have to be served – and quickly. As puts it: ‘It’s difficult [for the chefs] to participate: you can talk all the talk, but you have to deliver the food and be good at what you do and satisfy the public. But I am very happy that We Love Green is going on this path. It’s a real evolution I want to be part of.’

And that’s evolution, not revolution. Ducasse, Grünberg and the festival team understand that their food offerings have to be mindful of their audience’s tastes – particularly when, as is often the case, the elements are against us and comfort food is in order. So, on a woodland site not spared the soggy, boggy start to the British summer festival season, I’m pleased to report that, yes, chips were available. Albeit chips purveyed by Friterie 3000, a Champion du Monde de la Frite Arras 2023. These, then, are nationally-renowned, prize-winning chips.

Alain Ducasse, though, wasn’t having any of those. After his tour of the stalls and before the live music kicked in, he headed for the exit, hopped on the back of a motorbike taxi and roared off to his next appointment: at Roland-Garros, where local hero Corentin Moutet was playing in the third round of the French Open (he won, making him the last Frenchman standing in the tennis tournament).

Back at Le Dalí, I’d asked what message he’d like British audiences to understand from his mission at We Love Green, about how he was hoping to change the way music festivals present food.

‘We have to immerse ourselves in new experiences,’ Ducasse replied. ‘It’s time to open your minds and take a risk.’

Yes, Chef.

On the southwestern coast of India is the state of Kerala. It is known for its beaches, backwaters, mountains, coffee and tea plantations, leftist politics, high literacy rate, communal harmony, equal sex ratio, pluralism, (much to the dismay of what is currently a highly polarised democracy) and efficient healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

On the backwaters of Kerala, an event surfaces every spring during the harvest festival of Onam. The Vallam Kali Boat Race is a major sports attraction, where long ‘snake canoes’ compete to finish a stretch of 40 km. Rowing in perfect synchrony, to metrical singing, the sight of hundreds of arms and oars in perfect cadence, surging toward a common finish line, is symbolic of the state’s collective spirit. It hosts the Kochi-Muziris Biennale with the same spirit.

The fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, in the charming city of Kochi (formerly Cochin), was planned for 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic. Its main events, after much turbulence, opened in December 2022 and will be on view until April 2023. The theme of this edition is ‘In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire’, curated by artist-writer Shubigi Rao. Rao wrote her curatorial intent in 2019 and commented on how the vision evolved during the years of postponement. ‘I felt the urge to revisit and rewrite it, to reflect what was happening across the world. As it turned out, I didn’t have to and the reason was obvious – the issues that I had grappled with in the note remained as valid, now laid bare,’ she says. ‘The widening of the chasms of inequality, heightened redistribution of wealth from the majority world to the one per cent, the continuing and devastating effects of human action on the environment, the spread of misinformation, populism and demagoguery – all these struggles remain. The strategies to survive through social isolation and fragmentation of community, especially through storytelling and the arts, became vital supports for large swathes of the world’s population.’

Over 200 projects are spread across heritage properties, cafés, warehouses, galleries and public spaces. Featuring over 90 artists and collectives, over 40 new commissions, and a mix of international and local, emerging and established, surpassing lines and boundaries, the historic venues – Aspinwall House, Pepper House, and Anand Warehouse in the neighbourhood of Fort Kochi – pulsate with fervent anticipation.

The neighbourhood of Jew Town is dotted with cafés, shops and boutiques selling local handicrafts and Jewish embroidery, and is marked by an endearing synagogue. A few venues like the TKM Warehouse have seven shows on display; multidisciplinary and of artists across borders. They include ‘Tangled Hierarchy 2’, presented by KNMA and curated by Jitish Kallat; South African artist, William Kentridge’s video projection titled Oh To Believe in Another World invoking the imagination of an alternate reality. Elsewhere, the Chennai Photo Biennale asks searing questions about belonging, community, and identity. These questions are expounded upon by Bhumi – presented by the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts and Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (DBF) – where in the midst of the pandemic, rural artisans using traditional craftsmanship, channelled their community ethos for the ‘developed’ world to fathom and reflect upon.

Some solo exhibitions – ‘Anatomy of a Vegetable’ and ‘ZOBOP’ by Prasanta Sahu, and ‘Singed Not Burnt’ by Shahidul Alam – on display at the Mocha Art Café (their lemonade is fantastic) and Dutch Warehouse are provocative, urgent and beautiful. Centring agriculture, farmers and the precarity of their existence, Sahu’s work is a ‘rumination on fragile ecosystem’, while ‘ZOBOP’, provides an insightful rumination of everyday rural life, objects, memories and desires intertwined with the undeniable bio-political matrix. Ina Puri’s curatorial text reads: ‘From the epic horror of landscapes devastated by climate change to unflinching images of the ordinary man in the streets fettered by poverty, social inequality to make ends meet to the intimate images of strangers who have become friends over time, Shahidul Alam’s searing portraits bring alive a world that he has embraced as his own.’

The Student’s Biennale features the work of young voices that speak to the most potent issues of these times, exuding a kind of hope that is critical, aspirational, and actionable. 

Mario Souza, the head of programming, reflects on the intent and extent of what is to come: ‘We are looking at artists across the world, how they respond to their own socio-political contexts, and how they strategise and develop new methodologies and forms of coming together. It is also a post-pandemic edition in every sense of the word, rethinking the idea of the collective, intimacy, and the coming together of bodies. Solidarity is the anchor. Poetry, song, protest, assertion feeding into the idea of hope while also criticising the status quo.’

On a wall at the main venue (Aspinwall House), are the words ‘It’s Our Biennale’ in two languages, English and Malayalam, serving as a mnemonic cue. Kerala is a state like no other, and the biennale at Kochi is unequalled in its inclusivity. Kochi-Muziris Biennale exudes a sense of ‘ourness’, and embraces you into it. 

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale runs until 10 April 2023. kochimuzirisbiennale.org

Vågakallen is the ‘old man mountain’ which stretches out across the bay from Storvågan village. He lies on his back, head pointing towards the sea – crossed arms and raised knees rising in undulating peaks and scarps. Like many of the mountains in the region, Vågakallen was once a troll, his backstory involving a failed pursuit of a young virgin, a horseman, seven sisters baking bread, and an arrow shot into a hat of the king. As the saga concludes at dawn, each of the story’s characters is turned irrevocably to stone. 

Folklore of this kind is the lifeblood of Lofoten, where centuries of fishermen have journeyed to reach these arctic cod-spawning waters, their navigation way-marked by distinctly sculpted geologies; myth and memory settling onto the land with each century of snow drift.

It’s storytelling which steers the ship of contemporary culture in Lofoten, an archipelago in Norway’s Arctic Circle, host since 1991 to Scandinavia’s longest-running contemporary biennale, the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF). Themed 'Fantasmagoriana', the 2022 edition’s guiding star is the anthology of German supernatural tales chosen as writing inspiration by Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Clairmont during their infamous gathering at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816. (‘The year without a summer’). The fact that Shelley went on to set the first chapter of Frankenstein in the arctic midnight, had not escaped LIAF’s Italian curating duo, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. Through three chapters of their own (Venice, Oslo, then Lofoten), LIAF 2022 remaps a new archipelago of literary, political, and geographical references, with 37 artists in tow.

LIAF being ‘nomadic’, the curators’ ultimate decision to set the festival in and around the town of Kabelvåg was both for its historical potency — as the place where Kurt Schwitters was confined during the Nazi occupation of Norway — and also for its film school, Nordland Kunst, to whom the entire festival is dedicated. Thus moving image and its history become a wellspring for the ‘cinematic’ in various dimensions: from Sille Storihle’s meta-narrative film on the power play of ‘The Group Crit', 2022, as side-splitting as it is unnerving, to an outdoor mural of collaged fax imagery (‘Panels for the Walls of the World’, 1970-2022), in homage to multimedia pioneer Stan VanDerBeek.

Meanwhile in a solo presentation at the 'Museum Under Destruction’ (the elementary school building due to be razed), LA artist Jennifer West turns to another ruin, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, documenting its demolition against a backdrop of social uprising. “The world was on fire”, the artist recalls of that summer of 2020. “Everything was ruptured”.

Her engagement with American cinema surfaces through a catalogue of “broken technologies”, from 16mm film to ‘holofans’, designed as seductive shopping mall devices. Towering cranes sway amongst palm trees. Piles of rubble are plinths to screens, others cascade waterfall-like from wall to floor, flickering with the lesions of damaged photographic negatives. Then in a room of their own, four crystals of chandelier glass (the only vestiges of the museum) are suspended, spinning like psychotic ghosts in the dark. If Ed Ruscha’s painting ‘The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire’ is a premonition, West’s work acts as a death mask for the museum. “You have to allow for the new. But there’s no sense of preservation”, she says.

Fire, as a source of fear but also comfort and healing, haunts the work of Elina Waage Mikalsen, in Áhcagastá - Tales of the Ember, 2022. Reinterpreting a Sámi weaving method for making belts, Mikalsen’s ‘fire-braid’ installation is fueled by a multi-layered understanding of the role of fire in her community and its history: the World World Two destruction of her family’s land, the burning and erasure of Sámi cultural heritage, and the historical ‘vete’ system of coastal bonfires as warnings of a coming threat. Yet Mikalsen’s resolve is more hopeful: how ‘when objects are burnt and disappear, they can start anew or become something else’, she says. 

Elsewhere, images emerge from the darkness. 'The Museum of the Sun' is a reincarnation of Galleri Espolin, housing a collection of the 20th-century Lofoten artist Kaare Espolin Johnson, who suffered from cataracts and sight loss. At a scale almost troll-like to Espolin’s intricate works on paper, looming black bas-reliefs by Swedish Olof Marsja flank a doorway. Titled A lonesome flower’s dream of the past, 2022, these lumpy flower-headed figures seem to hail from a palaeolithic era, yet manifest via robotic milling and 3D scans.

Relief from darkness of another kind is found in a triumphant series of black and white photographs by Lithuanian Rimaldas Vikšraitis (At the Edge of the Known World, 1978-2008). Pastoral nostalgia up-turned for the darkly comic, Vikšraitis’s shrewd, often lewd depictions reveal both the clutter of rural life and the gaping societal voids following post-Soviet occupation.

Some staged, others candid, his images dare to expose “the wounds of society that are very painful”, he says, wielding humour with surgeon-like precision. Storytelling is a survival strategy, as it was for the fishermen and islanders of these extreme lands.

Four hours of sunlight will be lost during the duration of the festival. The quest for light, for visibility, for the appearance of an image, even lightness itself, is a constant refrain. Emma Talbot’s 30-metre silk hanging, Ghost Calls pertains to the possibility of monumentality without weight. It is a poetry mirrored by filmmaker icon Jonas Mekas’s video statement (Orquestina de Pigmeos, 2017), protesting the gigantism of art world institutions and events.

Escaping the institutional setting altogether, South African Nolan Oswald Dennis voyages to the Barents Sea, to examine the role of black bodies in past and future arctic exploration. Then in the Adjourned Courtroom (the courtroom of the former Nazi-era prison), we encounter the Poupéees poubelles sculptures of Marianne Berenhaut, whose entire family was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust. Here is the radical potential of the weak body: fragile nylon stocking dolls as figures of resistance.

Finally, it’s the trauma imprinted in the spaces themselves. In the ‘Haunted School’ (Kabelvåg’s primary school), Tomaso de Luca questions the promise of modernity, through his series of mock booby-traps quietly installed in the school’s changing rooms and communal showers.

Ridiculing the structures of minimalist sculpture, de Luca lays his mechanisms bare, such that the traps betray even their own horror. Instead, he suggests, we must be vigilant against the ‘violence embedded in architecture’ – in this case, ‘the experience of a queer kid in school’, the artist exemplifies – and against the ‘traps’ of society more broadly. Lest we forget early depictions of the vampire were not as a literary motif, but as 18th-century political allegory: a critique against the authority, or even the critic themself.

Kindred to Polidori’s The Vampyre, there is shifting, fluid ambiguity in the narrative mode at LIAF. And without conclusion, just as the blood-sucking Lord Ruthven escapes at the end of Polidori’s novel, unfound. But soon, whispers and spectres begin to take shape in the dark – and the longer one spends amongst the spaces of LIAF, the more that emerges both from its archive of mythology and its new cast of characters. Even the mountains cannot conceal their stories for long.

INFORMATION

The Lofoten International Art Festival will run until 3 October 2022. liaf.no

Performing, experimenting, emerging, revisiting, exploring and testifying; this is how the Rencontres d’Arles has categorised this year's impressive curation of 40 exhibitions presenting 165 artists. Sprawled throughout the city’s charming streets (bar a few satellite shows), works are exhibited in unexpected contexts, from 12th-century chapels and cloisters to the floor above a Monoprix supermarket. Just like the heat of summer in the south of France, photography has woven its way into the life of the city, from 4 July – 25 September. Also not to be missed in the city is Arthur Jafa’s powerful exhibition ‘Live Evil’ on show at Luma Arles.

5 must-see photography exhibitions for Rencontres d’Arles 2022

Katrien De Blauwer‘The Pictures She Doesn’t Show to Anyone’Croisière, Arles

While already alluringly ambiguous in print or on screen, seeing Katrien De Blauwer’s compositions in person takes her assembled narratives to another level. Working with images from her archive of magazines, De Blauwer explains, ‘I’m a photographer without a camera. For me, cutting is comparable to clicking on the shutter release.’ While her montages anonymise – a disembodied foot peers out from underneath a skirt, paired with a murmuration – their scale offers intimacy, inviting viewers to examine up close each thoughtful snip, glue and colour. For Wallpaper’s September 2018 Style Issue, De Blauwer collaborated with us on a special series for an A/W 2018 fashion story and also created a limited-edition cover.

Lukas Hoffmann‘Evergreen’Monoprix Arles

When walking around Lukas Hoffman’s exhibition, you imagine what it’s like to walk as Hoffman himself. His work is hard to pin down, at least partially in the presentation’s two temporal approaches. In one, a series of large-format polyptychs is distilled and offers continual views along the side of a scrapped container, branded as ‘EVERGREEN’. The year's worth of peeling paint on each letter is documented uniformly. In the distinct other, large format is used freehand, often without looking in the viewfinder. Fleeting compositions are created as a pedestrian walks ahead of Hoffmann, and the viewer follows.

Noémie Goudal‘Phoenix’Église Des Trinitaires, Arles

Exploring spatiotemporal vastness and post-anthropocentric modalities of being, Noémie Goudal’s Rencontres d’Arles showcase is awe-inducing. In Below the Deep South, segmented images of tropical fauna combust across the screen, revealing more and more photographic layers shifting the landscapes on screen as an interrogation of fire’s potential to renew and destroy.  While in Inhale Exhale, a swamp breathes in and out 3m-high images of banana trees and other flora, as an expression of Goudal’s philosophy that the Earth is an organism, following a distinct temporality from humanity’s brief yet destructive existence. In the series Phoenix, illusionary palm groves position the environment in a continual flux. Altogether, Goudal’s deconstructive and performative strategies create deep reflections on our world.

Sam Contis‘Transit’Carré d’Art, Nîmes

With Sam Contis’ expressive documentation, Rencontres d’Arles viewers are brought into her protagonist's worlds; a powerful effect when we consider photography’s complex role in the construction of place and self. In ‘Transit’, intimately scaled gelatin prints combine with large-scale colour photographs across the three series on show at Carré d’Art. In one, historically referenced images of a high school girls’ cross-country team nod to the passage of time, while political and personal tensions lurk in the background. The next gallery travels to the English countryside, recording stiles within the context of boundaries and freedom. Deep Springs is where the show completes, as Contis explores Midwestern and masculine mythologies through enigmatic images of one of the last all-male colleges in the United States.

Mary McCartney‘Moment of Affection’ Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade

Love, desire and grief come together in a heartfelt collection of visual memories in Mary McCartney’s ‘Moment of Affection’ at Rencontres d’Arles. She describes how the exhibition began to take form during the pause of the pandemic: ‘I have taken my time, looking through every contact sheet and photograph in my archive… Finding simple moments, rich in feelings. And here they are.’ Situated within the impressive ‘bastide’ of Château La Coste, moving through the gallery is an intimate reflection on the full spectrum of affection, throughout both McCartney’s and our own lives as viewers.

INFORMATION

Les Rencontres d’Arles runs until 25 September 2022. rencontres-arles.com

‘Photography fascinates me in so many ways. But on a personal level, growing up in a rural area, it allowed me to connect with the world; it helped me learn about myself and who I wanted to be. It was a portal to other places and experiences,’ reflects Elias Redstone, artistic director of Photo 2022, the international festival of photography taking place in Melbourne – the centre of Australia’s photography scene – from 29 April to 22 May. 

Photo 2022 transports viewers through past, present and potential futures across five broad narrative arcs (titled ‘Mortality, Self, Society, Nature and History’) exploring the grand theme of ‘Being Human’, a framework that provides, as Redstone describes it, ‘a chance to reassess what shapes us a species: what connects us as a society and makes us unique as individuals'.

The festival’s 2022 edition is immense in both geographic sprawl and curatorial ambition: from billboard-scale outdoor exhibitions by the likes of Cindy Sherman occupying iconic public spaces like the atrium of Fed Square to Mohamed Bourouissa’s staged pictures from the artist’s breakthrough series Périphérique, and his later Shoplifters works (based on photographs Bourouissa found in a Brooklyn supermarket documenting thieves with items they attempted to steal) hung among the portraits of dignitaries at the Victorian bar in the city’s legal district. In more conventional locations such as the Centre for Contemporary Photography are exhibitions by the American artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya and occupying ACMI are huge self-portraits by Gillian Wearing who employed AI and age-processing tools to depict a gallery of possible versions of herself at 70. There are also lush, large-scale images by Massimo Vitali, which explore the timeless theme of leisure shot at beaches across Italy after lockdown.

But it’s not just the era-defining names in the medium that make the festival exciting. It was important to Redstone and the festival partners to emphasise the wealth of emerging and local artists from the region, representing Australia’s ‘incredibly strong and varied’ photography scene’, as Redstone puts it. ‘There are many issues that are pertinent in Australia that also resonate universally. The impact of colonisation for one, and everything that entails. There are incredible First Nations artists with incredibly diverse practices. The landscape is an ongoing obsession, and Australia’s experience on the frontline of the climate crisis has added new urgency to this subject.’

Among 24 artists commissioned to make new work for Photo 2022 is Anu Kumar, whose work will be displayed in the forecourt of the State Library Victoria. The Indian-born, Australian-raised artist created Remnants of Rituals using medium format photography to speak about Melbourne through its Indian Australian diasporic community and its adaptations of traditions to create a new hybrid culture, one that is sometimes fraught with tensions and contradictions but that is constantly evolving.

Also riffing on notions of belonging and home is Madeline Bishop, an emerging Australian photographer who asked people she knew to introduce her to people she’d never met who were willing to be photographed by her in their homes. The resulting body of black and white works, So I sew stitches, are ruminations on intimacy, connection and community that land somewhere between documentary portraiture and performance. 

‘I love working with photography because everyone can read a photographic image,’ Redstone reflects on the way photography continues to permeate and pervade every aspect of our everyday lives. ‘It is incredibly accessible, and at the same time you can use it to bring people into contact with a multitude of ideas or lived experiences they might not otherwise encounter.’ 

Photo 2022 searches for the fundamental, lived experiences that make us human – but it also provides an opportunity to transcend the confines of our human existence; to imagine, dream, and explore a world that exists beyond our eyes, one that is at times bleaker, but often dazzlingly brighter; a shared space of sensory perception that has the potential to unite us beyond what we understand of our condition and place on earth.

INFORMATION

Photo 2022 will take place across various locations in Melbourne from 29 April to 22 May 2022. photo.org.au

When George Balanchine, legendary choreographer and co-founder of New York City Ballet, spoke about his work and legacy, he said: ‘I don’t have a past. I have a continuous present. The past is part of the present, just as the future is.’

In a similar spirit of melding time, Van Cleef & Arpels will be presenting the inaugural edition of its Dance Reflections festival in London, 9 – 23 March, a programme looking back to seminal postmodern works and to the current moment with new contemporary pieces. Performances will take place in the capital’s pre-eminent dance theatres, Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House, as well as at Tate Modern and multi-arts space EartH. 

Van Cleef & Arpels: a legacy of dance

Van Cleef & Arpels’ relationship with the dance community stems from the passion its founding family had for ballet. Claude Arpels met Balanchine in the early 1960s, prior to the choreographer creating one of his best-known works, the 1967 Jewels. Today, the maison has ongoing partnerships with several major ballet institutions, including Australian Ballet and Boston Ballet, as well as contemporary companies like Benjamin Millepied’s LA Dance Project. 

The London festival is its most high-profile initiative in the field to date and has been curated in-house by Serge Laurent, Van Cleef & Arpels’ dance and cultural programme manager, and previously head of live performance programming at the Centre Pompidou. Both Laurent and Nicolas Bos, president and CEO of the jeweller, are resolute that the event should attract a wide audience and have an impact that furthers our understanding of dance as an art form.  

‘Leaning on our history, we wanted to continue writing the story of our connection to dance, but with a holistic approach,’ says Laurent. ‘We wanted to create a programme that would be useful for the dance world.’

The 17 performances selected span from important examples of postmodernism by Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to boundary-pushing contemporary creations by artists including Christian Rizzo, Alessandro Sciarroni and Gisèle Vienne. The intent is to show choreographies from the past 50 years that have brought something new to the genre and, in some cases, have not perhaps been widely exposed beyond dance circles. An awareness of legacy and the transference of ideas between different generations of dancers and choreographers were also guiding curatorial themes. 

‘When you approach a contemporary art piece, in any art form, there is always a link with previous works,’ says Laurent. ‘That link can be a deliberate break or a continuity, but it is always a reference to the past. The 20th century is such an exciting period in the history of dance, and I wanted to talk about this through the programming.’

Dance Reflections: a stage for interdisciplinary experimentation 

In their interdisciplinary and conceptual nature, many of the works in the festival are as much pieces of theatre as they are dance performances. Borne from the highly experimental American postmodern scene, Lucinda Childs’ 1979 Dance and Trisha Brown’s 1983 Set and Reset were hugely influential in the way they incorporated the contributions of other leading artists in their creative fabric. For Dance, Philip Glass supplied the score and Sol LeWitt made a film of the dancers, which is shown simultaneously on stage alongside the live performers. In Brown’s Set and Reset, Robert Rauschenberg designed the set and costumes, Laurie Anderson wrote the music and Beverly Emmons originated the lighting. Viewing both works decades on, it is still thrilling to see how the collaborative elements blend to form a harmonious whole.

Franco-Austrian Gisèle Vienne is a contemporary choreographer-director (and also photographer) who, like Brown and Childs before her, has taken a multi-dimensional approach to her practice. Her dramatic 2010 work This is how you will disappear unfolds in an installation resembling a forest and features a ‘fog sculpture’ by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. The design is intended to represent both a naturalistic and symbolic landscape that mirrors the performers’ inner experiences as expressed through dance. The piece also incorporates lyrics by Dennis Cooper, and atmospheric video and lighting designs. 

A fresh interpretation of dance: past, present and future

Like the work of the other contemporary practitioners featured (Katerina Andreou, Boris Charmatz, Ruth Childs, Ola Maciejewska), the two performances bookending the programme are, in discrete ways, both celebrations of the transformative power of dance as an art form. Opening the festival, Neighbours sees LA-based b-boy artist Rauf ‘Rubberlegz’ Yasit and Albanian contemporary dancer Brigel Gjoka mesh their respective styles and techniques to find a new vocabulary of movement. Closing the programme, with their new piece When we speak I feel myself, Opening, SERAFINE1369 (Jamila Johnson-Small) is a London-based artist-dancer who incorporates film, sound and text in installations that investigate the politics of the body. As much a visual as a movement practice, their work is a synthesis of media and artistic collaborations that invites a fresh interpretation of dance as a performance art.  

In Laurent’s words, viewers of Dance Reflections will be led on a ‘parcours’ (journey) through a dynamic period of the art form’s recent history. With post-show artists’ talks, workshops and film screenings embellishing the live programme, it’s a content-rich event that will likely draw a broad and curious audience, and offer a compelling chance to think about dance – past, present and future – in a new light.

INFORMATION

Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival, 9 – 23 March, London. For programming information, visit dancereflections-vancleefarpels.com

In a year where we’ve consumed more images than ever before – but never felt quite so disconnected – a new photography festival asks us to explore the relationship between what we see and what we believe.

Taking place in Melbourne over the course of two weeks from 18 February, PHOTO 2021 is a major new festival of international photography featuring work from over 120 global photographers.

Based around the theme of ‘The Truth', the inaugural event will see the Australian city transformed into a huge outdoor gallery with installations and site-specific works in notable locations including the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens, Fed Sqaure and State Library of Victoria.

Over 40 cultural institutions, museums and galleries will participate, with new commissions on display from artists including Hoda Afshar, Zanele Muholi, Sam Contis, Kenta Cobayashi and Atong Atem. The works reflect on the role of the photographic image in an era of social media, fake news, and artificial intelligence.

Originally conceived as Photo 2020, the festival was rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, set to be Australia’s largest ever photography event, it joins the likes of France’s Rencontres d’Arles, Unseen Amsterdam, and Photo London as a world-leading platform for image makers.

Wallpaper*: Where did your inspiration to create PHOTO 2021 first stem from, and what role do you hope it will play in providing a platform for global photography discourse?

Elias Redstone: Photo 2021 was inspired by the incredible culture of photography and visual art that exists in Melbourne. Melbourne is Australia’s cultural capital and has the potential of becoming a global centre for photography. The city is home to venues dedicated to photography such as the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Monash Gallery of Art, strong collections of photography at NGV and other institutions, multiple schools of art and photography, and some brilliant artists and curators. The festival is a time for the sector in Melbourne and across Australia to come together and connect with the international photographic community.

There are so few Australian artists and photographers that receive attention abroad, and few opportunities for the presentation of international photographers to exhibit in Australia. We are working to correct that balance and, with a focus on commissioning new work, the intention is very much for Photo 2021 – and future festivals – to be a barometer for what is happening in contemporary photographic practice, here in Australia and abroad.

With a focus on one central theme, each edition will explore a current issue from multiple perspectives. Each venue curates their own response, and the festival commissions artists to respond to the theme in a very public way, presenting work in the public realm and at an urban scale. The events and education program is then an opportunity to learn more about artists’ practices and investigate the theme in more depth.

W*: Many of the events and exhibitions planned for Photo 2021 are staged within public spaces with free access such as Sam Contis’ Beating Time, Movement of the Hand (After Lange) and Zanele Muholi’s outdoor installation. What were your key priorities in ensuring the festival will be as accessible to the public as possible?

ER: The festival brings together my curatorial experience working across photography, architecture and urbanism, and is embedding art into the fabric of the city. It supports the work of galleries dedicated to exhibition making year round, by creating a special moment for artists to break out of the confines of the white cube to create unique experiences at unexpected sites around Melbourne.

Conceived as a festival of exploration, we are bringing photography to Melbourne’s streets and laneways, with work installed on sculptural installations, billboards, buildings and several hundred metres of construction hoardings with the Metro Tunnel Creative Program. The Festival will encourage the public to engage with and think about photography and visual culture in new and inspiring ways, leading visitors on a trail of photography installed at iconic locations, from the Parliament of Victoria and State Library Victoria to the Royal Botanic Gardens.

W*: The festival was originally conceived for 2020, and the world has changed quite a lot since. Aside from the postponement of the festival, how has the pandemic, or other global events, affected your approach - did anything change thematically or logistically?

ER: The festival was postponed at very short notice, but the artistic program is being presented as pretty much as originally intended. Some of the exhibitions that were already being installed when we postponed opened last year and are being represented at Photo 2021 through online content and virtual tours. The biggest problem we face is that Australia’s borders are still closed.

We had been looking forward to hosting some incredible artists in Melbourne – Sam Contis, Emmanuelle Andrianjafy, Felicity Hammond, Kenta Cobayashi, George Georgiou to name a few – and have had to adapt our events and education programs accordingly. On the plus side, it does mean that we will now be live streaming our headline talks program PHOTO LIVE and expanded symposium PHOTO IDEAS to allow audiences around the world to participate.

W*: The commissioning of new work and staging world premieres of projects seems to be a primary focus for the festival. One of these is Hoda Afshar’s Agonistes. Can you tell us a little about what we can expect from this piece, and why you consider the work so important?

ER: From the start, Photo 2021 was conceived as a festival of new photography and new ideas. It felt important to focus not just on what is happening now in photography, but what is coming next, with new commissions and the premiering of new bodies of work. One of the central commissions is by the Melbourne-based Iranian artist Hoda Afshar.

When we discussed the idea for a commission, Hoda knew exactly how she wanted to approach the theme of The Truth: by exploring the experience of whistleblowers who have spoken out against Australian institutions, from detention centres to the military. Hoda is an absolutely fearless artist and one of the most important voices in this country. We are presenting her series of photographs outside St Pauls Cathedral on Melbourne’s Swanston Street. The work – accompanied by a new film that is being screened at the Photo 2021 – Hoda explores what provokes people to take a stand and speak out, despite the risk to their careers or personal wellbeing. It is a shocking work that is urgent, powerful and absolutely unforgettable. 

INFORMATION
Photo 2021 takes place across Melbourne from 18 February to 7 March 2021. photo.org.au

Taking the ‘Design Variations' festival to the digital stage – responding to the current global health, design and travel challenges – curators MoscaPartners have launched ‘Virtual Design Variations' with a project by celebrated Portuguese architects Aires Mateus. 

The architects' digital installation, ‘The Rest Is Silence', is presented in the virtual environment of the main courtyard of Palazzo Litta, where the physical, site-specific piece would have been erected during Milan Design Week 2020 – before the highly anticipated event was forced to be cancelled.

The piece is a calming water feature, inspiring peace and contemplation. ‘As a direct reaction to the world around us today, so engulfed by images and noise, with ‘The Rest Is Silence' the designers propose a void to create a new perception of what already exists,' explain the curators.

The organisers, who have brought us striking works, such as last year's impressive, large scale structure by Chilean architecture studio Pezo von Ellrichshausen, are a spring staple in the generous, 17th century palazzo's courtyard. A design exhibition featuring a roaster of accomplished and young designers is also part of the festival. 

The installation piece is accompanied by a series of video interviews, by Aires Mateus, as well as more designers participating in the ‘Design Variations' festival, while the whole event will move to Portugal from 16th June, focusing on Portuguese creatives and creating a platform for international dialogue and idea exchange.

Click here to watch Manuel Aires Mateus talking about The Rest is Silence on Instagram.

INFORMATION

designvariationsvirtual.it

moscapartners.it

airesmateus.com

Terrence Malick isn’t kidding when it comes to a Houston sunset. But, as the shadows run impossibly long and the sky burns red, the citizens of the Texan capital are inside, celebrating the opening of a photography festival dedicated to ‘the idea of Africa’.

Since being founded by documentary photographers and journalists, Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss in 1983, Houston FotoFest has emerged as America’s leading photography festival. Now, in 2020, and based out of the city’s cavernous Silver Street Studios, the festival is exhibiting the work of 33 African artists, both living and dead, from across the globe.

This is all the more remarkable given the recent history of the city and the surrounding American South. On the same day as the opening, an eight-hour drive away (a short hop in this part of the world) Congressman John Lewis was joined by Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where, 55 years earlier to the day, Lewis and dozens of peaceful civil rights protestors led by Martin Luther King were brutalised by police armed with tear gas and billy clubs in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

Many people present at the festival will have a personal memory of that event, as well as the many other chapters of Texas’ less than proud history when it comes to respecting their African American citizens’ right to self-representation.

This made the celebratory nature of Houston FotoFest all the more remarkable. Citizens from all over the city celebrated to the point of breaking out in dance in front of photographs that, taken in isolation, often unflinchingly evoke the pain and trauma of the African experience, as well as the courage and creativity black communities harnessed, from one generation to the next.

The group exhibition, titled ‘African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other’, is curated by Mark Sealy, the curator of the renowned Autograph ABP gallery in Shoreditch, London. Here, Sealy hopes to explore Africa as conceptual, rather than providing a mere census of the continent’s many contemporary photographic artists.

‘When I was commissioned to curate this show, I made it clear I wasn't going to jump on a plane and travel around Africa’s 54 countries,’ Sealy tells Wallpaper* over tacos and coffee. ‘Because Africa is everywhere, all over the world. This is about recognising its influence; Africa is in our sounds, in our clothes, in our food. It’s the minerals in our mobile phones and the oil in our engines.’ But the exhibition, Sealy stresses, ‘is meant to be specific to Houston, Texas. I’m more interested in the geo-specifics of where the work is exhibited, rather than the geo-specifics of where the work comes from,’ he says.

Sealy’s recent work includes Decolonising the Camera, a collection of essays which seeks to explore the kinship between colonial histories and fine-art photography  – a kinship, Sealy says, that is still evident in today’s art galleries.

‘The art world is in crisis,’ Sealy says. ‘It needs to be more inclusive if it’s going to survive. It suddenly makes sense, from a business perspective, to be inclusive. But a lot of institutions don’t know how to change, because it’s difficult to be truly inclusive. The typical white cube gallery space presents a lot of psychological barriers for a lot of minority communities. That’s a historical, generational thing. But, here in Houston, I think people see themselves reflected in the art in that space.’

The exhibition spans 50 years, opening with the stunning work of the South African photographer Ernest Cole, who created surely some of the most enduring social documentary photography of the 20th century.

For his series House of Bondage, Cole dedicated himself so fervently to his art that he had his race on his identity card changed to ‘mixed’ and would often purposefully get himself arrested in order to infiltrate and capture the institutional humiliation of black-only prisons.

The exhibition includes Cole’s quote ‘Three hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of dignity, robbed us of self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.’ As such, Cole’s photography was actively recognised as political dissidence, and he was forced to leave South Africa in exile in 1966. 

Also on show is another unheralded African documentary photographer – a nominal contemporary of Cole’s, yet one who worked with a radically different ethos. Like Cole, the Accra-born James Barnor freelanced for the South African Drum magazine, initially in a newly independent Ghana and then, from 1960 onwards, in London. Barnor’s work was almost entirely ignored by the British media, which focused almost exclusively on ‘spectacles of violence and unrest’, Sealy says. Yet Barnor was virtually unique in his willingness to focus his lens on the African diaspora’s ability to integrate totally into London’s cultural life. Barnor’s photography is augmented by a multi-media project from a fellow Ghanian artist; one working in the current day but exploring very similar themes.

Serge Attukwei Clottey’s Softening the Borders installation, held at the Moody Center for the Arts in tandem with the festival, investigates how we reconstruct familiar experiences when displaced. ‘How does a subject negotiate their own baggage of cultural biases and prejudices with anxieties of belonging when in a foreign environment?’ Clottey asks.

From the ceiling, Clottey suspends chairs that at first glance seem unremarkable but actually relate to so-called ‘prestige stools’ from Ghanian Asante and Akan tribal cultures. Hung or stuck to the chairs, or stacked below, we see international postage stamps, newspapers turned to world news and items of Westernised clothing.

The combination of such seemingly everyday things is testament to Cottey’s ability to communicate complex ideas with direct minimalism – namely, how one’s geographic location can change our behaviour, and how re-appropriated fashions can serve as a ‘marker’ of home – ‘how one creates a home away from home and a renewed, resilient sense of self,’ he says.

Africa’s relationship with Western clothing is a thread that runs through Sealy’s exhibition. Take for example Look at Me, an archival photo album of black families taken in Johannesburg from 1890 to 1950, and elevated into an artwork by Santu Mofokeng, a South African news photographer who died in January of this year. Mofakeng pays attention to the formal studio settings – the ‘taking up’ of the British Victorian photo studio custom – in which the families are photographed, as well as the Westernised clothing the families wear.

These images have been passed down through generations of African families, a testament to how photography can at once preserve and reinterpret the past. Here, we see how African citizens were able to conform to an imposed colonial system whilst, simultaneously, rising above it and owning it for themselves. ‘Are the photographs evidence and testimony of mental colonisation,’ the artist asks. ‘Or a resistance?’

INFORMATION

‘African Cosmologies: Photography, Time and the Other’ opened at Houston FotoFest, Silver Street Studios, but is temporarily closed to the public, due to sensible restrictions presented by Coronavirus. fotofest.org

In mid-December the annual Wonderfruit festival returned for its fourth instalment near Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand. Unlike many fairs and exhibitions that perennially set up in cities leaving unsustainable practices and one-use ephemera in their wake, Wonderfruit was founded in 2016 on the very principles of sustainability.

Founder and creative director Pete Phornprapha, third generation of the Siam Motors family who works by day as president and CEO of Bangkok Komatsu Sales Co Ltd is the brains behind the immersive, eco-friendly, community-minded music and lifestyle festival which offers regional and global beats, yoga classes, talks and workshops from artists, activists and architects.

Since 2018, Phornprapha has worked with Ab Rogers Design (ARD) to build a village of structures that support his environmentally-conscious ethos for an intelligent yet exhilarating festival. Combining experience across health and lifestyle design – from retail concepts for Comme des Garcons to an upcoming Maggie’s Centre in the UK completing in 2020, with local Thai craft, materials and techniques, founder Ab Rogers has created a characterful series of semi-permanent buildings to serve the ‘Wonderfruits’ – as the festival-goers are known as.

‘Wonderfuit is a rarely enlightened client. Phornprapha has an exceptional vision and sustainable ethos. He owns the land so we can keep the structures all year round – the site is becoming a kind of sculpture park or eco community. There will be other events, and it will metamorphose and evolve as the community grows and more elements are added with a sense of permanence,’ says Rogers.

All the semi-permanent pavilions from 2018 were serviced before the 2019 festival kicked off – lessons about wind, shade and termites had been learned along the way. Termite-infested bamboo was replaced at the floating bath house (inspired by Thai fishing villages), and tartan shading added to the onion-shaped massage therapy rooms.

At the Eco-Pavilion (‘Why build a building if you can creating a mound plant bamboo and put up umbrellas,’ says Rogers of the design that features 124 hand-made, hand-painted cotton umbrellas) corn was replaced with robuster bamboo to shelter a new central umbrella with an air vent. And, at the Theatre of Feasts, an open kitchen and dining pavilion for 250 people, a lighter roof was installed, the table was rebuilt so it could be easily dismantled and new three-legged bar stools introduced.

‘I believe the key to building sustainably is to use temporary biodegradable materials in semi-permanent ways’ – Ab Rogers

‘I believe the key to building sustainably is to use temporary biodegradable materials in semi-permanent ways. These structures need up keep, they need care. We must take responsibility for what we make, and by doing so avoid the use of concrete materials and non-degradable plastics,’ says Rogers.

The new structures for 2019 each celebrate indigenous materials, and the surrounding nature and landscape. children’s adventure playground features up-cycled bamboo seesaws, and a mud-slide house made of tyres. The Forbidden Fruit stage was designed with bamboo leftover from previous years, recycled prayer mats and the natural jungle created a creeping backdrop. Plus a new stage made out of fabric made from recycled PET bottles that Bangkok’s residents have been donating at dedicated Wonderfruit collection bins. 

This year, ARD launched a design competition for a sustainable pavilion. Judged by Deyan Sudjic, Aric Chen, Farshid Moussavi and Thai Architect Boonserm Premthada, the prize was won by young architects Jeanne Pasquet and Helena Bosch of Trojans. Their bright bamboo ‘Woven House’ was coloured with red pigment from ‘Khrang’ a resin produced by the ‘laccifer lacca’ insect, bright yellow from gum extracted from the ‘garcinia dulcis’ plant or the berries of pomegranate, and intense blue made of fermented indigo leaves. ‘The beauty of the design was in the absence of materials,’ says Rogers. ‘It felt like an ephemeral piece of architecture, changing with light.’

As well as sustainable architecture, there are plenty of other exciting and experimental ideas buzzing through the festival. Elin Eyborg, lead architect at ARD, created a magical path of 3000 rammed earth bricks painted red with organic pigment, laid as a performance over the festival and left to return back to the earth afterwards. Landscape architect Kochkorn Voraakhom discussed her work in Thailand, and food expert Kanitsanan Thanthitwat opened minds on eating bugs.

A modular wooden structure requiring no nuts or bolts designed by Burning Man artist, Gregg Fleishman was rebuilt with added shading. A forest of bamboo is being planted, and farmers from Chang Mai have set up a farm growing salad, sweetcorn, watermelons.

As well as the mastermind behind the Wonderfruit village, Rogers is also a Wonderfruit himself, where he finds the diversity of experiences unparalleled: ‘You can sit amidst growing lettuces, eat real food, and the next minute be dancing to deep techno in the Polygon (a 360 degree stage with holographic visuals), or meandering down to the quarry to discover Craig Richards playing.’

INFORMATION

Wonderfruit Festival ran 12 - 16 December 2019

ADDRESS

Wonderfruit
The Fields at Siam Country Club
Pattaya
Thailand

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Cairo is the best kind of chaos: a cacophony of honking horns tempered by the ethereal calls to prayer, remarkable traffic jams and intermittent plumes of spicy scents. Twenty million inhabitants thrive in a patchwork quilt of architecture, where every ruler from Fatimid to Ayyubid, Mamluk to Ottoman has left their stamp. Cairo seems to be playing a game of what’s worthy of preservation and what is left to crumble, but one arts initiative is doing its best to ensure the dice rolls in favour of the former.

Al-Muizz is the city’s oldest inhabited street. As in bygone eras, merchants hard-sell their wares from worn shop fronts – all conceivable variations of hookah, endless reels of fabric and every spice under the burning sun. This is not necessarily a place you’d expect to find a mass assembly of contemporary art world pageantry, but for its third annual iteration, art consultancy, initiative and self-proclaimed ‘cultural operative’ Art D’Égypte takes to the kilometre long Al-Muizz stretch with a new chapter, ‘Reimagined Narratives’.

This year’s edition falls under the patronage of UNESCO, auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities and marks the second year of official partnership BMW Group, who have actively supported more than 100 cultural initiatives worldwide in the realms of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design, alongside jazz and classical music events. For Art D’Égypte, it’s in with the old as much as the new. ‘I think this is a revolution. Now people worldwide are going away from exhibiting in white cubes,’ says curator and founder, Nadine Ghaffar. ‘We have such an abundance of heritage sites, who cares if we don’t have money to get institutions. We have something even prettier.’ We voyaged to Cairo to find 28 contemporary Egyptian artists rewriting the rules, reinterpreting their 5000-year history, and reappropriating four key heritage sites to offer this corner of the ancient world a new lease of life.

Qalawun Complex

The first stop on the pilgrimage was built in 1284 AD and hosts a mosque, former hospital, madrasa and mausoleum. As you might imagine, installing art inside a mosque isn’t standard practice. Unlike churches, which can be deconsecrated and repurposed, mosques are mosques, until they crumble. ‘At the beginning of this project they didn’t want to let us in. They said, “No, it’s a mosque.” Now the director of the complex is so happy he even wants us to put art in the tomb of Qalawun!’ Ghaffar exclaims. The first intervention we encounter is Ahmed Askalany’s enormous palm leaf and terracotta sculpture, dangling from the rafters like drooping prayer beads.

Further in, Mohamed Shoukry’s enormous cotton wool cloud presides over mirrored cylindrical structures reflecting the metaphorical ‘circulation’ of Islamic worship. Huda Lutfi responds directly to the Qalawun’s 13th-century hospital, where patients were treated with a progressive mix of music and hydrotherapy. Her installation, including archival manuscripts of experimental treatments and a solitary bed stationed in one of the old dormitories stands for ‘remembrance, anticipation, silence and mortality.’

The smallest piece here, by Ghada Amer, is perhaps the most provocative. At first glance it’s a traditional burqa, the most conservative of Islamic veils strung up inside a glass box. But this piece is made from delicate Bayeux lace; synonymous with underwear and sensuality, and made by an artist known for defying conventions with heavily sexualised paintings. The point of the veil that would cover the mouth is embroidered with the Arabic word for ‘fear’.

Bayt Al-Suhaymi

This Islamic-themed Ottoman house, built in 1648, embodies the essence of noble Cairene domesticity. The network of reception rooms and centuries of decorative styles are both a feat of handcrafted design and a window into historic mentalities – elaborately carved screens overlooking the central courtyard were constructed to allow women of the household to enjoy the view without being seen by guests.

Here, Amir Youssef breaks the serenity with a metallic, whirling spinning top that mimics the movements of a tanoura dancer. Ibrahim Ahmed fashions sculptures from Cairo’s discarded objects, including a chandelier, window frame and prosthetic leg referencing the societal tendency to hoard unused materials on rooftops through fear of financial insecurity.

Muhib Al-Din Hall

Inside another elaborate Mamluk residence and ‘13th-century party house’, Sherin Guirguis has installed a duo of sculptures inspired by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, an epic mapping of Cairo’s post-colonial fall and rise. These plywood structures, channelling the forms of traditional Arabic jewellery, rock back and forth to ‘reference a woman’s body as she walks down a public street.’ Marianne Fahmy’s striking acrylic and epoxy resin sheets, inspired by water graphs hang in eerie suspension and shed a very iridescent light on environmental consciousness.

In a different mood, Heba Amin presents a handwoven jacquard rug, which chronicles the first photograph taken on the African continent. The image, taken in 1839 Alexandria and purely architectural, apparently stirred up erotic fantasy in the French colonial mind due to the inaccessibility of the North African female subject. The geography of the photograph alone was enough to imply feminine themes through the ‘voyeuristic gaze of the technological device’.

Maq’ad mamay al-sayfi

Constructed in 1496, this is a structure that’s survived almost impeccably through continuous use. Its imposing arches and stately columns made for an elegant Burji dynasty-era bolt hole, later repurposed as an Ottoman court and jailhouse. Ahmed El Shaer uses the latter as a virtual reality playground. This culminates in a piece exploring the ‘conceptual universe’ of painter Abdel Hadi Al Gazzar as a ‘hybrid space’.

Medhat Shafik has taken Imhotep, a physician and alleged architect of the Djoser’s step pyramid as his muse, as well as the Al-Muizz street itself. The Wise Man’s Shop combines ancient medical forms with vessels and vibrant fabrics, mirroring the bustling row of traders on the streets outside. It’s a stand against certain types of globalisation, or as he puts it, ‘To know the past is to have a dynamic identity which opens itself with the world and to the unknown by deciphering, synthesising and amplifying shared values.’ 

INFORMATION

‘Reimagined Narratives’, until 9 November, various locations on Al-Muizz Street. artdegypte.org

When Romania’s most cosmopolitan city is staging its third biennial, it seems no one has escaped the furore. One young taxi driver reveals genuine dismay for his sculpture escaping the curators’ programme, and determined to make the next run.

The justly named City of the Revolution, Timișoara has never shied away from cultural ambition, laying claims to the country’s only non-communist curriculum, the only Bauhaus education system, and vibrant 1970s art scene. In 2021 it will be the European Capital of Culture. ‘And still,’ laughs Oliviu Sandor, president of the Art Encounters Foundation, ‘contemporary discourse is taking some getting used to.’

The city historic centre – a trio of squares linked by crumbling secessionist architecture – houses the mainstay of the exhibition programme: 30 sites in all accommodating 60 artists (of who 20 present new commissions). Critically, Art Encounters is not in transformation but ‘opening up’ spaces for art.

‘We don’t want to be at the forefront of gentrification,’ assert curators Maria Lind and Anca Rujoiu. As such, the necessary oomph for this pre-existing infrastructure rises from the curators’ biennial ‘winds’: a set of thematic weather fronts spanning sustainability, craft, agility, reliance and borders, to name a few.

Under the breezy rafters of a tram depot (Corneliu Miklosi Public Transport Museum), Agnieszka Polska’s majestic Wayward Pigeon confidently asserts its borders badge while also announcing itself as the biennial mascot – here as large-scale digital print and poster-child for the contrarian messenger.

Shimmering alongside, Bella Rune’s five suspended yarn sculptures – as if blown over from Sweden on a whisper, in all their delicacy. Collapsible, unstable, they stand to provoke the nature of sculpture itself and are unafraid of being decorative. ‘There is something about purple in this city,’ Dune insists, taking inspiration for her mushroom-dyed mohair-silk threads from the lilac hues of Timișoara itself.

The city itself is again protagonist in a series of ‘reserve graffiti’ botanical patterns by Gunilla Klingberg (Spirit of the Woods, 2019), power-hosed onto pavements as a salute to a process of erasure. From overlooked tarmac to the bi-product of weaving – with Anne Low’s Dust bed (2018-19) – striped woven furnishings are offered up as cultural ‘translation’.

Meanwhile, Peles Empire seeks to translate archaeology into 21st-century idiom, via trompe l’oeil and photographic veneers – the internet age equivalent of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s hollow, headless fibre figures at the Timișoara Art Museum (Presence Essence, Identity, 1930-2017), which stand like forgotten skittles, pocketed, wrinkled and crusty with resin. And finally, their craft as a collective force for change – in timeless paintings by Roma activist and educator Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, patchworked with the recycled cloth of friends, family and children from her community.

Buoyant in spite of political heft, here, a serene card game speaks not of pastime but the endless time of unemployment. Games as abstract signifier also feed into Céline Condorelli’s Collection Show at the Museum of Banat, a scintillating ‘museum of everyday life’, welded in theory and practice with the artist’s faultless signature staging devices.

The Youth House, a postwar architectural gem and site of the infamous 1990 Timișoara trial, stages art as theatre of the emotions with Kray Chen’s Every Good Body Dances (2019) – a bewitching, tempo-defying ode to folk dance. Upstairs, two more moving image works (both 2015) exploit the duration of their medium, including Taus Makhacheva’s Tightrope, Dagestan, whose sublime scenery is almost outdone by act of sublimity in question, not least its poised cinematography.

Not least, Ane Hjort Guttu’s Time Passes is a riveting essay on the value and integrity of the artistic gesture, on truth and belonging, cynism and betrayal. Guttu’s question around the image of Icarus – fallen or heroic – is mirrored in Gary-Ross Pastrana’s After the Fall I (located at Building D, Maria Theresa Bastion), succeeding in upending the ‘fall’ through gravity-powered illumination of a light bulb. Productive or absurd, it is thankfully optimistic.

As the winds cease and the dust settles, Art Encounters reveals its true layers: city, nation and boundless art world. The biennial may not be building walls, but it is certainly building connections.

INFORMATION

Art Encounters Biennial 2019, until 27 October, various locations. artencounters.ro

The seventh edition of the Oslo Architecture Triennale has opened in the Norwegian capital. Entitled ‘Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth', it is based on a straightforward yet compelling premise – that the pursuit of unconditional GDP growth is leading to environmental catastrophe and that business as usual is failing the majority of our planet’s inhabitants. ‘Studies going back to the 70s show that swelling GDP above a relatively modest level does little to improve life expectancy, social progress, life satisfaction, happiness or equality,’ said one of the Triennale’s four curators, engineer and architect Maria Smith, at the opening. ‘Most of economic growth is just making the rich richer'.

On its opening weekend the Triennale demonstrated how it wanted to do things differently, how it wanted to be ‘an architecture festival for the whole body, not just the brain,’ in the words of co-curator and architecture critic Phineas Harper. Yes, there was the inevitable – and fascinating – main exhibition in the city’s National Museum of Architecture (more on that in a moment), but above all there were workshops, guided walks, performances, talks, debates and film screenings located in four designated ‘degrowth institutions’ (a library, a theatre, an academy and a playground) as well as other venues around town. This programme will continue throughout the full eight-week Triennale with the aim of engaging, demonstrating and, above all, sharing ideas and realities around the degrowth theme.

The more immersive, playful and interactive strand of the Triennale was curated by urban researcher and artist Cecilie Sachs Olsen and includes a series of clever participatory games as well as an audio walk called ‘Place Listening’ created by Sachs in collaboration with artist Nina Lund Westerdahl out of a series of workshops held in Oslo earlier this year. The walk challenges the listener to slow down and think actively about the city they find themselves in and ask why so much of it is designed around consumption rather than coexistence. What would you want to see go up in an empty plot of land it asks the listener/walker as you pass by a vacant lot. Do certain areas make you feel excluded or safe? Have you made any eye contact with passers-by today? Why is play proscribed to playground areas and suitable only for children? 

The main exhibition, called ‘The Library', is located in the National Museum of Architecture, a former 1830s bank adapted and extended with a concrete and glass pavilion by Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn. ‘The Library' celebrates the sharing, de-commodification, and democratisation of goods and ideas and takes the idea of reuse to the next level, to start with, in the exhibition design itself. ‘The first thing people asked us is: you won’t be building anything new then if your theme is degrowth,' says architect and the fourth co-curator of the Triennale, Matthew Dalziel, ‘and the first thing we were faced with, paradoxically, was having to build an exhibition!' The exhibition design is accordingly almost entirely ‘remetabolised’ from elements found in the museum’s basement and left over from a previous landscape design exhibition held in the venue designed by Snøhetta. What’s more, the materials will be made available to others once the Triennale is over.

Within the niches, shelves and spaces created by this simple but effective plywood and cotton fabric structure, devices, materials, drawings, models and prototypes showcased a future that will necessarily be collaborative. The space investigates the life of a well-known Oslo squat for instance, a community centre focusing on ‘Dugnad’ (mutual support in Norwegian) and local self-determination, or an idea for a civic launderette, where an activity now commodified and desocialised might once again become a more collective and less isolated ritual where resources are centralised.

A number of projects showed various ways forward in terms of reuse of existing materials too. One that stood out was a prototype by Milan-based design studio GISTO who had scoured a former army base in northern Italy scheduled for partial demolition for materials that could be turned into simple self-assembled furniture on a semi-industrial scale. ‘A little bit like an IKEA for the recycling era' explained Alessandro Mason, founder of the practice. Windows had been turned into desks, shelves and tables, plywood and ventilation covers into sculptural room dividers, carpet into acoustic walls and slabs of marble into benches, and a manual with a methodology that could be applied to similar future projects had been produced.

‘Enough’ has only just begun, but already it has created a new model of Triennale: one that celebrates the sharing of ideas and knowledge over and above the creation of new products and buildings and that offers inspiration, optimism and ideas for an alternative to our current consumption-centric and growth-based economic system. That in itself is an achievement. 

INFORMATION

oslotriennale.no

Istanbul is perhaps the most fascinating of urban venues in which to gather and discuss art. It’s a true metropolis – the world’s fourth biggest city, home to just over 15 million people. Its streets are a warren-like maze, a cacophony of noise and movement. Up high, in one of the many sky-bars, it’s impossible to see the city’s edges. And it’s easy to marvel at the Bosphorus, a glistening strait teeming with vessels that, from the days of the Silk Road, have joined west and east.

And it’s a place singularly capable of harmonising two identities: one determinedly secular, youthful and outward-reaching, the other deeply conservative, patriarchal and embedded in the mores of the past. Turkey also has one of the oldest and proudest artistic traditions of any culture in the world, yet modern day Turkey is an almost uniquely hostile place for contemporary art. This tragic paradox lies in plain sight on the World Press Freedom Index, where Turkey currently stands at number 157, below failed states like the Democratic Republic of Congo (154) and renowned dictatorships like Russia (149).

Beyond the high-profile arrests of the artist Zehra Doğan and the composer Mehdi Rajabian, as well as the exile of feminist artists Özgül Arslan and Ekin Onat, huge numbers of lesser-known Turkish creative luminaries been arrested and imprisoned or glued-up in legal proceedings. Turkey remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists, with at least 68 in jail in direct relation to their work at the time of the Committee to Protect Journalist’s 2018 prison census.

How to deal with this, and still successfully host a commercial art fair? And what work to show if you are among the country’s latest generation of artists, both native and diaspora? Answers lie at the 16th Istanbul Biennial and Contemporary Istanbul, both of which opened to the public on 14 September. For Nicolas Bourriaud, the French curator of the Istanbul Biennial (running until 10 November), the answer appears to be to focus on the relatively safe and collegiate topic of climate change – ‘the landscape of the Anthropocene’, as Bourriaud terms it.

The title of Bourriaud’s biennial – The Seventh Continent – refers to the mammoth islands of plastic waste that now float in our oceans. They cover, we are told, an area five times larger than the geography of Turkey. Bourriaud has organised the exhibition of works from 56 artists (36 are showing new work), who comment on this phenomena.

The most talked-about highlights include the sculptural work of Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant’s Post-Fordite, which she terms a ‘natural-artificial hybrid formation’. The sculpture, we learn, is moulded from something known as Fordite (also known as Detroit agate) – a paint that, over time, has congealed and solidified into a rock-hard mass on the floor of car factories. Kurant invites us to look at the resulting formation as if it’s an uncut diamond.

Simon Fujiwara’s project began after he discovered and salvaged the semi-ruined figurines of pop icons in the rubbish heap of an amusement park outside of Istanbul. Around the face of each figurine – from Homer Simpson to Mickey Mouse – he built architectural models of cityscapes, thus drawing attention to ‘the ways in which fantasy and escapism have bled into the core structures of our everyday lives, often masking the brutal pragmatism of globalised capitalism’, he says.

Among the prominent Turkish artists at the Biennial, perhaps the stand-out is Amsterdam-based Müge Yilmaz, whose work Eleven Suns can be described ‘as a future archaeology incorporating leftovers of our times’. Yilmaz’s installation resembles the discovery of a sacred shrine in a hidden cave, where we find her mesmerising drawings of hybrid plant-human-animals.

Uptown is Contemporary Istanbul, which took place at the Istanbul Convention & Exhibition Centre (ICEC) in the affluent Sisli neighbourhood. The fair is – at least outwardly – a more commercial presentation of art, one more focused on emergent Turkish artists and less curated around a unifying theme. Much of the work here is highly conceptual in form; perhaps because, to put it bluntly, the government finds it harder to censor abstracted work.

Yet Ali Güreli, the founder and chairman of the fair and a significant patron of contemporary art in Istanbul and Turkey, is adamant that the fair does not, and would never allow, the government to censor any work shown at the fair. ‘I cannot say that we feel any pressure from the government,’ Güreli told journalists at the fair’s opening press conference. ‘We never felt it before. But of course we have been living in a different environment in Turkey in the last 15 years, governed by a conservative party. As the art fair, we are a bit more conscious about these precious issues. But I cannot talk about pressure or any censorship.’

Be that as it may, Contemporary Istanbul art fair deserves credit. For, amid the populist turbulence of Istanbul’s recent history, it has remained steady, providing an outlet for Turkish artists and gallerists to exhibit to an international audience. It has taken place every year since 2006, and, now in its 14th edition, brings to Istanbul 73 galleries from 22 countries, with the works of 510 artists on show. As Güreli rightfully points out, much more is to come. The fair has laid the groundwork for Arter, a new five-floor museum dedicated to contemporary art, which this recently opened its doors in the city, while nine more dedicated art galleries and museums are poised to launch in the near future.

There’s no doubt that certain artists here have to practice a form of self-censorship; to do so is to safeguard one’s freedom and self-preservation. Yet some artists on show are clearly finding ways to push the envelope; to say things without explicitly stating it. Take for example Whip of Justice by Turkish artist İz Öztat, who is represented by Istanbul-based gallery Pi Artworks. The sculpture is erected from the metal barriers used by police during the violent Gezi Park demonstrations of 2013, which rocked the city after the Turkish government attempted to ban all public protests.

Meanwhile, the Turkish gallery Galeri 77 exhibited a series of works by Armenian artists like Vav Hakobyan, who, with his work Stop This Craziness, appears to be referencing Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s ghosts with nightmarish, semi-opaque scenes – yet the human faces have been replaced with cartoon characters.

At local gallery Art On Istanbul, the influential Istanbul collective who go by the name Oddviz, displayed a mesmerising video work of a street being denied all its civilising features, the vibrant colours of life stripped away so that only the cold grey of concrete is left. An adjoining large-scale photographic print showed traditional Turkish ceramics, exquisite in their artistry and craftsmanship, smashed into a Klimt-esque mosiac of fragments and shards.

Significantly, the fair included the work of Turkish curator Esra Özkan, who has curated Plugin, a strand of exhibitions focusing on new media and digital arts within the conventional format of an international art fair. This feels especially relevant to Istanbul, at a time when the older generation wield the levers of power, it’s in the digital and online space where virulent resistance movements can be found. This is perhaps best summed up by, the night before my arrival in the city, the sudden release on Youtube of an openly anti-authority hip-hop tune titled Susamam, which translates as ‘cannot stay silent’, and garnered more than 22 million listens in the space of a week.

Some of the stronger criticisms of power came from Turkish artists who no longer have to live under the government, like the New York-based Sarp Kerem Yavuz, who debuted new works at Hüsrev Kethüda Hamamı in Ortaköy, a historic hammam in the heart of Istanbul, considered the famed Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan’s final masterpiece. Yavuz’s exhibition – titled ‘I think the Sultan knows about us’ – ‘uses narrative as a form of resistance’, he says. The artist has channelled the pixelated visual aesthetics that millennial generations will recognise from 1990s Atari games to dress neon skeletons in traditional Ottoman iconography. Yavuz says of the work: ‘The sense of humour I am determined to instil in the visual depictions of this universe is the most unyielding form of resistance in the face of oppression, of fear.’

INFORMATION

16th Istanbul Biennial, 14 September – 10 November, various locations; Contemporary Istanbul 2019, 12 – 15 September. bienal.iksv.org; contemporaryistanbul.com

The Manchester International Festival – a biennial incubator of international art and cultural projects – is in full swing, offering a diverse spread of exhibitions and events across the city. The festivities kicked off earlier in July with Yoko Ono’s mass ring-a-thon, Bells for Peace. The artist’s message was clear as, via video link, she instructed crowds in Manchester Cathedral Gardens to ‘think peace, act peace, spread peace, imagine peace’.

This triggered a crescendo of cacophonous ringing from 4,000 specially-manufactured handbells, flooding Manchester with a message of unity, peace, and hope – well worth the risk of lingering tinnitus. Artistic director and chief executive of MIF, John McGrath, described the event as ‘a joyful response to our complicated times’.

Across the city at HOME, a centre for art, theatre and film, we’re deep inside the mind of filmmaker David Lynch, as far as we ever can be. You might associate Lynch with the likes of Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet or The Elephant Man, but his peculiar approach to cinematic surrealism translates just as unnervingly into visual art. His exhibition ‘My Head is Disconnected’ unites paintings, drawings and sculpture developed by Lynch over five decades.

These are staged in a dimly lit gallery where his absurd, creepy figures and faces look as though they’re about to peel themselves off the canvas and crawl into your nightmares. In another corner of the gallery, dystopian cityscapes and a series of starkly rendered drawings of industrial revolution era machinery, evoke a very particular facet of American nostalgia. ‘I was talking to Auntie Em [Wizard of Oz], and she said there’s no place like HOME’, says Lynch.

‘Parliament of Ghosts’ – the first major UK exhibition by Ibrahim Mahama – has landed at the Whitworth Art Gallery, transforming spaces into an archive of paintings, film and found objects, where one country’s trash has become the Ghanaian artist’s treasure. At its heart is a four-sided reproduction of Ghana's parliament chamber, built with tatty second-class train seats originally manufactured in Manchester, but salvaged by the artist from the abandoned Sekondi railway station.

The structure, lined with tired wooden lockers used by rail workers, tells the tale of Ghana’s Gold Coast railway built under British colonial rule, and also serves as a space for contemporary debate. ‘It’s a more futuristic thing I’m thinking about, but it uses the aesthetics of the old,’ says Mahama. Elsewhere, a mammoth concrete structure is modelled on Ghana’s stunted, modernist silos, which were built in the late 1950s with the intention to store cocoa and grain, but were left empty and unused. Mahama has given its interior space new life, in the form of an all-consuming seven-channel video installation.

At the Science and Industry Museum, ‘Atmospheric Memory’ by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer sits at the intersection of technological innovation, architecture and public participation. The artist drew on computing pioneer Charles Babbage’s 180-year-old theory that the air holds a ‘vast library’ of every word ever spoken. ‘The idea that the atmosphere is not neutral, that the atmosphere in fact has a total recollection of anything we say, is the beginning of this project,’ says Lozano-Hemmer. The polyphonic entrance tunnel to the main exhibition ‘chamber’ is lined with thousands of speakers, each trying to break through the noise with separate soundtracks.

Inside the space – custom built from 52 shipping containers – it’s difficult to know how to digest this buffet of technology. A weathervane table is controlled by computerised fans, a queasy film of an endoscopy plays from the bottom of an empty oil drum, and in the far corner of the room is the world’s first 3D printed speech bubble. In another work, various ‘atmospheric machines’ mine the air for sounds, which then become ripples on water, 360-degree projections and plumes of fog spelling out your spoken words. A large screen projects an image of your own baffled face, unknowingly taken when you first entered the space.

Among other tangents, the exhibition discusses contemporary themes of surveillance and misuse of AI. If you start to get a sneaking suspicion that the show is all about you, you’re probably not wrong.

INFORMATION
Manchester International Festival 2019, until 21 July, various locations. mif.co.uk

It is no coincidence that modern British sculpture was raised on strong tea and Yorkshire pudding. From Henry Moore to Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro to Phyllida Barlow, the 20th-century sculptural force of this region issued from the pounding heart of the art schools, welded by lineages of materiality and mentorship. Now well into the 21st century, the county’s major art institutions are to be rabble-roused by a new festival of sculpture, Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI), presenting one hundred days of sculptural song and dance.

With presentations from 18 international artists, outdoor commissions, talks and associated programmes, embarking on the festival programme is not unlike a lesson in the art of lost-wax casting, confounding with endless processes of filling and draining, melting and recasting. For starters, the designated ‘Sculpture Triangle’ spans a fiesty foursome of locations: Leeds Art Gallery, Henry Moore Institute, The Hepworth Wakefield and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

The pinnacle is found at the Hepworth: in Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis’ unsettling aquatic textile collages – advocates for ancestors lost to threadbare black histories; Nairy Baghramian’s intellectually laboured Maintainers, yielding polished wax and aluminium in co-dependency; and Rosanne Robertson’s exposition of the fluidity of queer bodies through haiku-like 1-minute looped films, Stone (Butch) and Pissing (YSP Bothy Gallery). And tempering the political with the spiritual, Wolfgang Laib’s pulsating grid of hand-sized rice ‘mountains’, exalting a humble truth to materials.

Ignited by Barlow’s observation that sculpture is ‘the most anthropological of the art forms’, the inaugural edition of YSI reveals the human impulse to connect with objects is more sentient than ever. Rashid Johnson’s Shea Butter Three Ways (Henry Moore Institute) is a luxurious study of the material coaxed into a three-phase installation, as tactile as it is aromatic. Meanwhile, the question of architectural anthropology is raised by Kimsooja’s quixotic installation of light and mirrors in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s historic chapel, as well as Ayşe Erkmen’s site-specific installation, three of four, a floor-to-ceiling extension of the recently rediscovered vaulted glass roof of Leed Art Gallery’s Central Court.

Fulfilling its calling card ‘to inspire audiences to rethink their understanding of sculpture’, YSI looks beyond the traditional trio of bronze, stone and wood towards a more interdisciplinary genealogy of making (albeit via a thoughtful foray of the latter in ‘Woodwork: A Family Tree of Sculpture’ at Leeds Art Gallery). Cauleen Smith’s hypnotic film Sojourner, is part political history, part golden-hour feminist utopia, languishing in the seductive desertscape of Noah Purifoy. Embracing community collaboration, composer Tarek Atoui has devised performances with instrument makers in a bid to better understand sound through deafness.

What YSI seems to enact is a retracing of artistic heritage through the material present. If Barlow’s contention is to be wholeheartedly embraced, it surely calls for positive cultural contributions towards our ongoing anthropology. And just as Yorkshire pudding is to roast beef, the story of British sculpture would be a meagre without Yorkshire. Yet the question remains, how meaningful a role YSI will play in the future of sculpture internationally. Will this local treasure find its footing in the non-placeness of the art world’s international event calendar? Only time will tell: the proof is in the pudding.

INFORMATION

Yorkshire Sculpture International, 22 June – 29 September, various locations. yorkshire-sculpture.org

With the mission to support London’s architecture talent, celebrate innovation, and promote positive change to the public realm, the London Festival of Architecture (LFA) returns this June with a 400-event strong programme.

The line-up – featuring events such as a ‘migration walk’ in East London, a ‘comedy safari’ of classic Londoner experiences and a séance at the John Soanes-designed Pitzhanger Manor – is experimental. Refreshingly, the majority of events push way beyond printed images and text on the walls. While events span many types – from exhibition, installation, talks, workshops, family events, walking tours – there is an enthusiastic focus on group interaction and public engagement.

This year’s theme of ‘Boundaries’ has been approached from many different perspectives by the events – from physical boundaries found in the city, to the hidden gender and privilege boundaries that many architects face in the industry.

Helping participants and Londoners alike to make sense of 400 events, the LFA has carved out four festival hubs – the City of London; London Bridge; the Royal Docks; and the ‘Heart of London’ covering St James’s, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Come June, we will offer readers a distilled list of the very best that the festival has in store – watch this space. 

INFORMATION

The London Festival of Architecture, 1-30 June 2019. For more information, visit the website

The sun is high in the sky on the Gulf of Oman. We are more than an hour’s drive from the street of Sharjah and the high-rise metropolis of Dubai, the windswept curves of sand dunes dotted by camels and cacti and the hulking, hazy Al Hajar Mountains in the distance. Our convoy arrives in the quiet seaside town of Kalba, and we’re ushered towards an abandoned, beige-coloured building, its foundations built on sand. This, I’m told, was once a factory for ice cubes. Now, it’s being ‘reactivated’ by a series of ‘host occasions’ — artist-led events incorporating visuals, sound art, site-specific installations, performance and dance.

The edges of the Kalba Ice Factory are on a manmade peninsular. The first reactivation is here, performed by Torkwase Dyson and her collective Dark Adaptive, who have orientated six sculptures so their sight-lines point us toward the wetland ecosystems leading out towards the Indian Ocean. I Belong to the Distance explores our ‘incessant desire to develop the land, tied to the global transformation of oceans into superhighways’. It’s a pointed comment on the precarious existence of our world, and of our ultimate capability to disrupt this path through forms of activism and protest.

For Dominican Republic–born and Berlin-based dancer Isabel Lewis’ Untitled (juice, inwardness, natures), we then witness a violinist and flutist improvise alongside digital recordings captured at Kalba Nature Reserve, while the mineral heat of the sun filters through coloured acrylic panels. A dancer writhes, her waist-long dreadlocks flying around her, before cars disturb the ensemble by churning sand in aggressive circles around her body.

Next up is Sympoiesis Observatory by the Austrian artist Nikolaus Gansterer. We’re in a room full of shards of mirror waving in the wind and casting shimmered reflections. Birds have used this space to roost, so Gansterer’s sculptures are littered with feathers, excrement and the natural ephemera of nest building and insect activity. Charcoal drawings sprawl across the floor. A sound installation of processed field recordings shudder through the space. In a performance that resembles something of a hypnotic trance, Gansterer completes the charcoal drawings, adding words and further curlicues to his creation, as if he’s giving us a map to a place only he can access.

Finally, and most triumphantly, we play witness to Land of Zanj, a site-specific installation by a South African performance collective including Thembekile Komani and Aphiwe Mpahleni, directed by the Johannesburg-based conceptual artist Mohau Modisakeng. The latter was raised during the most violent years of apartheid, and, as a child, experienced the murder of his older brother. His work, he says, ‘uses the body as a bearer of collective memory’, invoking ‘historical mechanisms of violence’ and ‘grappling with the tensions and contradictions of inequality, exploitation, slavery and race’.

The title of the piece refers to the island of Zanzibar or Azania, an ancient term used to describe various parts of southeastern Africa. Using the modern ephemera that litter the Kalba coast of today – the modern boats, fishing nets and surviving mangrove trees – Modisakeng’s performers set out on an obstacle-strewn journey that allows us to experience the migration of slaves during the historical confluence between the Arabian Peninsula and the Swahili Coast. It’s an audacious usage of found space by one of Africa’s leading young artists.

The reactivation of Kalba is the high-point of the 14th edition of the Sharjah Biennial, organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and curated by Claire Tancons, Omar Kholeif, and Zoe Butt. It runs until 10 June, making use of bespoke and repurposed sites across the emirate of Sharjah and indeed the whole of the United Arab Emirates, and showing the works of more 80 participating contemporary artists from around the globe.

In comparison to its noisy, illustrious neighbour, not many have heard of Sharjah. The tiny emirate lies to the north of Dubai. It’s a more down-at-heel area – used as a home for the many migrant workers that keep Dubai’s endless hotels and malls and restaurants operational. It’s also more conservative than Dubai (which has recently opened a Caesar’s Place casino, a bit like the one in Las Vegas) with requirements made of how women dress and how visitors behave. For fans of Duty-Free, it’s also worth nothing that consuming, selling or even possessing alcohol in Sharjah is illegal.

Yet Sharjah has much to offer for any Western traveller, dry or not. Unlike Dubai, with its huge highways, it’s more than possible to walk through the heart of Sharjah, which is dotted with fascinating contemporary galleries and historical museums built in Western and Middle Eastern architectural traditions. Those skeptical of such a claim need only glance at the names associated with Sharjah’s latest initiatives (which earned it a Best City nomination in the 2019 Wallpaper* Design Awards). The Sharjah Art Foundation recently brought art group Random International’s immersive installation, Rain Room, to the city’s Al Majarrah area as a permanent fixture, while collective Superflex is creating an as-yet unfinished ‘intervention’ in a nearby park. Foster + Partners is currently in the process of redeveloping a land-fill site for waste management company Bee’ah (Sharjah has pledged to achieve zero waste-to-landfill by 2020) while Zaha Hadid Architects is building Bee’ah’s new HQ.

Such monumental architectural creations are designed to be used as cultural meeting places; in addition to the Biennial, Sharjah hosted its first graphic design biennial last November, while the inaugural architecture triennial will also take place later this year. This is powered by Sharjah’s emir – Sheikh Sultan III – who is known for his love and knowledge of art, and his daughter Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, who founded Sharjah Art Foundation in 2009 after learning her craft in London. Al Qasimi holds an MA in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art in London, a diploma in painting from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and a BFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She now serves as the Foundation’s president and director.

The premise of this year’s edition of Sharjah Biennial is ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’. It’s a bold title, but is backed up the fact that more than 75 per cent of the works on show in the biennial are new commissions made especially for this event. Many are large in scope and immersive to experience, making full use of the spaces provided. A good example of this comes in form of the winner of this year’s Biennial Prize, Nigerian artists Otobong Nkanga and Emeka Ogboh. Located in the Bait Al Aboudi outdoor courtyard, the artists’ installation, Aging Ruins Dreaming Only to Recall the Hard Chisel from the Past, is based around the premise of an enclosed, gated microclimate.

At first glance, this ecosystem doesn’t appear to be doing all that well. A dead palm listlessly lulls in the sun, while cratered pools of water collected from the sea sit stagnantly. Yet concealed speakers convey the lovely sounds of local children singing a traditional ‘rain song’, while the artists recite poetry animating the perspective of the trees, water, and earth found in the courtyard. As darkness falls, screens around the courtyard light up, with gleaming text reflected in the water. In such a manmade environment, in which the wilds of nature is uncommon at best, the artists seem to be using the space to create a modern, harmonised form of prayer, spellcasting or ritualised wishmaking.

Nearby, the latest film from the American artist and 2018 MacArthur fellow Wu Tsang. Her film One emerging from a Point of View explores a seaside community of Lesbos, Greece, which has been transformed by the presence of over half a million refugees who have used the island to enter Europe since 2011.

Hanging in the Sharjah Art Museum, the Pakistani multimedia artist Khadim Ali – now based between Sydney and Kabul – exhibits tapestries that explore the violent recent history of his country via carefully hand-embroidered tableaux. The artist was once one of the persecuted Hazara people of Afghanistan, and his exquisite tapestries balance flowers and mythological creatures with sinister portraits of US soldiers. Ali’s larger series was again commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation. At the Emirates Fine Art Society, the artist has created a wall mural and a sound installation using the spiked, ominous metal horns that broadcast religious extremist verses in Kabul districts occupied by Taliban forces.

At the very end of one of Sharjah Art Museum’s long halls is Btitish artist Shezad Dawood’s virtual reality exploration of the relations between the US and Pakistan since Pakistan’s partition from India in 1947. The mirrored installations are ‘virtual reality’ sets animated by video screens, tapestries and sculptures. The work, titled Encroachment, Dawood writes is a ‘meditation on the idea of sovereignty, private property and the politics of space in the two largest cities in Pakistan – Lahore and Karachi’. We view a colonial bookshop in Lahore, the former US embassy in Karachi, and an old-school Space Invaders gaming arcade. Dawood was recognised by the Biennial for the work at the gala dinner. In January 2020, it will go on show at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham.

The Sharjah Biennial is a triumphant celebration of contemporary creations from across the world, a true dialogue between East and West, and a carefully curated confluence of the many issues we all uniformly face in the world, and can maybe only really understand through the shared experience of art. As a cultural destination, Sharjah is firmly on the map.

INFORMATION

Sharjah Biennial 14 runs until 10 June at various locations. For more information, visit the Sharjah Art Foundation website

The inaugural Frieze Los Angeles kicks off with a new indoor and outdoor tent design by local architecture studio wHY. Pitching up at Paramount Studios, Frieze’s new location in Hollywood celebrates the city’s creative eco-system, while the tent design brings in the Californian light and makes the most of the good weather with outdoor spaces and green walls.

‘We basically surgically insert the tent into a working busy film studio,’ says Kulapat Yantrasast, founder and creative director at wHY, and a Los Angeles resident since 2003. He wanted to create the effect of being backstage, and reflect the ‘less rigid’ art scene of LA, in comparison to other contemporary art hub cities.

A pink banner afloat two archways wrapped in faux-foliage welcomes you to the fair. The structure is a reference to the Paramount Studios’ famous double arch entrance on Melrose Avenue. Yantrasast used plants throughout, real and artificial, to anchor the fair into its new climate. Inside the entry pavilion, blue-stained plywood is constructed using set-building techniques of the studio’s master production designers.

Frieze London, 2009
Architecture and branding have developed a close relationship across the Frieze art fair design since it launched in 2004. Here, at the 2009 rendition in London, the trademark Frieze stamp appears like a billboard atop three chunky architectural columns marking the entrance. While the branding has become more muted as the fair has matured, this bastion is reminiscent of the early Frieze days. As a streak of continuation, sections of the fair continue to be highlighted by a series of neon shades.

Being at an art fair is often like being in a fluorescently-lit black hole, where you lose all sense of time. Yet wHY’s opaque and translucent plastic ceiling panels bring in more daylight than ever before for an enjoyable viewing experience – and the gallerists’ wellbeing – for the week.

Indoor areas are balanced by outdoor spaces that feature open-air artworks by Sarah Cain, Paul McCarthy and Barbara Kruger amongst others. Los Angeles is after all blessed with more reliable forecasts than London or New York, where Frieze spends the rest of its year.

Before reaching your destination booth, you might also be tempted by cult eateries SQIRL and Roberta’s, both woven into the experience along the way. Building a pathway to guide visitors from pulling up at the curb to writing a cheque, was the main aim of Yantrasast – as Frieze Art Fair has continued to prove since its founding in 2003, the art fair can be a lively social and educational experience too.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the wHY Architecture website

The floor of Zona Maco buzzed with excitement during its opening preview, kicking off the 16th edition of a fair that has officially cemented Mexico City’s place on the global art world map. As Latin America’s largest and most distinguished fair, over 70 galleries have turned up to showcase an array of emerging and established artists, with most hailing from the region. At first glance, it would appear that the recent election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has done little to temper the pace of the market, as a steady hum echoes along the expansive floor of the Centro Citibanamex convention centre.

While Zona Maco is certainly the tonier fair taking place this week – scrappy upstarts Salon Acme and Material Art Fair tend to showcase emerging talent – Zona Maco’s New Proposals section lent credence to the fair’s ability to blend the blue-chip with the brand new. Buenos Aires-based Galeria Nora Fisch followed suit with its mission to present dynamic voices that are as-yet flying under the radar internationally. At the fair, Fisch offers playful, irreverent works by Fernanda Laguna, a painter emanating from an impoverished Buenos Aires neighbourhood. Considering desire through the female gaze, Laguna’s languid, abstract shapes dominate the canvas, but a vivid use of colour is equally memorable.

New York’s Paul Kasmin gallery made a return this year, carrying a legion of works by both American and Latin American artists. Punchy, abstract works by Lee Krasner and James Nares break the monotony of white booths with bursts of color, while minimalist, textured works by Mexican artist Bosco Sodi lend visual appeal. Olga do Amaral’s tactile works similarly add volume to La Cometa’s booth – the Bogotá gallery regularly exhibits the most recognised Latin American artists.

Celebrated local gallery Kurimanzutto brings along the ambitious work of Eduardo Abaroa, who plans to gather enough fake gold chain to surround the entire territory of Mexico. A smaller scale version of this project hangs at the fair alongside works by Abraham Cruzvillegas, who is being exhibited at the gallery’s permanent showroom in the La Condesa neighbourhood.

The fair’s experimental Zona Sur section builds upon its thesis of taking the temperature of the art world by pushing forth the idea of the performative. Patricia Conde gallery’s Michael Kenna disrupts the harshness of the male gaze with a series of quiet, intimate portraits of a female body wrapped into itself, exposing fleshy folds of skin. Meanwhile, Bruno Gruppalli’s erotic wire sculptures offer some kink, making this section of the fair one of the raciest – and likely, our favourite.

INFORMATION

Zona Maco runs from 6-10 February. For more information, visit the website

When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour.

As he is interviewed by Andrea Lissoni, curator of film and international art at Tate Modern, Parreno speaks of ‘practising white magic, but – don’t worry – never black magic’. ‘Magical forms have an ability to articulate a disparate idea,’ he explains. ‘We’re always looking for things to make sense, but maybe there’s another way to approach them. Besides, an artist is like a shaman. A film is like a seance.’ He is not someone, you get the impression, who takes himself too seriously. Indeed, he often talks about his work playfully, as if he is creating make-believe at a child’s birthday party.

But it’s possible to be both an irreverent and a serious artist. Few contemporary artists can point to a massive retrospective at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (2013) or a large-scale solo exhibition in New York’s Park Avenue Armory (2015) or full usage of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2016). Parreno has done these and more, and now he is turning his hand to arthouse filmmaking, with a star turn in Rotterdam.

Parreno talks of the ‘the exhibition as medium’. He is perhaps the best known member of a school of European artists who practice what in artspeak is referred to as ‘relational aesthetics’, a term coined in 1998 by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (who was, at the time, Parreno’s roommate in New York). It’s the idea an artist should be the architect of a shared experience, the creator of a sensorial and transportive and essentially transient event, rather than the creator of a precious and permanent artefact. Rather than use a gallery as a hallowed space where static objects are hung in anticipation of reverence, it should be a space where we come to believe anything might happen, that disorientates our concepts of time and space, that upsets our inbuilt GPS.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is,’ he says of what he presents to the public in a gallery space. ‘It’s the way it appears that interests me. I’m interested in the nature of an image, and it’s relationship to what it’s supposed to represent. I’m interested by the production of a form in a public space, and how that form can change the public. All that stuff.’

No More Reality Whatsoever is playing directly before the latest film from the 88-year old Jean-Luc Godard, who is using IFFR to screen his new film Le livre d’image after it premiered in Cannes last year. The film is presented in the way Godard originally intended: in a specially designed replica of his home studio – Persian rugs included. The proximity pleases Parreno. ‘There was a strong movie culture where I grew up,’ he says.‘The legacy of the nouvelle vague [pioneered by Godard] and the literature around that had more of an impact in France than visual art I think.’

Parreno’s film starts with an introduction of sorts from a Rotterdam resident of Indonesian descent. The man is a Dhalang, a master of Indonesian shadow puppetry and ‘a fascination’ for the artist. The Dhalang waxes lyrical on the nature of time before singing a folkloric Indonesian hymn. He departs as Mikhail Rudy, a classical pianist, takes his seat at a grand piano, situated in front of the cinema screen, and starts playing a strange, atonal symphony, often layered on top of the film’s score.

Our 3D glasses are already in place. The split faces of a young women, a manga anime character called Annlee, is beamed onto the screen. Annlee addresses the audience directly, referencing how, in 2002, Parreno created the independent Annlee Association, transferring copyright ownership back to Annlee herself. The 3D is effective: close one eye, one huge manga Annlee is present on screen. Close the other, and a separate Annlee looms above us. The film moves from a female robot trapped alone in a hotel room to a train rolling through a rural town, the inhabitants of which stand and silently stare. We’re taking on a tour of the fishtanks in the restaurants of Chinatown New York, to a protest led by schoolchildren against the information age. ‘No More Reality’, their placards read.

Parreno was born in Algeria. Échirolles is not all that far away from Marseille, where a certain athlete called Zinedine Zidane, also bald, also of Algerian descent, and also an artist of sorts, was born and raised. Parreno is still best known for his beautiful 2006 feature film of Zidane: a movie that simply follows the movement of the player over the course of a 90-minute football match between Real Madrid and Villareal.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was co-created with the Turner-Prize winning artist Douglas Gordon, featuring a soundtrack from the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai and was shot in real-time using 17 synchronised cameras. During the creation of the film, Parreno got to know Zidane personally. I ask if he feels he shares anything with Zidane – a kinship of sorts? ‘Zidane told me that he always had to prove it, but only to himself. He was so focused on continually proving it to himself – that he was or could be a great athlete. He had to be intensely into the moment, as a great actor can also get intensely into the moment. He was able to ignore his presence totally. I think art can do that as well.’

Do you feel that need to prove yourself, I enquire. ‘Yes, totally,’ he says, with an emphatic nod. ‘I think I suffer the same as many people. The syndrome of the imposter? Imposter syndrome, yes... I have always had that. I try and combat it by trying to reinvent, by putting things in new contexts. It’s the best way I think, no?’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the International Film Festival Rotterdam website

Wonderfruit festival has launched in Thailand occupying a temporary community of creative pavilions designed by London-based Ab Rogers Design. Located 10km west of Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand, Wonderfruit festival hosts a programme of art, music and food events that focus on sustainability, which is reflected in the local materials and construction techniques of the structures.

The pavilions – that vary in function from performance venues to kitchen and dining and relaxation spaces – all make use of local resources, indigenous craft techniques and are specific to the culture and landscape of Thailand. The largest structure is the Eco Pavilion, designated for events and performances. The vast, flexible acoustic doughnut is made of Thai grass and yellow maze, and inside, clusters of hand-painted cotton and bamboo umbrellas with speakers at their centre, provide space for the audience to shade from the sun and enjoy the performances.

Social practices are at the heart of each pavilion design. The Theatre of Feast is a permanent structure designed around the ritual of cooking and eating. A kitchen made of red-stained bamboo is the hub of the pavilion, while a table seating up to 275 people circles the entire perimeter of the form. Entry to the pavilion is through a re-used fabric curtain and inside, diners are seated beneath a bamboo dome, with a dusty orange pebble floor underfoot.

The form of the Bath House, which offers visitors an escape to relax, was inspired by traditional Thai shing villages. A network of pavilions made of bamboo and re-used polyethylene barrels constructed by local craftspeople are connected by a series of pontoons. Each bamboo shell is slightly different, creating a dappled light of varying softness inside according to its function.

The Wonderfruit village, masterplanned by Ab Rogers Studio, follows a plan of radiating circles, that spread like audio waves and respond to the shapes found in the natural landscape. Sculptural look-out towers inspired by traditional Thai bamboo structures rise at useful moments, to guide people through the site, offering an aerial view of the activity or a place to meet.

INFORMATION

Wonderfruit runs from 13 – 16 December. For more information, visit the Wonderfruit website and the Ab Rogers Design website

The island of Capri is renowned for its crystal aquamarine waters, limestone cliffs and glamorous resorts – but this Italian gem has more to offer to sun-seekers as the third edition of its annual arts festival gets underway. Curated by Arianna Rosica and Gianluca Riccio, this year’s Festival del Paessagio (Festival of Landscapes) is headlined by the group exhibition, ‘Postcards’, which brings together artists from across multiple generations.

Among them, Milan-based Albanian artist Adrian Paci, and London-based Italian architect and food designer Francesca Sarti (who previously caught our eye with this artful Caesarstone collaboration) have created new works inspired by the island’s landscape especially for the ‘Postcards’ exhibition, as part of an artist residency programme at luxury hotel Capri Palace. Situated atop the island in Anacapri, the hotel launched its Travelogue/Artists In Residence initiative in 2008, and has seen the likes of Alessandro Mendini, Sandro Chia, and Ettore Spalletti take part.

For their residency, Paci and Sarti worked with local high school students in a series of workshops incorporating a variety of different mediums – illustration, photography, video, and painting. Sarti’s workshop – entitled ‘Souvenir Kiosk’ – challenged her students to upend the clichés associated with Italian knickknacks, and create a series of dishes imagined as ‘culinary souvenirs’. Paci, meanwhile, honed in on some of the most famous movie scenes filmed on Capri, such as Luigi Comencini’s L’imperatore di Capri (1948), and JL Godard’s Il disprezzo (1963), along with images and videos from the family archives of the students participating in the workshop.

‘Art is the instrument through which students have the opportunity to learn, recognise and appreciate the beauty surrounding them,’ explained Ermanno Zanini, Capri Palace managing director and CCO of Mytha Hotel Anthology, a global group of seven Mediterranean-inspired properties. Capri Palace has a long-standing connection with art: the hotel features 17 art-themed suites among its rooms, from Mirò to Magritte and Warhol, while its White Museum has amassed a formidable collection over the years, including works by Allen Jones, Fabrizio Plessi, and a site-specific installation – a 4om-long ‘sort of Atlantis’ – by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro.

Related: Hotels with museum-worthy art collections

INFORMATION

Festival del Paesaggio runs from 27 July – 20 October. For more information, visit the Festival del Paesaggio website and the Mytha Hotels website

The previous Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2016 was curated by André Tavares and the late Diogo Seixas Lopes. 

Biennale time means a rush of announcements, big and small, as other, smaller, events try and get into the spotlight and exploit the unmissable opportunity of having the world’s design media crammed into one place. Founded in 2007, the Triennale makes the most of Portugal’s ability to punch well above its weight on the international architecture scene. And so for many scribes, Venice kicked off in a small room up the steep, winding staircases of the Fondamenta Zattere ai Saloni in Dorsoduro.

The Triennale’s curatorial team, headed up by Éric Lapierre, announced the theme for the fifth exhibition, ‘The Poetics of Reason.’ Drawing on Aristotle’s pioneering piece of literary theory – that of all literature being assembled from a kit of elements that drive narrative forward – the Triennale examines how this might be applied to architecture. Lapierre described Lisbon as a ‘great urban operating theatre’, a ‘laboratory for the dissection of architecture’s component parts’. 

There will five central shows, including ‘The Economy of Means’, ‘Permaculture for Architects,’ ‘Inner Space’, ‘What is Ornament?’ and ‘Natural Beauty,’ and the curatorial team has all bases covered, from exploring virtual worlds to looking at ways in which architecture could re-shape the agriculture industry.

‘We’ve built more since the beginning of the 20th century than since the beginning of humanity,’ Lapierre notes. Lisbon 2019 will hopefully open up new debates about the ever-changing perception of architecture. Above all, can the historic values of architecture be diverted and directed into ever more socially and environmentally conscious ways?

Those demanding an annual architecture fix received a new date for their diaries, and the event ended with an improvised performance by Thurston Moore, smashing merry hell out of his Fender on the palazzo’s rooftop as he blended the sound of 12 distorted strings with the bells of Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute.

See all the latest news and stories from Venice Architecture Biennale here

INFORMATION

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale will run 3 October - 2 December 2019. For more information visit the website

The Venice Architecture Biennale is not only one of the most exciting events in the profession’s global calendar and a valuable platform for theoretical discussion; it is also arguably the one with the most spectacular setting. Brains and beauty are uniquely combined in a six-month-long multicultural, international, thought-provoking and well-attended design extravaganza. Grafton Architects’ Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are curating this year’s edition, which opens to the public on 26 May. Orchestrating the complex and multi-layered event under the inspiring theme of ‘Freespace’, the architects shared their thoughts on the upcoming architectural celebration with us. 

W*: What does this Biennale represent?
Grafton: Architecture is an extremely complex discipline, but because it affects us all in every aspect of life, it’s a good thing if we can take time to think deeply about what is possible; about what more can be done and what ways we could make more of limited resources.

W*: Describe your vision?
Grafton: When we were invited by the president of La Biennale di Venezia Paolo Baratta to become the curators of Biennale Architettura 2018, our first task was to write a manifesto – a type of philosophical framework. It was a very interesting process for us to prepare this document, which would encapsulate our values. We wanted to include the word ‘space’, because that is what architects choreograph – the space in which people carry out their daily lives.

We are less interested in the ‘object’ definition of architecture, and more interested in the enclosure. Architecture is commissioned by clients to make a project. We wanted to find a way to describe the additional possibilities of architects to ‘gift’ qualities to people in general, in a ‘what’s the civic benefit’ sort of way. So we chose to add ‘free’ to ‘space’, to form the word Freespace, fusing these two aspects together, so that perhaps things could be thought about slightly differently.

W*: What would you like people to take away from it?
Grafton: Architecture is by its nature optimistic. Since 2008 more than half the world’s population live in urban areas, in built environments. It is necessary that the future built-world is the best that can be imagined on the crust of this fragile planet. We would like to think that the work presented in the Biennale will stimulate discussion of space itself and the value of sharing.

We hope that the catalogue will be something that people will find useful and thought-provoking. We hope that each professional who reads our manifesto will be inspired to incorporate Freespace aspects in their work; that it gives non-architects a way to challenge proposed projects asking: what is the Freespace component of this proposed project? What does it offer the community? It would be great to think that the manifesto could help to give courage to resist mediocracy and help people demand something better...

W*: How did you go about selecting the participating architects and installations?
Grafton: We chose architects from around the world whose work we respect and which relates to the theme, inviting them to communicate to the public the Freespace component within their work. There are many more architects and colleagues whose work we really value, but were unable to include. To them we wish to say that they are a vital part of the architectural community.

W*: What is the biggest challenge in putting together this exhibition?
Grafton: The main challenge is that architecture by its very nature exists somewhere else. But nonetheless, what is fantastic about an exhibition of architecture is that it allows for a ‘freeze-frame’ possibility, where by ‘slicing’ a piece of architecture, you can sometimes find its very essence. For example in genetics, when you see the DNA model, you have a type of ‘a-ha’ moment, where the scientists have made extremely complex information accessible to everyone, particularly the non-specialist. That’s what we’d like to achieve during this Biennale.

We believe passionately in this form of communication, because architecture affects everyone. As architects, we are extremely privileged. We should hear more voices. As well as writing the manifesto as a philosophical framework for the Biennale, we wrote it hoping to make it easier for non-practitioners to access the wonder and power of architecture.

W*: Has curating a Biennale changed your practice, and how? What does Freespace mean within your practice?
Grafton: When we were designing the project for Bocconi University in Milan, the university needed 1,000 offices, a grand auditorium for 1,000 people and a number of conference rooms. We formed the 1,000 offices into a matrix of courtyards, raised to the upper levels and carved the auditorium and conference rooms into the earth. The space between these two aspects of the projects has real presence and has become the new place where new things are possible.

In our project in Lima, Peru – the UTEC University – we created a vertical campus, where the Freespace between the various laboratories, teaching spaces, etc. allows the breeze from the Pacific Ocean to cool the open circulation routes. We discovered the freespace for this project because the temperature of Lima is unique, so we asked ourselves: if the climate is such as to blur the definition between outside and inside, how could this affect the architecture? Through the process of investigation and design we found that nature could inhabit the freespace – shade, vistas, in-between connections.

W*: Please could you share with us a few highlights from the show? What can we look forward to?
Grafton: The thing that is important to do – like the Slow Food Movement – is to give yourself time to ‘mull’ over the presentations in the Biennale. Feel where you are in Venice, in what Paolo Mendes da Rocha calls: the ‘capital of the imagined world’.

All the architects are trying to communicate; spend some time with their work; absorb what they are trying to say; imagine with them. Architecture is both ordinary and wonderful. It encloses us all. Enjoy the Biennale! There will be some things that will resonate and others which won’t. Each of the participants are human beings like us, trying to unravel the mysteries of imagined space.

W*: What else are you working on and which projects do you have in the pipeline?
Grafton: We have a terrific team of architects in our office whose dedication and skill we really admire. We’re on site with a number of really interesting projects. In London we are creating a building for the London School of Economics, it has a 55m frontage that overlooks the wonderful green space of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. We are building a new university building with a wonderful brief in Kingston-upon-Thames, there will be Freespace in the form of a colonnade connecting with the neighbourhood.

We are building two universities in France – one is in the extraordinarily beautiful city of Toulouse. The other is part of an ambitious masterplan in Saclay, close to Paris, involving the transformation of a plateau into an exemplary European ‘Silicon Valley’, with a massive university and technological quarter.

In Dublin we are at planning stage for a new primary school on a new campus and also designing a new City Library, which is an amazing commission. A library is probably one of the most important Freespaces in contemporary society!

See all the latest news and stories from Venice Architecture Biennale here

INFORMATION

The 16th Venice Archtecture Biennale runs from the 26th May to the 25th November 2018. For more information visit the Grafton Architects’ website and the Venice Architecture Biennale website

The Manchester International Festival has been tempting Londoners north of the Watford gap for more than a decade with its programme of cross-disciplinary events.

Of this year's eclectic catalogue, the live performances are the hot tickets in town. One of the more sought-after stubs was last week's minimalist revival of the ballet 'Available Light' at the Palace Theatre, with sets by Frank Gehry, music by John Adams and choreography by Lucinda Childs. It marked 35 years since the ballet's original, groundbreaking performance in the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, still under construction.

'This is the kind of cross-cultural collaboration for which MIF has become wildly renowned,' says John McGrath, the festival's artistic director and CEO. 'Three artists from very different fields – in this case classical music, contemporary dance and architecture – come together to make a work that none of them could have envisaged, let alone created, without the other.'

It's easy to see how the maverick trio might have fought against one another unproductively, as big personalities often do – after all, they'd never met before this collaboration. But they waltz. Gehry's split-level set, backed by a chain-link screen downstage, acts as an industrial, multi-platform backdrop for the choreography, which is similarly elemental. Childs' dancers hypnotically re-enact the same restrained sequences, in chorus and rondo, with impeccable synchronicity. Likewise, Adams' pure, reverberating synths speak to the clinical severity of the architecture and choreography.

The score recalls the city's great traditions in popular synthetic music. And it's not been the only one. Over two weeks, visual artist Liam Gillck has joined forces with Factory Records stalwarts New Order on a series of spectacles in the Old Granada Studios. 'New Order have had an enormous influence on the way I make art,' says Gillick, who contructed an immersive, 'responsive' stage on which the band perform an avant-garde set, refusing to resurrect their classics. 'Their music continues to create new levels of intensity and control based on a constant testing of fundamental structures.'

To balance the big-ticket evening events, daytime treats are dragging festival-goers out of synthesised hangovers. 'True Faith', a monumental exhibition on the visual legacy of Joy Division and New Order at Manchester Art Gallery, centres on four decades of contemporary work from artists inspired by the two bands. It's an impressive list, including Gillick, Jeremy Deller, Mark Leckey, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Raf Simons.

As always, it's a (Northern) star-studded scene. And Wallpaper* is making its own appearance. At the soon-to-be-developed London Road Fire Station, we have launched our own project: bespoke interior design service, Wallpaper* Composed. Find out more in our October issue, on sale 7 September.

INFORMATION

The Manchester International Festival continues until 16 July. For more information, visit the website

'Nantes has changed, very much so,’ says architect Thomas Cantin, who has watched his home city’s creative community flourish over the past 12 years. Cantin forms part of Nantes-based artist collective Fichtre, just one of a growing number of creative studios that have chosen to make the French city their home, favouring its laid back pace over the freneticism of Paris. ‘I knew it was comfortable here, not far from the sea, but now it’s the place to be,’ agrees Breton-born designer Isabelle Rolland of Rich Lighting Design, who recently moved back to the city from Lebanon via Paris. ‘I was so pleased to see how the creative community here has grown.’ 

After a century that brought Nantes much misfortune – its beautiful canals were filled in to create multi lane boulevards in the 1930s, its buildings were bombed during the Second World War and its shipyards closed in 1987 – the late 1980s marked a turning point for the former shipbuilding centre when the city welcomed Jean-Marc Ayrault as its new mayor. 

Impressed by the work of an entrepreneur named Jean Blaise who had launched the Research Center for Cultural Development in Nantes in 1984, Ayrault took the decision to invest heavily in culture and the arts in an attempt to reverse the city’s fading fortunes. The investment paid off and while Ayrault went on to become Prime Minister of France (from 2012 until 2014), Blaise, who had served as his right hand man, continued the work that the two began now over 26 years ago. Having set up numerous cultural events in the city and founded the Le Lieu unique arts centre, Blaise’s focus is now on a summer-long festival named Le voyage à Nantes.

Celebrating its fifth installment this year, Le voyage à Nantes is an artistic trail marked by a green line that snakes around the city streets. Smile-inducing interventions lie at every turn – a telephone box turned into an aquarium by Benedetto Bufalino, a giant tape measure collapsed at the side of a building by Lilian Bourgeat, a meandering pedestrian crossing by Aurélien Bory, or a topsy-turvy ping pong park by Laurent Perbos. While most of the city’s art works are temporary, some have found themselves a permanent home, such as the installations created in 2007, 2009 and 2012 as part of the Estauaire programme – a series of 30 contemporary artworks spread over 120 kilometers of the Loire estuary. Its legacy includes an amorphous blue sculpture-cum-bar by Atelier van Lieshout that popped up in the forecourt of the Architecture School in 2007, as well as Jean-Luc Courcoult’s ‘La Maison dans La Loire’ – a partly submerged house that sits on the river bed, revealed and then hidden by the tide each day.

But perhaps the most spellbinding sights on Nantes’ green line can be found at ‘Machines de l’Île’, a ten-year-old project that has given birth to a fleet of giant mechanical creatures including a 12 metre-high elephant that parades around the city’s old shipyards, a giant moving spider that hangs inside a warehouse and a towering three-tiered sea-themed steampunk carousel. It is within the workshops here that the city’s next showstopper is to take shape – a 35 metre-high and 50 metre-wide tree topped by two mechanical herons that will carry sightseers in baskets under their wings.

It’s difficult to imagine a city in which the population would embrace such a wildly ambitious and fanciful artistic program, but in Nantes, it seems to fit. On a tour of the city’s artworks, our local guide tells us 'they call us "être à l’ouest”’ – an idiom that means ‘Westsiders’ but also suggests being ‘slightly crazy’ – a badge that the Nantais wear with pride.

INFORMATION

’Le voyage à Nantes’ runs until 28 August. For more information, visit the fair’s website

In the multi-layered city of Istanbul, multiple voices resounded last weekend at the sixth edition of IST Festival. Held at the Vakko Fashion Centre on Saturday and at Soho House Istanbul on Sunday, the days were packed with panel discussions that revealed myriad viewpoints.

Silvia Venturini Fendi opened up about her life as a scion of the Fendi family – an honest story of having to prove her capacities in the face of prejudice against nepotism, of the responsibility that a matriarchal lineage brings, and her incredibly long and singular partnership with Karl Lagerfeld.

Fierce female talent was also central in the ‘Women in Film’ panel with the Turkish actress Serra Yılmaz and indie queen Parker Posey. The relatively broad subject has personal and political relevance in today’s Turkey, where the cultural sector finds itself increasingly restricted by government regulation that, especially with television, subdues the strong opinions this festival generates.

British architect David Adjaye, in an exchange with Turkish architect Murat Tabanlıoğlu, addressed the complex question of how architecture can reflect values. Today’s cities, that are getting denser and denser, require more than just architecture, he argued. 'The trauma of my work is that we contribute to this incredible destruction of the plane,' he said. 'How do we find symbiosis? That requires a radicality that is more than just architecture. It is about society thinking very carefully about what we want to be in 50, 100 years time and how we’re going to achieve it.'

José Parlá premiered his new film, One: Union of the Senses: a fast-moving, rhythmical love letter to New York that narrated the point of view of his mural with the eponymous title, commissioned by One World Trade Center.

Interestingly, and a manifest testament to IST Festival’s cross-pollination of ideas across all fields, Parlá echoed Adjaye’s sentiment with his bold statement that it’s not the graffiti in our cities that is the crime, but the cities themselves, built as they are upon ground that previous civilizations respected. 'Who’s the biggest space thief?' he asked, but continued to add that 'it’s too late now, we can’t erase the cities. But it’s not too late to educate and spread real culture.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the IST Festival website

As in New York, the Independent art fair's Brussels edition looked to complement the city's buzzing art scene, strategically choosing the week(end) of Art Brussels for the inaugural iteration of its trademark fair model on European soil.

The team chanced upon the 50,000 sq ft Vanderborght building, a former department store in the heart of the city. 'We had the extraordinary fortune of this amazing space, right in the centre, with a wonderful architecture that’s almost perfect for presenting art,' explains creative advisor Matthew Higgs about the six-floor structure, replete with a glass façade and glass-walled atrium that allowed natural light to emphasise the building’s transparencies.

On the ground floor, the progressive concept became immediately clear: New York powerhouse David Zwirner rubbed shoulders with the not-for-profit White Columns, who in turn neighboured with Delmes & Zander, a gallery based in Cologne and Berlin that focuses on outsider art. 'What’s important to us is that every kind of gallery is represented,' notes Higgs. 'We make sure there is no hierarchy – a wealthy gallery doesn’t take precedence over a smaller project. At a lot of fairs, the younger galleries are all together; the blue chip galleries are all together. We’re interested in trying to dissolve that.'

It made for a diverse viewing experience that, after getting a sense of the set-up, was conducive to discussions on transitions and juxtapositions. Carlier | Gebauer placed Laure Prouvost’s monochrome slogan paintings together with Tarik Kiswanson's fine sculptures, creating a tension between dark, heavy words and lightweight steel. Elsewhere, Kasper Bosmans’ wayward work in media ranging from silver-plated bronze to gouache and pencil in wood, showcased his unfettered ability to create at Marc Foxx Gallery. 

'You get really interesting dialogues between individual artworks, which you wouldn’t with a more conventionally structured fair,' Higgs concludes. 'There has been a great response. Hopefully it’s a dialogue that will continue.'

INFORMATION

Independent Brussels is on view until 28 May. For more information, visit the Independent website

Photography: Isabelle Arthuis. Courtesy Independent

ADDRESS

Vanderborght building
Schildknaapstraat 50
Rue de l’Ecuyer
1000 Brussels

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Art Sheffield 2016 is the least cushtie city art festival experience you could hope for.

Forget about white cube spaces and gallery cafes; the festival invites you on a very northern kind of magical mystery tour around the city’s rawest, chilliest, least apologetic spaces.

Curator Martin Clark of Kunsthall Bergen, formerly of Tate St Ives, has gained unlikely access to all sorts of venues, including a derelict pub inn the brutalist Park Hill estate, the Victorian workshop where stainless steel was invented and – the biggest coup of all – the Moore Street electricity substation.

A landmark piece of 1960s brutalist architecture, the still-functioning power station sits uncompromisingly on the ring road and is not open to the public. When Clark discovered that for one month every seven years it is closed for maintenance he fixed his festival dates accordingly. For this period only, anyone brave enough to make the hike can access the installation in the cathedral-sized space on the top floor. The artist Steven Claydon has risen to the challenge, creating an affecting sound work. The sound is of atoms moving, and it’s amplified by an enormous, locally produced steel plate, which shakes and vibrates in the middle of the room. It’s a work about awe and its relationship to scale, and is accompanied by a stained glass window-length film projection.

All the art has been carefully chosen to relate directly to the city’s history and architecture. There is work by established artists like German sound artist Florian Hecker, pioneering filmmaker Charles Atlas – whose terrific work in collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham is on show – and French video artist Michel Auder, who makes compulsively (disturbingly) watchable Peeping Tom videos of people’s 'private' moments in front of large windows.

Don’t miss Mark Fell’s Link Pub installation, a love-letter to 1980s Sheffield rave and pirate radio culture, or Beatrice Gibson’s excellent film F for Fibonacci (2014) which has fun exploring the structural seriousness and mad fantasy at play in the worlds of music and the economy.

All in all it’s a thrilling, challenging way to think about the city’s past, present and future.

INFORMATION

‘Art Sheffield 2016: Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charm’ is on view until 8 May at various locations across Sheffield. For more information, visit the Art Sheffield website

The latest Bi-City Biennale, shared between Hong Kong and its neighbour city of Shenzhen, is back this month with a host of architectural celebrations. The large scale event is intended to focus on the common urban challenges facing the Pearl River Delta region, drawing the two cities even closer.

In Shenzhen, the exhibition (titled 'Re-Living the City') is held in a striking settting – an abandoned flour factory – but includes many, if not too many, voices, which has an impact in its overall critical strength. Still, many worthy displays offer an informative visit. 

Happily, Ecosistema Urbano's thoughtful series of small-scale urban projects stood out for its practical application of using technology to create playful social spaces like solar-powered 'air trees'; as did the V&A's 'Unidentified Acts of Design' highlighting the creative intelligence that exists outside of conventional design studios, challenging the preconception that design in Shenzhen is limited to reproductions. 

Elsewhere, Swiss architects Christ & Gantenbein's typology city guide features an app identifying hidden architectural gems in Hong Kong. Presented with floor plans and key information, the resource acts as a basis of creating new architecture based on established types.

Meanwhile, across the border, in Hong Kong's Kowloon Park, 60 exhibitors examined critical issues facing the city within a polished presentation, entitled 'Visions 2050 - Lifestyle and the City'.  Here, highlights include the Oval Partnership's examination of the interaction between people and intangible spaces, which provided an interesting take on parts of the city that are usually ignored.

Other exhibits worth seeing include legendary Hong Kong photographer Ho Fan's iconic black and white photographs of the city, and the quirky Transform Bar II by Kacey, Kwok Choi Wong. The mobile Mojito cocktail bar, complete with record player and pots of mint, takes inspiration from local hawkers, who the designers say have perfected the art of flexible design, displaying a multitude of products in a small space.  

The park setting also provided a surreal setting for ALPOD's monocoque aluminum pod homes, and elevator-company Schindler Group's futuristic immersive urban environment showcasing the potential future of urban vertical mobility.

While both Shenzhen and Hong Kong's exhibitions make for an interesting and extremely varied visit, it is a pity that with the 'one country, two systems' agreement (which is due to expire in 2047), neither city took the bold step to reflect on their position on the cusp of one of planning's most dramatic moments and China's voracious appetite for construction, reexamining the conventional planning model with a more critically audacious eye.

INFORMATION
2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture
December 2015 - February 28, 2016

For more information visit the Shenzhen and Hong Kong websites

The Interlace by OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren has been crowned World Building of the Year by World Architecture Festival 2015. Meanwhile Vancouver House by BIG was awarded Future Project of the Year and Yanweizhou Park by Turenscape International got the Landscape of the Year gong.

They were up against an eclectic shortlist - all of them category winners - at the festival in Singapore, which is billed as the world's biggest international architectural event. 

The stiff competition that included OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren's radical and alternative 'vertical village' in Singapore, for example, was matched by projects such as the quirkily individual Saigon House by Vietnamese practice a21 Studio. This too is an alternative dwelling, whose materials were sourced from local scrap markets.

There was more inspiring use of materials, many of them natural, at Cam Thanh Community House in the Vietnamese tourist destination of Hoi Han. Architecture firm 1+1>2 thatched the bamboo roofs with coconut leaves. 

In the Future Projects category, a straw roof is a winner. Designed by PROARH, the roof of ISSA Grotto/Hill House slopes down the meet the Croatian landscape.

A big straw hat supported by tree-like columns doubles as a roof in Klein Dytham's indoor play area for children. The Soma City Home for All was a pro bono project following the destruction wreaked by Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Materials also played a key role in Beijing's Courtyard House Plugin, but this time it was the effective contrast of tradition and modernity which wowed the jury. People's Architecture Office introduced a prefab modular system to improve living conditions in Dashilar, a centuries old neighbourhood of courtyard housing.

There's more sensitive reworking of the old with the new in St Petersburg. Studio 44 Architects have created a ballet school within a former cinema and a house.

For future impact, Bjarke Ingels Group's penthouse living concept for Vancouver was a category winner. The elegant twisted tower is yet to be built.

INFORMATION

For more information on the WAF visit the website

The Chicago Architecture Biennial, which just launched last weekend, is the very first of its kind in North America; a startling fact, even more so when one thinks of the city's (and country's) invaluable architectural contribution to modern design. So when it did launch, it did so with a bang. Pictured: 'Architecture is Everywhere' by Sou Fujimoto Architects (foreground) plays with the idea that any form can become architecture; 'House No. 11 (Corridor House)' by Moss Architects (background) is a comment on mega-mansions, corridors and the use of space in residential building. copyright Hedrich Blessing. Courtesy Chicago Architecture Biennial

It is somewhat astonishing that in our increasingly design-aware, festival-rich, global cultural landscape, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which just launched last weekend, is the very first of its kind in North America. Even more so when one thinks of the city's (and country's) invaluable architectural contribution to modern design. So when it did launch, it did so with a bang.

The organisers, backed by the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, brought in two highly experienced international curators – Sarah Herda, currently of the Graham Foundation and formerly of Manhattan's Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Joseph Grima, who succeeded Herda at Storefront and has since worked at Domus and the New Museum – who co-signed the main show at the Chicago Cultural Centre and its several off-site programs.

Maintaining an open brief (if a little too open – there were very few organised themes in the many galleries, although this, the curators explain, was deliberate), the pair delved into all the different issues and ideas that occupy the minds and drawing boards of contemporary architects. The show produced includes collaborations between humans and spiders (yes, that's right – Tomás Saraceno did just that) and an exploration of police stations by Jeanne Gang, to using the unused (Atelier Bow-Wow's installation saw to that) and even full scale houses from Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, NY office MOS and Vietnamese practice Vo Trong Nghia. Exploring projects of varying scales in Chicago, the States and beyond, this was a truly international fair that did not limit itself to a single location.

Several partner events across town and further afield – from the Stony Island Arts Club, to Farnsworth House, the SC Johnson HQ in Wisconsin, Mana Contemporary, the Arts Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Design Museum – joined in, making the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial a rich and layered experience.

Meanwhile the format was used as a launch pad for more, and more permanent, changes in the city. The Museum of Contemporary Art put on a site-specific display by LA-based Johnston Marklee architects that hints to the building's upcoming redevelopment; and a series of kiosks start off as a biennial showcase but hope to become one of the city's future staples.

This has been a year of celebration for the North American city; 2015 is the University of Chicago's 125th anniversary and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's 150th, while its annual Art Expo wrapped up at the end of September, leaving the city abuzz with cultural excitement. Combining this with its undeniable, inherent architectural power – from its priceless legacy of Louis Sullivans, Mies van der Rohes and Frank Lloyd Wrights, to its current roster of dynamic practices – this year's biennial is sure to be just the beginning of the city's role in the global architectural discourse.

Seeking to find out more about the making of this festival, Wallpaper* met with artistic directors Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima.  

The architecture and design biennial format is very popular around the world. What makes this one different?
JG: It is true that the biennial format is increasingly popular, and there are obvious reasons – it is so much easier to travel now, we live in a culture that is accustomed to experiencing things directly etc. But it is also important to remember that all it means is an exhibition that happens every two years and in that sense you could say the MoMA is a quarterly, as it does an exhibition every three months. So, there's nothing inherently different about a biannual than a museum that does regular exhibitions. It is a very slow architecture museum, if you like.

Why Chicago?
JG: It is actually extraordinary that it hadn't happened yet in this part of the world. So, this is an extraordinary opportunity and Chicago is the obvious place for this to happen. Not just for historical reasons but also because there's a set of circumstances in place for it – for example the administration, its mayor Rahm Emanuel, a vision that comes from the city, institutions such as the Graham Foundation. Everything is aligned for this to be – not just this time, but in the future also – an amazing and incredibly influential project.

Tell us a little about the participants' selection process. I know you didn't start off with a specific theme in mind...
SH: We were very conscious about laying the groundwork for even future biannuals. It would be very important to keep it as open as possible and not to dive into a single issue.

JG: Or represent a single vision or interpretation of what architecture is.

SH: Both Joseph and I have pretty extensive networks but we were both determined to push beyond who we already knew. We searched, we had a great team, we asked, people gave us lists, we explored different parts of the world and we reviewed a lot of work – well over 500 projects. Then we had to make difficult decisions, thinking about what each participant represented and how they would work together. We didn't do an open call.

Were you conscious about including a US or Chicago presence?
SH: We had a number of Chicago offices in our first list but then we decided to focus on Chicago and these speculative projects for the city. We brought Iker Gil to organise that and that increased the participation of Chicago architects, which we felt was important as we wanted to also use the biannual as a kind of launching pad for ideas in the city itself.

So were theoretical projects as important as realised or soon-to-be realised work?
SH: We wanted the full spectrum of practice. The speculative project is as important as the research project, as the building. We really wanted to foreground ideas and those ideas take many different shapes.

I know housing was a key theme the emerged in the show – were there other discourse threads that appeared as work developed?
JG: An interest in playfulness – there's a certain interest in architecture not simply being about problem solving but also about thinking about the more evanescent aspects of life and capturing those and giving them form. Another is the whole question of representation and drawing and the language of architecture in visual terms. It is something that we're really interested in.

SH: And an overarching issue that emerged is the agency of the architect. It was a unifying thing no matter what people where doing. It is about architects carving out new space to practice and overturning the image of the architect waiting for the brief and the client.

'In 2010 there was a 40 minute film made by young men based on their dissatisfaction for China in the 1980s called Old Boys. It got 80 million views,' says Philip Dodd, chairman of Made in China, a cultural agency that works between China and Europe. He's talking on the Today programme about the craze for microfilms that has been sweeping China since 2010.

Typically made on low budgets and produced within 3–5 days, microfilms encompass everything from storytelling to music videos to adverts to documentary, and can range anywhere from 90 seconds to 40 minutes in length. Eschewing the traditional box office distribution channel, they reach their audience online and by word of mouth.

'We want to explore [microfilms] as a conversation. Looking at what micro films are and how we engage and bring them to the UK,' says Faith Blackmore, director of Nottingham's first International Microfilm Festival, which launches on 15 October.

Hoping to raise the profile of microfilms and showcase their application outside of China, where around 40 million people search for videos on the internet on a daily basis, the festival's organisers believe the sector provides a low-cost, high-value springboard for filmmakers and businesses alike. 'Micro films are about using creative expression and acting, which connects to business, connecting to public consumption,' says Blackmore. 'Technology is developing and so should our films.'

Dodd, who believes that microfilms on mobile phones are the future, adds, 'The point is that these films are made to watch whenever, wherever. They are entertaining young China.'

Running in venues across Nottingham, the programme of events includes category screenings, master classes, talks and panel discussions from leading industry professionals, and a production market event designed to support, promote and encourage an understanding of and access to the screen industries.

INFORMATION

Nottingham International Microfilm Festival runs from 15–20 October

MOS's Michael Meredith is talking about the theoretical implications of the corridor from New York City; Tatiana Bilbao is talking about providing housing to poverty-stricken Mexicans from Lago di Como; and Hidetoshi Sawa of Vo Trong Nghia Architects is talking about how to make valuable and powerful housing for people living along the Mekong Delta, from Vietnam.

The three architects' ideas will meet again, in the form of full-scale models, at this fall's Chicago Architecture Biennial, the inaugural festival masterminded by Sarah Herda, currently of the Graham Foundation and formerly of Manhattan's seminally influential Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Joseph Grima, who succeeded Herda at Storefront and has since worked at Domus and the New Museum, as well as independently. The topic for the biennial is 'The State of the Art of Architecture,' both an ultra-specific callback to Chicago architect and theorist Stanley Tigerman's 1977 conference, and as open-ended as the organizers could get - on purpose.

'We want participants to come with a position,' Herda says. 'This isn't a project abut a specific ideology, or -ism.' Herda cites her background at Storefront and the Graham, and Grima's time at Domus and now the New Museum's IDEA CITY, as part of what makes playing with extensive networks their daily practical bread-and-butter - an ideal preparation for this global festival. Rather than a theme, then, shared concerns began to arise. And the shared concerns of these three projects-MOS' Corridor House, Vo Trong Nia's S House (3), and Bilbao's sustainable house-is housing.

'This is our most important project,' Bilbao says. 'I believe that architecture can improve the quality of life for the lowest income people in the country - this house is for the lowest part of the pyramid.' Her houses, which are funded through a combination of government grants and private financing through a bank (one of them run by one of her more upscale beach house clients), each fit neatly into the government's dictated size of 43 sq m, but are constructed in such a way that, should the inhabitants come into more money and need more space, they can expand. Bilbao's prototype blends inside and outside around a central core, and each house is constructed so that a second story could be added, or a patio built on.

The tension between a finished house and one that could grow is something that the inhabitants needed to work with. 'People wanted a house that could be expandable, but they would rather not have had it as expandable if it looked like it wasn't finished.' Bilbao came up with something modular-made out of standard materials like wood palettes and concrete blocks-and that could be shifted around depending on what the client wanted. In rural areas, people tended to want kitchens and toilets outside. In suburban areas, they wanted them inside. The house's cost doesn't change - but the shift in parameters allows each client to feel like this is truly their house, not a government-subsidized shed of social housing that removes everything personal.

On the Mekong Delta, Hidetoshi Sawa of VTN has been experimenting with prototypes of what the firm is calling S House - the third iteration of which will be displayed in Chicago. It's made of steel, which is easier to transport than the concrete the second prototype was made out of, and which operates as a basic frame. What VTN has done here, similar to Bilbao, is construct a basic shell that can then be altered depending on who's using the house. While it was originally designed for the Delta and its economic and geographical particulars, Sawa sees this house as global in possibility. 'We provide the frame, and then we can use local material,' he says, citing a version in India as an example.

MOS are interested in different issues. Working in New York City and under a different lash of housing concerns-yes, price is an issue, and so is livability-Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith were inspired by scholar Mark Jarzombek's work on corridors. 'The corridor is different than the hallway' Meredith says. 'It's a social space, and it's an almost willful leftover of architecture.' Taking this deeply unconsidered space, as he called it, and then considering and transforming it, was the exciting challenge of this project, and rather than a landscape of natural or economic disaster, MOS are looking at the quiet seeping disaster that is American suburbanism. The architects were inspired by 'corridors in McMansions, which are just immense - you could get rid of the rest of the house but keep the corridors, and you'd have a house that's big enough for people to live in,' as Meredith says. Their house has a pitched roof, but 'it's not really vernacular, it's an abstraction of the vernacular,' Meredith says.

These projects are all 'capital-A Architecture,' Herda says. Even with the vastly different applications and parameters, each of these architects is trying to figure out what people need emotionally, intuitively, and physically, and then provide that in built form - the ultimate architectural move. The three are paired because they provide context for each other - with MOS' theory providing a framework through which to investigate VTN's steel frame, and a lens through which to understand the deeply meaningful work that is being done by Tatiana Bilbao's built insistence that every person, no matter their circumstances, have access to powerful and individual architecture.

As a city considered holy by three religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – and that is claimed by both Palestinians and Jews as their capital, the various identities that make up the fabric of Jerusalem can be filled with magic and intrigue, but they're also divided, complex and conflicted. It is the aim of the Jerusalem Season of Culture to 'tell the different stories of Jerusalem', says its executive director, Naomi Bloch Fortis. 'It’s a very, very unique story.'

Until August 28 the Jerusalem Season of Culture will present Under the Mountain, a festival that engages the community by displaying works of visual art. Taking place at Temple Mount – an ancient site in the Old City, on which stands the golden Dome of the Rock, a site deeply significant to Christianity, Judaism and Islam – the festival, canceled last year because of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, is hosting a number of discussions and presentations.

A few highlights of the week include Israeli artist Yael Bartana unveiling a new sound work that examines the life of Simone the Hermetic on the 1,600th anniversary Simone’s birth. Israeli fashion designer Hed Mayner will partner with religious clothing merchant Bilal Abu-Khalaf for Le Dernier Cri, inviting audiences to try on the new collection, made specifically for the festival and rooted in Jerusalem’s religious history. Spanish artist Santiago Sierra will use the human body as a material, featuring veterans of Israel’s wars as living monuments of the violent battles they experienced.

According to artistic director Itay Mautner, the festival is receiving more attention than ever. 'Many things changed because of that war and what happened in Jerusalem before that war,' he says. 'It’s really harsh times, but addressing Temple Mount, even if you don’t want to look at it – it’s always shining and giving light into your life.'

Kevin Beasley’s recent performance at the Dallas Museum of Art began with the artist taking his seat in a microphone-infused rocking chair in the museum’s soaring atrium, his dark throne linked to 24 seat cushions, similarly wired with microphones, scattered on the floor around him. A melody formed by the creaking chair, the choir of cushions and musical tracks chosen by Beasley. A smattering of spectators swelled into a massive crowd of participants that stayed until midnight, talking and dancing, eating and drinking, looking and listening.

This Friday ‘late night’ at the museum was the latest collaborative crescendo for a city that has long been on the up, channeling its booming economy into the largest urban arts district in the United States. This 68-acre swath of downtown Dallas is, in the words of DMA director Maxwell Anderson, ‘a very tidy street, with all of these different monuments by starchitects.’ Buildings by I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, and Rem Koolhaas line the road. With its impressive infrastructure complete, the district’s cultural organisations are now focused on defining their individual identities and their shared goals and desired audiences. The ambition and intensity of that cooperation was revealed in the inaugural Soluna International Music and Arts Festival, a three-week event that concluded on Sunday.

Led by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Jaap van Zweden, the festival was conceived as a collection of collaborations - among disciplines, Dallas cultural organisations, and visual artists such as Beasley, Pipilotti Rist, Alex Prager, Yael Bartana, and Monte Laster - around the theme of 'Destination (America)'. ‘The city has spent a billion and a half dollars on this Arts District and until this festival there really hasn’t been a recurring sandbox to play together in,’ says Jonathan Martin, president and CEO of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. ‘We’re all here geographically but we had all been politely doing our own thing.’

A key force in expanding the festival beyond the orchestral was van Zweden’s daughter, Anna-Sophia, who is passionate about contemporary art. ‘There is a great opportunity for performance art and projects that push the boundaries,’ she says of Dallas. ‘What we want to create with Soluna a platform where artists can meet each other, collaborate, and come with crazy, outside-the-box ideas, and it’s our dream to make those ideas happen for them and with them.’

The festival’s opening night featured Los Angeles-based Prager, whose three films - Face in the Crowd (2013), La Petite Mort (2012), and Despair (2010) - were screened along with original scores performed live by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Another evening was dedicated to Rist’s new film, commissioned to accompany a performance of Miklos Rozsa’s Andante for Strings, Op. 22a. Beasley’s work, also commissioned for the festival, was concerned with the physicality of sound itself.

Another festival highlight came in the form of a video commission from Laster, a Texas native who has worked in Paris since 1994. His Destination, in Five Movements unfolded on screen as van Zweden conducted a program of patriotic favourites on the eve of America’s Memorial Day. The five-part video, created in collaboration with students from a local performing arts high school, dealt with migration and identity issues. ‘What I found interesting about the theme of destinations was the individual journey and physical displacement; "Movement" takes on many meanings and prompts new questions.’

The sleepy town of Hyères in the South of France underwent a high fashion take over this past weekend for the 30th edition of its namesake style and image fair.

With Karl Lagerfeld charged as the event's creative director and a fashion and photography jury helmed by Chanel's creative studio director Virginie Viard, and image director Eric Pfrunder, the somewhat bohemian affair which champions new creative talent, became a charged design think-tank. 'It's very sympathetic,' explains architect, designer and fashion juror India Mahdavi who first visited the event two years ago when she was asked to curate an exhibition space, 'There's a family of people who come back every year.'

'I wanted to create a platform that would foster good relations between professionals and young designers,' explains founder Jean-Pierre Blanc, adding that this year's festival received 400 fashion and 770 photography applications, which were whittled down to 10 by the organisers and each jury at various stages. And while Chanel may have set the tone for this year's high profile celebration, the luxury house did not interfere with the cult festival's indie charm, naïveté or authenticity.

In fact, Lagerfeld's ties to the event relate directly to the festival's spiritual and physical heart - Villa Noailles. In 1995, the photographer captured the raw beauty of the then dilapidated building, which was designed by Rob Mallet-Stevens in 1923 and inspired by the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Originally owned by Viscount Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure, the couple were serious supporters of the creative disciplines, inviting Man Ray to shoot his 1929 film 'Les Mystères du Château de Dé' on site, while also being patrons of Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau.

'When the building was finished,' continues Blanc of its 1997 restoration, 'we felt that we had lost something with its new perfection after so many years in the destroyed building.'

This year the villa and its grounds (Noailles was president of the French Horticultural Society) hosts a wide range of activities from Lagerfeld's 'Three Worlds' exhibition that includes his 1995 portfolio of the villa, to works by French artist Arnold Goron who has collaborated with Isabel Marant on her shop windows for many years. Also on the programme: a roundtable discussion on Instagram, a talk by designer Simon Porte Jacquemus, an exhibition of last year's photography winner Lorenzo Vitturi, and this year's 10 photography finalists' work.

'The criteria was to give the award to the person who was doing something new, seeing into the future,' explains publisher Gerhard Steidl who sat on the photography jury. 'The idea here at Hyères is to give some food, physically with award money, to one of these young people to build up the artistic sculpture as I see it - to build a lifetime's creative model.'

Tellingly, this year's finalists, nominated by a jury that also included Anne Cartier-Bresson, André Saraiva and Sølve Sundsbø, were all art photographers. Netherlandic winner Sjoerd Knibbeler took home the euro 15,000 prize for his multi-medium proposal that included a book and film and explored the conceptual notion of shapes that cannot be seen - like the wind.

Also of interest was the realism of Brit Polly Tootal's urban English landscapes of 'in-between' spaces, and Evangelia Kranioti who was awarded a 'special prize' from the jury for her nine-year, cinematographic series that told tales of her native Greece and the solitude of its sailors.

Pfrunder summed up the quality of talent on offer: 'Gerhard Steidl is going to make a book with somebody, Jean-Luc Monterosso is making an exhibition… everybody will do something on the side, because it was difficult to say that one is a winner.'

The fashion award, helmed by a jury that included Carine Roitfeld, HRH The Princess of Hanover, designer Anthony Vaccarello and producer Caroline de Maigret, was given to 28-year-old German designer Annelie Schubert. Schubert's tactile, sculptural shapes boldly combined traditional and techno fabrics like tweed and Neoprene. And in addition to the prize money she will also receive tutelage within Chanel's Métiers d'Art.

Dutch designer Wieke Sinnige got the fashion jury's 'special award', while Anna Bornhold won the Chloé Prize for her ombré jumpsuit that was entirely handcrafted. Also of note: menswear designer Sophie Harand's gender neutrality theme, which was on trend with the A/W 2015 runways. 'What I could see with these kids is that it's a lot about texture,' continues Mahdavi. 'In my discipline I really feel that textures are becoming more important as a reaction to this world that we are living in that's so digital. Everything that has to do with your senses is exaggerated. Because of these screens we can work from anywhere in the world and so spaces are becoming hybrid. This hybrid thing is becoming more and more important - seasons are hybrid, even genders are becoming hybrid - we could see it in the collections.'

Not only did the event showcase a new breed of talent, it also continued to lure a pilgrimage of creatives from around the world, enticed by its casual interactions with both the jury members and finalists. 'I spent these last few days chasing the people I was most interested in,' says French-American photographer David Luraschi. 'The festival is an opportunity for many to gather in a more relaxed environment than a metropolis.'

Luraschi has turned his back on fashion's street style epidemic quite literally… or rather his subjects have on him: 'I enjoy collecting people and their silhouettes,' he explains of his photographs of subjects walking away. 'This is something I practice in Paris where I live. Photographing environments and architecture there is something that has been done a hundred times and hundred years ago by the likes of Eugène Atget. I've always been interested in characters and realised that they are an element, which remains original and inexhaustible.'

However, without doubt, the festival's main event was Karl Lagerfeld's masterclass that touched on everything from his 300,000 strong book collection to his favourite architects of today: 'Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid,' began the polymath, 'there is nothing more opposite. I wanted to built a house by Tadao Ando and I never got it done because they always thought it looked too much like a temple of a sect. Three times I bought locations and three times they turned it down. My only frustration in life is that I could not build a modern building in France.' Adding, 'It is easier to live in a geometric compilation, it's where my brain works better.'

On the subject of his design process he continues: 'I don't want to be pretentious, but every decision is a refusal. I see something… and electric flash…  and then I'm lucky that I can put it on paper and people can immediately see it and make the dress without asking too many questions. I don't change my mind because before I present an idea I throw 20 into the garbage bin.'

His advice to the festival's young designers having won a similar Woolmark contest in 1954 that spearheaded his own career: 'I believe only in careers built on no rules.'  Adding, 'I hate that idea of "young designers". You are a good or bad designer.' Although he says that they better be able to draw: 'When people present me their books with computer sketches I throw them in their face. I don't even look at them. It all looks the same.'

The fashion designer picked up photography in 'nineteen hundred and eighty seven' as he likes to term years, when 'Eric tried three times, and each time I said "arrgh" and so we rented a camera and I started. Our first picture was Ines de la Fressange. Six months later I was doing editorial. I was always very interested in photography. I collected it but never thought that I could do it.'

And on why photography is important to him he explains (after a swig of Diet Coke), 'It's the only thing that reflects what we did.' Adding, 'My fortune teller told me something very strange, "for you, it really starts when it stops for the others".' And with that the icon is off to the next event socialising into the wee hours with the festival's creatives both 'young' and old.

ADDRESS

Villa Noailles
Montée Noailles
83400 Hyères

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

In 1972 Gerhard Steidl founded what would become one of the world's most respected independent art, fashion and literature publishing and printing companies. The impetus came from a teenage Steidl's frustration with the printing process, fused with a natural gift for selecting papers and layouts. Suffice to say, to this day the 65-year-old is still involved in every step of each book's production, they themselves printed on site within his four-storey headquarters in Göttingen, Germany.

We caught up with the bibliophile at the Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography, where he was in search of his next subject. Here we discuss analogue photography's second wind, what he's most excited about going forward and his own personal library…

Wallpaper*: Firstly, what is your connection to the Hyères Festival and more specifically its base camp at villa Noailles?
Gerhard Steidl: 1995 was my first time, 20 years ago when we were shooting a Karl Lagerfeld fashion campaign together with Nadja Auermann at the villa. In those days the building was not restored, it was more or less a ruin. Water was leaking all through the roofs and it was a disastrous situation for the building, but it had an amazing atmosphere. We did a book with his photos and we actually found the model for doing fashion catalogues up to this day. It was a book, but at the same time a fashion catalogue. People have to decide for themselves what it is more...?

What are you looking for when it comes to publishing a book?
If I'm publishing a book then for me it is most important that it is something new that I haven't seen before. I always say that it is my personal education. At first I'm doing the book just for me and the artist, and I don't care about the rest of the world. The moment I start working with the artist, this person is my private professor - my education and I want to learn as much as possible. And then once the book is ready it goes into the world, we both hope that there are others that can learn something aesthetically or visually.

How do you sieve through all the ideas that you no doubt receive?
It is very hard. We receive at Steidl approximately 2,000 submissions every year from all around the world. I really look through all of them, but 80 percent are really stereotype the same - so somebody is photographing the flowers of the garden, or another person is photographing the husband, the wife or the kids and dreaming to make a book out of it. Of course, those things you have seen a hundred thousand times and we send them respectfully back with a letter saying we have too much work and it is not possible. But there are always 20-30, out of this 2,000 that are really worth a look at and I invite the artist to start working on the book project.

What's currently exciting you?
After the digital revolution in photography it is very exciting to me that young people 20 or 24-years-old are coming back to analogue photography. That is really a surprise. I discovered within the last twelve months that young people are interested in the analogue chemical process. They want to learn all about it and they don't believe that digital is everything. This was a surprise I had not been aware of before. I'm not nostalgic at all. I'm not saying that digital is the devil and analogue was heaven, those are two technologies and every artist has to find out which is the best to express their ideas. What I can say now is that analogue photograph is not dead. It is rather inexpensive. You can buy a second hand camera, aged film and photo paper and chemicals for just about nothing... rather than the cost of all the digital upgrades and equipment. And believe me it is from all over the world. Young people from Korea, Japan, Brazil, Canada: they are writing saying, 'I have an analogue project, do you think it is worth that I continue?'

What's your ultimate goal when it comes to the material you publish?
To develop a photographer's lifetime work. To follow not just with one book, to follow for 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 years. For the moment most of my time is given to develop the complete works of William Egglesto, Robert Frank or Ed Ruscha. Ok those are the giants of photography and well known, but they are getting older and it is the last moment to work with them on their project's face to face.

Karl Lagerfeld has said that he has a personal book collection of some 300,000 tomes. Where does yours stand?
My library is less than that because I don't have so much space. I am not a book collector as he. I am producing books and selling books, but I have no private collection for art and not for books. But just the literature archive published is approx 7, 000 books and the photo books that I have done in the last 45 years is also approx 5,000. So with the other books I've read and bought I'm coming up to maybe 20 - 30,000 books. But I have some years to live and maybe I can make it up to 300,000.

Is there any one book that is still unpublished? An idea that remains in the vault?
I'm every day waiting for the one book that I have not yet published. The next book for me is always the best book, because of all the experience I have together with the artist. I don't know what the next one will be, but believe me it will be an exciting one.

A remote island in the Arctic Circle may seem an unlikely destination for an architecture and art festival. But, for visitors to SALT - a nomadic event inspired by the 'movement of animals and seasonal rhythms' of the Arctic - the journey is all part of the experience. When we approached rugged Sandhornøya by boat last week, we were met by a surprising sight. Its normally deserted stretch of beach was teeming with people and a series of angular structures stood tall against the dark silhouette of the mountains. Travellers had flocked from far and wide for the festival's opening weekend, set in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape.

SALT's co-founders Erlend Mogard-Larsen and curator Helga-Marie Nordby spent two years exploring Norway's northern regions, before they found this wild stretch of beach. Here, they invited Norwegian practice Rintala Eggertsson Architects to create three structures. These would act as the frameworks for a year-long programme of art projects, concerts, plays, readings and culinary experiences.

Rintala Eggertsson Architects drew inspiration from fiskehjell (ancient fish racks, used for drying cod) for their 'Arctic pyramids'. Says Mogard-Larsen, 'It's hard to compete with the nature. [The architects'] expression reminds us of our role in the landscape, and introduces something new and relevant into this epic scene.'

Visitors move between these structures to experience film, sample local seasonal food and beer and enjoy the world's largest sauna. For our first night on the island, chef Svein Kristian Malin rustled up a three-course feast, including smoked whale meat, reindeer stew and cheese from a farm on the nearby island.

The most impressive of Rintala Eggertsson's structures is the landscape for Chinese artist Yang Fudong's new site-specific film installation. Fudong has created eight films, screened on box-like structures. His hypnotic works eschew sound, instead using landscape to evoke a tale. 'I think about how to tell a narrative by using not people speaking so much, but how the wind tells a narrative, or how trees tell a narrative,' he says. 'It's a feeling of yesterday, but it's actually tomorrow.' Fudong explores ancient traditions, bringing them into the present. Adds Nordby: 'There is something similar in the way he is thinking about his filmmaking and the way we're thinking about this project.'

Nordby doesn't know how long Rintala Eggertsson's structures - which touch lightly on the landscape and can be easily transported to new locations - will survive the extreme storms during the winter months of their island residency. But that is part of the point. Their creations are a reminder of the daily battle against the elements that the 400 inhabitants of Sandhornøya face.
 
Alongside Rintala Eggertsson's designs are a series of tent-like volumes, conceived by local artist and architect Joar Nango - a member of the indigenous Sami people - in which visitors can stay. Based on Sami architectural practices, each 'Njalla' has a glass roof and is built on wooden skis, to allow the inhabitant to pull their lodging around the beach to find the perfect spot from which to experience the midnight sun or northern lights.
 
Mogard-Larsen and Nordby have also commissioned international architectural students to create three additional wood structures, siida, which sit on the furthest point of the beach and can also accommodate visitors to the festival. Or, they can sleep like we did on our final evening, on reindeer mattresses beneath the stars. Right on cue, the Aurora Borealis put on a dazzling display across the sky.
 
SALT will remain in situ until 6 September 2015, with the second part of the year's programme of performances, art installations and discussions raising questions about the effects of climate change and the exploitation of the region's resources. 'Few people are fully engaged with these important topics, so we are looking to approach it differently, informing them through visualisation and experience,' says Nordby. When its sojourn on Sandhornøya is over, the nomadic festival will continue on its eight-year journey across the northernmost parts of our planet, stopping off in regions like Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Alaska.

Ahead of August's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Scottish capital will experience a fashion takeover. From this Friday, the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival (EIFF) returns to the city for its third installment. The mostly free public event will see some of Edinburgh's most impressive historic buildings commandeered to host a rich tapestry of symposiums and runway shows led by renowned industry personalities.

Festival director Anna Freemantle has once again taken the curatorial reigns, revealing an engaging week-long programme ranging from an intimate talk by Lady Amanda Harlech and her daughter Tallulah about the role of storytelling throughout the ages at the National Museum of Scotland, to 'In Fine Style', a conversation with fashion designer Gareth Pugh reflecting on Tudor and Stuart period dress at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Other event highlights include Dutch model Saskia de Brauw's exhibition, 'The Accidental Fold', which serves to validate discarded ephemera from her daily life and travels, and an opening night runway gala hosted by Chinese cashmere brand 1436 Erdos. The latter stems from creative director Graeme Black's recent reinvigoration of Scottish-Chinese relations in the 200-year textile trade, bringing superfine Chinese yarns to be hand-knitted in Scotland.

Another new endeavour launching in tandem with EIFF is the inaugural edition of the Retina Scottish International Photography Festival, for which Freemantle is a principal curator. At the concurrent happening, Freeman will present two exhibitions: photographer Rankin's 'Portraits of Men'; and Helena Christensen's latest series for Rika magazine.

In the run-up to this weekend's festivities, we spoke to the founder about the multi-disciplinary mix of events, her strongest industry supporters and greatest challenges to date…

Wallpaper*: Now that you're in your third year, you must feel like you've come leaps and bounds since the festival's 2012 inception.
Anna Freemantle: Absolutely. The journey has been challenging and exciting in so many different ways. We leapt into the unknown with our first festival and we're still doing that. The content is constantly evolving and that's what makes it worth doing for me, the thrill of doing something new each year.

What was the biggest lesson you learned from the first two years?
Learning to say 'no' sometimes. It's not easy, but a change that needed to happen. Our first year was very much about selling an idea that didn't yet exist. Now it is more about curating and working with like-minded people who want to take the same risks in their work as we do. In many ways the programme is driven by the people we bring to the festival, rather than by us.

This year's schedule has an abundance of talks, exhibitions, shows and workshops. How important is this mix and what usually works best, in your experience?
It's very important. Fashion and art are so diverse but they come from the same creative impulse and run through many people's lives - often without them being aware of it. We like to open people's eyes and ears to inspire them to find the same creative impulse in their own lives. We want to connect artist and audience in a dynamic way and break down the wall between them. They need one another and we hope to encourage this dialogue with all our events.

What have you found the public responds to most when it comes to fashion festivals? 
We have to accept that for most people fashion is about the fame and glamour and the final product. So we try and make the content meaty, but wrap it in some of the glamour. I've learned that that's when it really hits home. That said, our audience is so diverse, some just come for the symposium, others just the shows. There have been so many highlights already where people come expecting something and leave with the thrill of experiencing something completely new and inspiring. We aren't a commercial festival, so we have the freedom to bend the form a bit.

The programme inhabits some of the city's grandest historical buildings and institutions. What sort of awareness do you hope to promote of Edinburgh?
Edinburgh is a beautiful grand dame of a city, however still a little reticent. We try and activate the various grand buildings by bringing high-quality events to them, things that wouldn't normally happen in these magnificent spaces, so the local audience will be able to experience their city in a completely different way.

From Gareth Pugh to Amanda Harlech, whose support were you most taken aback by this year?
Amanda has always been so supportive and over the years has become an incredible, loyal and trustworthy friend. Saskia de Brauw has been rather wonderful too - she's cut from the same cloth as Amanda. Helena Christensen has been so lovely to work with. They are all very busy people and have given their time so generously. It is a real affirmation to know that they get what we're about. It's why I keep doing it.

What makes you the proudest to date? 
That we're still here working on festival number three. Funding the festival is a big struggle and doesn't get any easier, so to have managed to pull off a bigger and better programme each year makes me very proud.

The public event will see some of Edinburgh's most impressive historic buildings commandeered to host symposiums and runway shows. 'In Fine Style' at the Palace of Holyroodhouse includes a talk with designer Gareth Pugh reflecting on the Tudor and Stuart periods of dress. From the left: 'Anne of Denmark', by Marcus Gheeradts the Younger, 1614; 'Elizabeth I', British School, c.1580-5.

The festival's opening night gala will be hosted by Chinese cashmere brand 1436 Erdos. The pairing is the result of creative director Graeme Black's recent reinvigoration of 200-year textile trade relations between Scotland and China

Also launching in tandem to EIFF is The Retina Scottish International Photography Festival, for which Freemantle has curated a duet of exhibitions, including a survey of Helena Christensen's latest work for Rika magazine.

The Shekou Industrial Zone in Shenzhen may not seem the most likely place to house a biennale devoted to design. But given the event's 'Urban Border' theme, this industrial port is in fact perfectly positioned - literally and figuratively - to host a fascinating debate on global urban issues at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (UABB). The urban design biennale's fifth edition is presented at two separate venues: an old warehouse at the city's industrial port and the former Guangdong Float Glass Factory, a short bus trip away.

UABB curator and creative director Ole Bouman enlisted a team of local and international designers to transform a four-hectare derelict industrial site into the biennale's main venue, the former glass factory. 'We didn't have much to do,' he says. 'It was all about cherishing its existing beauty and qualities.' Central to the revitalisation is a dramatic Guggenheim-esque spiral staircase and an 'urban farm', that echoes the Hong Kong vernacular.

On exhibit are works from the Ministry of Finnish Architecture, New York's Museum of Modern Art, OMA, the Shenzhen Design Centre and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Must-sees include a display by Droog and TD, which imagines a Shenzhen-Hong Kong 'Special Material Zone', where companies would develop products with material scarcity in mind - using 'boundless' materials like sand and human hair. 

The warehouse exhibitions, meanwhile, are dedicated to 'crossing urban boundaries'. Curators Li Xiangning and Jeffrey Johnson have balanced an eclectic but coherent mix of multidimensional perspectives by international and local architects, urbanists, sociologists and artists. Notable highlights include Atelier Bow-Wow's film 'Made in Tokyo', on creating and using coherent urban environments. Artist Liu Qinguan of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts presents 'Blueprint', a shimmering wall of ceramic tiles depicting auspicious Chinese patterns and symbols of modern production tools.

A team from Central Saint Martins are exhibiting a series of four films called 'Liquid Boundaries', which question rigid boundaries in the traditional production of space. The 'Cricklewood Town Square' film - based on a concept by utopian regeneration agency Spacemakers - stands out for its revolutionary attitude, which proposes giving town residents temporary planning power over their own public spaces.

The installation 'Made by Us', by the Het Nieuwe Instituut's Sander Veenhof, uses augmented-reality technology to help connect viewers with their architectural heritage. Cloud Factory, by information-visualisation specialist Mark van der Net, shows how data research can help people make informed decisions based on real-time digital information.

The highlight of the opening weekend was undoubtedly POP-UP, Studio-X Shenzhen’s lively presentation on inspiring urban projects from Tokyo to Rio de Janeiro to China. The interactive space, orchestrated by Hong Kong-based architect Marisa Yiu, comprised a sea of tables suspended from a ceiling grid by moveable steel rods, allowing visitors to transform the space 'to create an architecture for a real-time exchange of ideas'.

ADDRESS

Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture
Shekou Industrial Zone
Nanshan District
Shenzhen

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Those who visited the Belgian Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale or the 2011 OMA show at the Barbican in London - two key Rotor-curated shows - might have an inkling as to what to expect at the Oslo Architecture Triennale this year. In-depth archival research, focus on materials and themes of reuse have slowly but surely been developing into some of the Belgian collective's key strengths. And they all unfailingly feature in this sustainability-driven festival. 

Selected to curate the fifth edition of 'the Nordic region's biggest architecture festival' (together with independent French publication Criticat), Rotor chose a theme that feels as familiar as ambiguous. 'Our mission was to reach out to a large audience. How to attract an audience that is not necessarily used to going to architectural exhibitions?' asks Rotor member Maarten Gielen, who reiterated the goal to create something tight and consistent around the main topic. 

Sustainability is a matter that's been close to Rotor's heart for years. 'The idea was born as early as our involvement with the OMA exhibition,' says Gielen. 'We didn't have the means to do it then but we knew it was a powerful theme.' And it has always been one of Rotor's core interests. 'We ask ourselves the same question that every practice asks - how can we push things forward, how can we make a difference? Reuse of materials is, for us among other strategies, a very interesting one.'

The triennale's flagship show 'Behind the Green Door' is a result of the curators' meticulous year-long research into the question of sustainability, and in particular what it means to key international architects. The items on display - collected from the archives of practices around the globe - are varied but carefully arranged. A timeline on one side highlights key sustainability-themed projects from the late 1960s until today, while several smaller thematic groupings on the other hone in on specific topics, such as materials.

Exhibits span projects such as Foster + Partners' Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and 2011 Wallpaper* Award-winner Villa Vals by Search and CMA. Non-architectural offerings - such as Uniqlo's proposal for a lightweight clothing range for warmer-than-usual office environments that don't use intense air-conditioning - complete the picture. 

Behind the Green Door is complemented by two further shows: one at the city's Sverre Fehn-designed Architecture Museum and a second at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). The former, entitled 'Far-out Voices', creates a dialogue with the Rotor-created event, offering a historical backdrop through various expressions of sustainability in the US during the 1960s and 1970s, from Michael Reynolds' 'Earthships' to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. The latter, titled 'Custom Made', focuses on the Norwegian architectural psyche and the nation's ever evolving relationship with nature, featuring work by Eriksen Skajaa, Rintala Eggertsson and Norwegian design heavyweights Snøhetta. 

Consciously aiming to distance itself from the exhibits and look into the notion of sustainability as 'outsiders', Rotor took on the role of historical investigator, delving into archives and texts pointing to the origins of sustainability. It's a term that derives - quite fittingly, as Rotor reminds us - from 'sustainable development', first defined by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in the 1987 Brundtland Commission report for the United Nations.

'This is a collection of projects that call themselves sustainable,' says Gielen. 'We are trying to work as historians, but in the present. And perhaps in 30 to 40 years, when the dust has settled, we will be able to see that there were, say, five different currents at that time.' Several talks, guided tours and collateral events will roll out throughout the three-month triennale, all elaborating on the main theme. 

ADDRESS

Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture
Hausmanns Gate 16
0182 Oslo

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

Putting together an architecture festival devoid of buildings might seem a daunting prospect for any organiser. Yet this is exactly what this year's Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, entitled Close, Closer, is bravely offering. 

Divisive as it may be, leaving the buildings out of the equation was not an end in itself for the curatorial team. 'The funny thing is that we didn't consider it that bold', explains the British chief curator Beatrice Galilee. 'I never told people not to put buildings in their shows. Our intention was to show the forces that shape architecture before the client comes in. We did not do this because we hate buildings or as a reactionary act.'

The premise is certainly a recipe for sparking debate, closing the gap between architecture practice and theory and focusing on the things, situations and people that help shape today's architecture, rather than the buildings themselves. 

In its structure, the Triennale is straightforward and consistent, with common threads, such as themes of control, participation and architecture's dialogue with its various influencers (such as technology, or independent organisations), running through its four main events.

Three of them are exhibitions; The Institute Effect, curated by writer and curator Dani Admiss and designed by Italian collective Fabrica, focuses on the role of architecture institutes. 'From the beginning, I had quite a clear idea of what I wanted to talk about: all the other forms of architecture practice', says Galilee. 'The Institute Effect is about the people who frame our understanding of architecture.' The show engages with 12 organisations from as far away as the US and Mexico, presenting a series of events during the festival.

Future Perfect, created by Liam Young, is an experimental look into the future of architecture and includes installations and performances by designers such as Bart Hess. 'We need big visions and bold gestures', says Young. 'It is not a time to retreat'.

Meanwhile, The Real and Other Fictions, orchestrated by Portuguese architect Mariana Pestana, takes its cue from one of the city's historical landmarks, the Palacio Pombal, revisiting its spaces and re-imagining its past uses in a series of installations that incite debate and participation.

The fourth leg of the festival, New Publics, is a public program of performances overseen by José Esparza Chong Cuy. This included a creative re-imagining of Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten documentary from 1977, by Spanish architect Andres Jaque and The Office of Political Innovation, called Superpowers of Ten. 'We wanted an alternative to the more traditional conference form, for our public program', explains Galilee. The result was a round civic stage designed by Frida Escobedo in central Lisbon that anybody could apply to use.

Many smaller collateral shows are peppered around town, many of these funded by the Triennale's Small Grants Program: Crisis Buster, that awarded a small sum to interdisciplinary teams - including Paris based collective EXYZT - to realise their proposals. Openly aiming to focus on young practices rather than established ones, the Triennale's team admittedly includes mostly non-Portuguese participations, although several local institutions are in dialogue with their international counterparts in the many interactive offerings.

Mirroring Portugal's ongoing economic woes, the Triennale sadly suffered from lack of steady funding, which, as Galilee admits, in many cases forced them to scale things down. 'All biennales are different. Nevertheless, there are of course things that you don't see here that you see in others, like big monographic exhibitions,' she explains. But economic restraints engender creative thinking. 'Working like this makes it difficult to make anything conventional,' Galilee adds. And, while the Lisbon event might not offer the drama and glamour of the Venice Biennale, it does create a valuable platform for debate and a fertile ground for the exchange of ideas, within the country and beyond.

Lisbon's rich urban and natural landscape also chipped in, offering a selection of beautiful venues, which were just as worth visiting; an old bank, complete with its underground vaults, houses the city's Design Museum as well as The Institute Effect; the Electricity Museum and Future Perfect are located in an old industrial power plant; and the stunning, yet neglected Palacio Pombal, the home of The Real and Other Fictions, sits in one of the city's finest neighbourhoods, Bario Alto, and has served in the past, among other uses, as a residence and an embassy.

Russia is famous for its grand landscapes stretching out to the horizon, free and wild. Some of these green fields and ex-farm collectives not too far from Moscow also serve as platforms for architectural experimentation. In 2005, two festivals with a truly unique format were born, where architects, designers and artists of all ages gather to build a showcase for visitors to camp around and enjoy the show.

The Goroda and Archstoyanie festivals both provide their participants with a chance to design and construct something that wouldn't be possible in an urban context. For some of its young contributors this is often their first chance to build.
 
Both events fully exploit their sites' rural potential. Goroda has previously travelled around Russia and beyond, finding its permanent home last year in an abandoned Soviet collective farm, the Archfarm. Ten structures currently remain from last year's festival, all site-specific 'answers to the place'. Some of them are playful and some truly functional - including the elegant and simple wooden huts, now rented out to frequent visitors.

Those participating in these festivals use natural local materials to full potential and build for the future. Archstoyanie, set over 120 hectares of land, is home to Alexander Brodsky's wooden Rotonda and Boris Bernaskoni's Arc. They were designed for the festival, but also help develop the surrounding national park.

Over 10,000 people visited Archstoyanie this year, joining special walks around the site and attending performances by contemporary artists. Both rural festivals are known for their thought-provoking designs, but also offer a fun day out for all; a sample of what the numerous Russian architecture and design festivals have to offer, both in town and the countryside.

Here's our pick of the top five Russian architecture festivals:

Archstoyanie festival
Organiser: Nikola-Lenivets
Curator: Anton Kochurkin  
When: Annually, every July for 3 days
Where: Kaluga's region, Dzerjinskiy district, Nikola-lenivets village

Goroda festival
Organiser: Ivan Ovchinnikov
When: biannually, every August and February, over 2 weeks in the summer and 2 weeks in the winter
Where: Tula region, Zaokskij village

Sretenka Design Week
Organiser: Andrei Samonaev
When: annually, every October for a week
Where: Moscow

Moscow Architecture Festival
Curator: Bart Goldhoorn
When: Annually, every May for 5 days
Where: Moscow

Moscow Biennale
Organiser: Vasiliy Bychkov
When: annually, over two weeks between May and June
Where: Moscow