“you have more in common with an orca than a billionaire”
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This Week
💦 champagne-drenched Hermoine Granger
💦 aquatic accelerationists
💦 recumbent vegetables
Events
We’re pumped and ready for the packed week ahead! Heading our list is the opening of Kupfer’s new space on Thursday, with a top notch group show featuring Louis Blue Newby, Laila Majid, Ana Viktoria Dzinic, Waj Hussain, Lowena Hearn, Hongxi Li, Anya Gorkova, George Stuart, Woodsy Bransfield, firpal, Sofia Hallström and Dani Marcel; Judith Dean at South Parade on Friday; and Worms mag’s new edition launch, featuring the likes of Helen Marten, Martine Syms, Diamond Stingily etc. see u there wormies x
🧊 12 July | 6-8pm | Sam Moore: Search History (book launch), Tender Books [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 12 July | 6-9pm | Ripe Bananas, (Studio Programme Painters Leaving Show) Turps HQ [Elephant and Castle]
🧊 12 July | 6-9pm | Sam King: Seeing is Believing, Eve Leibe Gallery [Marble Arch]
🧊 12 July | 6:30-8:30pm | WORMS magazine / Artists that Write and Writers that Art (Issue launch), Donlon Books [London Fields]
🧊 13 July | 6-9pm | Allow Cookies, group show curated by Isabel Walter, Isabel Davies & Laurie Barron, Kupfer *new location alert* [Shoreditch High Street]
🧊 13 July | 6-8pm | The Belly and the Guts, curated in collaboration with Dr Ian Hartshorne, Alice Amati [Warren St]
🧊 14 July | 12-7:30pm | RCA, MFA Degree Show, Truman Brewery [Shoreditch High Street]
🧊 14 July | 7-9pm | Aurel Schmidt: Trash Dolls, Gathering at Glasshouse Projects [Tottenham Court Road]
🧊 14 July | 6-8pm | Judith Dean: New Builds/Bilds, South Parade [Deptford]
Exhibition of the week
Athen & Nina: Sleepover, Glasshouse Projects, until TODAY (Tuesday 11 July), info here.
In the back of Gathering on Warwick street in Soho is Glasshouse Projects, an experimental space for ‘emergent creative practitioners’. Here, Nina Mhach Durban and Athen Kardashian have built a shrine to teenage dreams. This show is a portrait, painted with objects, of a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. From every wall, posters of Bollywood pin ups gaze, their eye makeup perfect. I stare back at these larger works furtively and a bit exhilarated, like a Come Dine With Me dash to the host’s bedroom to comb through their belongings in the hopes of discovering a secret. Secrets are everywhere: imbued in the carefully arranged talismanic objects that cover the room’s shelves and surfaces. Pretty little plastic toys, DVDs, a digital camera, neon nail varnish, a Blondie tape, cucumber face masks, souvenir magnets, cheap mascara, a High School Musical era Zac Efron sticker… as well as designer bindis, Jura Pins, a pack of Santoshi sticker kumkum (with clinically tested adhesive), the actress Amrita Arora in a gold bandeau in front of a hot pink background, a doll wearing a sari, Bollywood postcards…
The use of white boards, pin boards and display cabinets instead of canvas and traditional frames allow the artists to add even greater emphasis to the materiality to the work and build layers of complexity – with materials like hoodies and grains of rice – into their composition. The composition in question is the entire room: it reads as a teenage bedroom, or an archive of idiosyncratic adolescent ephemera where influences from India and the South Asian diaspora mingle with a Union Jack tin and ‘London’ key rings.
It’s a show that presents a nuanced snapshot at identity construction – culturally specific and yet universal in its visceral sense of longing and giddy aspiration. Athen and Nina perfectly capture the mid-teens feeling, just before your first heartbreak, when childhood still functions as protective bubblewrap and dreaming of growing up and being glamorous is a serious preoccupation. As is, of course, manifesting a sexgod boyfriend like Tom and/or Robbie from Angus Thongs & Perfect Snogging… those were the days xoxo
Hot Links
🐍 “I’m just a malignant narcissist who does things for attention” – The inimitable Caroline Calloway gives a candid interview to Adina Glickstein on her viral Cambridge days, fake friends, adderall addictions, being a snake oil saleswoman and ‘the it girl as a start up’ concept… for Spike x
🐴 “An indoor training paddock for police horses” – spittle fave Sean Burns goes hard on JW Anderson’s newest runway installation - this time with Lynda Benglis - for Frieze. and we can’t get enough! More art-fashion-art dialogic please!
🐋 Orcas! Submarines! Billionaires! – Günseli Yalcinkaya delves into the deep in this discussion of how and why deep sea myth making is taking over the internet for Dazed. We, too, are on the side of the Orcas.
🗑️ The hood as “mythic space” – we have recently discovered the gift of Reuben Esien’s gossip rag and their charming ‘Bargain Bin’ book review feature (featuring charity shop buys under £3). We are now obsessed with and desperately looking for little known treasure, Driven (2005) by Kashamba Williams. All we ask for is a commitment to vibe.
Add-to-Cart
Everyone’s favourite cool girl Chloe Sevigny is back with an (obviously) chic relaunch of her Régimes des Fleurs collab, Little Flower - and it’s the perfect sexy summer scent ! Described as ‘juicy, romantic’, we can’t think of anything better to get us through this hot, wet summer 💋
Parting Shot
Last week, the Evening Standard magazine asked two unassuming Londoners how they would hypothetically spend a £200 ‘culture grant’ from the UK government in perhaps the most pointless vox pop ever carried out. Aindrea (Bayswater) sadly missed the point of both the question and the initiative (aimed at boosting a city’s cultural sector) suggesting she would instead fly to another city which, incidentally, happens to be the most expensive city in the world. Mark (Chelsea) (lol) suggested he would buy an 18th century antique at auction. Where did ES Mag go to find such auspicious representatives of the British public? *Surely* not the Serpentine summer party….