Y2K Nostalgia: With Love From Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban
Decorating your childhood bedroom with stickers, posters and magazine-cutouts is the earliest memory of home-making for many. It’s an exercise you return to as you move flats, change cities, countries, personalise work spaces, studios, and, in the present case, stage an exhibition adjacent to one of London’s most prestigious commercial art galleries. In 04). I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman, Kardashian and Mhach Durban bring their homes with them, performing the familiar task of placing trinkets, sticking shiny golden stars and sharing their favourite CDs and DVDs.
Read here.
Plinth Magazine
December 2024
December 2024
Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban - 04.) I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman - Soup at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ.
Louis Blue Newby & Laila Majid
For METAL, Kollektiv Collective discuss with the duo the tension amidst addition and erasure, formalism and intimacy, private and public spheres, revealed in the hazy, playfully evasive texture of their drawings. In a durational, complex exercise of layering and processing digital imagery, repetition becomes an act of mediating and destabilising surfaces and appearances. Also, as a way for the two pairs of hands to work indistinguishably as one, repetition re-contextualises source material, collapsing temporalities and techniques and altering perceptions in the process. Visit Inner Heat on view at Goldsmiths CCA until 12 January 2025.
Read here.
METAL Magazine
November 2024
November 2024
Nothing Concrete: A Case Against Perfect Cities
Transit through infrastructure is pre-planned by others, so well that the design is barely noticeable, in perfect adherence to the behavioural anticipations of those in charge. Following in predetermined footsteps creates a sort of comfort that quickly turns unnerving, as theories on control and surveillance inherent in urban planning await right around the corner, closely followed by those of science fiction. The city becomes a perfect maze, one that is almost too easy to navigate. Unsettling in its accessibility, it is a maze nonetheless.
Read here.
Something Curated
November 2024
November 2024
Nothing New: Exhibition-making Against the Myth of Novelty
Space is often treated as a given entity, a set parameter that one may accept or reject, but never truly shape. Albeit entirely abstract, vocabulary around “space” is frequently employed towards utilitarian ends, so much so that its simultaneously undefined and open-ended character is disguised. To reclaim space, assume responsibility that comes with guardianship and make it our own would presuppose our command of said entity.
Read here.
Something Curated
January 2024
January 2024
On the Baadar-Meinhof Phenomenon, Accidents, and Spilled Ink
Repetition, chances of an encounter, accidents and convincing coincidences. My personal case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is, unironically, learning about accidents and convincing coincidences. It is a puzzling predicament, studying the development of art history, or any history, analysing the blend of colours, the choice of structure, and not fully appreciating the essential accident, or the essential restriction, that produced what we now consider a ‘genius’.
Read here.
The Art Columnist
2021
2021
Sleeping Woman (1929) by Man Ray. Gelatin silver print (solarized), 16.5 × 21.6 cm. © 2023 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.