London

Long Read Interview

Akram Khan on the Pleasure of Drowning in Horizontal Time

Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists and storytellers today. Khan’s work stays rooted in long-term creative partnerships and is mostly known for its…

Long Read Interview

Eva Oh on the Psychology of Desire and Sexwork in the City

My friends and I hit Nolita, an area of Lower Manhattan, one summer night; it was New York Fashion Week, and we headed to a magazine party for which…

Long Read Interview

Jayden Ali on the Ephemeral City Playfully Transformed

If we live in a city, we are well aware of how fast a neighbourhood can change with the addition of just one development. We may even have a…

Portfolio

Sophie von Hellermann

Long Read Interview

Isaac Julien on Contaminating the Gaze and the Narrative

I had the immense pleasure of meeting Isaac Julien in San Francisco on the occasion of his exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery located in Chinatown. Prior to flying to…

Long Read Interview

Penelope Haralambidou on Allegorical Construction and the Mirror for Princesses

In recent decades the medieval Italian poet and writer Christine de Pizan has been the subject of renewed interest, motivated by a feminist reappraisal of this remarkable, pioneering author…

Epistolary

An Urban Confessional

  Hi J., Our memories from Croydon keep on coming back these days. Did I ever tell you about the time I almost got mugged, roughed up a bit…

Long Read Interview

Katherine Angel on Vulnerability as Desire

Over the past dozen years, Katherine Angel’s writing has sought to create intimate spaces for sexual joy in spite of the myriad socially constructed barriers against that possibility today.

Extra Reading

Spy Stories

The espionage novel facilitates a delicious sort of voyeurism, giving you access to the intimate and sometimes sordid details of another human’s life. How do you feel about meeting the…

Some Thoughts On...

Cosmetics

  Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder. Nº1 • Femme Fatale In an iconic scene from Billy Wilder’s 1944 thriller…

Tentacular Thinking

Mistakes are Pure Colour

I am having an erotic lunch, I write to Ronnie. Entrecôte. Béarnaise. Sole meunière. White wine. A cigarette. I am in Paris, the city is hot, like a tongue,…

Extra Reading

Coming-of-Age Stories

Coming of age is the most exquisitely painful of life’s many transformations. It’s a period of heightened sensitivity to the world and bewilderment at the eruption of desires beyond our…

Epistolary

The Appropriate

Dear Branwell, I tried to marry every single one of my serious relationships. That first one, my first graduate school boyfriend, was ring shopping when I left him.

Some Thoughts On...

Cuisine

  Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Nº1 • Key Lime Pie At the beginning of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, two men go out for oysters.

Musings

Notes on Longing

        (I) Towards the end of 2020, my husband and I spent what felt like hours going over Covid-19 protocols. We were about to host…

Long Read Interview

Michael Armitage on Mythic Landscapes and Visual Memory

At the cusp of figurative and abstract aesthetic traditions, Michael Armitage’s paintings are large works of expressionist landscapes. Human–animal beings are woven into visual ecologies rich with sensual life.

Some Thoughts On...

Sexual Undertones

Silvana Mangano in Teorema (1968)© Reporters Associati – Roma Nº1 • Cinema as Refuge In a 1969 interview in Lyon,…

Long Read Interview

Tai Shani on Affects Unknown

Working across performance, film and installation, artist Tai Shani has steadily developed an intoxicating mythology. Drawn from Greek myths, science fiction, queer theory and feminist activism, her fictions trouble…

Long Read Interview

Bethan Laura Wood on the Dreamer that Dreams the Dream

In December 2015, I met Bethan Laura Wood at a serendipitous event, where a joint friend of ours, the curator Sigrid Kirk, hosted a group of female creatives over…

Long Read Interview

Saelia Aparicio on Masturbators and 
Hybrid-Bodied Creatures

Born in Valladolid, Spain and now living and working in London, artist Saelia Aparicio understands bodies – their leakiness, unruliness and sensitivity. Her sculptural cosmos is populated by hybrid…

Long Read Interview

Charlie Fox on Transformation 
and the Deliciously Weird Creatures 
Who Live within Him

Sometimes you pick up a book not realising the power that lies beneath its cover. Like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, what exactly is in it remains a mystery,…

Musings

Ocular Offal, Chromatic Cannibals

It was dusk when we sat on folding chairs in the concrete courtyard, our backs to the industrial steel bins. We tapped personal screens made of unbreakable sapphire to…

Portfolio

Antonia Showering

Long Read Interview

Tim Etchells on Ventriloquism, Phone Sex, and the Hard Work of Language

The erotic quality of the oeuvre of visual artist and writer Tim Etchells is perhaps not immediately apparent. Though it is conceptual in nature and precise in execution, his visual…

Portfolio

Victoria Sin

Portfolio

Patrizio Di Massimo

Musings

Event Horizon

Event is a thing that happens or takes place, marked by its levels of significance; it is the momentous imprint of planned or unplanned happenings that can have a social…

Long Read Interview

Ed Atkins on Abject Bodies, Incorporeality and Virtual Flesh

Many years ago at Tate Britain, I picked up a small paperback written by an artist called Ed Atkins. Stacked in a darkened exhibition space that preceded a screening room,…

Tentacular Thinking

The Monstrous Passion

The tongue, this invertebrate, which is the grey eminence of Amorpolis, is the prime minister in the shadow cabinet; in fact, much more capable than the officially serving Penis;…

Essay

Musings

Do You Want to Play…

How shall we start talking about the course of activities that does not serve to represent you? Would you be interested in such an activity in the first instance? Do…

Long Read Interview

Matthew Beaumont on London Nightwalking: Evoking the Dangerous and Sensual

Life brings coincidences, or coincidences pronounce life. I came across Matthew Beaumont’s tremendous research at one of my favourite bookshops in London. Currently wrapped up in thinking about the night…

Portfolio

Celia Hempton

Portfolio

Lena C. Emery

Musings

Warding Off the Evil Eye

In ancient Rome, there was a firm scientific belief in the Evil Eye, a curse fired from the glare of a malevolent gazer on an unsuspecting…

Long Read Interview

James Richards on Physical Logics and Living with Images

Turner-Prize nominated artist James Richards uses a particular phrase to describe his fascination with the films of fellow artist Steve Reinke; that through his work you get a sense…

Long Read Interview

Simon Stephens on Scorsese, Libidinous Creativity and Looking for Humanity Where You Least Expect it

I first met Simon Stephens when he conducted a workshop with a group of young directors at the National Theatre Studio in London. He gave us chunks from his latest…

Musings

Principles of Pleasure

Pleasure is a double bind. Its inherent quality of finitude keeps you under the influence. It attracts and repels at all times. Perhaps it is a continuous engagement and negotiation…

Portfolio

Ivar Wigan

Portfolio

Matt Lambert

Long Read Interview

Eddie Peake on Revolution, the Ideal Body, and Roger Rabbit

Eddie Peake’s artworks marshal affect to inseminate the hallowed gallery space with a sweaty slick of bodies rendered under the fluorescent light of the nightclub. Driven by jungle music, his…

Portfolio

David Haines