The form and identity of artistic practices.
Is it identity that determines form or form that somehow constitutes the identity of an artistic practice? While analyzing some notable visual practices — each inescapably linked to an artist's personality and the ways in which they experience society—
Flash Art reflected on this question. In this winter issue, titled
FORMS/IDENTITIES,
Flash Art delves into these two concepts that inform one another like complementary colors. Octavia Bürgel, in her text on Tourmaline, one of the issue's cover stories, considers the words of Diane Arbus, who once wondered "what it is to become whoever we may be." Unlike Arbus's subjects, who in a sense cease to exist beyond their limited picture plane, Tourmaline's presence in her videos and photographs becomes part of a shared real-world narrative, a part of the legacy of Black history that she questions by "taking an approach that renders herself indivisible from ancestors in the fight for transgender liberation."
Spanning performance, works on paper, and photography, Tosh Basco's practice, as Matthew McLean points out, "finds forms for the inexpressible, in order to explore what happens outside languages and in between them." Whether they employ movement, lip-synching, mark-making, or the photographic image, her embodied works are like portals to a fleeting moment in time.
Stories of transdisciplinary identities intermingle in this issue. One of them is the preternaturally gifted artist, musician, model, and actress Kaya Wilkins — known in the creative industry as Okay Kaya, the other cover story of this issue. Among other things, she discusses with Isabelia Herrera her visceral connection to water, a motif that finds expression in multiple forms, including her latest album,
SAP (2022), released last November.
Returning to photography, Olamiju Fajemisin offers us a fresh and timely analysis of
Wolfgang Tillmans, arguing how "his recurrent point of departure is the single image—an image that is self-sufficient and attempts to challenge its condition of singularity as a standalone work."
In this issue:
Black-American Mytho-Cinematic Universe. Tourmaline by Octavia Bürgel;
Form and Feeling. Tosh Basco by Matthew McLean; Letter from the city.
We've Shamed the Sacklers. Who's next? by PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now);
Multitudinal Pictures. Wolfgang Tillmans by Olamiju Fajemisin; Visual Project.
The Song of the Land is Calling. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme by Noam Segal; SEMIOFUCK.
Episode II: Rom-Comms by Armature Globale;
Arizona 2000. Special project by
Sylvie Fleury;
Even My Subconscious is Self-Conscious. Okay Kaya in Conversation with Isabelia Herrera; Profile.
GmbH at Trussardi: It's About Time by Charlie Robin Jones; One to Watch.
Extinction and Extraction: Archival Politics in the Work of Jumana Manna by Jane Ursula Harris;
I Do What I Can. Gaetano Pesce in Conversation with
Hans Ulrich Obrist; Critic Dispatch.
The Dawn of Endcore by Shumon Basar;
God's Fertile Excrement. Tita Cicognani by Franklin Melendez; Questionnaire.
In Pursuit of the Masquerade. My Barbarian in Conversation with Jazmina Figueroa.
Flash Art is a contemporary art and culture magazine (and a
publishing platform) founded in 1967. Within a decade, it became an indispensable point of reference for artists, critics, collectors, galleries, and institutions. In 2020,
Flash Art became a quarterly publication, at the same time increasing its trim size and updating its graphic identity. The magazine offers a fresh perspective on the visual arts, covering a range of transdisciplinary approaches and fostering in-depth analyses of artist practices and new cultural directions. Today,
Flash Art remains required reading for all who navigate the international art scene.
Flash Art is known for it covers featuring artists who subsequently become leading figures in the art world. The magazine includes photoshoots, productions, critical essays, monographic profiles, conversations with emerging and established artists, and a range of ongoing and thematic columns that change every few years. The long history of the magazine is also highlighted by pivotal texts from the archive that are included in the publication time to time. Finally, every issue offers a highly curated selection of the best institutional exhibitions on the global scene.
