The Prada Rong Zhai sits on North Shaanxi Road in Shanghai, behind a stretch of wall and a detail of guards. Built in the early twentieth century as a private mansion, with Corinthian columns, leaded-glass windows,…
1: The Giantess When I first saw her in 2023, I had a job that paid me to tell stories about animals and an apartment in Berlin I rarely left. Most days I was squirreled under…
The 61st Venice Biennale, “In Minor Keys,” cites One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez as one of its inspirations—the story of Macondo, the town where the novel unfolds. A fragment that never made…
By Alt Går Bra (Branko Boero Imwinkelried and Agnes Nedregård)
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Aaron Cobbett’s analog camera immortalized queer nightlife in Manhattan’s East Village through fabulous photo shoots that both rivaled contemporary fashion editorials and rejected the fashion world’s unattainable beauty ideals. Most…
In 2008, the publishing giant Penguin Random House launched their Penguin Clothbound Classics (PCC) series, featuring attractively bound copies of the English literary canon. The books are affordable collectibles with a clear aesthetic formula: linen hardcovers,…
Oil circulates crisis. Paying forty bucks at the gas pump bankrolls war crimes; occupations abroad top off gas tanks at home. Speculation made in crude oil stocks monetizes occupation, and plunder finances endless consumption. Infrastructure’s deadly…
Approaching the university as a site of both critique and endeavor, Ben Spatz’s Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research offers a series of refreshingly challenging claims whose implications for academic inquiry…
In Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature (2025), literary studies scholar Emma Bond forays into urgent debates concerning the future of public museums. On its face, a literary theorist’s intervention in museum studies discourse—and operational museology at that—might…
Los Angeles is the kind of place that drives people—artists, writers, filmmakers—not just to understand it but to reckon with it, to publicly parse its ungraspable multiplicity. Such is the task handed to the rotating curators of the Hammer…
