artfridge

INTERVIEW: BOGNA BURSKA AND DANIEL KOTOWSKI

2026-07-20T14:34:24.195+02:00

Team of "Liquid Tongues," photo by Jacopo Salvi (altomare): Zacheta Archive

Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski's piece “Liquid Tongues” was chosen for the Polish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2026). It unfolds over a two-screen video installation. Thirty members of the Chór w Ruchu (Choir in Motion), which consists of hearing and deaf people, perform the libretto both underwater and on the surface, using sound and sign language to move across various forms of communication. Inspired by Roger Payne's legendary 1970 recordings Songs of the Humpback Whale, which led to a ban on whale hunting, “Liquid Tongues” explores possibilities of multi-sensory communication, Deaf Gain, and the importance of giving "voice" to bring about societal transformation. Interview by Lea Schleiffenbaum.

INTERVIEW: "PIERCING THROUGH"

2025-12-17T14:24:00.006+01:00

Natalia del Mar Kašik, Aufsicht, videostill, 2024

In piercing through, a current group exhibition at DAS WEISSE HAUS developed within the Curators’ Agenda: VIENNA 2025, the curators Trinity Njume-Ebong, Ahmad Darkhabani and João Dias turn their attention to a concept that exerts persistent pressure on artistic lives and institutions alike—success. Working with eight emerging artists selected through an open call at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the curatorial trio examines how success is produced, performed, and contested—across institutions, markets, diasporic trajectories and personal biographies—amid shrinking cultural budgets and a rightward political shift that increasingly pressures the art field. Their exhibition moves between conceptual, performative and materially experimental approaches, addressing how value and recognition circulate today. In conversation with Anna-Lena Werner, the curators discuss their criteria, collective process, and how navigating a residency shaped their thinking about the urgencies of this moment.

INTERVIEW: BASSAM ISSA AL-SABAH & JENNIFER MEHIGAN

2025-11-20T10:32:00.005+01:00

"Uncensored Lilac" (still) HD CGI Film (2024) © Bassam Issa Al-Sabah & Jennifer Mehigan.

In this conversation with artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, we discuss “Biolytic Daughter”, their collaborative exhibition at VSSL Studio in London (6–30 November 2025), which unfolds within the programme “Entanglements of the Apocalypse”. Emerging from their collaborative film project “Uncensored Lilac,” the exhibition expands their shared world of digital mythology and queer sensuality into sculptural and spatial forms. Our discussion traces the feverish, ironic tenderness at the heart of their collaboration and how they navigate the blurred boundaries between beauty and collapse, digital desire and embodied decay. We also speak about working with Carefuffle––a disability- and queer-led working group rooted in the principles of care, interconnectedness, authorship and social justice––who have been supporting VSSL Studio and the artists in making the exhibition as accessible as possible. This collaboration has opened up new ways of thinking about care and access as integral to artistic production rather than as an afterthought.

“Entanglements of the Apocalypse” is a transdisciplinary programme exploring queer and trans imaginaries of world-building in response to ongoing collapse, co-curated by Mine Kaplangı, Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Ash McNaughton at VSSL Studio in London. Grounded in research and collective practice, it resists capitalist and colonial framings of apocalypse as an end, instead approaching it as a continuous condition, a site for transformation, intimacy, and speculative renewal.

INTERVIEW: FLORIAN DOMBOIS

2025-07-14T10:55:00.002+02:00

Florian Dombois, Triple Instruments, 2019, Photo: Florian Amoser, ZHdK

In this interview, Florian Dombois and I reflect on his pioneering role in the field of artistic research and the path that led him there. “I had doubts about geophysics and the approach of the natural sciences from the very first semester, but I couldn't bring myself to drop out,” he says, looking back on the beginning of his studies. I have been working with Florian as his research assistant and co-curator of the annual Wind Tunnel Festival at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since 2022. Together with our colleague Berit Seidel from the artists collective U5, we explore strategies, methods, and formats of being-in-the-world within our academic and artistic practices. Florian has been an artist and professor in the Research Focus on Transdisciplinarity at ZHdK since 2012, where he leads artistic research projects and founded an artistic PhD program. His artistic practice dates back to the 1990s, the founding years of artistic research. For us, it seemed a fitting moment to reflect on Florian’s work and take a step back to consider the early introduction of what is now a highly discussed field — artistic research.

INTERVIEW: MANOR GRUNEWALD

2025-06-02T11:47:00.006+02:00

Manor Grunewald, "Re-Painting Class Studio" 2025, all images © the artist

In the exhibition “Timeline Samples” at Berthold Pott Gallery in Cologne, Belgian artist Manor Grunewald revisits his own painterly archive, reconfiguring earlier works through processes of sampling, reproduction, and self-referencing. By integrating techniques from both amateur painting manuals and digital printing technologies, his practice interrogates the circulation of visual knowledge and the construction of artistic authorship — turning painting into a recursive, self-referencing system. In this conversation, Grunewald reflects on how the studio informs his decisions in exhibition-making, how intuition and iteration shape his process, and how the boundaries between professional and pedagogical image economies begin to dissolve.

INTERVIEW: EVERY ISLAND

2024-08-07T22:54:00.005+02:00

Standing, from left to right: Andrea Mancini, Juliane Seehawer (EI), Caterina Malavolti (EI), Alessandro Cugola (EI) Seated: Joel Valabrega (MUDAM), Martina Genovesi (EI) © Alessandro Simonetti, 2023

Formed in early 2021, the Brussels-based design collective Every Island investigates space as a means for transitions of roles, stages, and meaning. Together with sound artist Andrea Mancini, the collective was invited to conceive this year’s contribution for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. "A Comparative Dialogue Act" is production space, stage, sound library, and immersive sculpture in one. Designed as an ongoing process, the work will be completed by four sound artists, who were invited to interact with the infrastructure and sound library over the course of the biennale. Lea Schleiffenbaum talked with Every Island members Italian artist Alessandro Cugola and German artist Juliane Seehawer about their work in Venice, the creative act of listening, the notion of performativity in space, and the strength of collaboration.

INTERVIEW: ÉLISE LAFONTAINE

2023-08-31T17:51:00.005+02:00

Élise Lafontaine in our studio, 2023 © Lawrence Fafard

Last April, I collaborated with Élise Lafontaine on her exhibition "Dornach Pillars", at Centre Clark in her hometown Montreal, Canada. I was willing to meet up again to take a reflective, perhaps already nostalgic look back at the exhibition. In the course of our discussion, Élise Lafontaine evoked her relationship to painting, from its technique, its history and the representatives that touch her personally, to the very object, in volume, of painting. She spoke about her investigations, proprioception and spatiality, the inner sound of organ pipes, about the architectures that confine her personal memories but also about her almost visceral need to disorientate and to disorientate herself. We took a stroll around the exhibition, through her paintings and current thoughts, and delve into her work, right to the back side of her canvas, or around.

INTERVIEW: SOPHIE ERLUND

2023-07-22T21:55:00.006+02:00

Portrait Sophie Erlund in her studio / photo: Anna-Lena Werner

There is always something unrecognizable – a small moment of disturbance and hesitation – in the work of Sophie Erlund, a Danish born artist living and working in Berlin. Trained as a sculptor during her BA at London’s Central St. Martins College, as well as in Copenhagen and Rhode Island in the US, she dedicates her practice to creating sculptures, installations and soundscapes and to exploring questions about the more-than-human. Starting her career in Berlin with legendary self-organized group exhibitions in her apartment, titled “HOMEWORK”, she has since exhibited internationally in galleries and museums.

It’s early spring 2023 – Sophie and I are now sitting in her studio in Kreuzberg, located inside a large industrial backyard building where lots of artist friends and Sophie’s partner also have their workspaces. Her dog Ayla joins us, we drink strong coffee. We’re surrounded by singular works of hers that were once part of an exhibition she did or currently in preparation for upcoming projects. I am resting my eyes on a wood structure that is placed on a table just next to us and seems to be in progress of becoming something else. Again, I can’t figure it out, but it looks like one of Sophie’s pieces. Both organic and architectural, no recognizable shape and still familiar. I ask her about its history and she shows me a photo of a similar work, once integrated in an exhibition called “Lived synchronicity” at PSM Gallery in Berlin in 2018. That’s how our interview begins.

INTERVIEW: MYKOLA RIDNYI

2022-11-08T15:53:00.011+01:00

Mykola Ridnyi, Grey Horses, film still, 2016

“I want to say something about this situation without repeating the violence”, says Mykola Ridnyi – Ukrainian multi-media artist, who dedicated much of his artistic research to the question of how and how not to respond and represent images of conflicts. Carefully, his films, installations and public art works address states and histories of violence – especially the Russian war against Ukraine – through poetic moving images, fictional narratives or non-linear montages. His works were shown in various international exhibitions, such as at La Biennale di Venezia, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, daad galerie Berlin, Transmediale in Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Museum for Modern Art in Warsaw and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm. In April and May 2022, Mykola and I had two video calls between Berlin and Ukraine, followed by jointly editing the interview according to the situation of his country and his hometown Kharkiv. As opposed to Springtime, when Mykola had to find shelter in Lviv and could not leave the country, he is now able to travel to his exhibitions and currently spends a residency at the Quadriennale di Roma in Italy. In our conversation, we spoke about his theory that relates the science of vision to the perception of war, about how media enforces a voyeuristic addiction to images of violence and about the current situation for Ukrainian artists.

INTERVIEW: DIEGO MARCON

2022-09-26T14:00:00.001+02:00

Diego Marcon, "The Parents’ Room", 2021 / Digital video transferred from 35mm film, CGI animation, color, sound, loop of 6’23’’ / Film frame © Diego Marcon. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

Diego Marcon (*1985) is an artist and filmmaker based in Milan. His work ranges from short camera-less animations such as Untitled (Head falling 01, 02, 03, 04, 05) (2015) and immersive sound pieces such as ToonsTunes (Four Pathetic Movements) (2016), to larger productions involving entire production teams such as Monelle (2017) set in Casa del Fascio by Terragni in Como. His film The Parents’ Room (2021) is currently shown in “The Milk of Dreams”, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani. Taking the form of a musical, Marcon’s film tells the story of a man who killed his wife and two children before committing suicide. Watching it in the context of an exhibition, which has a clear focus on female and gender non-binary artists, I could not help thinking of it as marking an end point for nuclear family structures. Diego Marcon prefers to keep a distance to interpretation. Instead, we talked about the refusal to persuade, power systems, the beauty of the collective and possibilities of transformation for those still living.

INTERVIEW: CORNELIA BALTES

2022-09-10T14:12:00.014+02:00

Studio Cornelia Baltes, Photo credit: Cornelia Baltes

A bold and strong palette marks the surfaces of Cornelia Baltes’ large paintings: The German artist and London Slade School alumni perfectionated the play between abstract and figurative motifs on intense colour fields. Gradients, spray colours and fine brushstrokes are applied in thin layers. A shape that we may recognise on the canvases could be a peach or a bottom, or perhaps a set of eyes – these forever undefined “characters”, as Baltes refers to her paintings, convey joyfulness and humour. While preparing her solo exhibition “Waggle Dance” at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, we met in her Berlin studio to talk about how she defines titles for her works, about paintings as theatrical objects and about archives of ideas.

INTERVIEW: INDIA NIELSEN

2021-11-05T13:36:00.003+01:00

India Nielsen "guardie e ladri (cops and robbers)" - 2021 - photo © Damian Griffiths

In her paintings, London-based artist India Nielsen interweaves subjective experience with elements of the 1990s and 2000s pop culture. As a teenager, she identified with MTV (Music Television) stars, such as Britney Spears, Madonna and Eminem. At the same time, the visual, ritualistic world of her Catholic upbringing were formative: the saints with their supernatural abilities, seemed to her to reflect aspects of the human psyche split in pieces, the iconography of the Sacred Heart and the Weeping Virgin Mary and the spiritual dimension of Catholicism. India Nielsen sees her paintings as vessels in which her inner life, her memories, feelings and projections can be inscribed and unfold. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 2012 to 2016 and graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2018. On the occasion of her London solo presentation “M is for Madonna, M is for Mariah, M is for Mother” at Darren Flook (which also marks the inauguration of his new gallery space, a former psychotherapist’s office on 106 Great Portland St.), we discuss the effects the COVID-19 pandemic had on Nielsen’s practice, her enduring love for pre-eminent pop divas, her fascination with the saints of the Roman Catholic Church and the distinct dichotomies that pervade the artist’s painting practice.

INTERVIEW: ULRIK MØLLER

2021-08-01T15:24:00.020+02:00

Ulrik Møller in his Berlin studio, 2021, photo by Anna-Lena Werner

In a typical industrial Berlin backyard, close to the little river Panke in the busy district of Wedding, the Danish artist Ulrik Møller found a bright space to create landscape paintings of his Danish home in Fyn and many other rural places. This opposition, between what he paints and where he produces the work, is inherently embedded in each single work as a longing for what is not around. Referencing and employing traditional techniques of painting, his art is always a manifestation of the endless travel between home and distance, between the comfortable and the exploration of the unknown. While visiting him in his studio, we talked about honest art, romanticism and Ulrik's current exhibition "Happy Together" at Faaborg Museum in Denmark.

INTERVIEW: MARIANA HAHN

2021-07-15T20:40:00.003+02:00

Mariana Hahn, photo © Philippe Chancel

Through photography, video, installation and imprinting Mariana Hahn investigates the modes of image making, the processes of archiving and transmission. Mariana digs the memory of her body, of her own genealogy and she depicts the transfer of knowledge from one body to another, from a woman to another. But she also tracks the recurrences and survivals (Nachleben) of collective memories and traumas. "Eros and Thanatos Made a Child" is a multifaceted installation by Mariana Hahn presented by Display, Berlin, at the photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles, from July 4 to August 29, 2021. In that framework, it was shortlisted for the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer curated this year by Sonia Voss.

INTERVIEW: ALPER TURAN

2021-03-15T14:28:00.006+01:00

Alper Turan, Photo: Maurine Tric, Protocinema, Istanbul

Alper Turan is a curator from Istanbul currently based in Berlin. Despite the challenges caused by the pandemic, he curated the group exhibition, "A Finger for an Eye", commissioned & presented by Protocinema within Protocinema's Emerging Curator mentorship series, at Poşe in Istanbul (until the 23rd of March), focusing on queer positioning as a response to the ongoing attacks on queer representations, symbols from the Turkish government. We talked about how Alper's curatorial practice has developed throughout the years and what it was like to curate a physical exhibition that needs and calls physical interactions during a pandemic.

INTERVIEW: BASIM MAGDY

2020-12-10T17:46:00.010+01:00

Basim Magdy "Renegade Dreams Hanging from the Clouds" at König Galerie, Berlin. Photos © Roman Maerz, Courtesy the artist and König Galerie, Berlin

"What if the sky is giant mirror reflecting our fantasies?" the movie "New Acid" by Egyptian artist Basim Magdy asks. Hosting his exhibition "Renegade Dreams Hanging From The Clouds" at König Galerie Berlin currently presents the artist's film work together with eight of his paintings. In our e-mail interview, I chatted with the Switzerland-based artist about what it was like to organise an exhibition during a global pandemic and lockdown restrictions, as well as the various sources of his inspiration for the works in the show and his practice in general.

INTERVIEW: NEHA KUDCHADKAR

2020-10-23T12:28:00.007+02:00

Neha Kudchadkar "Handjob", 2018, Image © Stashia D'souza for Mumbai Art Room

Neha Kudchadkar works at the intersection between ceramics, installation and photography. While in the making she often uses her own body as a tool, she also implies it as a site of investigation with materiality, spatiality, identity and otherness. Neha Kudchadkar’s ceramic work Handjob will be featured in the exhibition “Love Letters: Stories of Distant Proximities” at Horse and Pony, Berlin, from the 24th of October until the 22nd of November, 2020. The curators of the show, Lea Schleiffenbaum and Marie DuPasquier took the opportunity to discuss with the artist on her work presented in the show, her process, and her thoughts on intimacy, touching and caring in times of social distancing.

INTERVIEW: MELANIE AND STEPHANIE HAUSBERGER

2020-10-04T11:04:00.003+02:00

Art is always a joint endeavour for Melanie and Stephanie Hausberger. Since their studies at the New York School of Visual Arts, the Austrian-born identical twin sisters have been creating all their works – especially drawings and paintings – together. Their visual language reveals the influence of art from the era of classical modernism – Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and above all, Egon Schiele shine through. Although their works are figurative and representational, they display a high degree of abstraction. After finishing their studies, Melanie and Stephanie Hausberger travelled a lot, but they have also set up a small studio in the Tyrolean Alps.

INTERVIEW: AILBHE NÍ BHRIAIN

2020-04-14T15:42:00.001+02:00

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is presenting “Inscriptions IV”, her fourth solo exhibition at Domobaal Gallery in London, including her photographic, tapestry and sculptural works. In our interview she spoke about her collaboration with an algorithm and her recent video works selected for the Artists’ Film Festival.

INTERVIEW: ANDY GRAYDON

2020-04-03T18:08:00.003+02:00

Andy Graydon works with sound, performance and video. In his works he often questions and analyzes the coherence and compatibility of art and science, which I find most intriguing in terms of our understanding of nature. Andy and I met in Berlin a few years ago, and since then continued exchanging ideas on displacement, islandness and the role of fiction for future imaginaries. A short excerpt from our long lasting conversations to be continued…

INTERVIEW: MARIANNA SIMNETT

2020-02-04T21:49:00.003+01:00

Marianna Simnett, The Bird Game (film still), 2019. Courtesy: the artist, FVU, the Rothschild Foundation and the Frans Hals Museum

In 2018, just after the New Museum in New York, the Museum für Moderne Kunst / MMK Zollamt, in Frankfurt hosted an exhibition that presented Marianna Simnett's immersive five-channel video installation Blood in My Milk (2018). I visited this work more than five times with different friends and colleagues. Rewriting narratives grotesquely, this work of Marianna Simnett stayed with me for months, causing flashbacks to multiple references in the 73-minute film, such as its sensual and often shocking images, sounds and dialogues. In her practice, she plays with barely-visible borders between reality, fiction and politics, while Simnett places herself into the scripts not only as the storyteller, but also the sorcerer, the observer and, eventually, the artist. Simnett’s current solo exhibition My Broken Animal continues at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem until 23rd of February. We had a conversation about how fables and tales, processes of excess and Surrealism play into her practice, and about how she became to be an artist in the first place.

INTERVIEW: HELL GETTE

2020-01-13T22:04:00.002+01:00

Hell Gette manages to perform the balancing act between analogue and digital media effortlessly: while travelling, she works on plein air watercolours, paints on the iPhone or iPad and creates abstracts from depictions of nature with Photoshop. She paints the resulting images in oil, photographs them and inserts emojis via mobile apps. Finally, these pictures are transferred back to the canvas in oil paint. Hell calls the results "#Landscape 3.0". At the age of five, she arrived in Germany from Kazakhstan. She studied painting with Markus Oehlen at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich from 2012 to 2017. At the end of her studies, she was awarded the debutante prize of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture.

INTERVIEW: TAL R

2019-11-25T23:35:00.001+01:00

Tal R "Natten (The Night)", 2019 (Detail); ": Men Who Can't Sit on Horses" at Magasin III Jaffa, Photo: Noam Preisman

Tal R is one of Denmark's most influential artists, known particularly for his unique use of colour. Recently his show “: Men Who Can’t Sit On Horses” opened at the Museum Magasin III Jaffa in his birth city Tel Aviv. The exhibition includes only one commissioned painting, which has the exact same measurement as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” from 1937: 3,49 meter high and 7,77 meter wide, "Natten" (The Night) took Tal R about 9 months to finish. A conversation about bittersweet tragedies.

INTERVIEW: AHMET ÖĞÜT & BURAK ARIKAN

2019-10-26T09:00:00.001+02:00

To make visible the ongoing call-for-action for equal rights and fair payment in the arts, the researchers and artists Ahmet Öğüt and Burak Arıkan founded the outstanding online platform Code of Acquisitions. The website allows users to submit experiences and cases they had with an arts organisation and from the collected data it visualises complex mappings showcasing the institutions's or gallery's practices. These personal and disquieting experiences between artists, art practitioners and institutions are usually discussed in small, closed networks and they are often considered as unprecedented local system malfunctions. The platform, however, shows how these unspoken issues are embedded in the core of the global art system and how we can have alternative possibilities of collective discourses and support methodologies.

INTERVIEW: LATITUDES

2019-10-07T11:08:00.003+02:00

I met the curator Mariana Cánepa Luna during her talk with the Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui at her current exhibition “Agras Volcano. Mining Rights” at the IVAM in Valencia. Afterwards we had such a lively discussion on the discourse of the Anthropocene and environmentally-engaged art that I felt the need to deepen our conversation even further. Together with the curator Max Andrews, in 2005 Mariana founded the curatorial office Latitudes, based in Barcelona. As they write, their current research focuses on “material narratives, biographies of objects, and a world-ecological perspective on art histories”. An interview with two pioneers on their curatorial practice and writing about the urgency of a geological understanding of the world, how to “think with” and from a perspective of different objects and the challenges of curating…