INTERVIEW: BOGNA BURSKA AND DANIEL KOTOWSKI

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"

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

 "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

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

 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.