TELFAR
Nude

Spazio Maiocchi
Via Maiocchi 5/7
20129 Milan
Italy

kaleidoscope@spaziomaiocchi.com

spaziomaiocchi.com
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During Milan Men’s Fashion Week in January 2018, with the support of Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, KALEIDOSCOPE presents TELFAR’s first project in Italy, Nude, a fashion presentation without a single garment, eloquent to the brand’s progressive aesthetics and artistic DNA.

Launching his eponymous line in 2005 at the age of 18, Liberian-American unisex prodigy Telfar Clemens has developed a strikingly original and democratic design vocabulary. Laying the blueprint for today’s black avant-garde, TELFAR was genderless a decade before it became a trend, launching projects with a horizontal cultural impact—from collaborations with Solange Knowles at the Guggenheim Museum to designing the nationwide uniforms for over 10,000 employees of the US fast-food chain White Castle. After winning the 2017 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund, TELFAR is poised to take its place in the foreground of America’s fashion future.

The exhibition centers around a 30-ft-tall nude image of the designer by photographer Rob Kulisek surrounded by ten nude and genderless sculptures designed by American artist Frank Benson and manufactured by German state-of-the-art mannequin factory Penther Formes—an updated version of the iconic mannequins presented by TELFAR in the 2016 Berlin Biennale. The show is completed by a short film about Telfar’s apartment building in Queens, New York, by filmmaker Finn MacTaggart; and a musical composition written for clapping by Aaron David Ross in collaboration with artist Ryan Trecartin.

TELFAR’s exhibition will also take over the 3x6m billboard in the courtyard of Spazio Maiocchi, and will be accompanied by a book of images by New York photographer Jason Nocito, a performance by South-African musical duo FAKA, and an exclusive limited-edition T-shirt.

KALEIDOSCOPE is today’s most innovative magazine of contemporary art and visual culture, founded in 2009 at the core of a creative studio with a distinctly curatorial and interdisciplinary approach. Since October 2017, KALEIDOSCOPE’s studio and exhibition space are hosted by Spazio Maiocchi in Milan.

Spazio Maiocchi is a new social space where art, design and fashion blend to shape new cultural experiences. Originating from the convergence of visionary founding partners Carhartt WIP and Slam Jam, Spazio Maiocchi presents a cross-disciplinary program of exhibitions and events in a former-industrial complex in central Milan.

Timur Si-Qin and Dozie Kanu

April 18–May 18, 2018

Private view: April 17, 6–9pm, by invitation only

Spazio Maiocchi
Via Maiocchi 5/7
Milan
Italy

spaziomaiocchi.com
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KALEIDOSCOPE is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions at Spazio Maiocchi, the magazine’s new home and exhibition space in Milan.

Timur Si–Qin: NEW PEACE
April 18–May 18, 2018
A New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent who grew up in Berlin, Beijing and in a Native American community in the American Southwest, Timur Si-Qin (b. 1984) has developed work in conceptual, branded cycles which serve as frameworks for his sculptural environments, sculptures, light boxes, and CGI videos. While his most enduring concern over the last decade has been with the dynamics of branding and the formation of patterns in commercial imagery, his most recent series, “New Peace,” further develops this line of thought into a proposal for a new mysticism. A radically inclusive, secular faith of the real, forwarding a belief in the true infinite creativity of pattern, matter, and energy.

In the exhibition Campaign for a New Protocol at Spazio Maiocchi, Si-Qin launches a drive to communicate a new sense of non dualistic and secular spirituality adapted for the future. Here, the natural and the synthetic coalesce beyond the dualities through digitally rendered landscapes of New Peace’s advertisements and in an immersive virtual reality experience.

The exhibition will also take over the 3x6m billboard in the courtyard of Spazio Maiocchi, and will be accompanied by a book and exclusive limited-edition merchandise. Published by KALEIDOSCOPE, the book A New Protocol presents a collection of Si-Qin’s digitally rendered landscapes and elaborates on the conceptual foundations of New Peace in the evolution of religion, science and philosophy.

Dozie Kanu: STRETCHED
April 18–22, 2018
On the occasion of Milan Design Week 2018, KALEIDOSCOPE has teamed up with the iconic luggage company RIMOWA on a multi-platform project developing in print, online, and live. Featuring American artist/designer Dozie Kanu (b. 1993), the collaboration will unfold through three separate but intertwined activations: a short film, an installation, and a printed publication.

In the short documentary directed by British filmmaker Sam Hiscox, Kanu is captured at work in his newly-set up studio in the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal. In conversation, the 25-year-old Houston native explains his personal creative process—how he mixes high and low in creations “commingling hometown symbolism with a sleek modernism,” as described by The New York Times. The film follows him as he explores Lisbon to and inspiration in the city’s architectural landmarks: the brutalist Palácio da Justiça with its annexed skatepark; the Alvaro Siza-designed metro station of Baixa-Chiado; and the Vasco Da Gama Bridge by Santiago Calatrava, a cable-stayed engineering masterpiece and the longest bridge in Europe.

Melding street culture with design sensibilities, Kanu creates objects that are sculptural but still functional. Premiering the short film within an environment designed in collaboration with Bureau Borsche, the exhibition will present original artwork resulting from Kanu’s remix of RIMOWA material, and will be accompanied by a photo zine enclosed in KALEIDOSCOPE’s newest issue providing exclusive insight into to the making of this one-of-a-kind collaboration.

Spazio Maiocchi
Opened in October 2017, Spazio Maiocchi is a new social space where art, design and fashion blend to shape new cultural experiences. Originating from the convergence of visionary founding partners Carhartt WIP and Slam Jam, Spazio Maiocchi is a cross-disciplinary ideas aggregator hosting exhibitions and events in a former-industrial complex in central Milan, redesigned and repurposed by architecture firm Andrea Caputo.

Issue 32: spring/summer 2018

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We are delighted to announce the release of KALEIDOSCOPE‘s new issue #32 (spring/summer 2018), launching in New York during Frieze Art Fair from May 2–6.

This issue comes with a set of four collectible covers:

–Anna Uddenberg photographed by Lukas Wassmann introduces our DIGEST The New Domestic Landscape, weighing in on an aesthetic tendency at the intersection of domesticity, technology, gender and contemporary lifestyles. Focusing on a new generation of (mostly female) artists who pervert familiar forms and transgress the codes of good taste, waiving the traditional distinction between the functional and the aesthetic, the survey includes interviews with Uddenberg (by Anna Gritz), Melanie Matranga (by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen) and Hannah Levy (by Jocelyn Miller); an essay by Franklin Melendez; and two visual inserts by Louisa Gagliardi and Neïl Beloufa.

–Negotiating the boundaries between cinematography and art, LA-based filmmaker Arthur Jafa wants to make black film with the same power, beauty and alienation as black music—seeing the rule as something not to be followed, but rather continually undone and reforged. Through dense accumulation followed by delicate editing, his work frames black phenomena on a vastly human, even cosmological scale. In this issue’s monographic FILE—comprising an essay by Aria Dean, an interview by Dana Hoey, and original photography by Nathanael Turner—he discusses authorship, mental illness, self preservation, fluid resistance, and always keeping it going.

–In the footsteps of Rudofsky’s uniform—seamless and mobile, genderless and utopian—the NY-based brand Telfar is described by Matthew Linde as occupying an interstice between idealism and collective sickness, individualism and psycho-normalization. This 30+ page photo story by Torso presents the brand’s FW18 collection, illustrating their use of mimesis, extreme branding and détournement as tongue-in-cheek strategies for hijacking the mainstream.

–In an extensive photographic series by German photographer Tobias Zielony, whose work is subtly situated at the intersection of documentary and conceptual photography, Kiev’s club and queer underground scene is depicted as the unexpected site where the “intimate meets the political” in spite of repression and violence.

Specially commissioned contributions by artists and creators, this issue’s VISTAS include: pre-Internet LA artist Alex Bag, recounting to Piper Marshall and Mitchell Anderson how her “dirty little DIY hand” helped her make work that’s both cynical and sentimental; Italian photographer Gusmano Cesaretti, telling Alessio Ascari about forty years of being an eyewitness of the Chicano graffiti and lowrider subcultures in LA; New York artist Danny McDonald, “yesterbating” with Alison Gingeras about the dissident spirit of pre-gentrification downtown and discussing the queer subtext of his work; the young artists and creators reshaping Beirut’s cultural landscape, confessing to Myriam Ben Salah the responsibility of the political and the pleasure of the trivial; newly-launched algae-based foods company Nonfood, which artist Sean Raspet explains to A.E. Benenson as an attempt to fold art into other areas of the economy; Francesca Gavin looking back to the expansive art of Rammellzee, with its sensationally inventive blend of wildstyle and Afrofuturism, on the occasion of his first New York retrospective; and French filmmaker Michel Auder, whose thousands of hours of videotape are a diary of his life and a time capsule of New York’s downtown scene.

SEASON, the magazine’s opening section, accounts for the best of this spring/summer with profiles and interviews: Cajsa von Zeipel by Franklin Melendez; Women’s History Museum by Julia Trotta; Yaeji by Eliza Ryan; Rereading Pettibon’s Twitter by Allison Fonder; Lab Cult by Cristina Travaglini; Converso by Federico Sargentone; Charles Atlas by Rosey Selig-Addiss; Nkisi by Andrea Lissoni; Sophia Al-Maria by Myriam Ben Salah; Aries by Calum Gordon; Mother Culture by Jennifer Piejko; Sondra Perry by Lumi Tan; Swiss Institute by Alexandra Alexa; Rebecca Ackroyd by Federico Sargentone; Tau Lewis by Daniel Fuller; Paul Maheke by Charles Aubin; Orion Martin by Christopher Schreck; and Johannes Paul Raether by Elisa R. Linn & Lennart Wolff.

“Obsessed,” a think piece by Alissa Bennett, closes the issue with a tale on the power, beauty and danger of intense fandom.

This issue comes with STRETCHED, a photo zine providing exclusive insight into the making of KALEIDOSCOPE’s collaboration with legendary luggage company RIMOWA, inviting Houston native artist/designer Dozie Kanu (b. 1993) to put a progressive outlook on this timeless design icon. The zine is part of a multi-platform project on the occasion of Milan Design Week 2018, also unfolding through an installation at Spazio Maiocchi, KALEIDOSCOPE’s new home in Milan, and a short film shot in Lisbon by British filmmaker Sam Hiscox.

Issue 33: fall/winter 2018/19

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We are delighted to announce the release of KALEIDOSCOPE’s new issue #33 (fall/winter 2018/19), premiering in London during Frieze Art Fair with launches to follow in Milan, Shanghai and Miami. Today’s most innovative magazine of contemporary art and visual culture, KALEIDOSCOPE reaffirms its distinctly curatorial and interdisciplinary approach with a bold new issue, coming with a set of four collectible covers:

In an exclusive photo story by Richard Anderson, two landmark buildings by modernist architect Mies van der Rohe provide the setting for the Chicago-native designer Virgil Abloh to state his manifesto for “streetwear as the next global art movement”—a sentiment among young people, a way of making across disciplines, and ultimately a new Renaissance foregrounding collaboration and breaking the barrier between high culture and real life. This major cover story is completed by an interview by Alessio Ascari, an essay by Kimberly Drew, and a “catalogue raisonné” of the designer’s works and collaborations to date.

Nick Sethi’s portrait introduces an extensive monographic File—comprising an essay by Adriana Blidaru and an interview by Andrea Lissoni—dedicated to Korakrit Arunanondchai. With characters and symbols borrowed from Buddhist myth, the Thai-born, New York-based artist reflects on the duality of animism and technology, activating collective emotions through a ceremonial togetherness.

The cover story on Arunanondchai is also part of a theme survey, NEW NEW AGE, taking stock of different threads of inquiry, across the work of contemporary artists, into spiritual and esoteric dimensions. From underground cults, digital utopianism and cyber-religion, to a reconsideration of traditional iconography or the mystical possibilities of abstraction, artists continue to express an interest in mythological symbols, ritualized spaces, transcendence, and the sublime. Featuring interviews with artists Lucy Dodd (by Ruba Katrib), Camille Henrot (by Stuart Comer), Julien Nguyen (by Franklin Melendez), and Timur Si-Qin (by Ben Vickers).

Having grown up within the underground Bronx punk community, and gaining a public stage at a time when transgender and gender-nonconforming people are fighting to see their rights acknowledged, Elle Pérez talks with Jagdeep Raina about the process of making a portrait—an open conversation with the subject, carrying the traces of the artist’s diasporic experience.

A downtown NYC legend who moved from L.A. in the early 1980s, Kembra Pfahler fronts a death punk metal band in blue body paint and a bouffant black wig, and makes her own art by the tenet of “Availabilism” to use whatever’s around. Here, she talks to Jeffrey Deitch about her inspirations, from beach culture to Japanese Noh theater, and her main impetus: a different paradigm of female beauty.

Specially commissioned contributions by artists and creators, this issue’s VISTAS also include: Francesca Gavin looking into Metahaven’s visually and conceptually savvy commentary on the digital landscape and the infrastructures of power; HEADZ, the improv drawing jam turned radical community experiment, as recounted by its initiators Urs Fischer and Spencer Sweeney; Mahfuz Sultan’s essay on the art of Eric Mack, in which painterly gestures are sublimated into a ballad of the black mundane; Collier Schorr, one of today’s biggest photographers and one of the very few who can credibly walk the line between fashion and art, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist about the idea itself of looking, and looking back; Puerto Rican-born, New York-based artist Jonny Negron, whose voluptuous drawings are described by Franklin Melendez as synthesizing satire, fan fervor and socio-political critique; and finally L.A.-based photographer Buck Ellison, telling Myriam Ben Salah how his pictures negotiate a hazy line between attraction and repulsion towards the privileged realities they depict.

SEASON, the magazine’s opening section, accounts for the best of this fall/winter with profiles and interviews: Veit Laurent Kurz by Lennart Wolff; DeSe Escobar by Taylor Trabulus; Brujas by Jonathan Olivares; MOSS: Please do not touch by Alice Bucknell; Young Girl Reading Group by Federico Sargentone; CFGNY by Carissa Rodriguez; Lucile Littot by Jennifer Piejko; NAAR by Myriam Ben Salah; Passageways at Kunsthalle Bern by Jeppe Ugelvig; Patrick Frey Editions by Valentina Ehnimb; Sophie by Mike Egan; Boot Boyz by Calum Gordon; Reza Abdoh by Sohrab Mohebbi; When Études Become Form by Christopher Schreck; Franz West by Alex Bennett; Maurizio Cattelan: The Artist is Present by Cloé Perrone; Cassi A. Namoda by Hunter Braithwaite; Oneohtrix Point Never by Federico Sargentone; LUAR by Jeppe Ugelvig; and Dan Mitchell by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.

Little English Drug, Nostalgia, a think piece by Calum Gordon, closes the issue with a tale on Brexit, Britishness and Brit Pop.

KALEIDOSCOPE issue 33 FW18/19 takeover at Spazio Maiocchi

November 30, 2018, 5pm

Spazio Maiocchi
Via Maiocchi 5/7
Milan
Italy

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spaziomaiocchi.com
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5–7pm: Talk with Virgil Abloh and private view (by invitation only)
7–9pm: Public opening and performance by Young Girl Reading Group

On November 30, 2018, KALEIDOSCOPE will take over the entire surface of Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, curating a multimedia experience which brings together a diverse selection of international artists featured in the magazine’s newly-released fall/winter issue.

Guest of honor will be Virgil Abloh, presenting a specially-designed collector’s edition of KALEIDOSCOPE printed in 300 copies, while also unveiling a new installation and billboard commission. Coming with a special cover, a T-shirt and a signed artwork, the limited edition pack will be launched at Spazio Maiocchi and exclusively available to buy at kaleidoscope.media and at Slam Jam stores. The Chicago-native polymath, Off-White founder, and newly-appointed Louis Vuitton menswear creative director, will also engage in a public talk to state his manifesto for “streetwear as the next global art movement”—a sentiment among young people, a way of making across disciplines, and ultimately a new Renaissance breaking the barrier between high culture and real life.

Acclaimed French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978) will present—for the first time in Italy after the debut at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and MoMA, New York—a 3D video installation titled Saturday. Suspended between experimental fiction and anthropological gaze, the film looks into the Seventh-day Adventist Church to explore the relationship between religion and globalization—continuing the artist’s ongoing research into the infrastructures of knowledge.

After a two-month residency at Spazio Maiocchi, uprising American artist Eric N. Mack (b. 1987) allows visitors into his temporary studio, presenting it as an installation and a glimpse into his creative process. A language of the suspended pile, the messy space, of bodies leaving traces behind, the artist’s shamanic combinations of textile, newspaper pages and fragments of everyday objects have an architectural, even Baroque ambition—his painterly gestures sublimated into a “ballad of the black mundane.”

In the gallery facing the courtyard, Collier Schorr (American, b. 1963; lives and works in New York) will present an exhibition of photographs dating from the early aughts to today. Self-described as a product of the ’80s—deconstruction and French post-feminism, the nefarious and seductive operation of advertising—Schorr is one of today’s biggest photographers, and one of the few who can credibly walk the line between fashion and art. The exhibition will reveal the inner interactions that make her images so “meta”—interrogating the very idea of looking, and of looking back.

A performance by Young Girl Reading Group will unfold across different areas of the space. Established in 2013 by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė (respectively Polish, b. 1986, and Lithuanian, b. 1987), YGRG started as a weekly, queer-enthusiast bookclub around feminist-inspired theory and fiction, later expanding into the domain of performative installation mediated through technology and the Internet—or in the artists’ words, “a sonar-social architecture of shared curiosity and synchronicity, a live Instagram hangout, and a self-conscious aesthetic chamber for intimacy and discovery.”

KALEIDOSCOPE is today’s most innovative magazine of contemporary art and visual culture, founded in 2009 at the core of a creative studio with a distinctly curatorial and interdisciplinary approach. Since October 2017, KALEIDOSCOPE’s studio and exhibition space are hosted by Spazio Maiocchi in Milan.

Spazio Maiocchi is a new social space where art, design and fashion blend to shape new cultural experiences. Originating from the convergence of visionary founding partners Carhartt WIP and Slam Jam, Spazio Maiocchi presents a cross-disciplinary program of exhibitions and events in a former-industrial complex in central Milan.