The Magic Issue: Launch Party

The Magic Issue: Spike Launch Party

With
TAROT READINGS
FANCY DRINKS
MUSIC

Saturday, 16 February, 8.00pm
Spike Berlin, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 45

In the witching hours of the twenty-first century, magic is once again a tool with which we can change reality, but at the same time it is pervasive and pernicious, co-opted by spiritual entrepreneurism and the false gods of Silicon Valley. Spike and Ignota Books, who collaborated on the conception of this issue, are pleased to unveil Spike 58: "The Magic Issue" and bid you welcome on your journey through, cybernetic, psychedelic, technoshamanic worlds that are still in the making.

Spike #58 features essays by Ella Plevin, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers on the resurgence of magic in the digital age, portraits of Lu Yang, Jim Shaw, and Suzanne Treister, Erik Davis on millennial culture’s turn towards psychedelics, CAConrad and Ariana Reines discuss rituals for writing, Lynn Zelevansky remembers Paul Thek’s “Processions” and much, much more …

Please check out the Facebook event page

 

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Views
Still from Jeamin Cha, Nameless Syndrome , South Korea, 2022. © Jeamin Cha

Still from Jeamin Cha, Nameless Syndrome, South Korea, 2022. © Jeamin Cha

The machine doesn’t always love you back

The melancholy muse, glitchy machinimas, and plenty of Super 8: The 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival mined the space between arthouse and art world for new and archival gems.

People
#10
Kenneth Anger (left) and Tav Falco (right) in conversation at the 2006 Viennale. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler

Kenneth Anger (left) and Tav Falco (right) in conversation at the 2006 Viennale. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler

The Dark Side of the Moon: Kenneth Anger

In memory of Kenneth Anger (1927–2023), we’re republishing our 2006 interview with the iconoclastic filmmaker on silk flowers, vindictive scientologists, and his refusal to hustle for production money.

Views
Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6 , 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Love Pool 6, 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas in three parts, each: 205 x 122 cm; overall: 205 x 366 cm. All images courtesy: the artist and Peres Projects

8-Bit Intimacies

In triptychs of hot-and-heavy bodies at Peres Projects, Berlin, Hong-Kong-based artist Mak2 materializes the tensions of synthetic desire and our urges to gawk and look away.

Discourse
North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

North Face x Gucci linen puffer from a campaign shot in Iceland, 2021. Courtesy: Gucci. Photo: Jalan and Jibril Durimel

Theory of Style: On Seasonality

“Fashion is the future, clothes are what we already wear.” In her May column, Joanna Walsh ponders how fast fashion’s accelerationism plays with seasons, desire, and the virtual, projecting us into an elsewhere we’ll never venture into.

Views
#75

Xiyadie, Sorting sweet potatoes (Dad, don't yell, we're in the cellar sorting sweet potatoes), 2019, papercut with water-based dye and Chinese pigments on Xuan paper, 140 x 140 cm. All images courtesy: the artist

Sorrows and Delights

An exhibition of Xiyadie’s steamy papercuts at The Drawing Center, New York narrates his four-decade usurpation of a traditionalist folk form and a coming-out transition from shame to bliss.

People

The Many Fathers of Success: Ei Arakawa

Ahead of his first-ever pool performance at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg, Ei Arakawa walks through the changing infrastructure for artist-parents, the integrality of surprise to humor, and modelling queer fatherhood.

Views
View of “My eyes like shovels.” Courtesy: the artists and Hua International, Berlin

View of “My eyes like shovels.” Courtesy: the artists and Hua International, Berlin

GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN 2023

Spike editor Isabella Zamboni picks the six most vibrant shows from Gallery Weekend Berlin 2023. Home ghosts, Kurdish ropes, watery half animals, too-blue eyes, Neapolitan satyrs, hysterical bureaucrats: Indulge in the capital’s most spirited visions.

Spike Events

Artist Talk: Wolfgang Staehle

On Tuesday 16 May at Soho House Berlin, net.art pioneer and The Thing co-founder Wolfgang Staehle maps out the technical and aesthetic ancestries of our contemporary adventures in cyberspace.

Discourse
Nile Koetting, Cherry script , 2023, e ink display animation, 9.5 x 12 x 2 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Parliament, Paris

Nile Koetting, Cherry script, 2023, e ink display animation, 9.5 x 12 x 2 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Parliament, Paris

User Error: The ghost in the machine

Two exhibitions in Paris – Nile Koetting at Parliament Gallery and the group show “Au delà” at Lafayette Anticipations – conjure data’s limitations in the face of the divine.

Views
#75
OMA, Hermitage Guggenheim, Las Vegas, The Venetian Resort Hotel, Solomon. R. Guggenheim Foundation, archival materials, 2000–01, and Flick House, Zurich, commissioned study, archival materials, 2001. All photos: Nelly Rodriguez

OMA, Hermitage Guggenheim, Las Vegas, The Venetian Resort Hotel, Solomon. R. Guggenheim Foundation, archival materials, 2000–01, and Flick House, Zurich, commissioned study, archival materials, 2001. All photos: Nelly Rodriguez

Bases of Distrust

A group show at gta Exhibitions, Zurich calls into question local worlds left unbuilt, the worthiness of certain gifts, and museums’ credibility as storytellers of the cultures they serve.

People
Portrait of Ulysses Jenkins, 2022. © Harry Gamboa Jr. Photo: Harry Gamboa Jr.

Portrait of Ulysses Jenkins, 2022. © Harry Gamboa Jr. Photo: Harry Gamboa Jr.

“Who are you? Let me in!”: Ulysses Jenkins

Occasioned by a retrospective at JSF Berlin, the polymathic video artist talks to Harry Gamboa Jr. about self-love and technological liberation, LA’s ethos of inclusion, and finding humor in the struggle for change.

"The 80s was the last period when low self-esteem was a normative response to authority"

Essay: The Last Great Era of Low Self-Esteem