A Faggot is a Unit

For British artist Delaine Le Bas, dress is divine. Clothes appear as both mask a nd memorial within an expansive body of work exploring mythologies of Le Bas’s Romani ancestry. Embroidered and hand-painted textile is central to the artist’s lyrically activist practice, alongside costume, writing and performance. In a new series of portraits by the British photographer Tara Darby, directed by Jane Howard, gold leaf dances across the planes of Le Bas’s face in repose, it wraps and jangles around her wrists, glimmers across her clothes. In a notebook she has inscribed: “In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold.” The grief is alchemical.

As Stephen Ellcock writes:

‘The maxim ‘Know Thyself’ was inscribed in gold on a column on the threshold of Pythia’s temple, serving as a warning that wisdom, understanding, empathy and anything remotely resembling peace of mind are unachievable without selfawareness, reflection and ruthless self-criticism.’

The fragments of hope, anger, magic and curiosity redolent in Le Bas’s work form a call to action. A reminder of the racism, exclusion and subjugation that abound. Photographs of Le Bas, which Darby has been making for more than a decade, present the artist as truth sayer, inquisitive goddess and modern-day Sibyl.

Through the incorporation of texts—a conversation between gallerists John Marchant and Keiko Yamamoto with curator Claire Jackson—drawings from Le Bas’s journals, archival images taken at her home and the restyling—and reflection—of her own personal wardrobe, In the forest of grief I grew into a shrub of gold radiates psychological, social and political wisdom. Fashion is revealed as both tyrannical disguise and liberating regalia.

Gabrielle Civil's Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.

The publication If You Don’t Believe in Yourself, Someone Else Should is between a monograph and an artist book with a text by Florentine Rungrama Muhry and a conversation between Anna Schachinger and the artist. Together with the graphic designer Alexandra Möllner, they developed a book concept that makes the various strands, the instinctive, methodical and processual working methods as much as the joyful experimental approaches in Katharina Höglinger's work tangible and entertaining.

"The image pulsates with alternating contrasts of light and dark. A sweeping, purple- coloured line unites a human countenance in half profile with the little head of a blue dog. Red strokes in the middle of the canvas, perhaps the arms of an animal-like being, reach into the widened eyes of the one facing it. Expressing its pleasure, the lively creature cheekily sticks its tongue out of its mouth, while the facial expression of the person remains indifferent, in spite of the affront."

(Excerpt from the text "Wandering Thoughts" by Florentine Rungrama Muhry, Translation: Miriam Stoney)

The Imaginary Republic is an artistic research project focusing on questions of social practice. In particular, it considers the creative and restless imaginaries underpinning our political selves and argues for a deeper engagement with what Elena Loizidou terms “dream-action”: the figurative and poetic staging of world making activity.

The publication brings together participating artists Tatiana Fiodorova, Octavio Camargo / Brandon LaBelle, the Sala-Manca Group, and Joulia Strauss, whose practices engage situations of struggle and autonomous cultures through a range of methods and approaches. From social fictioning to camouflaged interventions, collaborative pedagogies to gestures of care, their works propose unlikely paths of mutuality. The publication includes documentation of an exhibition held at Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, as well as key essays and works by theorists and artists Rhiannon Firth, Hélène Frichot, Marysia Lewandowska, Gerald Raunig, Raimar Stange with Oliver Ressler, and Manuela Zechner.

TYPP is the community journal of Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp. TYPP is partly a generator for the shared research of our advanced master students, and partly a platform for carefully selected contributions by tutors, students, alumni, guest lecturers and friends of SLA. TYPP is a stage where art and research from this community is shared with you, to enjoy, read, look, learn and get inspired. 

Each edition is carefully and freely designed by Ward Heirwegh.