Women Looking at Women Looking at Women

The first issue of the editorial discursive space for the Bergen Assembly triennial, conceived by Saâdane Afif, explores the identity, role and position of the Professor.

Side Magazine is conceived as a site of research for the fourth edition of Bergen Assembly convened by Saâdane Afif. Yasmine d'O., who has been invited as curator of the upcoming edition, will be the executive editor. 
Side Magazine is dedicated to the seven characters in The Heptahedron, a play written by the French poet, essayist, and scholar Thomas Clerc in 2016. In order of apparition these characters are the Professor, the Moped Rider, the Bonimenteur, the Fortune Teller, an Acrobats, the Coalman, and the Tourist.

The first issue of Side Magazine is dedicated to the figure of the Professor. It features seven articles, each of which explores the identity, role, and position of the Professor. Contributors include Uli Aigner, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Jörg Heiser, Christian Nyampeta, Marjorie Senechal, and Vivian Slee. 
Seven issues of Side Magazine will be released in the run up to the opening of Bergen Assembly 2022, opening September 8. A special eighth issue will be published after the opening days. This, combined with the existing seven issues as a collection, constitute the exhibition catalogue and guide.

Saâdane Afif (born 1970 in Vendôme, France) creates installations made up of unexpected encounters between objects. These creations, of uncertain status, oscillate between function and symbol, between art and design, and provoke shifts of meaning that engage a reflection on today's industrial society.

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.

Elizabeth in the Woolds is the product of two superimposed compositional strategies; a thematic aggregate based on notes dating back to 2008 and an epic prose narrative. Elizabeth is the device through which this simultaneous register moves. Screen writing provides a model for multiple voices. In a film script, the narrator can be the camera; there’s a machine at the centre of the story structure which figures a demand for resolution of plot; a contrario, the thematic approach (S, U, N, as electric light) obliterates chronology, and enumerates an atemporal topological figure, or the way the world is built.

(730pp., self-published first edition of 50, Kortrijk, 2021) 

In the high-octane essay And Then Comes the Chorus, Jon Refsdal Moe pursues the imagination of theatre opened up by Alfred Jarry when he slipped an ‘r’ into a profanity as he exclaimed ‘Merdre!’ on stage. ‘What matters is that the words became flesh and that this flesh exploded right in the world’s face. What matters is that literature stood up at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on December 10, 1896 and cried FUCK! and all hell broke loose and the world has never been the same since.’

Jon Refsdal Moe is a writer and dramaturg from Oslo. He has written two novels, one doctoral dissertation, several essays and a lot of criticism. He was artistic director of Black Box teater in Oslo from 2009 to 2016 and is now professor of dramaturgy at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Published by Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures
First edition November 2022
48 pages, 11.0 x 16.5 cm, sewn perfect binding
ISBN: 978-82-691492-8-9
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

A fascinating account of Lankton's inquisitive, sociological and emotional ruminations in advance of her gender-affirming surgery.

This is one of the earliest of Greer Lankton's (1958-96) journals, sketchbooks and daybooks to appear in the artist's archives, and the first to be published in facsimile form. Written during her time as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the journal offers key insights into Lankton's mind at work before her career-defining move to New York in 1978, where she would become an important figure of the East Village art scene in the 1980s and early '90s with her lifelike dolls and theatrical sets.

Containing drawings, behavioral diagrams and aspirational, occasionally confessional writing, the journal is a record of imagining the body and mind reconciled through transformation. In these pages, the 19-year-old turns an inquisitive, sociological eye toward the emotional landscape and somatic effects of the days recorded here; days leading up to her decision to undergo hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery in 1979. Lankton reflects with raw vulnerability and keen self-awareness on critical questions of self-image, social perception, gender normativity and human behavior.