Spike #85 – Nostalgia

Spike #86 is turning to the wild season of youth – life’s Salad Days.

Forget all the Boomer panic about a generational crisis; the kids are alright, living out our hyperconnected present to its strangest limits. New kinds of aesthetics, of activism, of entrepreneurship; new images as much as new perspectives on what images are; and, above all, a new, very quantum attitude towards fact and fiction, history and the future: young people are modeling how to be in our very confused times – and producing some of the most interesting forms of culture we’ve ever seen.

Featuring a Zoomer’s guide to the Slopgeneration; an essay of on being young at art in the Instagram age; a rundown of contemporary art’s nepo babies; reality checks on culture’s obsessions with youth and dying young; portraits of couture-sculptor Tenant of Culture, Turner Prize-nominated photographer Rene Matić, e-waste sculptor Brian Oakes, and Austrian painter Lukas Posch; send-ups of teenage fiction’s ecstatic weirdness and youth-quakers’ political promise; a critique from Silicon Valley of the industrialization of young risk-taking; art’s perfect Los Angeles metaphor; and a splash of back-page advice: “You shouldn’t be fun at twenty-one. You should be tortured.” 

This publication accompanying his most comprehensive exhibition to date exhibition is Jack O’Brien’s first monograph. Conceived by the artist himself, it complements the exhibition in both form and content, documenting his practice from 2021–2025 and transfers it into a different medium. Developed as an artist’s book it stands in direct relation to the magazine collages in the exhibition. The torn book cover, perforated paper pages, and a shoelace sealed under cellophane make the publication itself a sculptural gesture.

O’Brien negotiates themes such as staging, visibility, queer identity, and the circular dynamic between consumption, body, and performance. The title refers to the English “cue”—a theatrical cue—and at the same time to its repetition. This double meaning reflects O’Brien’s working method, in which material, form, and gesture continually oscillate between suggestion and withdrawal, presence and dissolution. O’Brien works with found and discarded objects, which he transforms through gestures of wrapping, binding, and perforation. His sculptures, installations, and collages use industrial materials such as cellophane, shrink wrap, and synthetic textiles.

The catalogue brings together the first substantial essays on O’Brien’s work. Alexander Wilmschen introduces the exhibition, in which chance becomes the driving force of reordering, and situates O’Brien’s work within the context of queer phenomenology. Kristian Vistrup Madsen examines the sadomasochistic dimensions of the work. Juliette Desorgues reads the sculptures as embodied punctuation. In conversation with Jeppe Ugelvig, O’Brien reflects on his artistic methodology and language.

The result is a monograph which also formally works with the moments of controlled instability that are so striking in the exhibition: floating, supported and warped.

Texts: Juliette Desorgues, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Jack O’Brien & Jeppe Ugelvig (Interview) and Alexander Wilmschen

Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins offers an in-depth look at nearly two decades of artistic output by the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Retracing her practice from recent works back to her earliest experiments, the book provides an original overview of how her visual language and conceptual concerns have evolved over time.

Basma al-Sharif's films and installations navigate the unstable terrains of displacement, colonialism, and representation—often shaped by the ongoing reality of the occupation of Palestine. Through a rich selection of images and curatorial essays, the monograph highlights the layered political and cinematic frameworks within which her works are embedded.

Also included are two newly commissioned literary contributions: a fictional piece by Karim Kattan that resonates with the themes of place and estrangement, and a conversation between al-Sharif and the artist Diego Marcon, in which they reflect on shared affinities, artistic processes, and their long-standing dialogue. Blurring the personal and the political, the real and the imagined, Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins captures the complexity and urgency of al-Sharif's artistic journey.

Texts by Basma al-Sharif, Karim Kattan, Diego Marcon, et al.

Basma al-Sharif (born 1983 in Koweit) is a Palestinian artist working in cinema and installation. She developed her practice nomadically between the Middle East, Europe, and North America and is currently based in Berlin. Her practice looks at cyclical political conflicts and confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

A complete survey of the cast, forged, and fabricated metal sculptures made by Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen since 2017.

The artist's practice addresses the industrial complex of virtual and robotic bodies and their relationship to labor in tech, pornography and gaming. While some sculptures were conceived as individual pieces, others were created with digital counterparts within installations that typically include CGI animation, documentary video, drawing and prints.

By presenting the metal works as stand-alone pieces, this book adheres to Meineche Hansen's concern with the material means of production, highlighting their concrete yet elusive nature. Several pieces in the publication are accompanied by poems written by artist Diego Marcon in response to the works. As an artist's project and an archival document, the publication echoes the tradition of documentary photography devoted to sculpture.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen (born 1981 in Denmark, lives and works in London) is a Danish artist. She produces exhibitions, interdisciplinary seminars and publications that foreground the body and its industrial complex, in what she refers to as a "techno-somatic variant of institutional critique". Meineche Hansen questions the body in the field of industrial representations: robotic or virtual bodies, and their relationship with the working world of industries of gaming, pornography, and new technologies. Her research-led practice has taken the form of woodcut prints, sculptures and CGI animations, often made by combining her own low-tech manual craft with outsourced, skilled digital labour.

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.
Poems by Diego Marcon.

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

The third issue of Le Chauffage is an inquiry into the relationship between the practices of artists/ writers and their day jobs. This subject stems from a question fundamental to the existing mandate of Le Chauffage: 'how do you keep warm?' and subsequently, 'how do you pay the bills?' As these perennial concerns occupy our everyday lives, we ask artists/writers to consider the influence that their day jobs, side hustles, creative or non- creative forms of employment have on their respective practices.

This issue tries to account for the significant ways in which complex economic realities come to shape the art we produce, look at, and discuss. How do we deal with limited time and resources? How do we reclaim and steal time back? How do our day jobs shape and influence what we make? How do we subvert the means of production of the workplace? Can the constraint of a day job also be a way to alleviate the pressure of professionalising?

With contributions by Daniel Bozhkov, Nathan Crompton Pippa Garner, Chauncey Hare Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes, Garrett Lockhart, Jannis Marwitz Reba Maybury, Tiziana La Melia, Dan Miller, Ragen Moss, Jean Luc Moulène, Jean Katambayi Mukendi Paul Niedermayer, Sophie Nys, Megan Plunkett, Chris Reinecke, Jacquelyn Zong Li Ross On Gabrielle L Hirondelle Hill Margaux Schwarz, Eleanor Ivory Weber James Welling, Werker, The Wig.

The new “left-wing Catholics”; education under Trump and the American brain drain; theater, porn, and bullfighting with Lorraine de Sagazan; an X-ray journey with the nuclear nomads; soccer, Gen Z, and algorithmic governance in Morocco; Pedro Rhino, cinema at the end of the neocolonial mirage...

Founded in 1995, Mouvement is a French “indisciplinary cultural magazine”, published quaterly.