A SENSE OF PLACE
CHARLIE OSBORNE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOLADE BANJO
INTERVIEW BY BEN BROOME
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ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Working across video, performance, sculpture, and sound, Charlie Osbourne’s films have been screened alongside artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Mica Levi, and Tai Shani.
BEN BROOME
I know you spent some time working at a gallery. You must have seen a very different art world from the one you inhabit now.
CHARLIE OSBORNE
I was basically a desk girl: helping get ready for shows, selling the paintings. It was the first time that I saw big money involved in art—I’d grown up around people that make art, but they were in no way financially gaining from it. I was watching people hand over tens of thousands for one small painting, not even knowing anything about the artist. I was thinking, “Am I a massive idiot for not picking up a paintbrush?” The artist Tai Shani recently came by [my studio] Conditions and was talking about exactly this. She was myth-busting a lot of stuff, saying, “You can always be an artist that makes performance, videos, sound, sculpture, installation, but you will also reach a certain point in your practice where you need to be able to stand on your own two feet financially.” She surrendered, continued painting, and is still a really great artist. People in my age group and my scene are making some really good stuff, and we’re all biting at the bit to get funding, to find space, to have access, to have visibility. I think that does make us resilient.
BB
Do you think about viewership? Is it more important to have an environment in which your film makes sense or an environment where people are actually going to see it?
CO
Maybe I can talk about the way that Bury-Man-Lane (2022) got seen: I made sure that the first ever viewing was in a space that basically felt like an extension of the film, as if the film came from that space.
I was constantly looking for spaces to either shoot in, do shows in, or film in, and a friend said, “My dad’s got the keys to this old disused pub. It’s annoying that it’s sitting empty—could you use it?” I went in and turned it into a gallery space to show Bury-Man-Lane. It existed as an event, and the film’s subplot was all about getting to an event. That way of showing art feels more successful, because you’re actually living and breathing the project.
Then again, if I only hide in disused spaces—forever living in the dark, surrounded by smoke machines—I’m acting out a self-fulfilling prophecy: being an artist from a working-class background finding visibility in darker spaces becomes a loop.
Actually, I’d like to see my work in an institution. It should have a life with the audience and space of a museum. What was great (and also limiting) about the Bury-Man-Lane pub is that, when I looked around, I saw a sea of people I kind of know. Institutions can reach a much wider audience.
BB
You’re about to show in “In the Offing,” the show at Turner Contemporary, curated by Mark Leckey. Can you speak about the work you’re showing?
CO
My film for “In The Offing” is called Old Town (2023).
It started by looking inwards at places that I associate with Mark’s theme of seaside towns, the horizon, and the way that space and people operate down by those coastal places. These fringes of places are going extinct now. I started looking at how these extinct liminal spaces now function in other ways. I was going down to Hastings a lot because, I have family down there—there are so many empty, closed-down spaces looking completely disused and boarded up that actually do still function in other ways. So, I made the work about a functional liminal space called “Old Town.”
I think Mark was impressed with what I did with the funding—he said directly, “How did you make that film?” To put it bluntly: being someone not from money but constantly making work, you know how to use it when you have it. Production-wise, I created a 20,000-pound film for only 5,000 pounds. It was only possible, because I have this network of friends that left school young and now work in kit houses; they just pile all this kit into a big van and roll up on set.
BB
It sounds as though you’ve gotten pretty good at working with whatever you have. It’s a limitation, but has that limitation become part of your approach to filmmaking?
CO
When I was asked, “How did you make it?” I wanted to just say, “Well, I directed it.” That is how it was made. It became a kind of event in itself. I’d created an event that we were filming with a very strict schedule, and everyone was living and breathing those characters. I was replaying a fantasy plan that I’d been plotting and changing and shifting. I had to film for two days, and that was it. I don’t look back. I’m still in that stage where I’m hustling for work that doesn’t align with my art, so I have to make work in this way. There’s no aftermath where I can really re-edit, sit with it, change it.
BB
You often score your work yourself: Can you talk a little bit about how music and sound informs your video-making?
CO
I’m always learning with sound and music; I take on more and more ownership and urgency to learn with each project. I’m learning a lot by sampling and recording things around me—a kind of collage/mixtape way of making sound. I’ve embraced this whole new part of my practice—I used to think it was procrastination, but now I realize it’s totally part of it. I go to the depths of YouTube—videos with zero views, accounts that are near extinction, people’s vlogs of their whole life—and I use parts of those videos in the sound or narratives to create a web: some stuff that’s happened to me and feels personal contrasted with some stuff that is very “internet” and fictionalized.
BB
That final scene of Old Town where the “GIVE UP” stone is thrown into the ocean and then spat back out: Is that a reflection of your own attitude to artmaking—a rejection of failure or a compulsion to persist?
CO
That scene came from a trip to see my uncle who I hadn’t seen in a while. Me and my cousin were begrudgingly walking behind him on the beach. He thought it’d be funny to sit down and act emo because he’s kind of, like, this skater guy ... He wrote the words “GIVE UP” with a marker on a massive rock and lobbed it out to sea. I made a note of it and thought, “You know what? It is actually kind of profound.” He’s pretending, but maybe that’s also how he’s feeling deep down.
I like to compare the themes of my work to music genres. At the moment the genres seem to be quite grungy. It felt like the perfect ending to a grunge video, some guy lobbing this “GIVE UP” stone. That’s how I was feeling at that time too: “Make sure you don’t give up with whatever this is.”
BB
The characters in your films are often the disenfranchised, the fringe person who is searching for space or community. What part does the misfit play in your work?
CO
I’m always thinking about archetypes, pairing magical realism with social realism. I look at the archetype of the misfit—who that might be or where they are. I think my upbringing and my network of friends gears itself to that: I’ve always felt like a misfit. People that live on the fringes or on the outskirts might feel alone in that they’re always looking to go somewhere where they’ll find whatever “that” is. Because I’ve moved around so much, I can’t claim a place to be home—it’s like this big collage.
CHARLIE OSBORNE WEARS REEBOK LTD PREMIER ROAD MODERN
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.