A SENSE OF PLACE
LENARD GILLER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOLADE BANJO
INTERVIEW BY BEN BROOME
FOOTWEAR EXCLUSIVE: REEBOK LTD
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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.
London-based artist Lenard Giller explores the life-spans of time-based technologies and their translations into language, memory, and perception.
BEN BROOME
I last interviewed you six months ago in conjunction with your exhibition “Revisions” at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ. That was a formative exhibition and a formative conversation!
LENARD GILLER
I think the one realization I had during our last conversation was the idea of making videos that can be approached like minimalist sculpture—I’d never had that thought before.
What I meant was that these objects appear without a predetermined narration: they just exist physically, sculpturally in front of you. They work in relation to your body and the architecture they are surrounded by. They don't tell you what to do or how to look. I liked that ambiguity as a working methodology.
BB
And that idea came through the act of speaking?
LG
There’s very few people in my life who I can talk to about ideas without them having to be finalized or bulletproofed. It takes imagination; a lot of people need to see the final result before they can engage.
BB
I think that's part of what we do: have a thought, exhaust it, then see if it still interests us a week later.
LG
Ideas stay in the back of our heads. The moment comes where the situation makes sense, and you get them back out. It's like a catalog you build. When you invited me to show at The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ earlier this year, I took something that existed in Berlin and brought it to London. In this process of transportation, the work changed because it had to adapt to a new context.
BB
Speaking of Productions (2022) and its subsequent second life as Revisions (2023), the work we showed together in London, can you tell me about the starting point for the work?
LG
Finding a box of images at a market sparked the idea. I realized they were all stills from Disney’s 1950 film Cinderella. 360 stills had been extracted from the film and made into collectables for a 1980s Panini sticker album. It made me think about the hierarchy of images in pop culture and why certain images get selected over others to promote a movie or an exhibition, thus defining our collective memory of an artwork or of a wider cultural object. This selection of 360 images literally represents our collective memory of Cinderella.
Around the same time, I had this fantasy to hold the volume of a movie. I like the idea that, with analog film, there’s a relationship between weight and time. Time equals weight, and weight equals dimension. In Productions, I combined these two objects: the material dimensions of an analog movie and the 360 found stills from Disney's Cinderella.
I transferred the images onto celluloid, cutting them into the precise moment where they originally appeared. The end result was a physical object the same size, dimension, and weight as Cinderella would've been when it was first shown, but the majority of what was shown was blank, with only the found images flashing in between. Disney was the perfect starting point for this work because the subject matter is so well known that only a few images spark our memory of the story.
BB
For Productions, there is no pre-defined method of viewing: without narrative language, spectators define their own way to navigate the work. Is this something you center across your work?
LG
We can talk about this in the context of exhibition-making but also consumerist society in general. It's a question that both the advertising exec and artist might think about, this idea of an artwork's potential indifference to the audience and vice versa. It’s speculative: someone might sit through an entire video work of mine, someone might walk in and out, someone might not come at all. The advertising industry takes a similar approach when looking at a map of a city to decide where a billboard should go. They hope there will be encounters that affect the subconscious, there is the possibility of someone walking past and seeing it at 3:00 a.m., but it's equally likely that no one walks past.
BB
The grappling between the intangibility of time and the tangibility of object is apparent in your output. You’ve been making sculptural works from mosquito coils: Do you see these as an actualization of passing time in object form?
LG
I watched the mosquito coils in my studio disintegrating over my working day. They were objects that I lit in the morning and they worked in sync with me: as I worked and got tired, they burnt and became smaller. They have a burn duration of eight hours, which mirrors a working day. I started seeing them as abstract clocks.
They share visual similarities to film in that they’re round coils. The more you show an analog film, the more it disintegrates. The coils consume themselves in order to protect you and film consumes itself in order to entertain you.
BB
And how do they manifest as artworks?
LG
I like to think of them as witnesses. They’re a recording of their own fabrication. I was left with these remnants of a four- or six-hour work day and I decided to translate them into another materiality in order to preserve them. They're all getting cast, becoming solid and trapped in time. They become stopped clocks—it's like the end of a movie.
I like this change from one state into another. When you invited me to show Productions in London, we decided to translate it into a digital form in order to present it anew as Revisions. What happened in that translation from one material to another, or one state to another, is that we also preserved the work. By transforming it from celluloid into digital we also made sure that it has a life beyond its disintegrated form.
BB
Martine Syms has this notion of “Real Time Cinema”—the idea that, when you know you’re being filmed, your behavior changes to become a performance. I think it's the same in an interview setting: you hit “record” and suddenly you have to perform. All of these metrics are at play that didn’t exist ten minutes ago when we were chatting as friends. In a sense, we’re actors in this conversation. You made a work entitled Actors (2023) that concerns the camera’s role as the protagonist in film. How does the camera function in this way?
LG
The title I had in mind at the beginning was Is Acting Lying? I was thinking about the difference between lying and acting and whether or not there's a difference between the two.
BB
Do you think there's a difference?
LG
I don't think there is. What do you think?
BB
I don't think it's lying because I think the act of lying is rooted in self-preservation, self-protection, and self-advancement. Acting doesn't have to have a motivation, but lying always does. When you're lying, you're acting, but if you're acting, you're not always lying.
LG
I like that answer! I'm more interested in the question than I am in the answer. I knew I didn't want to work with actors and I didn't want to work with language. I was curious to attempt to make a work in which the camera is both the recording device and the actor. I came across a special effect that was common in Hollywood: “day for night,” in which you film a day scene and make it appear as if it was shot at night. I was in Berlin—I had a 16 millimeter camera—I drove to an industrial part of the city and filmed the steam coming out of the chimneys of the factories, making it appear as if it was a romantic night sky.
BB
Your work poses questions but is not always immediately legible. Do you consider that it might be alienating? Could it be too abstract?
LG
I’m not sure what's more abstract: a formal object or the type of work that I make. I’m interested in abstract ideas but I think I bring them to a logical conclusion—it's not a logical conclusion only I can arrive at. I like that the work Actors sits between these polarities of a romantic depiction of the night sky and a constructed image of an industrial society. I'm definitely not going to become a simple illustrator of ideas; these polarities are what makes the work.
LENARD GILLER WEARS REEBOK LTD PREMIER ROAD MODERN SNEAKERS AND LTD TRACK-PANTS
PHOTO CREDITS: STUDIO SHAPIRO, JORGE STRIDE
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PETRINE, PARIS.