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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).

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MANIFESTO

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KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT are excited to announce that our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO, will return to Paris from June 20 to June 22, coinciding with Men’s Fashion Week. Building on the success of the last two editions held at Espace Niemeyer, a landmark building designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will again bring together visionary artists and creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion, and sound.

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 

These five London-based emerging arts are making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell. 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.

CAPSULE PLAZA

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From 15–21 April 2024, Capsule Plaza returned for its second edition, taking over Spazio Maiocchi and extending to a new satellite venue: iconic Milanese destination 10 Corso Como. 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 and multisensory curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, innovation and craft.

FELIX ART FAIR & DSMLA

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On the occasion of the 2024 edition of Felix Art Fair, taking place February 28 to March 3 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, KALEIDOSCOPE has partnered with Dover Street Market Los Angeles to present a limited-edition zine. In celebration of the Oscar Tuazon installation, commissioned to host the DSM store inside the hotel's ballroom, KALEIDOSCOPE presents a free publication created in collaboration with the artist, available exclusively to Felix and DSMLA visitors.

SARA SADIK 

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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

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ERIK BRUNETTI: OVAL PARODY
50 EUR
Giger Sorayama
80 EUR
TOBIAS SPICHTIG PAINTINGS
45 EUR

FROM THE ARCHIVE

THE LOST DECADE

HIROH KIKAI

WORDS BY JEPPE UGELVIG

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Over four decades, Japanese photographer Hiroh Kikai has captured the portraits of people who passed by the Sensō-ji Buddhist Temple in Tokyo’s Asakusa district.

“I’ve concluded that Asakusa is a mysterious neighborhood,” noted Hiroh Kikai in his diary in March 1998. He was referring to an overlooked district in Tokyo, once a pleasure and entertainment district that serviced the governing Tokugawa shogunate. After the Edo period, it had fallen out of the city’s consciousness: except for the enormous and well-frequented Buddhist temple Sensō-ji, not much was happening in this urban backwater at the turn of the millennium. It was the height of the Japan’s “lost decade,” after all, the economic depression that followed a meteoritic postwar ascent, casting the newly established Asian superpower into a strange haze of melancholy. Perhaps Kikai, who roamed the temple grounds in search of subjects to photograph, understood the intense significance of this—at least, he begged to differ when it came to Asakusa: “This is still a neighborhood full of people seeking a livelihood on a peculiarly personal level. So many of the people I see there wear the stories of their lives in their visage and bearing. A unique story hangs around each of them like a cloak, and fires my imagination. Silently, as they pass by, they give me a yet another glimpse of a distinctively human drama.”

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Kikai was a purist in the very best sense, devoting his entire practice to the universality that is the “human drama” and, more specifically, the possibility of capturing it through the image. Far too humble, and focused, to ever pose as a conceptualist or social documentarian, his work nonetheless distilled the highest qualities of both, procuring grand emotional narratives out of chance encounters on the street. That he spent most of his career in the Sensō-ji’s vicinity was a question of convenience—it was close to his home, and there were always lots of people. He would often annotate his images, suggesting open-ended narratives: a man reading his fortune carefully from end to end, a woman who wasn’t looking for a long-term employment contract any time soon. Why venture further if his camera found all it needed there, humanity itself cloaked in the intense idiosyncrasies of attire, physiognomy, body language, expression? Each human, so impossibly heavy with meaning, with history.

In university, Kikai studied philosophy; afterward, he worked as a truckdriver. He detested cinema, praising it only when broken into stills, and he adored Diane Arbus. When, in 1969, he discovered a Hasselblad for sale at a discounted rate, he successfully convinced his old professor, the philosopher Sadayoshi Fukuda, to lend him the money. By the mid-1980s, he had settled for his location (Sensō-ji’s red walls offering a distinctive muffled gray when translated into black-and-white) and established “game rules” that he stuck to until his death: subjects should be passersby and photographed from the knee up, in square format; no recognizable designer clothes should be visible as it would identify the picture too closely with a specific time. Fashion, then, sits at the heart of Kikai’s work, namely as a problem—an issue in the way of timelessness.

Jeppe Ugelvig (b. 1993) is a curator, historian, and cultural critic based in California. His first book, Fashion Work: 25 Years of Art in Fashion was published in 2020.
Hiroh Kikai (1945–2020) was a Japanese photographer best known for his series of monochrome photographs depicting scenes and people in the Asakusa area of Tokyo.

IMAGE COURTESY: NANZUKA, TOKYO