The historian, curator and director of the Canadian Photography Institute at the National Gallery of Canada picks her best of the year – including Timothy Prus’ exhibition The Cow and the Orchid
Features
The writer, curator, lecturer, and founder of Self Publish, Be Happy picks out his top five of the year – including Shanghai-based studio Same Paper
The founding editor of Splash and Grab magazine and photo director at PORT Magazine picks out his top five of the year – including Suzie Howell’s Inside the Spider show
The editor of Vice Magazine UK picks out his top five of 2017 – including Lewis Bush’s Shadows of the State
CJ Clarke and Poulomi Basu, photographers and co-founders of the Kolkata festival pick out their top five
The Warsaw-based photographer picks the top five projects from Eastern Europe in 2017 – including Alexander Chekmenev’s Passport
The Madrid-based photography correspondent reports on the Spanish top five of 2017 – including Álvaro Laiz’s The Hunt
Nadya Sheremetova and Yury Gudkov from the St Petersburg-based photography gallery, publishing house, and creative hub pick out their top five of 2017 – including the second edition of FotoDepartament’s Presence festival
Launched on 11 December, a brand new biannual, Clove, has a refreshing take on art and culture. Founded by London-based, British-Indian journalist Debika Ray, the magazine focuses on creative work from South Asia and its global diaspora. “My impression was always that, in Western media, there was a narrow frame of reference when it came to covering parts of the world beyond North America and Europe,” says Ray, who until recently was senior editor at the architecture and design magazine Icon. “Stories from South Asia or the Middle East are often handled in a distant way, focusing on problems or crises and how people battle against odds to overcome things. I wanted to tell stories from those parts of the world in a way that were instead built on their own merit.”
Jessica Backhaus’ A Trilogy was born out of intuition. After 2015’s Six Degrees of Freedom, a project that saw the Berlin-based artist confronting personal topics of “identity, family, origin and memory” she craved something new; something rooted in minimalism and abstraction that would be wholly artistic and natural. Published now by Kehrer Verlag, the resulting book is a triptych of sorts, in which Backhaus takes her experimental sensibilities to a place of lucid colour, playful collage, and radical reduction. “I felt a cycle was finishing,” she says. “After Six Degrees of Freedom I felt empty, but not in a negative way. It was liberating. That notion of emptiness and void made me listen to how I was feeling.”