GLEAN (EN) 3, Spring 2024

Our Spring Issue is here. As the art world prepares for yet another jam-packed season, we venture out to places outside the rarefied orbit of biennales and weekend gallery crawls, where other temporalities and the weight of both past and future give rise to new forms of action and activism. The result is one of our most ambitious issues yet. Plus: the latest GLEAN artist edition by Ced’art Tamasala, member of CATPC.

Guest Editor CATPC
Our Guest Editor for this Spring issue is the Lusanga-based artist collective CATPC (Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantations Congolaise). Founded in 2014, CATPC is both a physical space and a conceptual laboratory to rethink colonial power relations within the global art world. Together with artist Renzo Martens and curator Hicham Khalidi, the collective will represent the Netherlands at this year’s Venice Biennale.
CATPC invited Jean Katambayi Mukendi to contribute an essay. This special supplement also includes an excerpt from the script of CATPC’s unreleased film Judgement of the White Cube; photos by Brussels- and Kinshasa-based photographer Léonard Pongo, who visited the collective in Lusanga as early as 2016; drawings by CATPC founding member Matthieu Kasiama; and a conversation between Kathleen Weyts and artist Ced’art Tamasala, also one of the collective’s co-founders.

The Artist’s Library
UK-based Katie Paterson’s Future Library allows us – and future generations – to travel through time. None other than Margaret Atwood was the first author to be invited to take part in the project, in which participants write a book that will be sealed in a vault for a hundred years before being published. With the Library’s tenth anniversary coming up, Els Roelandt made her way to Oslo to speak with its founder.

Jim Shaw
‘Your Future is All Used Up’ was one of the possible titles for Jim Shaw’s solo exhibition at M HKA in Antwerp. But it became ‘The Ties That Bind.’ Nothing is what it seems in Jim Shaw’s world of accumulation, not even the titles. Phillip Van den Bossche spoke with the artist, who seems to prefer a world beyond the orderly and ordinary.

Martin Margiela
In a rare interview, Martin Margiela sheds light on his artistic process and discusses his upcoming exhibitions at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens and Brussels. Margiela talks about serendipity, traces, found objects and sudden triggers of desire in achieving excellence. But also about failure and doubt and the transition from fashion to visual art. Margiela himself provided the art direction for the layout of the interview, which was written by Birte Carolin von Knoblauch.

Barbara Visser
Barbara Visser’s most recent documentary, Alreadymade (2023), explores the hypothesis that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (aka Baroness Dada) was the true author of Fountain (1917), the infamous pedestal-mounted urinal cited as the first significant readymade in art (and conventionally attributed to Marcel Duchamp). Febe Lamiroy spoke with the Dutch artist about her new film and the eponymous exhibition in Kunsthaus Zürich, which is on view through 15 May.