Category: Art & Culture

What the Directory Contained. What Art Dreams 

By Natasha Marzliak

A Critical Essay on the Pop-up Exhibition When Artists Talk to Telephone Books and These Respond to Them: PTT Archive Meets Wikimedia: Telephone Directory Stories from the Past. Museum of Communication, Bern, 19–29 May 2026 

Organized by Sandra Becker, GLAM Lead at Wikimedia CH, and Heike Bazak, Director of the PTT Archive Bern, in the framework of the CoCreation Project, Wikimedia CH, in partnership with the PTT Archive and the Museum of Communication. Idea and concept by Sandra Becker. Presented on the occasion of International Museum Day 2026, International Council of Museums. 

Start with the ear. 

A ceramic ear, cream-white and anatomically faithful, sits under a vitrine in a darkened hall in Bern. It is approximately the size of a large hand. It is not attached to anything. The ear outside the head is, in the tradition of surrealist anatomical fragmentation, an organ that has become a thing, separated from the body that gave it function and placed under glass like a specimen from a collection whose logic has been lost. It can receive nothing, while the room around it is full of sound. 

There is another ear in art history. In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh severed most of his left ear and brought it, wrapped in paper, to Gabrielle Berlatier, a young maid in Arles. The circumstances of the act remain uncertain, but the severed ear has come to signify sensitivity pushed beyond endurance. Yara Noémie Schaub’s ceramic ear belongs to this unstable lineage. 

Schaub made this ear to accompany a sound installation that translates telephonedirectory pages from Bern in 1926 and 2021 into rhythm. The directories are ninety-five years apart. What changes between them is who appears: names migrate, multiply, diversify, contract, and vanish. The sound does not narrate this or illustrate demographic change. It produces a trance-like acoustic environment that spreads through the entire exhibition space, entering the boxes, spheres, painted blueprints, film, and annotated directory pages until the whole room seems slightly submerged in it. The sound recalls Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, where syllables were released from ordinary language. Schaub’s number-rhythms similarly reach the nervous system before meaning can intercept them. Alphabetical order becomes duration, a century compressed into pattern. The method risks remaining more persuasive as an idea than as an acoustic composition; its numerical structure is easier to understand conceptually than its individual sonic decisions are to hear. The ceramic ear prevents the installation from remaining a data-conversion exercise. It gives abstraction a body and asks what these columns of names might become once the eye can no longer scan them in order. 

Standing in front of it, I think involuntarily of the orelhão, the public telephone booth shaped like an enormous orange ear that lined Brazilian street corners and squares when I was growing up in the 1990s. It was large enough to receive a head but never an entire body. To use it, you leaned into its curve, inserted a token, and pressed the receiver against your ear. The apparatus organized the body before it connected the voice. The city remained audible behind you, momentarily held at a distance. Privacy was always incomplete. Strangers stood close enough to overhear fragments of arguments, declarations of love, bad news, and arrangements for the evening while performing the courtesy of inattention. The orelhão is gone now, replaced by the telephone carried in the pocket, and with it went a particular quality of public intimacy, a specific arrangement of bodies, voices, and urban space. Schaub’s ceramic ear holds some of that loss without knowing it. The work comes from a Swiss archive, but the ear is the ear, and the ear remembers everything it has ever been used for. 

Telephone directories promised a related form of public legibility. A name, an address, and a number offered a route from one person to another. That promise was always conditional. To be listed meant that a person had entered the telephone system and could be made publicly findable. Others remained absent, unlisted, displaced, unable to afford a subscription, or beyond the administrative reach of the directory. The exhibition is strongest when it enters the distance between a person who can be located and a life that can be known. 

Small boxes. 

Violetta Vollrath’s Reliquienschrein analog (2026) is constructed from discarded institutional cardboard, its exterior borders decorated with watercolor drawings of umbrellas, fire extinguishers, insects, lightning bolts, and document clips. Inside are fragments of old telephone directories under plastic sheeting, the residual hardware of archival processing, and the small detritus of institutional maintenance. It sits under a vitrine like a reliquary, which is what it is: a container for something that has been decided to be sacred. 

Standing in front of it, one wants to be inside it. Not metaphorically. Physically inside, reduced to the scale of the objects it contains, living among the telephonedirectory fragments and discarded document clips as if they were furniture. This desire is neither rational nor critical, and it belongs entirely to the work. Something in the scale of the object, its handmade quality, and the care given to its border produces a longing for smallness, for the protected interior, for the condition of being contained rather than containing. The reliquary is a house for the sacred. Vollrath’s reliquary is a house for the discarded. 

What makes this theologically precise rather than merely poetic is the history of the reliquary form itself. The medieval goldsmith who constructed a container for a fragment of bone understood that holiness does not reside only in the object. It is also produced through the decision to treat an object as holy, to surround it with labor and material that exceed its intrinsic worth. The relic does not make itself sacred; the reliquary does. Vollrath performs this mechanism with the cheapest materials available: cardboard, watercolor, plastic sheeting, and discarded clips. The drawings of umbrellas and fire extinguishers, rendered with the attention one might give to illuminated-manuscript ornament, do not illustrate the contents. They declare those contents worthy of a frame. 

The sacred here is historical. Inside Vollrath’s boxes are the material traces of communication systems that organized daily life for more than a century and have now become obsolete. The telephone directory, scanner, compact disc, and document clip were technologies through which people located one another, reached one another, and filed one another into manageable order. Their obsolescence is not neutral. It marks the end of a particular form of collective legibility. Telephone directories may appear to embody the promise of an open society in which individuals are publicly named and findable. Yet, as Karl Schlögel’s reading of Moscow address books demonstrates, visibility was never equally distributed. Access to directories, addresses, telephones, and unpublished numbers also reflected social hierarchy and political power. A system that made one person reachable could render another invisible or dangerously exposed. 

Reliquienschrein digital (2025) is an earlier counterpart to the analog reliquary, built from electronic components and compact discs. Here, the materials announce obsolescence too quickly. A compact disc already carries a familiar aura of technological death, and the work sometimes depends upon that recognition rather than transforming it. By contrast, the analog box produces intimacy through scale, surface, and touch; its materials appear vulnerable, handled, and capable of decay. The digital reliquary raises an important question: whether a file can be mourned as a document can be mourned, whether data possesses a body capable of decay and residue. Yet here, the question is stronger than the object that carries it. 

War child. 

A boy of ten loses his father. The Second World War has ended, but its afterlife is long, and the family it leaves behind is a family missing one of them. Through a child-relief program organized by the Red Cross, the boy travels to Switzerland for summer stays with a host family, a country that is not his country, people who are not yet his people. He is a guest. He is happy there. He is a child already acquainted with catastrophe, spending the summer in a country that has survived the war differently from his own. The stay offers protection, but protection never occurs outside power. An organization selects the child; a foreign country receives him; an unfamiliar family temporarily becomes responsible for his safety. The relationship outlives the humanitarian structure that produced it. The Swiss family becomes his family. The connection that began as postwar assistance becomes something the program could not have predicted: a family that continues choosing itself across the generation that comes after. 

Kim Dotty Hachmann’s war child (2026) is presented on a screen embedded in the surface of a Bibliothek PTT cart, a battered wooden trolley on metal wheels that has traveled through institutional corridors for decades. The viewer stands over the screen, looking down. 

Somewhere in the PTT Archive there is a telephone directory that lists the address of the Swiss family. Name, street, number. The directory confirms that they existed, that they lived where they lived, and that they belonged to the connective tissue of a country that briefly received a child from elsewhere. The directory can confirm this. What it cannot confirm is the particular knowledge of arrival: the unfamiliar room, the language spoken around the table, the body learning that it is safe, or what it meant for Hachmann, decades later, to continue calling this family her own. The boy grew up and passed the story on to his children. After his death, Hachmann made the film from three unstable bodies of material: what he had told them, what the Swiss family remembered and communicated in interviews, and what the archive could verify. These sources do not always describe the same events in the same way. Memory protects certain details, alters others, and assigns emotional weight to moments the administrative record cannot detect. The archive confirms location while remaining silent about attachment. No source becomes sovereign. 

The video moves through architectural interiors, railway-station clocks, and winter tree branches in black and white. It does not reconstruct the summers. It moves through the visual residue of a history recovered from documents, from a father’s voice now also gone, and from the voices of the family in Switzerland who remain able to speak it. The trolley as plinth forces a posture of examination. You stand over the screen looking down, assuming the position of someone reading a document, but what you are reading is not a document. It is a story the father told his daughter; it is what the Swiss family remembers; it is the daughter’s grief for the father; it is her attachment to a family she chose to keep as hers; and it is a film set inside a cart once used to move the records of the telephone system through institutional space. The layering is structural. The film is made of what remained. 

The screen holds its temperature. There is a version of this story that would insist on its emotional weight, reconstructing the Swiss summers through warm light, actors, period detail, and domestic reassurance. Hachmann refuses that version. The film is cold and precise. Its restraint is its discipline and occasionally its risk. The desaturated images can turn absence into atmosphere, permitting winter trees and empty architecture to perform grief on the viewer’s behalf. The film becomes stronger when it remains inside the disagreement among testimony, family memory, and archival verification. The coldness is not distance. It is the specific temperature of grief for a father who is gone, held beside a family who is not, a gift that outlived the man who first received it. 

To dream. To imagine. 

Sandra Becker’s ceiling installation, Kristallkugeln der Zukunft (2025), hangs transparent plastic spheres at varying heights above the exhibition floor, each containing small objects: Hama-bead constructions assembled from fused plastic units in primary colors, fragments of white lace, and pixel-like patterns built from individual pieces. The spheres are clear, and light enters them differently according to where the viewer stands. They reflect the entire hall in their curved surfaces, compressing the room into miniature: the pedestals, carts, yellow-lit panels of the permanent exhibition, and other visitors. Each sphere is a world that contains the world that contains it. 

Gaston Bachelard understood that smallness is not diminishment but concentration, that the miniature asks the imagination to complete what the eye cannot see. Becker’s spheres test this proposition, although their transparency is less a guarantee of access than an instrument of distortion. They hover close enough to invite inspection and too high to be held. Their surfaces promise visibility while reorganizing the room through curvature. Histories, wars, marriages, migrations, and different epochs appear to be sealed inside transparent shells, yet nothing inside them remains entirely clear. This is both the installation’s force and its limitation. Transparent spheres readily become worlds, memories, futures, or preserved histories; the symbolism approaches familiarity. The work becomes more specific when the viewer notices that its apparent openness never provides undistorted access. The archive appears as a series of sealed atmospheres rather than a stable storehouse. 

Becker’s blueprint work, The Body Is the Message (2025), takes a technical drawing of the Hausrohrpoststation II Zürichand crosses it with a painted orange spiral. The technical drawing organizes movement in advance. Its thin lines define routes, connections, and the efficient transfer of physical objects through a building. The painted spiral records another kind of movement: the pressure of a hand crossing the page. It moves through the blueprint without obeying the routes prescribed by the document and carries the presence of the people whose names filled the telephone directories, who were listed, numbered, and made findable by the same infrastructure the blueprint was designed to serve. The directory gave them addresses. The blueprint organized the systems through which those addresses could be reached. The spiral is what neither document could hold: a life with an address, a number, and a place in the system that still exceeds all three. 

This matters because Becker is showing the work in the Museum of Communication, an institution whose curatorial logic is built around the history of transmission and the progressive development of systems capable of sending messages from one point to another. Yet the spiral does not simply oppose sensation to communication. It reveals the bodily pressure and human labor already present within technical systems that present themselves as neutral infrastructure. A structure designed to regulate movement receives a mark that cannot be used as an instruction. What moved through these systems was never only information. Bodies operated them, voices entered them, and lives exceeded the routes established for their movement. 

This collapse of function runs through the exhibition. A ceramic ear cannot hear. A telephone directory ceases to locate. A library trolley no longer transports books. A technical blueprint loses control over the route drawn upon it. The archive’s materials begin to act once they stop performing the tasks assigned to them. 

The notebooks, Die Telefonzellen (2025) and Die Telefonistin (2026), hold the exhibition’s most speculative gesture. Die Telefonistin opens to pencil sketches of faces annotated “Death mask out of blended metal, Chimú-culture, North Perú.” The connection it draws between Swiss telecommunications infrastructure and pre-Columbian funerary technology runs through the mask as a container for a face, a means of preserving the features of the dead so that the living may continue to address them. It also runs through a history of labor. The Telefonistin, the telephone operator, was almost always a woman. Her voice was the medium through which the directory’s list of names became an actual connection. The death mask preserves the face. The telephone preserved the voice. The association is provocative and historically incomplete. The movement from Chimú funerary culture to Swiss telephone labor remains largely analogical; the notebook opens a route without fully confronting the geographical and historical distance it crosses. Its most consequential subject is the operator herself. A communication system that presented itself as technical infrastructure depended upon feminized labor trained to disappear into its operation. The directory offered names and numbers, but connection required a body and a voice. 

Judith Boy draws directly on the archival surface. Chanukke für Mahatma Scholem (2020) lays a menorah in green and gold across the open pages of a wartime telephone directory. A Magen David occupies the center, and a small photographic fragment of barbed wire appears near the lower edge. Jewish names identified through Boy’s research during the archival workshops remain visible beneath the drawn forms. They are not obscured. They remain legible. The menorah crosses them, and they persist through it. 

Boy has spoken of her debt to Dada, and the connection runs most clearly through Hannah Höch, whose From an Ethnographic Museum series, produced between 1924 and 1930, cut into the visual archives of colonial classification, placing bodies and fragments in arrangements the archive had never intended. Höch understood that the institutional document is never neutral. Its surfaces carry the logic of the system that produced it, and working directly on those surfaces rather than reproducing them from a critical distance makes a different kind of claim. Boy operates through the same physical insistence. The telephone directory is not reproduced or cited. It is marked. The page is opened, crossed, and made unable to return entirely to administrative neutrality. The menorah does not merely illustrate loss. It occupies the document and insists that the page cannot be separated from the lives it registered. 

The telephone directory confirmed that a community was present. It recorded names, addresses, telephone numbers, and a form of civic existence. Such registration offered no guarantee of protection. Administrative visibility could connect a person to society and simultaneously expose that person to surveillance, exclusion, or control. Different bureaucratic systems, operating with comparable habits of enumeration, classification, and demographic identification, could transform the same population from citizens into targets. Boy’s work holds this contradiction on a single surface. The menorah crosses the names while preserving their legibility, allowing registration, memory, threatened existence, and the contemporary act of looking to remain visible at once. Boy’s formal decision to draw directly onto the archival page alters the document permanently. The archive now contains something that was not there before. This is a claim: the archive does not own the lives it contains. 

Klimax Wandel Mythos Back layers Arabic script over directory columns organized through German-language headings and Latin typography. Pine trees, lips, a ceiling fan, tropical vegetation, and a coiling white paper snake accumulate across the surface. The intervention does not prove that every name entering the 

directory was forcibly Germanized or that every linguistic difference was erased in the same manner. It makes visible the pressure exerted whenever different languages, histories, and geographies are required to occupy a uniform administrative order. The directory’s apparent neutrality depends upon repetition.  

Every entry receives a standardized position. Names of different origins become equivalent as units of information even when the people bearing them inhabit unequal relations to citizenship, property, language, mobility, and public visibility. Boy places linguistic and visual density back onto a surface designed to suppress it. The result is not chaos but argument: the page was never as monolingual or as orderly as its columns claimed. 

What the archive sets in motion. 

The International Council of Museums has organized International Museum Day for over forty years. The theme for 2026 is Museums Uniting a Divided World. The choice of words deserves scrutiny. Not museums interpreting a divided world, documenting one, or making its divisions visible. Uniting. 

The divisions in question are not abstract. They are wars whose territorial logic recalls the mid-twentieth century, border regimes tightening across Europe, military occupation, mass displacement, and the reorganization of global power along axes the post-Cold War settlement declared obsolete. States continue to assert sovereignty over populations, territory, movement, and the question of who belongs where and under what name. They classify people through addresses, passports, databases, residency categories, biometric records, and documents that determine whose movement appears legal and whose presence becomes administratively suspect. The technology has changed. The desire to stabilize human movement through information remains. Telephone directories belonged to an earlier stage of this history. Their columns presented society as a public order in which each subscriber occupied a place and could be reached. They claimed comprehensiveness while recording only those who entered the telephone system under particular economic, administrative, and linguistic conditions. Equality of format concealed inequality of access. 

Into this moment, ICOM places the museum as a unifying institution. Museums do hold materials that might otherwise be lost and create conditions for encounters with objects that resist the simplifications of the present. Yet the exhibition in Bern proposed something more abrasive than preservation and less reassuring than unity. It entered the systems through which divisions are recorded, ordered, and maintained, and made those systems temporarily lose their stability. Pages became drawing surfaces, records became sound, library carts became screens, technical diagrams received bodily marks, and archival material entered workshops, artworks, photographs, personal testimony, museum display, and public digital circulation. The collaboration among Wikimedia CH, the PTT Archive, and the Museum of Communication did not stand outside the archive and denounce it. It entered through the archive’s own procedures and made them briefly lose their footing. What these five artists do is turn that infrastructure against itself, extracting from its columns what the columns were not designed to show. 

Sandra Becker conceived the project and developed it with Heike Bazak through CoCreation workshops held in the archive before the exhibition. Artists entered the archive, worked with its materials, and returned them in altered forms. The exhibition was also accompanied by a Wikimedia editathon, through which photographs and documentation entered Wikimedia Commons, including photographs I contributed. The project therefore did not end inside the museum. Yet Wikimedia Commons is not an institution-free space. It replaces one system of classification with another. Its materials circulate more widely and may be linked, edited, categorized, contested, or removed according to a different set of rules. 

Public access expands, but access remains mediated through licenses, permissions, technical knowledge, categories, and editorial judgment. 

The political force of the collaboration lies less in the fantasy of knowledge belonging to no institution than in the passage between institutions. Materials governed by the logic of telecommunications history moved through artistic interpretation, museum display, private memory, photography, and collaborative digital classification. Each passage altered what could be seen, who could name it, and how the material might return. The exhibition was an institutionally authorized act of disobedience. The institutions opened their own structures to interruption. The archive did not disappear, but it could no longer remain entirely identical to itself. 

What these five artists found in seventy meters of Swiss telephone directories was not unity. It was density: the density of lives that passed through a system designed to make them findable, and the irreducible excess of those lives over the data the system produced. The archive remained standing, but for the duration of the exhibition its materials forgot the functions that had kept them in place. 

Bibliography 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Foreword by John R. Stilgoe. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.  

Bailey, Martin. “Name of Mystery Woman Who Received Van Gogh’s Ear Revealed for First Time.” The Art Newspaper, July 19, 2016.  

Ball, Hugo. Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. Edited by John Elderfield. Translated by Ann Raimes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.  

Boswell, Peter, Maria Makela, and Carolyn Lanchner. The Photomontages of Hannah Höch. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996.  

International Council of Museums. “International Museum Day 2026: Museums Uniting a Divided World.” Accessed July 30, 2026.  

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Introduction by Lewis H. Lapham. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Originally published 1964.  

Museum of Communication Bern. “Pop-up: Wenn Künstlerinnen mit 

Telefonbüchern reden – und sie zu ihnen sprechen [When Women Artists Talk to Telephone Books—and They Talk Back].” May 19, 2026. Accessed July 30, 2026.  

Murphy, Bernadette. Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.  

Schlögel, Karl. “Wsja Moskwa.” In Moskau lesen, 101–111. Berlin: Siedler, 1984.  

Natasha Marzliak is an art critic, curator, researcher, studio manager, and Associate Editor of the Art Style International Magazine.

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

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Exploring Black Resistance: The Inner Passage Uncovered

MIT Press published The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway, a powerful new book and photographic project by Charleston-based artist Virginia McGee Richards, in April 2026.

The Inner Passage began with a question. While cooling off in a river near her home in Charleston, South Carolina, Richards found herself thinking about the deep histories held in the landscape and the waterways that shaped it. That moment sparked a fifteen-year inquiry—part fieldwork, part archival excavation—into the maps, documents and lived memories embedded in the region’s marshlands.

Her research uncovered a largely unrecorded 300-mile network of colonial-era canals—known as “cuts”—carved between the 17th and 18th centuries along the Atlantic coastline from Charleston, South Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida. Built largely by enslaved Africans and Indigenous people using little more than shovels and axes to clear forests and excavate coastal mud, these waterways remain sparsely documented; the Black workers’ names were never recorded. Richards traced this intricate system through fragile plats, scattered family papers and maps marked only by the silhouettes of ancient live oaks—many of which still stand as witnesses today.

From the late 1600s through the early-1800s, enslaved people used segments of the Inner Passage route to escape from Charleston to Spanish Florida, where they were granted freedom. This layered history shaped Richards’ approach to the work.

“I wanted to visually document what was there,” she recalls, “but my first photographs didn’t convey the history or the ambience of the place.” She turned instead to wet-plate collodion, a 19th-century photographic process whose alchemical unpredictability mirrors the watery, shifting world she sought to capture. “Wet-plate collodion demands that the photographer embrace chaotic elements and uncertain outcomes. A slight change in atmospheric temperature or humidity alters chemical volatility and the eventual image on the glass.”

From this deep immersion emerged portraits—of the trees and of the living descendants connected to the waterways. Many of the people she photographed carried family histories rooted in the region for centuries, mirroring the geological and cultural time embedded in the land itself. “They were like the trees,” Richards says. “They had overseen everything.”

The Inner Passage has been recognized for its intertwined layers of rigorous research, environmental awareness and poetic visual language. Yet Richards resists a didactic reading. “I want people to experience it as a visual poem,” she says, “to feel—through the land, the trees, the water—the sense of place, and the power of the landscape telling its own history.”

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

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25 Women Artists From Around the World to Be Presented in Times Square

NEW YORK, NY — August 15, 2026 — Twenty-five women artists from around the world will come together in Times Square this August as part of Women Beyond Borders, an international digital exhibition presented by Art Queens Gallery.

The exhibition will be inaugurated on August 15, 2026, and will continue through September 14, 2026, transforming the digital billboards of Times Square into an open-air gallery.

The exhibition brings together a range of contemporary artistic practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture and performance. By presenting the works on large-scale digital screens, the project places contemporary art within the everyday movement of one of New York City’s most internationally recognized locations.

The participating artists are Alexandra Monteiro, Andrea Niven, Angélique Vivran, Anna K. Sherrard, ASUKA KIM (Myoungsoon), Carolyn Hardy, Chantell Van Erbé, Cherie Daly, Dr. Lauren Jackson, Elena Exenberger, Gloria Carnevale, Ingrid Forbregd, Jolanda Walther, LATANA, Lorrayne Paula, Martha Baxin, Melanie Meyer, Metra Mitchell, Sevim YILDIZ, Sonja Terese Brekke, Hanna Hagelin, Emma Harrison, Marlena Kokot, Natalie Vorontsoff, and SENTIENT TO PAINT (Simona Ray).

The exhibition marks the third chapter of Women Beyond Borders, an international project that explores the relationship between women’s artistic voices, cultural exchange and visibility in public space.

Its presentation in Times Square offers a different context for experiencing contemporary art. Rather than being encountered exclusively within a gallery or museum, the works appear within a highly active urban environment, alongside the digital imagery and architecture that define the square.

For curator Salma Eltoukhy, the decision to bring the project to Times Square is deliberate:

“We want people to encounter art where they least expect it—and to discover voices they might otherwise never encounter.”

— Salma Eltoukhy, Curator, Art Queens Gallery

The project will officially open in Times Square on August 15, accompanied by a live performance from SENTIENT TO PAINT (Simona Ray), See YOU II.

The inauguration will also be accessible through live streaming, while the Art Queens Gallery Metaverse will provide a virtual extension of the exhibition.

Women Beyond Borders is presented by Art Queens Gallery, with Art HERstory Magazine as Media Partner.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Exhibition: Women Beyond Borders

Presented by: Art Queens Gallery

Curator: Salma Eltoukhy

Media Partner: Art HERstory Magazine

Location: Times Square, 1560 Broadway, New York, NY

Dates: August 15–September 14, 2026

Metaverse: https://artqueensgallery.com/metaverse

Press contact: info@artqueensgallery.com

Website: https://artqueensgallery.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artqueensgallery

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Publishing in Art Style Magazine is free of charge for anyone. There are no article processing charges or other publication fees. Art Style Magazine is independent and supports the Open Access Movement. The editors of Art Style Magazine cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in essays and articles published on the Art Style Magazine’s website and editions. Authors agree to the terms and conditions and assure that their submissions are free of third parties’ rights. The views and opinions expressed in the essays and articles are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Art Style Magazine. The authors of Art Style Magazine’s essays and articles are responsible for its content. The Art Style Magazine‘s website provides links to third-party websites. However, the magazine is not responsible for the contents of those linked sites, nor for any link contained in the linked site content of external Internet sites (see Terms & Conditions).

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EXHIBITION REVIEW / CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE

Arcana: The Lion of the New Horizon. Stone, Spirit, and Memory in the Work of Andrea da Montefeltro

At the Castello dei Conti Oliva in Piandimeleto, a major anthology curated by Annalisa Di Maria explores Neoplatonism and the universal roots of humanity through the sculptural mastery of Andrea da Montefeltro.

Editorial Staff  |  Piandimeleto (PU)  |  July 10, 2026

There is a material that knows no time. It traverses centuries without ever betraying itself, silently safeguarding the memory of civilizations, the breath of landscapes, and the labor of human hands. This material is stone. It is from stone—and its stubborn fidelity to its own nature—that the artistic research of Andrea da Montefeltro takes shape. He is the protagonist of a major national exhibition at the Castello dei Conti Oliva in Piandimeleto, titled ARCANA: The Lion of the New Horizon.

The exhibition, which opened on July 10, 2026, and will be on display until September 30 in the frescoed halls of one of the most evocative architectural landmarks in the Montefeltro region, acts as an authentic pilgrimage for the eyes. Under the artistic direction of Annalisa Di Maria—an internationally renowned scholar and one of the world’s leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci and Neoplatonic thought—the event restores to art its original vocation: to be a tool for thought, dialogue, and knowledge.

The Symbiosis of Matter and Spirit

The stone that Andrea polishes and chisels with delicate mastery is pierced and opened from within, resulting in airy lightness, almost suspended in nothingness. It is a perfect symbiosis between raw material and the artist’s hand, emphasizing the skill of one who adopts stone as a “matter/symbol” for profound, polyvalent, and piercing messages. Before these sculptures, light-years away from commercial logic and the ephemeral trends of the contemporary world, it becomes impossible to dismiss the work with the common superficial remark: “What’s the big deal, I could have done that too.”

The artist does not merely show; he incessantly has something to tell. His works are not mere aesthetic exercises, but “arks of knowledge.” In this journey, the challenge to the unknown, as an innate human need, manifests through cultured and powerful references: from the myth of divided between Templars and Saracens in an ancient struggle that retains its dramatic contemporary relevance.Odysseus in The Bow of No One to the rigorous metaphor of the Chessboard, where pawns are 

“The future is not born from the erasure of memory, but from the ability to recognize, preserve, and transform it into a new possibility for dialogue.”

Neoplatonism and Renaissance in the Montefeltro

The choice of the Castello dei Conti Oliva is not accidental. For over five centuries, this residence dominated the Foglia Valley, a Renaissance crossroads of ideas and culture in dialogue with Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, and the great Italian courts. In this setting, ARCANA reties the thread to the past, proposing a New Humanism founded on responsibility and the centrality of the person.

As artistic director Annalisa Di Maria emphasizes, Neoplatonism is not reduced here to a decorative repertoire or an exhibition slogan: “It is one of the highest philosophical elaborations of Western civilization, capable of putting art, science, spirituality, and the search for truth into dialogue.” The exhibition, created by the Municipality of Piandimeleto with the patronage of the Marche Region and the support of the Florence UNESCO Club, is an official part of the national journey marking the 800th Anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi, featuring a section dedicated to the values of peace, brotherhood, and harmony with Creation.

A Solitary Navigator Between Myth and Modernity

Andrea da Montefeltro moves through today’s landscape as a solitary navigator guided by the North Star of art’s deep roots. Works such as The Swans or The Celestial Hierarchy appear as a Divine Comedy imagined and sculpted in rock. The baskets of daily food products, which recall the lessons of Arcimboldo and the great past masters like Mantegna and the Della Robbia, open onto a global Eden that goes far beyond consumption, questioning the observer on major ethical, metaphysical, and ecological themes.

In an age dominated by the ephemeral and by the carpe diem mentality, this sculptural body of work reminds us that art is called upon to offer a fundamental contribution to the culture of a conscious existence. Under his blows, stone ceases to be inert matter and becomes a vigilant guardian of the past and a prophecy of a new human horizon.

EXHIBITION INFORMATION

Title	ARCANA — The Lion of the New Horizon. National exhibition by Andrea da Montefeltro
Artistic Direction	Annalisa Di Maria
Venue	Castello dei Conti Oliva, Piandimeleto (PU)
Dates	July 10 – September 30, 2026
Hours	Every day: 9:00 – 12:00 | 16:30 – 18:30 (Guided tours with the artist upon reservation)
Patronage	Municipality of Piandimeleto, Marche Region, Florence UNESCO Club

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Dr. Wilbertz: An Art Historical Essay on the Exhibition IMPERFEKT

by Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer, MAERZ Gallery

“Due regard will be paid to durability when the foundations are carried down to solid ground and when the materials, of whatever kind, are carefully selected and applied without parsimony.”

Vitruvius, De Architectura Libri Decem, Book I, Chapter 3 (c. 33–14 BC)

For the ancient architectural theorist Vitruvius, firmitas (durability) constitutes the foundation—and the first category—of all built reality. It is not only a prerequisite for the utility and function of what is built, but also for its aesthetic quality and effect. A well-constructed building designed for permanence provides people with security, protection, and a sense of belonging. It is closely linked to our notions of beauty.

Structural damage, ruptures, and defects are indicators of decay and destruction. They manifest themselves on the surface of a building, yet their causes often lie hidden deep within its inaccessible structural substance. Our dwellings are indispensable foundations of human existence. When they become fragile or damaged, this results in a tangible sense of uncertainty and disturbance to our psychological well-being. The unconscious is triggered; we lose stability.

Rainer Nöbauer’s body of work IMPERFEKT addresses precisely these conditions and thus becomes a symbolic reflection of a reality that is becoming increasingly unstable. The production and reception of images—particularly within digital environments and pseudo-valued product worlds—are becoming ever more perfected, while at the same time the social, cultural, and human principles that once provided stability and cohesion are losing their constitutive relevance. (Self-)destruction has become the new paradigm.

Since the early 1960s, the artistic strategies of the Nouveaux Réalistes have belonged to a broad and highly heterogeneous group of international positions that take materiality, its questioning, and the processes of damage and destruction as the starting point of artistic practice. Their target was the complacent saturation of postwar prosperity society, whose artistic production often exhausted itself in the aesthetic affirmation of a belated and frequently decorative understanding of modernity. The parallels to today’s oversaturated digital world are difficult to ignore.

Rainer Nöbauer employs artistic strategies of imitation and simulation without foregrounding his own authorial presence or artistic signature. The works in the IMPERFEKT series present themselves as an objectively conceived collection which, comparable to the moulages of the nineteenth century, displays fragments of an injured—or perhaps diseased—body (the house). Physical and chemical processes and their resulting manifestations are initiated, simulated, systematically explored, and presented as phenomena of quiet and undramatic destruction.

Framing, traditional modes of display, hanging methods, and the almost classical placement of the sculptures within the exhibition space are elements of a carefully considered presentation and musealization that initially render the damage and ruptures seemingly harmless. The same applies to the perfection of execution, which possesses considerable aestheticizing potential. The resulting “images” follow artistic and aesthetic principles associated with modernism both before and after 1945.

Abstraction, Informel, and autonomous processes of artistic formation give rise to works of remarkable graphic, painterly, and sculptural quality. These works demand to be taken seriously and should by no means be understood as ironic commentaries on the fragilities and injuries of the present. Rather, they seek to make visible the aesthetic and artistic potentials inherent in destructive processes without, in the literal sense, beautifying them.

If one engages with these works, they reveal that disturbing forces are at work beneath the surface— not only of what is built. Small and large catastrophes may be their consequence. The acceptance of the “ugly,” in opposition to the “classically beautiful,” and its artistic manifestations as part of existence and reality had already been articulated by Karl Rosenkranz in his Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853):

“This inner connection of the beautiful with the ugly as its self-destruction also establishes the possibility that the ugly may in turn negate itself; that, existing as the negative of the beautiful, it resolves its contradiction to beauty and returns to unity with it.”

Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853)

Few formulations could summarize Rainer Nöbauer’s artistic programme more aptly.

IMPERFEKT – The Beauty of Imperfection

Artist Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer’s new body of work is inspired by structural defects and signs of decay found in 20th- and 21st-century architecture. The damage, defects and structural injuries observable in these buildings are artistically and sculpturally reinterpreted and transformed into autonomous works of visual art.

IMPERFEKT deliberately transfers flaws and damage—typically regarded as negative phenomena—into the artistic media of sculpture, relief and graphic works. Fracture, flaw and damage are rendered visible and transformed into aesthetic qualities. This is achieved through complex and deliberate material processes and mechanical interventions that generate calculated flaws and damage within the works themselves. The result is cracks, spalling, instabilities, as well as accelerated oxidation and mould-growth processes. Further strategies of aestheticisation emerge through acts of collecting and museum display within the MAERZ space, newly reconfigured for the exhibition.

At a time of social upheaval and uncertainty, IMPERFEKT deliberately challenges the prevailing dogma of perfection, countering it with an aesthetic of underlying imperfection.

Biographie:

Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer was born in Linz in 1979. After training as a sculptor, he studied Fine Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Arts Linz. His artistic practice explores social attributions and conventions, using them to develop independent, often interdisciplinary approaches. By combining perspectives from the natural and cultural sciences with specific situations and contexts, his work challenges established categorisations and patterns of perception. Rainer Nöbauer-Kammerer subtly develops an aesthetic of resistance without explicitly naming it as such.

His work has been recognised with awards and grants, most recently the State Grant for Fine Art from the Republic of Austria (2024). International exhibition and residency experience, including projects at CCA Glasgow, Salzburger Kunstverein, Transit Photographies Montpellier, Forum Stadtpark Graz, Stadtgalerie Bern, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, Mana Contemporary New York and S.Y.P Art Space Tokyo. Lectures at the University of Art and Design Linz.

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Sous la Figure, La Plage: The Painting of Bertram Schilling at the Threshold of Abstraction

A booth, a banquet. TOP Berlin* at Supermarket 2026.

A critical essay on the paintings of Bertram Schilling exhibited at Supermarket 2026, Stockholm.

by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style Magazine

Night and hangover are the same god, just as Bertram Schilling’s paintings are. Intoxication dissolves the self, dissolves the protective distance between the critic and what he/she/they look(s) at, makes seeing hurt in a way sobriety refuses. There is a force that form carries without being able to contain it entirely, the charge that traverses the surface and undoes it from within. I needed this to enter Schilling’s canvases. His partner, brother, and friends prepared the ritual, the space for what the paintings would demand.

I came to Stockholm with the beautiful and painful mission of writing about Supermarket Independent Art Fair and, above all, about Schilling’s paintings. The fair: twenty years selling what has no price to those who did not come to buy. The Erskinehuset, in Slakthusområdet (the former abattoir district of Stockholm), is the right space for this. More than sixty artist-run initiatives from various countries, no galleries as intermediaries, no silent pressure of the collector circulating. A structure indifferent to the market’s expectations. Autonomy that produces work suspending immediate legibility, answerable to no one.

Writing about Schilling is painful because the absence that should organize the writing keeps pressing through it, the way the force presses through the surface of the canvases, collapsing the distance that would make criticism possible.

Plato’s Symposium works this way: thought about what matters only happens while the bodies are still at the table, while the conversation still finds reason to continue, while Eros, the force that moves between what is present and what is absent, holds the room. Last Friday, Schilling’s partner, Pernilla cooked for the group in Stockholm. There was wine. There were the paintings sent by his brother Clemens. The night was still open. Blanchot, in La Communauté inavouable (1983), wrote that there are communities that only exist in the sharing of loss, that form precisely where something irreparable happened and where no one pretends otherwise. That dinner was this: a feast that life makes possible only because the dead are inside it, active, present in every gesture of hospitality. The conversation circled around the present and the non-present, around that pulse of life which exists precisely because it does not conceal what is missing.

Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Matthias Roth, and Ricarda Wallhaeuser studied with the same Prof. Lobeck at Kunsthochschule Kassel in the 90s. They founded the artist initiative microwesten under the umbrella of TOP Berlin together. Schilling died in 2023. They placed the paintings on the walls of the booth. What those walls held is what this text attempts to approach.

When I stood before the works, I felt the cold first. The cold of Stockholm in April I already carried in my coat. This was another cold, older, coming from inside the paint. What I felt, the canvases had already decided beyond retrieval. Greys, desaturated blues, whites that weigh like compressed matter. According to his partner, Schilling was thinking about painting all the time, in the places he passed through, on the living room sofa. In his almost recognisable landscapes, painting was the way to register the ground beneath his feet as duration, as something that had happened to a body. The hand leaves a trace no subsequent interpretation can fully claim. The snow that recurs series upon series compresses the vegetation, the soil, the horizon line, removes the atmospheric buffer between form and the pressure form carries, leaves the pictorial elements exposed to the weight of what the painter chose not to resolve. It is a reduction, a simplification in reverse. What remains when the snow has passed is the skeleton of existence.

The contours are black and deliberate, holding the planes apart by force, refusing the atmospheric fusion that would be the easy consolation. Schilling’s canvases exist at the threshold between the recognisable and the irreducible: the landscape is almost there, almost nameable, and it is precisely this suspension, this refusal to resolve into either pure figuration or pure abstraction, that gives the surface its particular pressure. Here one feels Munch of the late Norwegian landscapes, where the horizon remains opaque to the eye, where the sky weighs on the earth like a question left standing. In those late works the paint surface carries its own gravity, the horizon a sealed line, as if landscape had decided it no longer needed to be entered. And De Staël: the figure that exists before knowing what it is, planes of colour suspended at the moment before the decision between abstract and figurative, the canvas that demands to be read in more than one direction, a refusal to resolve that the paint enforces from within.

And then I felt the solitude. Solitude inscribed on the surface by the hand, prior to any theme, and heavier than any. The black contour that keeps each plane at a distance from the others carries an entire worldview: things exist separately, the space between them is real, and the paint affirms it without apology. After solitude, fear. The plain fear of standing before a work that gazes back.

Didi-Huberman analyses this in Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992). Before certain surfaces, something resists our visual possession and looks back at us as a structural operation of the canvas. The argument emerges from an experience in front of Tony Smith’s minimalist works: black boxes that return something of the order of death, of the tomb, of what refuses to be possessed by the living. In Schilling’s canvases, this effect gains a still sharper precision because what the surface holds is the death of a specific person who painted there, who left the trace of the hand, who chose that quality of grey and not another. The canvas looks at us with the eyes of one who has gone. Lyotard, in Discours, Figure (1971), names the force that produces this effect from inside the image: sous la figure, le désir, a structural tension prior to any reading, which acts within the figure and prevents it from closing on itself as a complete sign, deforming it by a charge it carries without being able to absorb. For Lyotard, the visual field is traversed by a force that representation registers without domesticating. It is the pressure that form contains and does not exhaust. What Lyotard locates inside the canvas, Didi-Huberman locates in the interval between the canvas and whoever looks at it. They are the same movement seen from opposite sides of a vibrating surface.

And in this tension, in this compressed winter, in this solitude heavier than any theme, in this fear returned by the gaze, in this wine that dissolves the protective distance, I found something I did not expect. A freedom. Sous le pavé, la plage: as a pictorial condition, as what exists beneath the snow that compresses, beneath the contour that separates, beneath the weight of the horizon that resists the eye. There is a layer that form carries without being able to contain, an existence that presses the surface upward from below, that surges precisely where form reaches its limit. Schilling’s landscape is where existence appears raw, unadorned, with that strange freedom that only comes when there is no longer an illusion to sustain. A freedom of sky and flesh.

The booth as banquet: Schilling painted whole spaces of existence, and Kim and Matthias brought them to Stockholm so that they go on pressing against whoever stands before them. It is the force that Lyotard named and Didi-Huberman felt returned: the désir beneath the figure, the gaze that the surface sends back across the irreversible distance between the dead and the living, and that no subsequent interpretation can extinguish. The community that forms before these canvases is the same that formed at Pernilla’s table, what Blanchot called la communauté inavouable: the one that exists only because something irreparable happened. That instant passed. In Bertram Schilling’s paintings, the instant stayed. What stayed looks at us.

* TOP Berlin is a transdisciplinary collective based in Berlin. Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Ricarda Wallhaeuser and Matthias Roth, all graduated from the Kunsthochschule Kassel, University of Kassel, together with Julia Hürter formed the nomadic artist initiative microwesten around the year 2002. Bertram Schilling later established the artist projects “Being in the word” and “Mind map memory”. Bertram Schilling died 2023.

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HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.

Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.

Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.

“It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me”. IM

Rather than depicting the Avebury stone circle as landscape or monument, McKeever focuses on the presence of the stones: their physical mass, indomitable endurance, and radically non-human sense of time. The photographs do not attempt to encompass the site as a whole. Instead, McKeever moves close to the stones, cropping tightly, circling them and allowing their weight and density to assert themselves within the frame.

The photographs Seven Stones emerge directly from McKeever’s painting practice. Known primarily for his abstract paintings, McKeever frequently turns to photography not as a preparatory tool, but as a “reality check”: a way of affirming the world of sensation that his paintings pursue in more elusive, amorphous forms. While his paintings allow presence to remain latent and indeterminate, photography pins it down to a recognisable object. However, also recognising that a photograph as such is itself an abstraction, as is the painting. This gap between an object and an implied presence McKeever explored in his monumental painting series Henge Paintings 2017 – 2022.

“It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself”. IM

The tension between the fixity and certainty of the photographic image and the open-ended temporality of painting is central to McKeever’s work. A photograph holds a single, emphatically fixed moment in time, while a painting evolves across months or years, resisting completion and refusing to belong to either a single point in time or a single viewpoint.

Ian McKeever: Seven Stones invites viewers into a quiet but profound encounter with the stones as presences rather than images, asking how we register the world physically and sensorially and how art mediates between what is seen, what is felt, and what endures across time.

About Ian McKeever

Ian McKeever (British, b. 1946) emerged as an artist in the early 1970’s out of an interest in both conceptualism and abstract painting, the prevalent trends at the time. Although seeing himself primarily as a painter, this is informed by his ongoing engagement with photography. Not in the blurring of the boundary between the two disciplines, rather in seeing and understanding them as distinct visual languages.

McKeever received the DAAD scholarship in 1989 and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1990. He has exhibited internationally and has taught extensively in the UK, Germany, and the USA including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Ian McKeever was elected a Royal Academician in 2003 and his work is represented in leading international public Collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Fine Art, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

About HackelBury Fine Art

HackelBury was founded twenty-seven years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.

The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier- Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Malick Sidibe, and Sebastião Salgado. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong.

In recent years the gallery has taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson, Coral Woodbury and Sharon Walters.

Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long term.

NOTES TO EDITORS

In May this year the Royal Academy will publish a book of the selected writings on art by Ian McKeever covering the period 1978 – 2025. The publication will have entries ranging from his travel journals to such places as Papua New Guinea and Greenland alongside essays on such artists as Piero della Francesca, Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Mitchell. This will be illustrated with a selection of sketchbook pages and photographs drawn from the artist’s travels and studio.