THE WORK ISSUE
Venus X
Linder Sterling
Céline Sciamma
Kakan Hermansson
Casey Legler
Nina Power
Myrza de Myunck
Leidy Churchman
General Sisters
Hanne Lippard
Felicia von Zweigbergk
Stav B
Clara T. López
Katarina Elvén
Cover:
Venus X
Photographed by Martien Mulder
Casey Legler
Casey Legler is a visual artist whose work is narrative-based. She believes in Joseph Beuys’ system of social sculpture and often uses her body as a medium for execution. Her most current public conversation is as the first woman to be signed exclusively to a men’s board as a male model at FORD models.
Photography by Agnes Thor
Nina Power
Nina Power teaches Philosophy at Roehampton University and Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of One Dimensional Woman (Zero, 2009). She’s also a review editor, editor-at- large, website editor, curator and
occasional writer for a selection of philosophical, political, art and film pub-lications, newspapers and institutions.
Photography by Christa Holka
Mari Ouchi
Mari Ouchi was born in Japan and travelled all over the world before ending up living in New York, where she’s been for the past 10 years. She used to work as a fashion stylist and is now owner/designer at jewellery brand FAUX/real since 2009, running the label together with Louis di Chicco.
Photography by Agnes Thor
Linder Sterling
Linder Sterling is a British artist and performer whose career spans the 1970s Manchester punk scene to her current collaborations with Tate St. Ives and The Hepworth Centre in northwest England. She has worked in a variety of mediums – from music (as singer/songwriter/guitarist for post-punk band Ludus) and collage (using a steady scalpel to splice pornographic images into feminist statements), to her current durational works. These include her 13-hour improvised dance performance piece Darktown Cakewalk and her most recent work, The Ultimate Form, a ‘performance ballet’ inspired by Barbara Hepworth, featuring dancers from Northern Ballet and costumes by Pam Hogg.
Photography by Devin Blair
Felicia von Zweigbergk
Felicia von Zweigbergk is the initiator of art foundation Sly Prop Otter (running the ‘art bar’ Lost Property) and founder of Butcher’s Tears brewery in Amsterdam. She also tours around Europe with grind / metal / punk bands like bINGO, Våld and Neolithium.
Photography by Mylou Oord
General Sisters
General Sisters is a place outside of home and work, where people congregate and engage in creative interactions. It is a general store – open and wide – designed so that a shared space is formed, shifting the emphasis from consumerism to that of producers. And, importantly, the possibility that all of us can be producers.
Kakan Hermansson
Kakan Hermansson is a Swedish DJ, TV and radio host, director and blogger who also happens to be an artist with an MA degree in Ceramics. She is passionate about issues concerning race, class and sexuality. In her MA project she set up the political nail saloon Girls Club, where girls could share stories about sexual abuse while doing nail art. Kakan is also the co-director, along with Roxy Farhat, of the beautiful video for The Knife’s single A tooth for an eye.
Photography by Märta Thisner
Venus X
To say that 26-year-old Venus X, née Jazmin Soto, is a DJ and club promoter is factually accurate – but it’s somewhat missing the point. GHE20 G0TH1K, the party she started in Brooklyn almost four years ago with some of her best friends (including Shayne Oliver, who’s behind the seminal clothing label Hood by Air), has the effect of an earthquake shaking up a stagnating New York nightlife marred by ever-tighter police regulations and a prolonged Sex & The City-era hangover of vapidness and cheesy drinks. Instead of bottle service and socialites, GHE20 G0TH1K offers clandestine locations, plastic cups, and an uninhibited, gender-fluid crowd of artists, designers, and musicians that once might have been described ‘downtown’ (except they all live in Brooklyn). But the glue that holds the queerclectic GHE20 G0TH1K scene together is the music – and Venus has an irreverent yet unerring way with it; casually mixing goth with hip-hop (as the party’s name implies), but also salsa, dubstep, Turkish techno, punk and ‘Jersey club music’, to name but a few. In a very short space of time, Venus has been catapulted to being one of the figureheads of a new movement that feels like a real space mirroring the digital space carved out by online publications like DIS, or by the video art of Ryan Trecartin.
Photography by Martien Mulder
Leidy Churchman
Leidy Churchman is an artist living in New York – Arnisa Zeqo is an art historian based in Amsterdam. In this issue is a conversation initiated during Leidy’s residency in Amsterdam, focusing on how to immerge oneself in the work of the other.
Céline Sciamma
In just five years, Céline Sciamma, the smart and talented film director has become an indispensable star of the cinema d’auteur. The middle child of an older sister and younger brother, Céline grew up in the suburbs of paris, where she lived a sheltered life until she was 20. She claims she discovered Paris as a city only when she moved there to study film. Her first feature film, Water Lilies, made her a star at the cannes film festival and her second movie, Tomboy, was an international success. Water lilies was shot in her childhood hometown, and tomboy had a similar suburban setting. She’s currently living with her girlfriend up the hill in Belleville, the bohemian eastern part of paris – without any pets. Céline has a dog phobia.
Photography by Estelle Hanania
Myrza de Muynck
Myrza de Muynck is a Dutch fashion designer who has recently graduated from the MA Fashion programme at Central Saint Martins in London. Her typical style fuses tomboy and sportswear influences with vintage couture-inspired, ultra-feminine, delicate hand-worked details.
Photography by Christa Holka
A life of beauty needs no market place
This conversation began when GIRLS LIKE US approached New York-based artist Caroline Woolard to talk about Trade School, a self-organised school running on barters, which she co-founded in 2009. In true collaborative style she refrained from having only her voice heard in the discussion and asked three women with whom she works – and who inspire her – to join the conversation: Pascale Gatzen, teacher of Integrated Design at Parsons, artist and pedagogue Susan Jahoda, and activist Cheyenna Weber. The red line throughout the conversation was the search for a more community-driven and communal life; the strategies to get there and – obviously – the question marks and downsides that are part of that process. In order to present all of these challenging ideas without losing the original spirit of the conversation, we chose to compile a reader with quotes loosely arranged around each topic they talked about.
Drawings by Sophy Naess
