Through an extensive investigation of the new searches and work productions of international artists, the new CURA. 41, New World Agency™ raises questions related to the ability of art and artists to have a transformative role as regards the apparent irreversibility of the events that impact our present.
In a shift between fiction and reality, New World Agency™ explores, with a transgenerational gaze, the artists who foresaw the building of new possible worlds and new modes of agency for alternative futures. Not only AI, CGI, videogames and virtual reality, but also highly advanced analog tools, animatronics, and mechanical devices are able to forge the imaginative, creative and narrative space of artists, founding new realities, in which mythology, ghosts, topoi, fables, childhood memories, technology, pop culture and magic intertwine, in the comprehensive illusion to be in different places and in part of it.
CURA. 41 presents 4+1 covers with works' premiere by:
Diego Marcon introduced by Travis Diehl;
Mark Leckey presented by a long mixtape of undead voices created by Charlie Fox;
Cécile B. Evans presented by Asma Barchiche; plus a cover story and an insert by trans woman artist and activist Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), photographed by Myles Loftin. Anticipating the special cover coming out in December, Jordan Wolfson, in conversation with Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, reveals the production and what goes on behind the scenes of his third animatronic sculpture. Essays, interviews and projects include an introductory text by
Ian Cheng; a focus on the pioneering work of the American artist
Mike Kelley, presented by the double gaze of the curator of La Bourse in Paris, Jean-Marie Gallais, and the artist, raised in his myth, Matt Copson; a conversation between
Agnieszka Kurant and
Hans Ulrich Obrist, investigating the evolution of culture and also "the relationship between predicting the future and how this is impacting the actual future"; new narratives, articulated in the visual essay conceived by
Helen Marten. Furthermore, we present: the new film and corpus of work by
Martine Syms, introduced by the British curator Ben Broome; a special section curated by Countersubject that introduces us to the work of the multi-disciplinary art collective
Bernadette Corporation; Anna Uddenberg's totemic sculptures, presented by David Andrew Tasman; a photo shoot commissioned to the New York-based fashion duo of artists and activists Women's History Museum which is introduced by a conversation with Ada O'Higgins. The New Now section also features the work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, with a text by Wong Binghao (Bing), of Gabriel Massan, investigated by Tamar Clarke-Brown, and Alice Bucknell in conversation with Sarah Johanna Theurer. The Portraits' section features the work of Pete Jiadong Qiang with a text by Tadej Vindiš; Shuang Li with a text by Lina Martin-Chan; Gray Wielebinski presented by Francesca Gavin; Omsk Social Club with a text by Estelle Hoy; Ndayé Kouagou presented by Madeleine Planeix-Crocker.
This issue comes with four different covers, randomly distributed.
Cura.magazine is a platform for contemporary art based in Rome that investigates with an independent spirit today's artistic production, art's emerging scene and the borders that have marked its central moments, through collaborations with international artists and curators, who live in different areas of the world. It has a production of three issues per year.
The platform is also an editorial structure (Cura.books), publishing a series of artist's books (see the
corresponding page in the publishers section).
