A SENSE OF PLACE
R.I.P. GERMAIN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BOLADE BANJO
INTERVIEW BY BEN BROOME
FOOTWEAR EXCLUSIVE: REEBOK LTD
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ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE
ESCAPE TO MIAMI
The most southernly city in the US, Miami exists in the tropical recesses of the American imagination: land of celebrity, thunderstorms, Tony Montana, and Art Deco architecture. Here, we meet the latest generation of Miamians—committed radicals in the fields of art, fashion, and music, who are dreaming up new narratives for the city they call home.
NEW ART: LONDON
The art world’s compulsion to categorize by the yardstick of “hot or not” has historically been the driving force behind the market and the gallery system. Commerce is intertwined with this metric, spurred on by the insatiable appetite to find talented young things to build up. This system is uninteresting: what’s in vogue rarely reflects those operating at the cutting edge. Who are those young emerging artists making work against all odds—work that is difficult and costly to make, store, exhibit, move, and sell? These five individuals typify this path. Working across video, sound, installation, and sculpture, they march onwards, carving out their own niche—exhibiting in empty shop spaces one day and major institutions the next. For them, making is guided by urgency, and persistence is motivated by blind faith.
SARA SADIK
KALEIDOSCOPE hosted a solo exhibition by Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (b. 1994, Bordeaux), in November 2023 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan, with the support of Slam Jam. Inspired by videogames, anime, science fiction, and French rap, Sara Sadik’s work explores the reality and fantasies of France’s Maghrebi youth, addressing issues of adolescence, masculinity, and social mythologies. Her work across video, performance, and installation often centers on male characters, using computer-generated scenarios to transform their condition of marginalization into something optimistic and poetic.
FROM THE SHOP
FROM THE ARCHIVE
MANIFESTO
In 2023, from June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound. The 2024 edition will run from June 21 to June 23.
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft. The 2024 edition will run from April 15 to April 21.
Drawing from Black experience, R.I.P. Germain’s practice delves with double meanings, deep resonances, and a tension between accessibility and occlusion.
BEN BROOME
In your work, there is no clear method of consumption. There was, for example, no text in your ICA show, “Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus!”
R.I.P. GERMAIN
One of the registers that I was trying to attack within that show was the stereotypical gallery experience where a press release dictates a line of thought. I hate generic press releases because they take away the audience’s agency to engage with the work personally. The business cards at the ICA tell you everything about the show in that one Skepta bar.
BB
Are those business cards for your own audience or the typical audience at the ICA?
RG
Both—that’s what the glossary was born out of. I knew that 95% of the audience wouldn’t have come across a “bust down” piece of jewelry (or even come across the term). The glossary existed to give those people something to latch on to or a reason to keep going. Half of my practice is making the work; the other half is how the audience responds to it. I’m posing questions and I want conversation. I grew up in a town that doesn’t have a gallery. Friends from my hometown don’t have any sort of armor when it comes to engaging with fine art.
BB
When I saw “Jesus Died For Us, We Will Die For Dudus!” there was a group of kids in there. It was pretty clear from how they were moving around the space that this was a new experience to them.
RG
And they have no bias towards how they’re supposed to behave. We’ve been raised to passively observe art—“These are precious items that are then meant to be sold to collectors, so you stand from a distance; look, don’t touch.” Fuck that.
I enjoy artwork having a half-life; I’m interested in the idea that an artwork can start as one thing, and I have no control over how it ends. At my ICA show, I installed a fake wall but told no one it existed. There was a piñata there on the floor and a mallet. What do you do with a piñata? You smash it. The idea was for an audience member to come across it, engage with its actual functionality, and smash through the wall.
That aspect is akin to how you navigate the false fronts I’m referencing. It’s trial and error how far you get into these spaces.
BB
It’s a way of navigating these spaces that is actually not so different to the methodology learned to navigate art spaces.
RG
Exactly. I was trying to unpack those typical art-world behaviors, engaging with the gallery by bestowing the same learned social norms needed to navigate the false front. They clash in quite a beautiful way. This process meant that I had to unlearn my own artistic behaviors. I’m usually a control freak when it comes to my work. For this, I let the space become freeform: the audience had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. It was beneficial to my practice to let go, placing intensity in areas other than just what’s beautiful and aesthetic. My focus could be something that a lot of people find ugly—that’s where the white Tupac Jesus piece comes into it. That’s fucking ugly. It was meant to be an agitator. It’s posing the question, “What is the endgame with Black culture in the Western world?”
BB
How do you navigate a largely white art world that doesn’t have an appreciation of the culture and motivations behind your work?
RG
In some breadths, the way I’ve managed to navigate it is by ignoring it whilst paying it the utmost attention. I know that the vast majority of my audience is completely alienated by the work I’m making, but they’re not the front line of who I’m trying to talk to. The kids you mentioned are probably the type of people that I want those frontline conversations to be with. Whoever wants to come along for the ride, fair play—I welcome you.
BB
The art world thrives on alienation of and illegibility for a non-artworld audience—would you say you’re flipping that?
RG
Yes. The ICA is pretty inaccessible architecturally, but one of the ways I get around that is to create a building within a building; that way, I have total freedom to explore the topics I’m commenting on without clashing against the architecture and infrastructure of the institution. I’m able to take someone to a world that’s believable. You can’t have 18th-century mahogany furnishings when you’re trying to talk about East London trap houses!
To ignore the spaces that I’m placing the work in and the types of people visiting would be disrespectful to my own target audience. I’m the only artist out of dozens of people in my hometown’s friendship group. I have to take into account whether the environment where I exhibit is actually welcoming for them; it’s important for me that they feel comfortable to explore my work.
BB
You’re not someone that shies away from a big idea, and your work is largely installation or video-based. I see you as an artist that has chosen the path of most resistance; do you see it the same way?
RG
I’ve been painting for most of my life—if you’d have told me when I was 20 that I’d be making sculptural works, I’d have laughed in your face. I’m a painter at heart.
I have confidence in my practice: I’m saying something that’s interesting for me. Whether it’s interesting to other people is up for debate, but I feel like it’s worth being out in the world. When I have a new idea, I think: Does it actually deserve to exist? Will people actually get anything out of it? If not, then what’s the point?
At the ICA opening, there was millions of pounds worth of jewelry on display. Most people only get to see that in music videos...When you get to see the physicality of it, you’re really caught in awe: “This object is tiny and it’s 250,000 pounds. What the fuck?” It’s an opportunity to present to an audience the triumphs and tragedies of the culture that I’m intertwined with. I’ve spent my whole life involved in rap culture, grime culture, and now UK drill culture. It’s one thing to be a spectator of a culture; it’s another to be an active participant. When I went into a jeweler for the first time, they thought I was a rapper or a footballer because of the way I carried myself. I look the part; I talk the part; I am the part—I just didn’t have the financial means to engage in a meaningful way. Now I have that opportunity through my art, so why not?
The Jesus piece is such an iconic totem of hip-hop jewelry and iconography. Of course, I wanted to make my own one; I wanted to put my own stamp on that legacy. Ghostface made the first Jesus piece, then Biggie blew it up using Tito’s mold. It goes on into the 2000s where we see the first signs of hip hop referencing itself: Kanye getting teased by Jay-Z for his white Jesus so he makes a Black Jesus piece ... The next generation comes through and Drake makes a Tupac piece. I have the means to actively engage with that part of hip-hop culture when most people are only passive observers.
BB
Is a visitor to one of your exhibitions a passive observer or an active participant?
RG
I want to create that mutation from observer to participant, but it comes with pros and cons in how the work is treated: you can’t be mad at someone for fucking something up if you’ve told them they have freedom to do what they want. There have been violators, but that’s the nature of the beast; that’s where I have to take the L. Some of the weed got stolen!
BB
They were real plants?!
RG
That’s the magic trick: it’s the double bluff. People think, “There’s no way the ICA let you put real weed plants in an exhibition.” They assume the jewelry is fake too. That’s the point of the show: false fronting everywhere. Where the false front begins and ends is subjective: it’s all in front of you—or maybe it isn’t.
R.I.P. GERMAIN WEARS REEBOK LTD OVERSIZED PIPED HOODIE AND CLUB C LTD SNEAKERS
PHOTO CREDITS: THEO CHRISTELIS, MARK BLOWER
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.