Interviews
✷
Interviews ✷
Woman in Mind: The Politics of Quiet
In an era in which identity is increasingly performed through visibility and exposure, Dragon Hill's exhibition of works by photographer Maryam Eisler and sculptor Nicole Farhi turns towards restraint, interiority and contemplation. The exhibition, produced by Catherine Hunt and curated by Catherine Loewe centres on presence: bodies, fragments, folds, curves, shadows and sculptural forms that hover between abstraction and figuration. The distinction matters.
The Philosophy of the Home: Bhutanese Domesticity as Knowledge
Philosophy of the Home proposes the domestic sphere as a living site of knowledge, memory, care, and female authority. Drawing on feminist theory, Emanuele Coccia’s philosophy of dwelling, and the matrilineal traditions of Bhutan, Laura Dzelzytė repositions the home as an epistemic structure shaped through intimacy, ritual, inheritance, and repeated gestures of care. Moving between personal history, post-Communist memory, Catholic upbringing, migration, and the traditional houses of Nobgang in Punakha, the text explores how domestic space carries identity across generations. The Bhutanese home emerges as a living archive: a place where women sustain material continuity, emotional formation, and cultural knowledge through the quiet power of dwelling.
Emergent-cy, A Queered Epistemology
Emergent-cy, A Queered Epistemology develops Emergent-cy as a neologism for unresolved, durational crisis. Moving through Stuart Lee’s The Felled Tree Performance (2025), their writing links queer epistemology, scientific knowledge systems, jelly/projection-based performance, and ecological gesture, reading Jannis Neumann’s Grasping the Liquid alongside their own The Felled Tree Performance (2025). This discourses the movement between queer theory, scientific reductionism, Jannis Neumann’s performance Grasping the Liquid, and Gilbert Simondon’s concept of ontogenesis to consider how bodies, objects, gestures, and materials remain in flux.
Virginia Damtsa | It takes a Village to Build An artist’s Career
Several London galleries and institutions were at the forefront of performance art, particularly from the 1970s onwards, often serving as spaces for challenging the boundaries between art and life. Alongside Whitechapel and Serpentine, there was Riflemaker in Soho. Opened in 2003 by Virginia Damtsa and Tod Taylor, it was specifically dedicated to exploring feminist, sound, and performance art, hosting regular live performances, including some groundbreaking, intimate shows such as Bagism by Yoko Ono.
Estelle Hoy | Manhattan Marxist Manifesto and Rage
“Manhattan Marxist Manifesto and Rage” A conversation between Writer Estelle Hoy and ARK Editor Laura Dzelzyte.
Genocide for Trade: The Uruguayan Wool, Erasure of the Charrúa and Atlantic Amnesia
Monica Perez discusses the Uruguayan wool trade, the Salsipuedes Massacre, and the near-erasure of the Charrúa bringing together artwork documentation, historical research, footnotes, and contextual writing. Perez’s project “COST” examines how colonial violence was absorbed into Atlantic commodity routes and transformed into European material culture. Wool is a colonial material shaped by land clearance, Indigenous dispossession, animal labour, imperial trade, and the forms of forgetting that allow commodities to appear detached from the violence of their production.
Democratic Imaginaries, and the Artist’s Role Against the Radical Right
Professor Johnny Golding responds from a positioning of care, and democratic imagination, with dialogue centred upon power, myth, fascist formation, and radical matter with a world entrenched with AI and entangled epistemology. A transcript recording an exchange on the formation of a Philosophy Society and the role of artistic thought under conditions of right-wing political resurgence. This discussion asks whether artists who challenge fixed truth-claims and amplify excluded voices can still offer meaningful cultural and political alternatives.
Parrhesia — Khrystyna Oryshchak & Maria Savoskula
Parrhesia — Xiangyin Gu
Parrhesia — Kamini Vellodi
Parrhesia — Anoushka Kandwala
Parrhesia — Mai Maraguchi
Parrhesia — Chantal Faust
Axel Wieder | institutions as social spaces
A conversation between curator and cultural theorist Axel Wieder and ARK editor Laura Dzelzyte on institutions as social spaces.
Editor’s note
Is it 1938, 1968, or 2026? When the ARK issue “Deception and Illusion in the Arts” was published in 1961, we were building the Berlin Wall, - now we have an American Mexican one. For those of us living in sheltered geographies, life rolls on as matcha lattes at Parker’s café, behind the college building. Yet for some, even at this university, “who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the centre of our foreheads,”* there are no safe homes to go back to. The countries we were born in no longer exist. Maps are constantly redrawn at the whim of the mighty and male, skewed and gluttonously bulged where wealth, and power are greatest.
In this edition, I ask writer and critic Estelle Hoy how can artists provide an effective response to what is happening now. She talks of Audre Lorde and rage. Rage is cultural. How it is expressed and punished. In these isles, it is disapproved of in polite circles, alongside public displays of affection, hoodies, potholes, junk mail, graffiti, call centres, menopause, immigrants, protesters, e-scooters, and bad punctuation. It is tricky in international academic environments, where the line between sanitisation of thought and mutual respect is constantly being recalibrated. And yet rage is effective. It bypasses reason and activates the core. So much so that rage is now being used by the extreme right to counteract “the cultural centre”, to dismantle inclusion, break the connectedness.
We live in a highly polarised world, with an abundance of data yet imperfect information, skewed by algorithms. As digital emojis and AI-enabled autocues replaced physical contact and spoken word we lost our ability to speak or to hear. We forgot how to have conversations that broaden our perspectives rather than re-entrench narrow positions. We stopped thinking and began only to feel. We oscillate between private rage and public conformity, then flip. Can we fight rage with rage? Or is there something else?
This ARK concentrates on the idea of repetition as both: practice and a form of protest. Repetition is often mistaken for stasis, but it is movement. It is, as Deleuze argued, a positive force with unpredictable effects. Not an apathy. In repetition, the mind is freed from a conscious cognitive load, whether quiet, accumulative or transformative. It is the rhythm that carries artistic practices forward. The daily routines, returns, recommitments to an idea or cause, revisits, revisions, gestures that build meaning over time.
“Repetition is like a dance,” reflects Camille Henrot. “A refraction of memories,” Chantal Joffe. “A meditation,” Ani Liu. “A heartbeat,” Brigitte Bloksma. “A repair”, Indrė Šerpytytė. It is like “food or sleep or sex,” says India Mullen. “An act of survival,” declares Carrie Scott.
The director of the Berlin Biennale, Axel Wieder, believes in the power of institutions as social and porous environments that accommodate dissent and community - something this publication aims to be. It is a snapshot of what young RCA artists are thinking, listening to, and looking at now.
– Laura Dzelzyte