ARK
In May 2025, together with British neo-conceptual artist Ryan Gander, she relaunched the cult Royal College of Art journal ARK in six languages, presenting it as a conceptual participatory exhibition.
ARK
PARRHESIA
Relaunching the cult Royal College of Art magazine ARK became one of the big projects in 2025. 40 contributors. 6 languages. And as many editors as readers. We presented it as an exhibition at Hockney Gallery in May.
The Annotated Reader by Ryan Gander (who has agreed to collaborate with us on our journal, much like Lucio Fontana in 1958), served as the inspiration. Conscious of ARK’s significance as a cultural artefact, we are including a text by an award winning writer Boris Bergmann on his obsession with collecting the journal. Our aim, however, is not to venerate but to devolve ownership of ARK’s legacy. We invited current RCA students to contribute, and now to curate, and assemble their own versions of the cult magazine in a live performance–exhibition–as–publication. The goal is to capture a moment in time at the Royal College of Art in 2025.
Parrhesia is a pompous word — but a necessary concept. It is dissent par excellence, associated with speaking truth to power and the willingness to accept criticism. This limited-edition, print-only publication contains submissions on marginalised issues such as gender, power, conflict, migration, colonialism, addiction, disability, generational trauma, AI and others. Current international students and staff at the RCA explore these topics in various languages and diverse forms. For some, these ideas are unspeakable-if not punishable-at home.
ARK
In this edition, as an editor, 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.
Read the issue online.
