To call Fanglin Luo an artist feels almost redundant. Trained at Goldsmiths and shaped by interests in feminism, mythology, and embodied identity, her practice works like a ritual — where movement, sound, and voice become channels of agency. Concepts of generational memory, bodily resilience, and feminine archetypes recur throughout her work, forming a vocabulary in which goddesses become mirrors for modern women.

Words by: Anya Duncan

For two nights, in the convivial confines of Brick Lane’s Galleria Objects, the first in a series of events developed through curatorial platform Obtuse Archive, set out to translate its central metaphor into a physical, multi-sensory experience. The exhibition was one that strived to occupy the “unsettled zone” between structure and resolution.

Ultimately, OBTUSE (°) succeeds as an inaugural show because it aptly achieved what it blatantly set out to do: avoid a unified statement. Instead, it relies on proximity and co-presence; While the wide variety of media – from Japanese memes to French desserts – could risk feeling scattered, the central metaphor of leaning without ever arriving provides a cohesive enough container for this choreography of almosts, unsettled zones and partial alignments.

Review by: Maria Mukaranda

As the year draws to a close and Italy’s art world pauses to consider which moments have truly taken root in the mind of 2025, one weekend in Bergamo lingers with unusual clarity. It felt less like an event that arrived and departed, and more like something grown slowly from the clay and limestone of the region itself.

Here, art took on the qualities of vegetation. Human made, yes, but also deeply entangled with formations shaped over centuries of geological and cultural time. The occasion was a widespread cultural programme launched by GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo. Recently renamed The Orobie Biennial, the project has been unfolding since 2024 and will continue until the end of 2025, extending across the entire Province of Bergamo.

Review by: Anya Duncan

In Four Chambers, presented to the London public during the Barbican’s Dirty Weekend , Vex Ashley builds an erotic cosmos where pornography is neither product nor provocation. Instead, erotica is treated as process: an ongoing inquiry into how a body becomes an image, and how an image, in turn, looks back at its voyeur.

Her exhibition combines photography, fashion, and film into a living nervous system. The compact space carved out for Ashley’s vision heightens the sense of stepping inside another consciousness

Review by: Anya Duncan

An Original Review 🎬 There’s a certain electricity in the air at the @britishfilminstitute the kind that reminds us all why we fell in love with cinema in the first place 🍿 

Thank you for having us @britishfilminstitute ❤️ 

Too excited (like us!!) and don’t know which film to watch first? let us know what film is your favourite🍿 

Words by: @_anya124_

In contemporary capitalism, every need finds its market. From the logic of commodified healing, Naz Balkaya’s Break-up Kit imagines the aftermath of love as a curated delivery service for the newly single. This work gathers objects against a sterile white background, and in their arrangement, I make out the shape of a face. One mismatched eye is a miniature toy bear, although the comfort it might offer seems correspondingly small. The other eye is a more ambiguous object that Balkaya calls “the clock,” which, she explains, takes time off an ex’s life, “a month for every month you were together!”

Words By: Carolina Fernandez Bold
Images Courtesy: @mmmaqa_studio

Reude’s exhibition Call Mum, shown at Hackney’s Green Place Studios, takes us back to the world as it once appeared in childhood: ordered by improbable, dream-like logic, saturated with colour, and woven with the sense that Mum knows truths that we’ll only really understand much later. 

Within Reude’s dense, Neo-Expressionist compositions, recurring motifs take shape. Planes, umbrellas, and spaceships appear alongside pyramids, planets, and plants, out of which an interplay between flight and the pull of gravity emerges…

Words By: Carolina Fernandez Bold

More is More: Defiance, Destabilisation, and Visibility in Claire Fontaine’s “Show Less”. For the collective Claire Fontaine, art is a means of political resistance against systemic injustice. Her latest exhibition at London’s Mimosa House, curated by Daria Khan, brings together new and existing works which destabilise language and expose power structures.

“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” 

Words By: Carolina Fernandez Bold
Images By: Christa Holka | Courtsey of Mimosa House

ADMT on Darkness, Discovery, and Finding His Voice. “When it happened to me, it just made me realise how dark and how uncomfortable and how sad it is to be in that place. How lonely it is.”

Interview By Nandini Bhattacharya and Words By: Anya Duncan, Original Magazine, Arts & Culture, 2025.

All Time Low’s Alex Gaskarth on Independence, Intention, and the Community That Carries Them

“It’s fun to experience your music again through everyone else’s eyes.” When All Time Low, long-standing titans of the pop-punk genre, announced new music, speculation buzzed louder than ever. What does a band, two decades deep, sound like in the present day? For fans who grew up on the melodic angst and emotional introspection of their early catalogue, the announcement of their independence from any major label added further intrigue. What would this version of All Time Low sound like? What would they say?

Interview & Words By: Anya Duncan

The word pressure conjures up a multitude of emotions. It’s universal; everyone has felt its hand at their neck, gently tightening. A presence lingering just beneath the surface of our dominant feelings. For Julia Wolf, this pulsing sensation quite literally defines her newest album. Pressure is a confessional, an act of emotional exorcism that doubles as genre-defying songwriting.

Words by: Anya Duncan

In our latest interview, Anya Duncan catches up with the multi-talented Talia Mar to talk all things music, love, and advocacy. Talia opens up about her powerful new single ENEMY. An anthem marking her departure from her record label and reclaiming creative freedom on her own terms.

Talia also reflects on the deeply personal nature of 365, a vulnerable track made even more special with exclusive footage from her wedding woven into the music video. Beyond her music, Talia shares her pride in being an ambassador for The Lobby, a collective pushing for greater visibility and support for women in gaming.

“We need to see more sapphic stories and less tragedies”

Joyride – the new single by Catty – was released on the 15th of May. It’s a celebration of queer love and joy, freedom and visibility all set within a pop-rock sound that will get stuck in your head for days.

The music video was directed by Sam Kinsella and stars Catty alongside her girlfriend, jewellery designer and I Kissed A Girl star Amy Spalding. Together they drive a vintage convertible in a Thelma & Louise inspired romance.

‘I believe that what I’m trying to create is way bigger than me as an individual. It’s a movement for female empowerment. There are references within it about my own relationship with my body, but it very much is about other women telling their own stories.’

Sophie Tea Art

“I wrote this for the messy-souled girls…”

Alt-pop rising star ISOLABELLA returns with her most vulnerable and unapologetic track yet. ‘imNOTaprettygirl’ is a bold, emotionally-charged anthem for anyone who’s ever been told they were too much—too loud, too sensitive, or too pretty to be taken seriously. A powerful follow-up to her flirty, feel-good single ‘Backseat Lover’, this release cuts deeper, unpacking the tension between self-expression and societal expectation.

Interview by Anya Duncan

Images by Claire Hodgkins

“I hope so! I would love to think some of the work I’ve done has helped others in some way. I just want to show people you are beautiful and worthy no matter what your differences may be.”

— Mollie Pearce

“Sorry I’m in a Starbucks!”

Aimie Atkinson laughs as we start the call. She is on her way to an editorial shoot for one of her music videos – iconic. Aimie is casually sipping on a hazelnut iced latte, which immediately makes me regret all my life choices of not also sipping on a caffeinated iced beverage myself.

Aimie Atkinson is a singer, songwriter and actress who is especially known for her role as Katherine Howard in the musical SIX.

Words By Lilly Gentner

Many fans describe your music as something they listen to when they’re at their most vulnerable. Is vulnerability something you feel protective of in your work, or do you see it as a shared space with your listeners?

Vulnerability is so important. Vulnerability is a bridge. I hope my music holds space for someone to feel what they need to. It’s a privilege.

Do you ever write something and then hesitate to release it because it feels too raw, or is that kind of openness part of the point for you?

The openness is definitely part of the point for me. There are things I’ve written that felt too exposed at the time, but that feeling doesn’t usually last long. What’s the use otherwise?

“As a Black, curvy woman with a big voice, you knew your place,” she tells Original Magazine. “I did those roles, and I did them well, but I always felt like there was more for me. What if I went against type? What if I did what I wanted, instead of what people expected?”

— Marisha Wallace

Ever the black sheep of the music industry, this divisive genre has spent decades defining itself by what it isn’t: anti-establishment, anti-commercial, and anti-fascist. But what does it take for a band to embody the spirit of punk in the 21st century?

Interview By: Anya Duncan

“…I think I’m going into my rockstar era now. It’s not a rap show anymore – sometimes in the past I would be singing with rap choreo and it just didn’t make any sense. I think that was just based on my early career when I was doing See Nobody and Nice to Meet Ya. They’re all sort of melodic rap, but now that I’ve transitioned into dance, pop, and garage, it’s changed. It’s a development; I’ve started wearing flares…”

“A lot of people assume that I sit in silence when I do my make up..how psychotic do you think I am?! just sitting there with my tiny little brushes…🤣”

Interview by Fae Reid

“I decided to set up Lover the very next day because I loved the industry. It was a risk, but it’s one of the best decisions I've ever made. Initially, I worked with friends in the entertainment industry who needed management, from club nights to meme pages. Over time, I realised there was a gap in the market for management specializing in the sex industry, I naturally gravitated towards this space because it's where my interest lies…”

- Helena Whittingham

"The PIX Project — from a distance — is a straightforward ritual. Seasoned New York-based photographer Pete Voelker summarises his creation in seven words on SPOTZ’s website “I believe images carry a kind of visual syntax that photographers instinctively understand, almost like a shared vocabulary that goes beyond words..."

A short video by artists Lilia Li-Mi-Yan and Katherina Sadovsky is a sad, poetic metaphor for what is happening in the world today.

The plot and melody of an Armenian lullaby are taken as a starting point, where a mother tries to calm her son by offering to make a symbolic choice of a destiny bird…

“No one leaves home without being wounded” was the impetus for the Geneva-born artist Shahryar Nashat’s latest exhibition, Streams of Spleen. Transforming a fist-sized organ, biologically constructed to fight harmful bacteria, into an alliterative title that comments upon the assimilated and pre-established prestige of art, is remarkable.

Nashat’s art lacks assertiveness: it does not judge nor does it attempt to provide interpretations on our predisposed perceptions..."

As the age old saying goes, 'a man's home is his castle,'

but in our collaborative editorial series crafted exclusively by a team of talented women, we find it imperative to redefine this notion.

The Vessel is a poetic exploration of the experience of living and human connection with nature. It is something beyond simple knowing, creating its bonds through our senses, emotions and compassion.

“…“I believe standing in your truth is the best gift you can leave behind, because it’s the most purest priceless element of who you are. It doesn’t seek for you to be anything other than unapologetically raw…”

— Grace Blessing

“Shot on DSLR: the content focuses on Clahane Beach, which is a rockshore close to the Cliffs of Moher. Most of the photos were taken in Spring, but they still portray the residual cold colour palettes of the previous months…”

“As a gay man born and raised in a small Russian town in Siberia I always was under pressure of heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and so on…”

“This work focuses on my fascination with romanticising human encounters by staging fictitious scenarios and capturing the immaterial nostalgic touch and impermanent human presence in the forms of dancing and fleeting golden light on wrinkled skin…”

Most of your favourite performers first found their feet through fringe - a term for off-piste spaces and places where new and established artists can test their work to friendly audiences - on a budget.

“Find your community,  they are your audience. 

Befriend other artists and creatives. I always say if you like what somebody does, tell them. Look at at as many visual books as possible. See as many exhibitions as possible. Make lots of art but carefully choose what you release out into the weld…”

“If you think about it, as a photographer, you enter a room inside a device in which only you can exist...”

Perhaps one of the harshest thoughts to stomach is that sometimes grief is needed to realise this. It taught me one of the many complex, intricate shapes and forms that love resides within, only to remember that my friend would never know what I learnt.

For me, the  artwork is more than just a sketch, its the persons reaction when I give them the drawing and the connection we are able to create.

This is the unique identity of fuze, each performer brought not just their art with them but themselves and openly shared it with one another and the audience. We were presented with a nebula of artists really representing the idea of community.

Through nudism I am able to address vulnerability, fragility as well as the beauty of the human body. Additionally, nudism in my work provides an aspect of humor which I believe is important to “digest” the rather intense and dark topics I choose.

It was through inviting them into my everyday, that I could allow these individual parts to weave together the delicate threads of my life that felt frayed and entangled, conjuring up a tapestry...

‘My grandfather was hospitalized in November of 2019, and in an attempt to bring a bit of home into his then bleached, sterile hospital room, my Grandmother brought bright-red poinsettias to place in the corner — a holiday tradition.

She placed the bouquet on the desk opposite his cot; always facing him, commanding and ever-present…’

By Zoe Montgomery

‘…Is as a study, was born out of an acute wanderlust, triggered by the static from COVID restrictions. Daydreaming of lush countryside, traversing together through Google Maps on Zoom got us intrigued about what travel really means. This nagging question of “What constitutes a travel experience?”…’

By Aarushi and Arunima

“…is a 23 year old, London based illustrator. His work is a maximalist and indulgent hyper-feminine approach to fashion and portraiture illustration, with a focus on queer culture and inclusivity…”

“…Inspiration is really about keeping our eyes and minds open to all the possibilities that surround us…”

Amsterdam Art is delighted to announce the 12th edition of Amsterdam Art Week ( 29 May to 2 June 2024) and share the full programme and reveal the participating galleries and partner projects.

To gain deeper insight into the intricate history of Shepherd’s Bush Market and its enduring relationship with the fabric and textiles industry, I had the privilege of speaking with Steph Dye, the Head of Marketing and Communication.

Steph Dye: I think it’s mainly the diversity of the market. Fabrics and textiles - whether you choose them or wear them - play a significant role in how you want to be perceived by others. They are one of the best ways to showcase your culture and identity.

A believer in the power of interdisciplinary creativity, Sir Ben Okri spoke to the magazine about the importance of collaboration in the fight for our planet:

“These are times when we need the full collaborative spirit of humanity to overcome the massive climate challenge ahead of us. Art, science, and poetry have great roles to play. It’s about choice. Picking the right words.”

Of all the creative industries, fine art holds the reputation for being the most difficult to break into. When did the canvas become a brick wall? When did oil paints first get used to ward off independent and working-class talent? In conversation with Sophie Tea Art, Original Magazine wants to blend the rigid colours of the art world in the hopes of discovering a new favourite shade

The instinct to show up truthfully and unapologetically carries into her political activism: from the queer romances of her music videos to her headline-making act of resistance in Poland, protesting the surge of homophobic policies. Reflecting on that moment in 2021, holding a pride flag during a televised performance, Karin says, “I only thought about how important it was for the people in the LGBTQ+ community in Poland to know that someone has their back.” In its own way, this moment mirrors her song writing.

Word by: Carolina Fernandez Bold

Hui Zhang’s work reclaims what culture devalues: material waste and women’s labour alike.

A Chinese artist now based in the UK, she has exhibited in Beijing, London, Edinburgh, and Paris, situating her work within the shared conditions of globalised, consumer culture. This article explores three of her recent works, with insight into process and inspiration from Zhang herself. 

Re-Growth weaves together branches and discarded denim into rectangular sculptures that read almost like three dimensional paintings, escaping the boundaries of form.

Words by: Carolina Fernandez Bold

Post-punk icons The Cure played their debut live gig in 1978, going on to tour for nearly 50 years and carving their legacy into gothic alternative subculture. This summer, they are to headline the Isle of Wight Festival. Original Magazine attended an evening at London’s Iconic Images Gallery, exhibiting photographs of the band and other musical paragons, with photographers Kevin Cummins and Richard Bellia alongside Curepedia author Simon Price.

Word and Photos by: Bee Woodley