Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i Wallpaper

IBRAHIM MAHAMA Artist Mahama’s jollof rice, a dish synonymous with West African cuisine, features in our monthly Artist’s Palate series (page 178). Mahama was the youngest artist to feature at the inaugural Ghana Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He remains closely involved in his hometown of Tamale, in Ghana, where he founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art in 2019, and is in the process of converting an abandoned midcentury grain silo into a cultural centre. SAM FROST Photographer The LA-based Frost took the portrait of art collector Eileen Harris Norton (page 102) for us this month. ‘I was moved to hear about Eileen’s foundation, Art + Practice, which supports young adults who have aged out of the foster care system,’ says Frost. ‘Standing among master works while hearing…

Designed to complement a renovated and extended 1920s black timber chalet in the countryside outside Geneva, this lush garden is the handiwork of Belgian landscape architect Erik Dhont. A deft hand at blending nature and architecture to produce rich compositions, Brussels-based Dhont created this design for Karin Handlbauer, founder of Galerie Mezzanin, whom he first met ‘on a sunny afternoon in Geneva at a dinner under the oak trees’. Fittingly, nature became a recurring theme in their relationship and this project. Working against a backdrop of the contemporary addition to the existing structure, designed by Frey Architectes, Dhont composed an arrangement that promotes ‘a new spirit of art, nature and balance’. About two thirds of the 1.86-acre garden are dedicated to greenery and reforestation, including a leafy, undulating terrain and…

Following his successful debut at The Future Perfect’s Casa Perfect in Los Angeles this summer, sculptor Ian Collings will be unveiling more new pieces with the New York-based contemporary art gallery at the Salon Art + Design fair in Manhattan this November. Collings, who co-founded design studio Fort Standard (W*207) in 2011 and left in 2018, has an ability to manipulate stone into small abstract monoliths that teeter between feeling like they were found naturally or made, challenging viewers to consider what elements predate the artist’s hand and what is created. Each of Collings’ sculptures highlights the mercurial qualities of stone. In his hands, it has the ability to appear light, malleable, animated yet majestic at all times, with each work seemingly emerging in a way that’s unique to each…

WHERE TO FIND GREAT NUTS *The Il San Pietro hotel in Positano gets its almonds from Burdi in Puglia, and serves them blanched, soaked in egg white, then salted and roasted for 24 hours, burdi.com *Chef Jackson Boxer, of Orasay in London, gets his pistachios from Sally Butcher at Persepolis in Peckham, south London. She recommends the Akbari and Kaleh Ghochi varieties from Iran, foratasteofpersia.co.uk *Matt Hranek, author of The Negroni, prefers Pizzuta d’Avola almonds from Sicily and pistachios from Santa Barbara, California, ilpistacchio.it *Tank magazine founder Masoud Golsorkhi recommends online store Grand Bazaar and also says aim for Iranian pistachios as they are not mechanically picked, gitanegrandbazaar.com…

With its rich artistic heritage, Belgium is fertile territory for art and design collectors, and two of them – architect Olivier Dwek and businessman Frédéric Hanrez – recently united to create a stunning new gallery space in Brussels. Called New Hope, it opened its doors during the Brafa Art Fair in January. Dwek is a tousle-haired character with a wickedly good eye and the confidence to take a morning Zoom call in his bathrobe. Architect to Belgium’s crème de la crème for the past 20 years, he is still something of a secret beyond the country’s borders (though, with seven Parisian projects underway and the release of a monograph published by Rizzoli, this will soon change). Growing up in a business-focused family, Dwek was an outlier with a passion for…

‘When I design, I do it from a personal place. But in terms of describing what I do, I would probably settle with “artist”, because it has fewer limitations and I enjoy working in multiple disciplines,’ says South African designer Rich Mnisi. Best known for the eponymous fashion brand he founded in 2015, as well as his photography practice and social advocacy platform Thoughts, Mnisi has since expanded his work to furniture design. A series of much-lauded pieces, shown as part of group exhibitions at Cape Town’s Southern Guild gallery, have culminated in a highly anticipated solo show, ‘Nyoka’, which opened in November. For Mnisi, designing furniture was a natural progression from fashion. ‘When I create a fashion collection, if I had 15 runway looks, the 16th had to be…

Visions of a life Nine years ago, when Cao Fei first featured in the pages of Wallpaper*, she was already at the forefront of technology, but relatively unknown among an audience that wasn’t familiar with the Chinese art scene. Commissioned by our then guest editor, Ole Scheeren, to share her impressions of Beijing, Cao riffed on her RMB City project (2008-11) – a fictional Chinese city constructed in the online virtual world Second Life, an experiment in avant-garde urban planning – to create a dynamic, dreamlike collage of architecture and landscape, including four of Scheeren’s designs. As the architect told us at the time, ‘Cao Fei has long intrigued me with her depiction of the new China through scenes of fantastic perpetual construction and a virtual world in which everything…

In 1998, when Petrit Halilaj was 11, Serbian troops swept through his native Kosovo and forced him and his family to flee into nearby Albania. Destruction, displacement and loss came to define his youth, and eventually shaped his career as an artist. Now one of the foremost cultural figures to have emerged from his young homeland, he has explored these themes with poignant urgency. At the 2010 Berlin Biennale, he reconstructed the scaffolding of his family home, burned down in the village of Kostërc during the war and later rebuilt in the capital city of Pristina; and let loose a flock of live chickens as symbols of rural life and recovered freedom. He subsequently meditated on migration and integration through large-scale recreations of the jewellery that his mother had buried…

Bettina von Zwehl has put her models into a corner, both literally and metaphorically. In her new series of photographs commissioned by Wallpaper*, the artist has favoured the corner for all the complex associations that it offers – as a place to perform in, to hide, to emerge or be still, or to feel constrained, or conversely, to feel safe. When I inquire about the corner in her work, von Zwehl quotes philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote in The Poetics of Space (1958) that the corner is ‘the chamber of being’. The artist continues, ‘for the fashion story, I felt it was a symbolic place for my group of sitters to perform in, and to resist the constraints of the space… and in the most subtle way, [it is also]…

Portable toilets are unglamorous things, designed for functionality not form. Across the venues that require them, such as campsites, festivals and building sites, they are places one prefers to spend as little time in as possible and should ideally be concealed. However, a new portable toilet, recently installed amid the picturesque Gstaad landscape, aims to challenge this paradigm. Tagged the Throne, it was commissioned by To.org (a foundation that creates and funds initiatives that address the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges) and made by Nagami, a Spanish studio that specialises in computational design. Its streamlined form resembles a rocket (tapered at the top and bottom, bulging at the core and with a slightly truncated base), and importantly, the bulk of it has been 3D-printed from discarded single-use plastics…

Part modernist villa, part sleek contemporary entertaining space, Thirty Lane nestles into its leafy Belgian countryside setting like a beautifully carved architectural sculpture. Its author, the Ghent-based architect Glenn Sestig, is a master in the art of residential design and a deft hand at blending 20th and 21st century styles, the low key and the glamorous, luxury and subtlety. And this family home near Antwerp is no exception. Sestig and his client met during a New Year’s Eve dinner at Château Lannoo, the arts venue the architect designed for mutual friend and gallerist Louis Lannoo in Ghent. Thirty Lane’s owners, a family of four, were after an architect to work on their new home in a richly planted plot a stone’s throw from Antwerp. ‘One thing led to another, they…

We’re thrilled to present the inaugural Wallpaper* Smart Space Awards, which provided us with the perfect excuse to dive into the worlds of domestic technology and product design. The panel of judges included architect Tosin Oshinowo, of Nigerian practice CM Design Atelier (part of our 2021 Architects’ Directory, see W*270); artist, musician and designer Yuri Suzuki; and Harrods retail manager Veronica Forin, together with Wallpaper’s editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas and transport & technology editor Jonathan Bell. The five sifted through a substantial pile of entries, searching for objects that inspire, and technology that’s designed to last. As always, the winners are very Wallpaper*, a celebration of undeniable beauty, striking design and intuitive function. MOST FUTURISTIC FURNITURE ‘OE1’ workspace collection, by Herman Miller Designed by Industrial Facility’s Sam Hecht and Kim Colin…

Wallpaper* recently collaborated with Samsung on a competition that celebrated the art of creativity and the endless configuration potential of the Samsung Bespoke, the company’s flagship refrigerator. First introduced in Korea in 2019, the Samsung Bespoke is both technically adept and aesthetically focused, with a choice of multiple modules and panels that can be customised with various colours and three types of finishes. With a judging panel that included interior designer Kelly Hoppen, artist Yinka Ilori and Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas, as well as Harry Choi and Felix Heck of Samsung, we invited readers to take part in the Wallpaper* + Samsung Bespoke Design Challenge by submitting original artworks to be transferred to the Samsung Bespoke fridge’s doors. The first prize of €5,000 is awarded to Royal College of Art…

Aligning with the design aesthetics that underpin its brand ethos, Swiss luxury skincare house La Prairie has long been a patron and supporter of contemporary arts, sponsoring initiatives at Art Basel and West Bund Art & Design, funding projects at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, and collaborating with students at ECAL. Now the brand is set to make its first appearance at Frieze London in October. La Prairie’s debut offering at Frieze is Sense of Blue, a multisensory immersive installation that plunges the viewer gradually into the depths of the night. The piece is by French digital artist Maotik, who is best known for using computer-generated algorithms to create reality-shifting environments. Here he deploys that same technique, although this time using motion sensors, low-frequency sounds, and shifting blue and black…