Listen Festival, Brussels

By Martin Longley

JUNE 2022 | Music

Fanfared as a “celebration of music and diversity,” the Listen Festival mostly revolves around contrasting breeds of electronica, ranging from idiot-bangin’ house to the most diaphanous environmental strokings. Brussels gorges on sounds that, via different routes, are descended from dance floor culture, in all its variegated manifestations.

The 16th Cyprus International Film Festival

By Harrison Blackman

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Film

The Cyprus International Film Festival represents an intriguing initiative to bring film culture to the periphery of the European Union and raise awareness of Cyprus’s complex geopolitical situation.

The Brooklyn Presence at SXSW

By Nic Yeager

MAY 2022 | Film

Between March 11 and 20, four Brooklyn-based short films screened at SXSW, each shot in Brooklyn and made by and featuring Brooklynites. SXSW is known for celebrating innovation in tech and education, and these projects offer their own kind of innovation: namely, an irreplaceable artistic ingenuity that flows out of this borough.

79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)

NOV 2021 | The Miraculous

An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.