Last Friday (30 November 2018) pop star Ariana Grande released the much anticipated video for thank u, next. The track has just spent its fourth week at the top of the UK’s single music charts, the longest time at #1 for a female artist in 2018.
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December diary: where to go and what to see before Christmas!
Well would you believe it, it’s the 1st of December. And as is tradition here at It’s Nice That at the beginning of each month, we’ve pulled together our team’s top picks of exhibitions and events to check out throughout the coming weeks.
Groupe CCC add a graphic design edge to Novembre Magazine
Over the years of commissioning exciting and experimental photography, Novembre Magazine has gained a reputation as one of the most glorious image-focused publications around. Through imagery, the magazine zooms in and interprets “art practice, fashion, beauty and innovation”. But, in its work to champion photographers, it’s now seen as more a representation of various photographer’s porfolio and artistic contributions. To widen its remit and publication fanatics view of it, Novembre decided to give Paris-based studio Groupe CCC a call with the idea of “bringing back the idea of graphic design,” the studio tells It’s Nice That.
Dusseldorf’s Kunstakademie present one-day-only raft-themed sound installation
Something exciting is happening in Venice tomorrow, and it sounds pretty interesting to us here at It’s Nice That. Students and professors working in the departments of art history, architecture, fine art and theory at Dusseldorf’s Kunstakademie have been tasked with reconsidering an old abandoned raft.
Way back when, in the early 1800s to be precise, French duo Henry Savigny and Alexandre Corréard found themselves navigating the west coast of Africa, in the Raft of the Medusa. They wrote up their account in Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816. A sketch of said raft has now been transposed into a musical composition that’ll find itself floating through the rooms of the British Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2018.
The five professors, 15 students, and one alumnus from the Kunstakademie were inspired to translate the raft into “the more translucent and fluid material of sound” as a direct response to this year’s pavilion theme of Island. The aforementioned sketch is, they say, “the main impetus to reconsider the raft as a relevant analogy to the current global political climate of today.”
Turning a sketch into a sound installation is, as you can likely imagine, a relatively difficult process. In order to make the drawing legible as music, and thus then mutable into sound, the drawing was stretched to the original length of the raft (20m). The lines were then read as musical notes, and that reading was limited to the scaled used in Hans Werner Henze’s opera, The Raft of the Medusa.
Studio Makgill present ten objects that capture the beauty of simplicity
Today marks the opening of a small but perfectly formed exhibition in Bermondsey: Beautifully Simple. The show was put together by Brighton-based Hamish Makgill, founder of design and branding agency Studio Makgill, and his team as a way of celebrating the studio’s tenth birthday. At the centre of the exhibition is a simple idea (and, as you’ll immediately spot, simplicity is a recurring theme here) – displaying a selection of ten objects and projects from around the world that embody the studio’s design philosophy.
The internet responds to Banksy’s self-destructive act of art
Last weekend, Banksy made jaws drop and hit the headlines as his infamous Girl with Balloon unexpectedly self-destructed through its frame’s in-built shredder. The original piece had just sold for $1.4 million at the major art auction house Sotheby’s.
Superimpose explain the worth in creating a studio that’s culturally rooted and fully independent
Superimpose, a global but fully independent studio based in London (and soon LA), were the second to take the stage at September’s Nicer Tuesdays.
Gabriel Gabriel Garble’s new animated film sees perfume as pure escapism
Vacuum, a new short film by London-based animator Gabriel Gabriel Garble, opens with a mechanical whir and a bird’s-eye view of a supermarket conveyor belt. As a pack of six vacuum-packed grapes passes along the belt in front of us, a cold voice from a PA system cuts across the incessant drone: “Organic scents are prohibited by law in public spaces.”
Illustrator Jose Mendez produces six guides to university life for UAL students
“Nervous, excited, anxious,” is how one recent graduate now working at It’s Nice That describes how she felt on her first proper day of university. By “proper day” we mean the first time she had to step into a lecture hall, rather than spend a hungover morning in bed grappling with an existential crisis and a bout of homesickness over an episode of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and a bowl of Coco Pops. “It would have been great,” she says, “if independent creative practice Studio LP had teamed up with Spanish illustrator Jose Mendez to produce a series of informative and visually appealing guides to beginning life as a student in the arts. That would have been great.”
Jon Rafman’s LED-panelled tunnel for the Balenciaga show in Paris will trip you into virtual reality
The fashion set in attendance at the Balenciaga show for the Paris Fashion Week just gone got more than the boxy-shouldered collection than they bargained for. The French fashion super-house’s creative director Demna Gvasalia commissioned digital artist and filmmaker Jon Rafman to create a mind-melting LED-panelled tunnel for the models’ walk to showcase his latest collection for Spring/Summer 2019.
