The Current
A small gathering from the month.
- 01Seen
How to Like It
Lucy Robson · Southern Guild, Cape Town · 28 May – 9 July 2026
Robson constructs interiors as a kind of domestic theatre; hyper-stylised, intimate, and charged with the mood of neo-noir. To enter these rooms is to understand that control and desire can share the same wallpaper. The paintings ask not what a home looks like, but what it withholds.
more here - 02Read
In Praise of Shadows
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Tanizaki makes the case that beauty depends on what the light fails to reach. A corner of shadow, a patina of age, lacquerware seen by candlelight: these are not deficits but the very condition of depth. The essay is brief, but it teaches a way of seeing that outlasts the reading.
more here - 03Object
Simone Andreoli — Fico Nero di Sardegna
Eau de Parfum, 50ml
A fig that has been dried by the Sardinian sun until it carries the warmth of the stone itself. Mastic and juniper keep it from becoming sweet; this is a fig that remembers the hillside. The kind of scent that attaches to linen and stays for days.
more here - 04Thread
Amina Agueznay
Artist, Morocco
Agueznay works with fishermen's nets, wool, and the architecture of the Moroccan coast. Her practice asks how craft becomes concept without losing its hands. There is a patience in her pieces that feels almost tidal, as if the work were made by the desert itself, slowly.
more here - 05Heard
Franco Luambo & Madilu System — Mamou
1984
One of the great Congolese rumba records; guitar lines that loop like memory, vocals that argue and reconcile in the same breath. Luambo and Madilu sound like old friends who have known each other long enough to finish each other's sentences. Play it loud and let the room fill.
more here - 06Watch
GENER8ION — Storm I & II
Dir. Romain Gavras, 2026
Gavras makes violence look like ballet and ballet look like a riot. These two companion pieces, shot in what appears to be a single breath of weather; treat the music video as a condition, not a format. The scale is absurd, the precision surgical. You emerge from it winded.
more here - 07Bite
A magic field of baklava
Art Basel Doha · Laila Gohar
Gohar laid out pastry for six hundred people as if it were a crop. The gesture is generous, but the scale makes it uncanny. Food as landscape, hospitality as installation. It asks whether nourishing people can also be a way of making them pause.
more here - 08Caked
Makeup for Junya Watanabe Fall 2026
Isamaya Ffrench · Eyeshadow Looks
Ffrench treats the face as a moving canvas — colour placed with the confidence of someone who understands that beauty, at its best, is a provocation. For Watanabe's 2026 collection she built sculptural shadow across the lid, bleeding into the brow bone with an almost bruised intensity.
more here