Every edition of The Current.
A monthly sampling — what was seen, read, heard, and held. Each issue's gathering lives here, together.
VOL. I / ISSUE 01 · Jul 2026
The Gaze That Doesn't Resolve
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Makeup for Junya Watanabe Fall 2026
Isamaya Ffrench · Eyeshadow Looks
Ffrench treats the face as a moving canvas, with 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.
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Marcus Aurelius
Book 4, Section 40 of Meditations
"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception."
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The Portal
Those We Remember or Are Yet to Meet
Chemu Ng'ok, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, 25 July – 19 September 2026
Ng'ok paints the community that is not quite visible: ancestors, elders, the not-yet-born; in vibrant, hazy assemblies that feel less like portraits than like the sensation of being held by people you cannot name. During the making of these works she wrote in her journal that painting is making fleeting moments real, anchoring them into a physical archive. In this issue, that phrase arrives with particular weight.
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The Order of Time
Book by Carlo Rovelli, 2017
Time does not flow the way we think it does. Rovelli, a physicist who writes like a poet, makes this strangeness feel not disorienting but consoling: if the past exists only in the traces it leaves behind, then memory is not a pale copy of what was. It is the substance of time itself.
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Mussel necklace
Estée Lauder, Aliage solid perfume locket, 1974
A silver-plated mussel shell on a chain, opening at its seam to reveal solid perfume within. You wear it at your throat and carry the scent on your body. The fragrance, Aliage, is green and slightly oceanic: the smell of somewhere coastal, of salt air and cut grass and something faintly mineral underneath. An object that is also a vessel that is also an act of memory, worn close to the pulse.
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Christiane Cegavske
filmmaker and analogue artist, Oregon
Cegavske spent twelve years making a single stop-motion film by hand: Blood Tea and Red String (2006), a dark feminist fable populated by puppets, crows, and dolls moving through a world of moss and candlelight. Every frame was made alone, in analogue, with no digital assistance. The result is something that could not have been planned: a fever dream that feels genuinely ancient, as though it had always existed and she had simply found it. Her practice spans across film, painting, puppetry, and doll-making, and inhabits the symbolic language of the feminine uncanny without irony or explanation.
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El Madrileño
Album, C. Tangana, 2021
An album about Madrid that never once feels like a postcard. Tangana moves through flamenco, bolero, cumbia, and rumba as languages rather than genres; the city's particular genius being that it absorbed the music of the entire Spanish-speaking world and made it its own without quite explaining how. Reflective nostalgia in sonic form.
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Volver
Pedro Almodóvar, 2006
Volver means to return. Almodóvar films kitchens and corridors and the backs of women's heads with the same attention he gives to faces. The dead come back. The past resurfaces. Penélope Cruz carries the whole weight of it with her hands.
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Sea Essence
Anchovy extract, El Capricho Salmŭria, Santoña, Spain
Twelve to eighteen months in salt barrels, Cantabrian anchovies pressed under weights until they yield an amber liquid: not sauce, not oil, but essence. Two ingredients: anchovy and salt. The result is what El Capricho calls liquid umami; what the Romans called garum; what a few drops in a vinaigrette, a pasta, a slow-cooked sauce will do to a dish that thought it was already finished. It disappears into food and makes everything taste more completely like itself. Used properly, it is invisible.
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Draw Me A Face Project
Buro Nōto, Pierre-Emmanuel Testard & Tiziana Raimondo, 2026
A Paris studio asked children to draw directly onto printed portraits. Makeup artist Tiziana Raimondo then translated those drawings — proportionally indifferent, chromatically fearless — onto living faces. What the children produced, without knowing what a face is supposed to look like, was more original than almost anything the beauty industry generates. Instinct as the oldest tradition.
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Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time (Volume V: The Captive/La Prisonnière), 1923
"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is."/"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
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