15-year issue
CURA. turns 15 this year and celebrates this important milestone with We Monsters, a special “horror” issue dedicated to the exploration of the revolutionary role of monsters in modern civilization. Through a wide series of monstrous figures, beast-like characters, aberrations, masks and figures, human and animal hybrids, nightmares, and chimeras, the new issue of CURA. investigates artists’ interest in weird life forms produced by the imagination, and the dismantling of a fictive idea of normality and its divisive categorizations. In a world that hides monstrosity behind “otherness,” monsters thus reveal a dynamic, varied, multifaced, transformative universe.
The new issue of the magazine thus presents new artists commissions, special projects, visual essays, texts, and conversations about the attractive and bumper world of the alterity, that delves into the dark side of consciousness and brings us into the hidden folds of the human being. New monstrous figures have been created for the occasion of CURA. 42, thanks to the cover commissions of Marianna Simnett and Charlie Fox. If Marianna Simnett goes through her most iconic and recent works, premiering her latest production of WINNER, Charlie Fox gifts us a visual selection of his favorite monsters, featuring artworks, movies, celebs, and graphic novels. Will Benedict in conversation with Steffen Jørgensen also scrolls the most monstrous figures of his work for the third cover of the issue and offers a preview of the new character created for the third season of The Restaurant. Furthermore, a Monsters zine designed by Will Benedict himself features a wide archive of monsters in art history, comics, found images and old magazines.
There is no escape from monsters!
Alex Da Corte’s polyhedral transformations are described by Travis Diehl; Monster Chetwynd’s self-determination as a “monster” is narrated by a text by Jessica Ramm; Ambera Wellmann’s monstrous plasticity is described by Natalia Sielewicz; Ivana Bašić’s new work premiere is accompanied by a conversation with Margot Norton, while Sibylle Ruppert’s dark art is introduced by Ben Broome.
A special project by Jon Rafman introduces us to a suggestive cavalcade of monstrous AI characters taken from his new video game S.S. Lacuna: Cloutbomb. Special commissions selected by DIS are allocated to Ada O’Higgins, alias Ada Antoinette, Rafael Amadeo Foster, and Evan Eisel, with their Incest Movie Night and to the independent game studio Softethix with their new videogame.
Lastly, The New Now section sheds new light on the work of Darja Bajagić, introduced by Ana Simona Zelenović; Sandra Mujinga, introduced by Zoë Hopkins; Josèfa Ntjam, presented by Martha Kirszenbaum; Mary-Audrey Ramirez, with a text by Adriana Blidaru, and King Cobra, presented by Sir Jacobs.
“We are all monsters as we tend to see in the others the monster that lurks within us.”
CURA. 42 will be distributed throughout Europe and the US from May 2024, and in the rest of the world from June 2024. The issue will be premiered at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin on the occasion of Marianna Simnett’s solo exhibition WINNER from May 16. It will be internationally launched at Art Basel from June 10 to June 16 and through some hotspots in Rome, New York, Paris, London, Berlin, and Milan.
An extended collection of monsters is also visible on the We_Monsters_Collection Instagram page.
Stay tuned!
Editors-in-Chief: Ilaria Marotta, Andrea Baccin.