The language of borders has become inescapable. It shapes political discourse and public debate, but also the ways in which images circulate, technologies operate, and communities imagine themselves. Today, borders are no longer confined to the edges of territories; they emerge through infrastructures, memories, architectures, and systems of representation, revealing themselves as dynamic sites where identities, geographies, and forms of belonging are continually negotiated.
The fall issue of Flash Art, titled “Borders,” approaches the border not as a fixed geopolitical line but as a condition that permeates contemporary life. Bringing together artists and writers whose practices unfold across different cultural and geographic contexts, the issue explores borders as spaces of conflict and translation, exclusion and encounter, asking how art can make visible the forces that shape our present while imagining other ways of inhabiting it.
The issue presents three cover stories. Thea Djordjadze, photographed by Osma Harvilahti in her studio in Berlin, is profiled by Ela Bittencourt, who reflects on the artist’s poetic understanding of architecture, materiality, and memory, where objects and places become carriers of psychological resonance. Thomas Ruff speaks with Louisa Elderton about photography, artificial intelligence, and the mutable status of images at a moment when technological innovation is reshaping visual cultural. Alvaro Barrington, photographed by Alice Mann in his London studio, discusses painting, collaboration, and cultural inherence in conversation with Taylor Le Melle, reflecting on the artist’s practice as a space of community, exchange, and lived experience.
Also in this issue, Tolia Astakhishvili’s sprawling installations are approached by Anya Harrison as disjointed architectures where memory, domestic space, and accumulated objects unsettle linear notions of time; Claire Shiying Li explores Lap-See Lam’s expanding universe of Cantonese myths, opera, and speculative storytelling, tracing a living vocabulary through which diasporic identities remain in constant transformation; Guillaume Blanc-Marianne follows Vladislav Markov’s practice through games, conspiracy, and staged realities, considering play as a way of exposing the mechanisms that produce contemporary belief; Juliette Desorgues reflects on Dora Budor’s architectural interventions, in which built environments become unstable sites of projection and psychological tension; Amy Jones examines Yalda Afsah’s moving-image works through questions of embodied presence, intimacy, and the fragile dynamic between care and control; Gea Politi delves into Lydia Ourahmane’s practice of displacement, inherited histories, and the political resonance of materials experienced; Christina Lambrou follows Maria Toumazou’s intimate reflections on place, language, and everyday ecologies in Cyprus; Blake Oetting approaches Bruno Zhu’s practice through performance, authorship, and the mutable coding of identity; and Ewa Poniatowska joins Tosia Leniarska in a conversation that considers art as a space where value, labor, and cultural production are continuously renegotiated.
In the issue’s installment of Unpack / Reveal / Unleash, Michela Ceruti revisits Armineh Negahdari’s layered engagement with landscape, migration, and memory through the recurring image of a river. Studio Scene opens the doors of Mimmo Haraditiohadi’s studio in Basel, where Otto Bonnen follows the artist’s everyday practice via the intimate relationship between making, collecting, and living. The Portfolio presents “Leak,” a visual essay by Martín Sabyno accompanied by a text by Elsa Estrella, while the Focus On Oslo by Abirami Logendran and photographed by Max Creasy turns its attention to a city negotiating new cultural infrastructures, local histories, and shifting artistic communities.
The issue also includes reviews on Augustas Serapinas, “Physical Culture” at Nottingham Contemporary by Sofia Hallström; Nina Porter, “Sample Question” at Kunstverein in Hamburg by Katrin Krumm; “Call me gravity” at Wiels, Brussels, by Emilio Marroquin; Shirana Shahbazi, “All at Once. An Interplay with Li Tavor” at Kunstmuseum Luzern by Annalise June Kamegawa; Miriam Cahn, “Ciò che mi guarda” at MACRO, Rome, by Manuela Pacella; Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Sweet Revenge” at Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, by Valerie Mindlin; Frida Orupabo, “Cloud of Confusion” at MAC/CCB, Lisbon, by Carolina Quintela; and “Fendi / Karl Lagerfeld 1985. After Steps Through Work” at GNAM—Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, by Gea Politi.
