Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells
Reference Point. 2 Arundel St, London WC2R 3DA
ICA. The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom
Founded in 2024, Pina is a portable, printed exhibition space. It functions as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions that exist solely within the pages of a magazine. Each commission spans sixty pages, offering artists the space to construct worlds, which audiences can explore as they would any other exhibition.
The issues pair the exhibitions-in-print with new short stories, inviting writers to respond to the exhibitions’ layouts through fiction. A conversation piece between each artist and a notable thinker offers further insight into the projects and the wider practices.
Pina issue one commissioned Gala Porras-Kim and Asad Raza; issue two, Forensic Architecture and Edgar Calel.
Publishing in September, issue three contains exhibitions by American Artist and C.B. Evans.
American Artist presents Power Grid, an immersive mapping of contemporary life along X-Y axes intersecting poverty, wealth, captivity and freedom. Deftly referencing 20th century conceptualist forebearers, Artist’s grid lays bare a matrix of disparities inherent to late-stage racial and extractive capitalism: from “being in love”, situated between poverty and freedom; to “political asylum seeking” at the extreme of poverty and captivity; and ‘recreational space travel’ as the manifestation of wealth and freedom.
For Pina, Power Grid takes the form of a detachable, translucent poster with snapshots of news cycles coinciding with selected gridpoints. Straddling the abstraction of geometry and language on the one hand, and the all-too-real day-to-day of oppressive systems as portrayed in the media on the other, Power Grid is ultimately a tool. As Artist expresses in their acknowledgements: “Now that you have witnessed every corner of what is, imagine what has yet to be, and bring it into being.”
American Artist is joined in conversation by scholar and archivist of Black and trans visibility and abolitionist thought Che Gossett, to consider the equalising tensions that underlie each quadrant. Together, they go in search of the unstable balance that brings ‘common flourishing, well-being, living well, rather than mere fleeting happiness’.
Feminist writer and researcher Lola Olufemi contributes the short story that accompanies Artist’s exhibition. Her piece The Grid imagines an all-observant connective form, its Plutonian power and the abrupt, transformative process that it faces when shaken by failure.
In For Your Consideration, C.B. Evans presents a treatment-in-progress for their first feature length film: a neo-noir speculative fiction set in 2026, but a 2026 in which the internet has been down for ten years, and a global corporation, GAMMA, manages the cloud archives that survived its crash, selling memories back to consumers. A story of queer worldbuilding on the brink of societal collapse, the film carries a proposal for decentralised and horizontal political and community systems.
The exhibition opens an opportunity to cruise the architectural scaffolding of a film that does not yet exist. It exposes the nascent stages of its production in all of its triumphs and defeats, mirroring Evans’ fascination with the ways emotion comes in contact, and rebels against political and technological structures.
Evans invites Dean Spade—author of Love in a Fucked Up World (2025)—to join them in conversation, transforming this space in Pina into a focus group. They begin by asking: “How do we want to live together? What does fighting for that look like?” The fast-paced exchange that follows draws from mutual experiences in resistance, organising and love.
Tokyo-based author Orion J Facey—whose debut novel The Virosexuals (2021) garnered cult following in the queer literary scene—contributes the sci-fi story Babe in Flames. It stages a techno-corporeal spectacle at the mouth of a volcano, and becomes an explosive companion to Evans’ worldbuilding speculations.
Pina was founded by Editor Catalina Imizcoz, it is made in collaboration with the London-based designers Graphic Thought Facility, Producer Lucila de Arizmendi and Deputy Editor Bitsy Knox. It is kindly supported by Arts Council England and Jan Michalski Foundation.
Subscribe to Pina, collect exhibitions. For press inquiries, email bk@pinamagazine.com.
