What’s more welcome in difficult times than an effective distraction – for example in the form of a die-hard obsession? A good ten years ago, our new columnist Alissa Bennett published her zine Dead Is Better, driven by a keen interest in the lives and premature deaths of celebrities such as Judy Garland, Peaches Geldof, and River Phoenix. The stapled pages assembled an addictive collection of personal prose, based on in-depth internet (re)search results derived from dubious sources. For her TZK column, Gladstone Gallery director Bennett pursues her interest in prominent personalities and their legacies, rummaging up remnants of their eventful lives found on the world wide web and its auction house catalogues. Under the title “Fiction/Nonfiction,” borrowed from the former New York gallery of the same name, Bennett’s series of texts begins by taking up the cudgels for conning. If this seems untenable in times when bullshitting, fake news, and falsity dominate the political landscape, you’d better read on.

With her first institutional survey in Europe, which opened in Bern last fall, Amy Sillman expands the well-established temporal dimension of her practice, which includes layers, series, and repetitions, into a dialogue with the Kunstmuseum’s collection. The coiled quality of her gestures – the physicality of the mark as well as the process of its making that are at play in her paintings – manifests here in art historical constellations and murals across the two-storied exhibition space as well as in her own work. As Sasha Rossman argues, this results in a suspenseful viewing experience that subverts the linearity of time and fixity of position both humorously and rebelliously.

Die Gier nach Territorien und Rohstoffen, die zur Vertreibung ganzer Bevölkerungsgruppen führte und die politische Landschaft heute wieder besonders unverhohlen bestimmt, hat seit der Kolonialzeit auch zahllose Tierpopulationen zerstört. Inwieweit Strafbestände des Völkerrechts wie „Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit“ auch nichtmenschliche Tiere einbeziehen sollten, ist angesichts des sechsten Massenaussterbens vermehrt Gegenstand philosophischer Debatten und künstlerischer Produktion. Das Duo Hörner/Antlfinger nimmt diesbezüglich eine Vorreiter*innenrolle ein und verfolgt den Ansatz der Interspecies Justice besonders ganzheitlich und konsequent. Mit Blick auf eine von Felix Sattler kuratierte Ausstellung, zu deren Urheber*innenschaft neben den beiden in Teilen auch zwei Graupapageien zählen, erläutert Annette Weisser, wo die artenübergreifende Kollaboration an Grenzen stößt und warum es dennoch ein Umdenken bei ihr bewirkt hat.

The drastic budget cuts that the Berlin federal state government passed at the end of 2024 set an alarming precedent for the coming years and at the federal level. The cuts disproportionately affect initiatives and projects by and for marginalized groups and individuals – a fact that reveals the ideological bias of these austerity measures. In the second contribution to this series on the status of Berlin’s cultural politics, Kate Brehme, cofounder of Berlinklusion, gives an account of the activist, educational, and curatorial work necessary to provide access to cultural participation for all inhabitants of the city and reports on the threats this hard-fought for infrastructure faces today.

Fashion nevertheless: The new edition of “Seen & Read” begins on Bella Freud’s couch, where the designer – inspired by her great-grandfather’s psychoanalytic method – welcomes celebrity friends from the creative industries and has them talk about their relationships to fashion. From Freud’s talking cure we move on to the hospital, where the protagonist-narrator of Garth Greenwell’s most recent novel finds himself under observation in an environment that leads him to reflect on the current changes in society and the potential of poetry. Finally, Isabelle Graw draws a line back to fashion with her discussion of Sylvie Fleury’s most recent exhibition in Paris, which included a personal favorite: Fleury’s Celine Bag.

In the first retrospective of Hamad Butt’s work, early drawings and paintings by the artist are presented alongside a series of his installations that make use of biotechnology from the 1990s, a time when the loose group that was later called the Young British Artists first gained traction. While the latter works have been frequently exhibited, the former are to be discovered here. Central to both is a symbolism that underscores the tension between life and death; this moved from the pictorial to the exhibition space over the course of Butt’s career, which was cut short by the artist’s untimely passing. In this review, Elliot Gibbons elaborates on the twofold nature of Butt’s work as well as on its commentary on corporal and subjective integrity at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic.

In times of ceaseless doom news, it’s all too easy to lose focus and feel defeated. While they are no longer leading the headlines, the drastic cuts to Berlin’s public funding for culture, education, and science continue to require our attention. We invited some of the cultural workers who have helped make this city the cultural and artistic hub that it is to reflect on the status quo of Berlin’s cultural politics. In the first of three contributions, the performance collective Gob Squad offers a utopian vision that counters the prevailing rhetoric of mourning. They propose to consciously spend attention as a practice to retain agency and share where they’ve spent theirs recently.

Artworks that were made to counter institutional power structures and market conventions, exhibited on the initiative of a super-rich entrepreneur and collector, and in not just any of his imposing exhibition houses but in the Parisian venue that historically served as the home of the French capital’s commodity and stock exchange? The clash is obvious. Yet the contrast could potentially be used productively – especially with the lavish spaces and financial resources that François Pinault and his team have at their disposal – to convey the original motivations of Arte Povera and present its works according to the movement’s down-to-earth and here-to-engage-with spirit. Unfortunately, this opportunity was recently wasted, reports Erik Verhagen, sharing his sincere disappointment.