Elephant Magazine

Elephant Magazine Life Through Art

SW: What is your favourite means of subverting traditional white cube frameworks?ELH: I love this question; my favourite...
03/06/2026

SW: What is your favourite means of subverting traditional white cube frameworks?

ELH: I love this question; my favourite means of subverting it is by embracing it and not pretending. It’s been so important for me to be upfront about my desire for a for-profit gallery. I called it a kunsthalle with a gallery, because the capitalist-for-sale-commercial side was important for me. I don’t think a paradigm shift is helpful, most importantly for the artist. Artists need money. Artists need studios, and while there are shows that aren’t necessarily for sale, I wasn’t interested in being that kind of space. I was really interested in finding a way to maybe not subvert the white cube as a commercial entity, but instead shift the ideas around the kind of shows we could put on those spaces.

Samaira Wilson () sits down with Ebony L. Haynes () to discuss the impossibility of work-life balance, how she crafts love letters to the artists she works with through her curatorial practice, and the advice she offers aspiring curators.

We are greatly saddened by the loss of our friend and contributor, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (1985–2026), known to many as...
02/06/2026

We are greatly saddened by the loss of our friend and contributor, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (1985–2026), known to many as Jerry Gogosian ().

Helphenstein was an artist, intellectual and most famously a critic. Critics are needed but rarely fully understood. Through biting humor Helphenstein held a mirror to the art world we all share and through her life’s work shone a light in a sometimes dimly lit white cube.

Hilde Lynn Helphenstein will be greatly missed by us all.

“One thing I would say is start your own things, even if you don’t plan to do that forever. Just see what it feels like ...
29/05/2026

“One thing I would say is start your own things, even if you don’t plan to do that forever. Just see what it feels like to have people rely on you, to have so many egos in the room, to understand what it is that you want to build, or what it is that you see is lacking. You’ll then get a sense of how other people are moving and why they’re moving that way when it comes to critique and community.”

Samaira Wilson () moderated a discussion between Salome Asega () and Ajay Kurian (), two voices at the forefront of shaping creative infrastructure today, for Elephant.

Photography by Grace Antino

“Her work is full of small surprises and moments where structure gives way to play.”This month in Kitty Lees’ () jewelle...
27/05/2026

“Her work is full of small surprises and moments where structure gives way to play.”

This month in Kitty Lees’ () jewellery archive: forgotten kitchen utensils and pieces of aluminium. Turned into something special, naturally, by Anni Albers.

“Molly Crabapple and I met while doing graffiti with a mutual friend: three women in her art-filled Manhattan loft, stir...
22/05/2026

“Molly Crabapple and I met while doing graffiti with a mutual friend: three women in her art-filled Manhattan loft, stirring a gluey pot of wheatpaste like a witches’ brew. Later, it would be used to erect posters of her art all around the city: portraits of activists, of politicians, of burlesque dancers and fire performers and everything in between. Molly is an artist whose work is explicitly tied to revolution; she has been described as a “punk Joan Didion,” “a young Patti Smith with paint on her hands,” “art’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”

Molly’s work has brought her to the front lines of war zones, but also to autonomous zones: temporary, self-governing communities that embody a utopian vision of social change. There, protest becomes something closer to a party: a space for free expression, community building, and saying “f**k you” to the powers that be. She’s known as the foremost artist to document Occupy Wall Street—but before that, she got her start in the burlesque world serving as house artist for iconic nightclub The Box.”

On the heels of her bestselling book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, the artist, , joins Camille Sojit Pejcha () to discuss desire, disruption, and the erotics of rebellion.

Photography by Marina Galperina ()

Jens Fänge () plays a dare game with his paintings. Stepping into his Stockholm studio in the mornings, he finds himself...
21/05/2026

Jens Fänge () plays a dare game with his paintings. Stepping into his Stockholm studio in the mornings, he finds himself avoiding the last painting he was working on the previous night. A mind game or a kink if you will, the diss helps Fänge to rationalize his affiliation with his own creative urges and even understand where his mind was headed when he turned the studio’s lights off last night. “It is an act of disregarding the painting, and even being impolite to it,” he tells Elephant. He busies himself by making coffee and tending other paintings, and “when I can’t stand not looking at it any longer and when the painting least expects it,” he muses, “I turn and look at it.” The cowboy-sharp stare back at the ignored work ushers the artist to discover its new aspects, “because the painting looks back at me.”

Swedish painter Jens Fänge who has a solo exhibition at Perrotin talks about the unattended corners of the mind and sometimes dreams. By Osman Can Yerebakan () for Elephant.

Jens Fänge, Antechamber, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ()

14/05/2026

Ferg introduces Darold Brown (Volume 1)

Video by: RTT Productions ()

Elephant Magazine’s May Digital Cover Star features Darold Brown, popularly known as Ferg, in conversation with Editor-i...
14/05/2026

Elephant Magazine’s May Digital Cover Star features Darold Brown, popularly known as Ferg, in conversation with Editor-in-Chief Tschabalala Self. Together, they discuss Brown’s studio practice, his upbringing in Harlem, and shared cultural references that continue to shape his work across art, fashion, and music.

Brown is reintroducing himself to the world not through reinvention, but expansion. Elephant Magazine is proud to present Darold Brown.

Featuring: Darold Brown ()
Interview by: Tschabalala Self ()
Photo: Christian DeFonte ()
Photo Assistant: Valentina von Klencke ()

“I’m from a pretty proletariat household, as you can imagine. We don’t have much regard for hierarchies of materials. It...
11/05/2026

“I’m from a pretty proletariat household, as you can imagine. We don’t have much regard for hierarchies of materials. It goes back quite a few generations; my mum was an amazing craftsperson with pretty much anything she took her hand to; she would construct cardboard box tool organisers for her ceramic tools, but she didn’t actually like doing ceramics – she just liked making cardboard boxes. Then, my grandma was a textile worker – a pattern cutter in the textile district of London. It keeps going back like that with various technically-skilled roles. The attitude was very much, Why would you buy something when you could make it, even if it meant making a slightly more rubbish version of it.

As much as I’ve tried to avoid making work about my mother and grandma, they are very much present in there, guiding my hand. These creative, talented, skilled – though weird is the most operative term for them – and sometimes difficult women who had difficult lives, and who didn’t find it easy to relate to the world they were forced to inhabit. Enough time has passed that the world has evolved so that I can exist comfortably within it and make things for my own pleasure, for making’s sake, they never got to have that. I’ve always made things for no reason, although I wasn’t very good at it; I was never formally skilled at anything, but I just liked art and kept making it. Thought it was more about the playful narrative of the objects and how they’d sit next to each other in my world than the things themselves.”

C.Mae Bloom () speaks with Alma Feigis about abandoned objects and their imagined pasts, the guiding hand of the women in her family, and the unresolved tension between labour and pleasure in the act of making.

Photography by Alma Feigis

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