On the cover:
Osman Khan, installation view of “Road to Hybridabad,” MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2024–25. Photo: Jon Verney, Courtesy the artist, made with MASS MoCA
Editor’s Letter:
Osman Khan’s massive exhibition “Road to Hybridabad,” on view at MASS MoCA and the subject of his interview here, is based on interwoven stories that he has been developing for most of his life. Indeed, he found key inspiration for the multi-room installation, he says, in the transformational stories of One Thousand and One Nights. For Johan Muyle, who creates assemblages based on fictive scenarios, narrative is both impetus and an inevitable result: “By bringing two objects together, I seek to generate an induced meaning, which comes about by way of adjacency. Place a revolver within proximity of a blood stain and one reads a murder into the juxtaposition,” he says. In many ways, storytelling drives the practice of another artist in this issue, Saad Qureshi. To investigate an idea such as displacement, he gathers disparate stories on the subject from many people, braiding them together into what he calls sculptural “mindscapes.”
At its metaphorical limit, visual art can be seen as the transformation of material into a certain type of story, just as stories come together as the transformation of words. Although Tadáskía writes and incorporates text into her installations, she focuses more on metamorphosis than on narrative. In a fascinating interview here, she says, “I embrace transformation and surrender to the process and the elements I’m working with, from pastel and charcoal for the drawings to the fruit and vegetables that will decay and renew in the sculptures.” Bharti Kher also hews close to metamorphosis, seeing herself “as an alchemist interested in animism, in understanding how something can be more than the sum of its parts.” She views her approach as breaking open objects, freeing them to be more than they seem. I would argue that the interviews featured here do much the same: they will transmute your perceptions of things into something renewed and more open to the world. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
