Something Curated

“While being a researcher and archivist usually means that there is no shortage of exciting and novel things to discover,” says Sanam Sindhi, “if you’re as obsessive about your niche interests as I am, there are moments when you can find yourself seemingly at the edge of all there is to know.” New York, for her, is the cure to this feeling, “with its excess of bookstores, libraries, and a recent renaissance of independent, new spaces for print lovers.” As the founder of @southasiaarchive – a research initiative, consultancy, and preservation platform that uncovers alternative visual histories, sartorial politics, and counter-narratives of the subcontinent and its diaspora – Sindhi’s work is defined by a devotion to the overlooked and the ephemeral. This guide extends that impulse into the city she calls her “favorite place to research” – an intellectual capital where “nothing is sexier than being smart,” and where the New York Public Library stands as a temple to print, surrounded by an abundance of smaller spots that keep its spirit alive. It’s these smaller spaces that Sindhi’s guide focuses on. Read the complete guide on somethingcurated.com now. Editor: @ke5hava 📷: 1-3. Sanam at Climax Books and Library180. Photography by @thomas_mccarty for Something Curated 4. Courtesy Casa Magazines 5. Courtesy High Valley Books. Photography by Morgan Dojny 6. Courtesy Vowels Research Library. Photography by Max Balderas 7. Courtesy Asia Art Archive in America. Photography by Argenis Apolinario

Rainclouds hang over Venice all morning, flattening the light around the Arsenale into shades of silver and grey as crowds move between pavilions clutching umbrellas and damp press releases. By the time I arrive at the @kazakhstan_nationalpavilion_ inside the Museo Storico Navale, the vernissage has already thickened into its usual frenzy. “When I first encountered the Biennale’s curatorial concept, In Minor Keys, it immediately led me to the notion of qoñyr in Kazakh culture,” curator @syrlybekbekbota tells me. Qoñyr is a fundamental concept in Kazakh cosmology. While it literally means brown, the word also refers to a certain texture of sound, silence, and atmosphere. “In the Kazakh worldview, qoñyr is a state, a rhythm, a voice, even a way of sensing time,” the curator shares. At its core, qoñyr is an attentiveness to subtle things like wind, breath, and footsteps, making audible what is usually lost beneath noise. Walking into the pavilion, I am immediately confronted by a series of enormous horse heads. #SmailBayaliyev’s ‘Steppe Architectonics’ occupies the opening room with startling force. These monumental forms rise upwards into the cavernous height of the building, making the already vast pavilion feel even larger. Discover more on somethingcurated.com. ✍🏽: @ke5hava 📷: Keshav Anand / Luca Girardini. Courtesy of A&A Worldwide #LaBiennaleDiVenezia #BiennaleArte

Near Belém’s waterfront, hundreds of eggs form a square on the ground, their presence quietly unsettling, as if something could go wrong at any moment… At six o’clock, #AnnaMariaMaiolino, who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 60th Venice Biennale, appears. She moves slowly in a long black wool coat, her walking stick marking each step. She speaks in Portuguese, asking if we are immigrants… Each step is deliberate. The sound you expect, the crack, never comes. Instead there is a held breath, shared across the audience, as bodies move through this fragile terrain without breaking it… “I am an artist and also a political being; my work is influenced by my surroundings, now as it was before,” Maiolino tells me. “I was born in Italy during the Second World War and, before emigrating at the age of eight, I witnessed the destruction caused by the bombs. Humanity repeats itself, given what is happening now in various parts of the world. I created the first ‘Entrevidas’ right at the start of Brazil’s democratic transition, at the end of the dictatorship. However, it is a work that still opposes wars across the globe and the everyday violence to which human beings are exposed...” Anna Maria Maiolino’s latest performance marked the opening of her new exhibition ‘Poetic Earth’ on view at @maatmuseum , Lisbon until 31 August 2026. Discover more on somethingcurated.com now. ✍🏽/📹: @ke5hava Cover: Anna Maria Maiolino, ‘Entrevidas’ from the ‘Fotopoemação’ series, 1981

Rajasthan, India by @sheilametzner , 1990s

@city.girls.xp is an anonymous artist duo making unique lamps that London’s art scene is swooning over. Set up by two artist besties who transformed their shared tastes into something productive, they present their sculptures in chicly curated single-evening collection drops where artists, gallerists and creatives quickly snap them up. Magpie-like, their works are formed from (often shiny) found materials sourced from eBay and charity shops, turning abandoned (sometimes kitsch) objects into elegant pieces that reference design movements from pretty Art Nouveau to pared-back minimalist modernism. @laurietgbarron visits the elusive pair’s London studio to preview several luminously glowing new works in progress, and learn about the foundations of their collaboration, the Victorian novel behind their name, and their dream future project. Read the full interview on somethingcurated.com now. 📷: Clarissa; Tara; Raquel; Sabine; Chloe. Courtesy city.girls.xp

Max Guderian, ‘Rolling Stones’, 2021

This past weekend, @154artfair returned to Marrakech for its seventh edition. Highlights included @mehdigeorgeslahlou , presented by @loftartgallery , whose sculptural totems transform the palm into an anthropomorphised archive of migration and ecology. @rachel.marsil ’s paintings at @galeriececilefakhoury quietly pulled you inward, mining family photographs with tenderness, while @barthelemy_toguo ’s solo presentation at @spaceun.tokyo bridged Cameroon and Japan through ceramics and tapestry developed during his time in Nara. What distinguishes the fair is how thoroughly it activates the city beyond its HQ at @lamamouniamarrakech . Founder @telglaoui traced this back to an earlier moment, the Marrakech Biennale, founded by Vanessa Branson and Abel Damoussi, which ran from 2005 to 2016. “It kind of got the city ready for when 1‑54 arrived,” she reflected. When the Biennale’s planned 2018 edition was cancelled, 1‑54 stepped into that gap, building a city‑wide programme of exhibitions, partnerships and off‑site projects. This year, @jnanerumi ’s offering stood out as one of the most thoughtful of these satellite events. Curated by artist @samysnoussi_ , ‘The Garden of Encounters’ unfolded across the property’s lush grounds. The works revealed themselves gradually. @mohammed.el.hajoui ’s ‘Radici’ performance quietly reactivated the carpet as a symbol of hospitality and time, sifting powdered pigment into an ephemeral, woven form. Nearby, @loutfisouidi ’s large‑scale aluminium sculpture suggested a speculative terrain, shimmering, unstable, shaped by pressure. Discover more on somethingcurated.com now. ✍🏽/📷: @ke5hava

Introducing the newly opened group show ‘Atlante’ at @thomasdanegallery in Naples, curator @james.lingwood begins with a quote from the late Italian artist and photographer Luigi Ghirri. “The pleasure of looking at the map,” Ghirri writes, “is one of the most natural gestures of humans from childhood onwards.” … If the gallery’s first reveal wasn’t impact enough, my next turn leads me onto the sprawling veranda, overlooking the Gulf of Naples, the Tyrrhenian Sea stretching towards Capri, with Mount Vesuvius behind the city. Here, @igshaan.adams ’ woven clouds drift outward into the light. Adams’ work, based on aerial photographs of Cape Town townships, maps the movement of people navigating imposed boundaries. The title ‘Keeping Light’ refers both to resilience and to Italo Calvino’s idea of lightness as a quality that enables movement beyond fixed structures. The clouds, the curator adds, “escape the frame of the space and drift into the world beyond.” … ‘Atlante’ never claims neutrality. Instead, it presents mapping as provisional, ideological, and deeply human. It begins with the map as a tool and ends with surfaces marked by absence, drift, and erasure. In between, it insists on looking slowly, and on staying with uncertainty rather than resolving it – calling for a kind of Keatsian “negative capability.” Read more on somethingcurated.com now. ✍🏽/📷: @ke5hava

‘Farm Is Table’, Treiber Farms, New York, 2025. Part of ‘A New Futurist Cookbook’ by @allanwexlerstudio and @tangible.space . “’Farm Is Table’ is an earthwork and dining table created from and within the farm soil. The concept was to challenge the perception of a “farm to table” meal. The table is the farm - insinuating a new form of hyper-locality. The long table is at grade, the seating dug into the earth, the weeds, grasses and wildflowers are the centerpiece.” 📷: @claireesparros @poyaoshih

“In Turin, I quickly realised art school wasn’t quite what I had imagined but I stuck to it—mainly to avoid the military. I enrolled in the fall of 1966. I spent most of 1967 getting a sense of the school, and by 1968 I started to produce my first artworks. After two years, I realised the school wasn’t of much help. I saw other students making copies of famous sculptures. One student did a copy of Giacometti, another a copy of Moore. Even the best ones. However, copying Giacometti doesn’t express your thoughts and identity—it expresses Giacometti’s. My reasoning was simple: if I want to do this job, I will need to find a way to express my own identity. However, I didn’t have much of what then was considered culture, didn’t identify with any specific scene or context. So I decided to work with the tools and knowledge that I had as well as the things that I liked the most, which was my relationship with the woods, the river, and the nature I grew up with. It was a theme that I realised was present in poetry and scores of artistic expressions. What’s more, it was something—let’s call it a “material”—that could be understood and shared across different cultures and peoples, and even across time. So it afforded some kind of cross-cultural, universal possibilities of expression. That’s how I started imagining my first artworks, which were concerned with the way trees grow,” Giuseppe Penone shares with SC. Read the full interview by Bartolomeo Sala on somethingcurated.com. 📷: Giuseppe Penone, ‘Soffio di foglie (Breath of Leaves)’, 1979. ©️ Archivio Penone

In recent years, I have been asked with striking regularity, most often by journalists, about the rise of an “up-and-coming” Southeast Asian art scene. The phrase appears almost instinctively, as though self-evident. Yet its meaning is rarely specified. Is this up-and-comingness a matter of market confidence, evidenced by auction results or gallery representation? Is it about visibility, marked by the presence of Southeast Asian artists in international biennales and museum exhibitions? Or is it infrastructural, referring to the proliferation of art fairs, residencies, non-profit spaces, and institutional platforms across the region? The lack of clarity is revealing. “Up-and-coming” functions less as a descriptor than as a temporal positioning. It places Southeast Asia in a state of becoming, always oriented toward a future point of arrival that remains undefined. The region is imagined as approaching something already known, already established elsewhere. The mirror it is asked to look into reflects not its own conditions, but a set of expectations inherited from other art ecologies… In Singapore, the short-lived but pivotal space Fifth Passage (1991 to 1994) functioned as an artist-run platform for performance, installation, and experimental practices at a moment when state-led cultural infrastructure was still nascent. Its closure, following controversy surrounding performance art, reveals how artistic experimentation in the region has often developed through friction, interruption, and constraint, rather than through steady institutional consolidation. Read @seafocus Curator John Z.W. Tung’s essay ‘Art After “Emergence”: Why Southeast Asia Can’t Recognise Itself in the Mirror’ on somethingcurated.com now. S.E.A. Focus returns at @art.sg from 23–25 January 2026. 📷: Suzann Victor, ‘Still waters (between estrangement & reconciliation)’, 1998, site-specific performance in 2nd floor drain at Singapore Art Museum. Photography by Jason Lim

Trick glass, Catalonia, 1600s A glass, usually for wine and often of extraordinary shape, designed to be as difficult as possible to drink from without spilling the contents. In drinking competitions, any drinker who spilled wine was required to start again with a full glass. 📷: Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, New York)