OSMOS Magazine Spring/Summer 2024

Founder and editor of OSMOS Magazine Cay Sophie Rabinowitz (formerly of Parkett and Fantom) describes the publication as “an art magazine about the use and abuse of photography.” The magazine is divided into thematic sections—some traditional, and others more idiosyncratic.

In OSMOS Magazine Issue 26, Christian Rattemeyer’s ESSAY discusses a historic series of photo collages by Astrid Klein that combine her previous work on female new wave film stars with references to German author Arno Schmidt and political film from the 1970s. 

Tom McDonough’s STILL MOVING STILL on Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s new multi channel video installation at Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, brings an intimate philosophical read to the large scale public examination of human encounters in the forest. This text both surveys the artist’s cinematic encounters of the past 20 years with insightful references to the ecological writings of Bruno Latour.

In PORTFOLIO, Emily Alesandrini writes on the multifaceted practice of artist Joiri Minaya, contextualizing Minaya’s Divergences (2020-2022) in its implicit critique of dominant colonial ideations of the earth and the self—an undoing of the “layers of projection” in need of revisitation.

Stefan Gronert’s EYE of the BEHOLDER text on the expansive practice of photographer and scholar Gottfried Jäger extrapolates on how the physical aspects of the photographic medium were the springboards for Jäger’s generative and programmatic works. Gronert discusses the German artist’s re-entry into the canon following his 2023 career retrospective at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, curated by Gronert, historicizing Jäger’s oeuvre and its subsequent methodologies.

Nadja Van Buseck’s CONVERSATION with Austrian artist Stefanie Moshammer on the autobiographical conceptualism embedded within her practice, spanning visual metaphors conveyed through image, installation, textiles, and sculpture. “[When I close my eyes and think of my mother, I see] a very fragile person, who is also very strong.”

Photographer Alon Koppel’s REPORTAGE Middle Eastern Promises (2014) uses the stereoscopic image cards collectively titled Palestine from Traveling in the Holy Land — Through the Stereoscope (1900) by Jesse Lyman Hurlbutt. The cards, featured alongside Koppel’s 2014 photographs capturing the same locations of Israel and the Occupied Territories, act as a viewpoint into the physicality and landscape of heavily politicized and fluctuating borders and identities. The effects of power and politics are highlighted in the visible changes taking place across a timeline over a century long.

In STORIES, Tim Maul writes on the collapse of formative, life-altering memories into their essential object formations seen in Mac Adam’s installation Passenger (1978-2013), as it was shown at MUDAM Luexembourg in 2011.

Photographer Bev Grant’s POSTCARD narrates the story of her 1968 photograph Busing Farm Laborers, PA, July 1968, which captures Black workers boarding a hand painted bus. The photograph was taken only a few days after another bus carrying thirty-nine migrant workers was rammed by a passenger train. Grant’s recollection of this historic moment signifies the larger socio-economic structures which composed the vulnerable lives of these workers and many others like them.