Flash Art #351

In this issue: “The Familiar Strange,” a visual essay by Phung-Tien Phan with an introduction by Ela Bittencourt; Bianca Stoppani reflects on Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Grumpy as a surreal, feminist critique of techno-capitalist control, fragmented embodiment, and gendered visibility through grotesque digital forms. Leo Cocar explores how Lyric Shen’s ceramic and installation works blur boundaries between image, surface, memory, and materials, revealing a poetics of fragmentation and ambiguity grounded in bodily and architectural metaphor; Racheal Crowther and Ben Broome discuss her installation-based practice, focusing on scent, sound, surveillance, and sensory engineering to reveal hidden power structures and influences on human behavior; in conversation with Tosia Leniarska, Agnieszka Polska explores her use of seductive, media-driven storytelling to critique manipulation, emotional economies, and the technological influence of perception and memory across time; and finally, Eleanor Ivory Weber explores Olga Balema’s sculptural practice through Laconic repetition, emphasizing how the artist’s works merge materiality with contingency and introspection.

For Critic Dispatch, P. Eldridge offers a visceral meditation on trans embodiment and the grotesque as revelation, defiance, and sacred rupture — where transformation becomes language, art, resistance, and prophecy of queer futurity. For The Curist, Fafaya Mogensen meets Andreas Fuhrer, founder and director of Institut Funder Bakke in Silkeborg; the second installment of Studio Scene spotlights Sofia Defino Leiby with words by Gabriela Acha. Unpack / Reveal / Unleash, curated this year by Margaret Kross, features Sophie Friedman-Pappas. Focus On explores Zurich, with Tibor Beilicky and Ellena Ehrl guiding us through the city’s major urban projects.

By making these emerging voices dialogue with foundational figures, the summer issue does not proposing a linear genealogy. Rather, it tries to trace a