LOWDOWN: We're so back
Let us soothe your end-of-summer blues...
Well hello there,
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I hope you’ve all been having a glorious summer. At LOST ART HQ, we’ve moved to an East London office and consequently become regular partaker’s in Cafe 1001’s pizza and spritz happy hour deal…
Now we have done some work over the past month. Notably, SECRET CEREMONY is back on the 9th September with the fourth screening of our TAROT SEASON. We’ll be celebrating THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE card with a screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s life affirming autobiographical masterpiece, Endless Poetry.
The screening will include live performances by two equally inspiring poets. Sebastian Wiener, and Ellana Blacher. Get your tickets HERE - and be quick. Our last few screenings have been a sell out, and we suspect this one will be too.
Now for this edition of THE LOWDOWN, we’ve got choirgirls, mosaics and love. It’s almost biblical.
Happy reading,
Maya Sall x
Writer and editorial assistant
THE LOWDOWN by LOST ART
Pro Tips: Let’s play catch-up…
THE LOWDOWN may have been on a little summer holiday, but at LOST ART HQ, we were still writing away. If you missed any articles, why not catch up now? Talking about these in the office will be far more impressive than your holiday in the Maldives, trust me.
‘So Much Freedom’: In Conversation with Maria Korolevskaya
Curator Maria Korolevskaya discusses her 2024 virtual exhibit The Dimension of Feeling, and its take on female creativity and power, and the new frontiers of curating exhibitions virtually.
Images of Modernity in Mayfair at Huxley-Parlour
Pathfinders is fascinating exhibition that explores three female Surrealist and Modernist photographers. It’s free to visit, and is on display for another two weeks.
Rebel Yell! Are you Joining the Reader’s Resistance?
In July we released the collector’s edition of our magazine ‘Spill the Beanz: Digital Arts and Cultures’. Turns out, LOST ART HQ is part of a big ol’ print resurgence. Click the link to read all about it…
Faith and desire: Urška Djukić’s Little Trouble Girls
By Wang Sum Luk
The mood to watch: you’d like to expand your horizons with a thoughtful coming-of-age tale
Faith and desire mix in startling ways. Take Saint Teresa of Ávila’s account of moaning with pain and ecstasy during a mystical vision of an angel spearing her through the heart, or how some Medieval manuscripts draw the wound in Christ’s side as a conspicuously vagina-shaped opening.
Such a depiction of Christ’s wound opens Little Trouble Girls, the debut of Slovenian director Urška Djukić. This transgressive image is a microcosm of this movie’s conflict, which follows Lucija, an introverted choir-girl undergoing a sexual awakening during a retreat at a convent.
Djukić captures Lucija’s tumultuous emotions through long, often static shots and evocative sound design, presenting her attraction to a male worker and a female friend with detached frankness. Stylistic restraint makes Djukić’s exploration of repression and queer desire shine all the brighter, particularly in a climactic sequence that will startle you with its quiet emotional rawness. In its understated intensity, Little Trouble Girls is a tremendously self-assured debut.
WHERE: All good UK cinemas!
WHEN: Little Trouble Girls is out NOW
Celebrities Underfoot: Boris Anrep’s National Gallery Mosaics
By Wang Sum Luk
The mood to visit: you’ve got terrible posture, and may as well do something useful with it
Unless you’ve tripped up, you don’t usually look down at your feet. That goes double when you’re in the National Gallery, where there are so many cultural treasures on show that you might miss a few that you’re standing on.
If you head to the gallery’s entrance hall, you’ll notice mosaics decorating the floor, the work of artist Boris Anrep. Created in the early 20th century, Anrep’s mosaics employ seemingly traditional themes, such as allegorical depictions of virtues or depictions of the Muses, the classical goddesses of artistic inspiration.
However, Anrep put a contemporary twist on these symbols, visualising them with the personalities and habits of modern Britain. The mosaic ‘The Pleasures of Life’ features pleasantly eclectic amusements: football players, motorcycling, a man conversing flirtatiously with two women (marked ‘Profane Love’ on the mosaic, presumably to dissuade visitors from imitating his behaviour on museum premises), and a Christmas pudding.
An associate of the Bloomsbury Group, Anrep used his friends and other celebrities as models for their designs. Thus the profile of Clio, Muse of history, resembles novelist Virginia Woolf, while Melpomene, Muse of tragic drama, has the face of Greta Garbo, and the virtue of ‘Defiance’ is represented as Winston Churchill facing down a swastika-shaped monster. So when you’re next at the National Gallery, look down—you might be standing on a celebrity’s face.
WHERE: The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN
WEBSITE: click here
Love and bookshops: Libby Page’s This Book Made Me Think of You
By Wang Sum Luk
The mood to read: you want a cozy story about loving books and being in love
‘The right book in the hands of the right person at exactly the right moment can change their life forever…’
I visit a bookshop practically every weekend. Often it’s Foyles on Charing Cross Road, the store where Tilly Nightingale, the protagonist of Libby Page’s upcoming novel This Book Made Me Think of You, meets her fiancé Joe. But you’ll also find me at a few independent bookshops—like the one in Primrose Hill that Tilly heads to after the death of her fiancé, where a package from Joe is waiting for her.
Before he passed, Joe organised a parting gift: twelve books for each month of her first year without him. Over the year, Tilly rediscovers joy and finds community at the lowest point in her life, all because of the life-affirming power of books and independent bookshops. It could be cliché, but instead I find it to be a tender portrayal of love and loss.
That said, one part of this novel doesn’t ring true to my bookshop-going experience. No bookseller I know has the muscular biceps and auburn-flecked beard of the store owner that Tilly finds herself increasingly drawn to as he helps her complete this year of books. (If you know of a bookshop with staff like this, please contact LOST ART magazine ASAP.)
The bookshop in this novel is unfortunately fictitious, but resembles independent bookshops like Primrose Hill Books, a family business in walking distance of Regent’s Park. So as you’re waiting for This Book Made Me Think of You to arrive on shelves, take a page out of my book (pun intended), and drop by Primrose Hill to find your next literary obsession!