Lee Ufan

Artist McArthur Binion: "How can I paint without a brush?" | Louisiana Channel

”I want you to look at my painting and say: this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.” Meet one of the great personalities of contemporary art, American artist McArthur Binion, who shares his story and tells about a life in art for over 50 years.

” There are two things I'm happy about: I was born poor. And I stuttered. Challenging. Very challenging. Let's go get them.” McArthur Binion’s love for art started by chance. As a delivery boy, he was asked to drop a package at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ”This was the first time I'd ever been in a museum. I went in, and that experience changed my life.” Binion started drawing classes and worked uninterruptedly for two years.”If you can’t talk, I became a professional listener. And then I realised: You can’t learn while you talk.”

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Fighting Imperialism!!! ••• Louisiana Channel: Writer Zadie Smith on How Language Upsets the Right-Wing | From the Archive | Louisiana Channel

"I'm amazed how much of it comes down to language. I think that is the one thing that really strikes me about the right-wing sites is that when you get down to the core complaints, the things that really upset them are linguistic."

Zadie Smith (b. 1975) is a British novelist, essayist and short story writer. She is the author of the critically praised novels ‘White Teeth’ (2000), ‘The Autograph Man’ (2002), ‘On Beauty’ (2005), ‘NW’ (2012) and ‘Swing Time’ (2016). Smith is the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award for ‘White Teeth’, ‘Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists’ (2003 and 2013), ‘Welt-Literaturpreis’ (2016) and the ‘Langston Hughes Medal’ (2017). She lives in London and New York City.

Zadie Smith was interviewed by Synne Rifbjerg in August 2017 in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark.

Artist Tesfaye Urgessa: What Does It Mean to Belong?

“I was thinking about being a foreigner. I was thinking about what it means to belong.”

Tesfaye Urgessa makes history as the first artist to represent Ethiopia at the Venice Biennale. His participation comes at a time when the Biennale's theme, Foreigners Everywhere, resonates deeply with the themes explored in Urgessa's large figurative paintings as well as his personal experiences. As an artist who has navigated the complexities of identity, race, and the immigrant experience, Tesfaye Urgessa’s work engages with the emotional realities of displacement and cultural intersections.

Tesfaye Urgessa started his artistic journey in Ethiopia, where he would copy paintings from the church: “In Ethiopia, in the church, you see very bright, very strong paintings, and those are the kind of art I used to know at that time. I was copying them, and I taught myself how to draw and how to paint.” However, it wasn’t until Tesfaye Urgessa moved to Germany and enrolled in the Staatliche Akademie in Stuttgart that he decided to turn his talent for drawing into an artistic career.

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