Baku - Spring 2016 by Baku Magazine

art. culture. wild. a conde nast publication spring 2016

strike a Pose glamour with attitude

oscar murillo - chloĂŠâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clare waight keller - viva vitra

uk/international

P62

Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Got the Look

P76

P114

Putting on the Glitz

The Lives of Others

P102 Novruz Bayraminiz Mubarak! P126

High Frequency

P94

Design Inside Out

Editor’s letter

ALAN GELATI.

ll of the world’s great cities have an indefnable blend of history, contemporary culture, style, architecture and people that together make up their vibe. When people ask what makes Baku so special, the answer could be the city’s Art Nouveau legacy, or its current art scene, or its sweeping Caspian seafront; or perhaps the amazing, centuries-old palaces and historic Old Town; or maybe its burgeoning restaurant scene. Any and all of these are Baku. What better way to refect this cultural richness than this issue’s fabulous fashion shoot. Young, fresh and edgy, it embodies the spirit of a modern city that understands the importance of looking forward as well as respecting its past. I am proud that this year my country is hosting its frst show devoted to the brilliant Colombian superstar artist Oscar Murillo, and we speak with him in this issue. We also meet Chloé’s Clare Waight Keller, another artistic superstar, albeit on the fashion side. Meanwhile, we learn how the British interior designer Robert Angell is bringing a modern elegance to Baku’s White City development. And speaking of design, it doesn’t get much more sophisticated than our photo feature on Vitra, shot and written by Architectural Digest photographer Mark C. O’Flaherty. I am also enormously excited about the new movie of Ali & Nino by the director du jour, Asif Kapadia, who speaks to us about his life and work. With all this, and the rest of the cultural content of this issue, I hope you can sit back, relax amid the birdsong of a springtime garden, and enjoy.

Leyla Aliyeva Editor-in-Chief

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Contents SKETCHES CULTURE FIX

126

HIGH FREQUENCY

OBJETS D’ART

132

RUNNING WILD

MAPPED OUT

137

BAKU EYE

ON THE RADAR

146

FRONT ROW

LA VIDA LOCA

Spring events, including art, fashion, historical wonders – and a new gallery for contemporary art in London.

This season’s can’t-live-without treats, including customizable knitwear and iPhone cases to covet.

Your guide to the world’s best sculpture parks.

The deconstructed world of Australian artist Nicholas Mangan.

More is more this season, as Latin American fever sweeps the fashion world off its feet.

FRIEND OF THE EARTH

The line between work and pleasure is blurred for conservation pioneer David Macdonald.

Hot Columbian artist Oscar Murillo talks about his new projects ahead of his show in Baku.

Explore the wild, untamed nature of Shirvan National Park.

Baku’s cultural barometer of cutting-edge trends on the international art scene.

A behind-the-scenes pass to Baku Fashion Week.

CATALOGUE

152

UNDER THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

156

INTERNATIONAL MAN OF HOSPITALITY

Discovering the ecological diversity of Nepal and Bhutan.

Ricardo Acevedo of Four Seasons Baku takes some time out.

DESIGN FOR LIVING

158

MY ART

SILK ROAD

160

DESTINATION

163

ALL IN THE MIND

We meet interior designer Robert Angell, who has been putting the stamp of luxury on Baku’s White City development.

Azerbaijani scarf designer Menzer Hajiyeva combines contemporary panache with age-old tradition.

CANVAS

Richard Nicoll, of the eponymous cult clothing brand, talks about the intersection of art and design.

Go west to discover the breathtaking beauty of Nakhchivan.

The healing – and celebrity-endorsed – art of sonic therapy.

SHE’S GOT THE LOOK

164

THE ARTIST

TOKYO V BEIJING

167

HISTORY LESSON

PUTTING ON THE GLITZ

168

THE ILLUSTRATOR

DESIGN INSIDE OUT

170

ELECTRIC DREAMS

NOVRUZ BAYRAMINIZ MUBARAK!

102

172

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

THE LIVES OF OTHERS

114

174

ENDANGERED

BRAVE NEW WORLD

118

176

TABULA RASA

Clare Waight Keller, Queen of Chloé, recaptures the insouciance of the nineties woman.

Which Asian metropolis is shaking up the art scene the most?

Bring on the razzle-dazzle with big, bold fashion this spring.

A guided tour of the spectacular Vitra Campus.

Celebrating the new year as only Azerbaijanis can.

Asif Kapadia on the Amy Winehouse effect, and on flming a much-loved story in Azerbaijan.

Baku’s futuristic cityscape envisioned.

All the colours of the rainbow – the world as experienced by Azerbaijani painter Namik Mammadov.

The legend surrounding Galarsan Gorarsan fortress.

On the theme of beauty.

Tesla’s technological prowess is taking motoring up a gear.

This spring’s names to watch in the art world.

The plight of the Caucasian brown bear.

Russian gallerist Mariana Gogova gets cultural in Baku.

COVER. Photographed by MARCELO KRASILCIC. Styled by SORAYA DAYANI Dress by ROKSANDA. Jewellery by AMANDA PEARL

ART. CULTURE. WILD.

A CONDE NAST PUBLICATION spring 2016

Editor-in-Chief Editor-in-Chief, Condé Nast Creative Director Managing Editor Deputy Editor/Chief Sub-Editor Associate Editor

Leyla Aliyeva Darius Sanai

Daren Ellis Maria Webster Abbie Vora Laura Archer

Acting Associate Editor

Anna Wallace-Thompson

Acting Chief Sub-Editor

Andrew Lindesay

Editorial Associate Editor-at-Large Contributing Editors

Picture Editor Designer Sub-Editor Production Controller

Deputy Editor, Russian Baku Magazine Director, Freud Communications Director, Media Land LLC in Baku/Advertising

Co-ordination in Baku

Deputy Managing Director President, Condé Nast International

Francesca Peak Simon de Pury Maryam Eisler Jarrett Gregory Dylan Jones Emin Mammadov Hervé Mikaeloff Harriet Quick Kenny Schachter Nick Hall Arijana Zeric Julie Alpine Emma Storey

Tamilla Akhmedova Hannah Pawlby Khayyam Abdinov +994 50 286 8661; info@medialand.az Matanet Bagieva

Albert Read Nicholas Coleridge

BAKU magazine has taken all reasonable eforts to trace the copyright owners of all works and images and obtain permissions for the works and images reproduced in this magazine. In the event that any of the untraceable copyright owners come forward after publication, BAKU magazine will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly. BAKU magazine is distributed globally by COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex, UB7 7QX; tel +44 1895 433800. © 2016 The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU, United Kingdom; tel +44 20 7499 9080; fax +44 20 7493 1469. Colour origination by CLX Europe Media Solutions Ltd. Printed by Pureprint Group. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

30 Baku.

Contributors

IONA WHITTAKER

MARCELO KRASILCIC

ANNA WALLACE-THOMPSON

JAMIE MILLAR

LAUREN ROLWING

WILLIAM ANDREWS

is a fashion and ftness writer. He lives in London. What is your greatest fear? Ill health, closely followed by werewolves. I know it’s spring when… I wake up and it’s not the middle of the night. Sunrise or sunset? Sunrise – I’m defnitely a morning person. What was the most surprising fact you learned about Asif Kapadia (p114)? That there’s so much more to his flmography than Amy and Senna. He does Pilates to help him play football and to counteract the hours spent cooped up in editing suites.

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is a Brazilian-American photographer. He lives in New York. What is your greatest fear? I believe expressing your greatest fear makes it real, so I keep the very few fears I have to myself. I know it’s spring when… our white mulberries are getting plump. Sunrise or sunset? A romantic sunset, dinner, then a splash in the ocean watching the sunrise. Did you enjoy shooting in Baku (p76)? If Paris, Moscow and Dubai had a child, it would look like Baku. It was inspiring to see all the different elements blend so well.

is a freelance fashion illustrator and graphic designer. What is your greatest fear? My greatest fear is snakes! I know it’s spring when… I start sneezing a lot. Sunrise or sunset? I am not a morning person at all, so sunset would defnitely be my pick. What was the most challenging part of illustrating our Baku Eye section (p137)? The trickiest part was coming up with a way to incorporate an eye within my illustrations of Beirut’s architecture.

is a Finnish-Australian arts writer who has recently joined Baku as acting associate editor. What is your greatest fear? The cold clammy grip of an impending deadline that I have been putting off which then keeps me up at night. I know it’s spring when… I can put the thermals away. Sunrise or sunset? Sunset all the way. As long as I’m on a beach. With palm trees. And preferably a large cocktail. The kind with an umbrella in it and a cornucopia of fruit that would make Carmen Miranda proud, natch. Will you be celebrating Novruz (p102)? I will literally do anything for plov, so yes.

is a freelance writer, editor and translator who lives in Tokyo. What is your greatest fear? That the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will be a disaster. Things have not been going well at all. I know it’s spring when… the cherry blossoms – sakura – are in full bloom. Sunrise or sunset? Sunset, of course! Where is your favourite spot in Tokyo (p70)? Sangenjaya, a laid-back district that’s only a short hop from central Shibuya but has its own independent vibe. It seems safe from the demons of urban redevelopment, which is a precious thing in ever-changing Tokyo.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANÇOIS BERGER.

is an art writer and editor. Originally from London, she lives and works in New York. What is your greatest fear? My greatest fear is oversleeping and then missing everything! I know it’s spring when… it’s my birthday, which falls on the vernal, or spring, equinox. Sunrise or sunset? Sunrise. Looking forward, what is the most exciting change for the art scene in Beijing (p70)? It’s 2016, which is the Chinese year of the monkey, which always signifes competition and challenge.

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WHERE IT’S AT THIS SEASON

POT LUCK

UNTIL 1 MAY GRAYSON PERRY: MY PRETTY LITTLE ART CAREER

Where Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney What This exhibition examines Perry’s ceramic work, such as his 2011 Rosetta Vase (pictured), through which he refects on society from his characteristically cheeky perspective. His works’ subjects range from warfare and the royal family to sexuality and the Bible, all conveyed with sly humour and extravagent wit. mca.com.au 35 Baku.

29 APRIL–4 MAY HUE FESTIVAL

Where Hue, Vietnam What Events by local artists celebrate the rich history and culture of Vietnam, with highlights including music concerts, recreations of the traditional Hue Royal Games (pictured below) and truly spectacular light shows. huefestival.com

UNTIL 5 MAY FIRE UNDER SNOW

UNTIL 15 JUNE RICHARD DEACON: ON THE OTHER SIDE

Where Louisiana, Humlebæk, Denmark What The museum shows off its impressive permanent collection with an exhibition of recently acquired works by contemporary artists, including Candice Breitz (whose 2006 video installation Working Class Hero is pictured above) and Ed Atkins. en.louisiana.dk

UNTIL 5 JUNE TILL IT’S GONE

Where Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul What This group exhibition’s focus is on sustainability and nature, and includes Jasmin Blasco’s 2015 The First Human Born in Space project (pictured above). The result is a multi-generational vision of the future of our planet, conveyed through sculptures, installations and images. istanbulmodern.org

16 MARCH–13 JUNE THE WORLD OF MIYAKE ISSEY

Where The National Art Centre, Tokyo What From his training at Tokyo’s Tama Art University in 1960 to his position today as one of the most recognizable designers in the world, this exhibition charts the career of Issey Miyake over the past 45 years (including his 1994 design Flying Saucer, pictured below). Part of the show concentrates on Miyake’s innovative ongoing research into clothes that combine comfort and style. nact.jp

UNTIL 15 MAY MARCEL BROODTHAERS

Where MoMA, New York What The infuence of this singular artist’s work has gone unappreciated by many, but this frst major retrospective should change that. Through his use of traditional sculpture materials and more unconventional choices – such as eggshells and mussels – the lasting impact of Broodthaers’s work (pictured above) is highlighted with references to today’s art scene. moma.org

UNTIL 23 APRIL REZA DERAKSHANI

Where Sophia Contemporary, London What The celebrated Iranian artist provides the opening exhibition for this new gallery in London’s Mayfair. Derakshani’s use of colour (as seen in his 2015 work Hunting Pink, pictured above) refects the fusion of Eastern and Western art, as he explores themes of migration, modernity and nostalgia in his varied output. sophiacontemporary.com

UNTIL 29 MARCH FAIG AHMED UNTIL 8 MAY MARRAKECH BIENNALE

Where Marrakech, Morocco What This year’s edition, ‘Not New Now’, showcases the artistic traditions of Marrakech, and their evolution in the modern world. Tours of the city’s historical wonders accompany the art (which includes Khaled Malas’s 2015 work Windmill, pictured left). marrakechbiennale.org 36 Baku.

Where MACRO, Rome, Italy What The Azerbaijani artist is known for distorted traditional carpets, in which he disassembles familiar cultural signifers. Here, in his show ‘Points of Perception’ (including the carpet, above) he creates a site-specifc installation using the museum’s architecture to connect tradition and modernity. In doing so, he touches on the Suf notion of connecting mind and body as his multi-media practice reinterprets and rearranges reality. museomacro.org

PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY THE ARTIST, VICTORIA MIRO, LONDON AND THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON © GRAYSON PERRY. THIS SPREAD: COURTESY REZA DERAKSHANI AND SOPHIA CONTEMPORARY GALLERY. YASEEN AL-BUSHY. MEGAPRESS/ALAMY. KOJI UDO. © 2015 ESTATE OF MARCEL BROODTHAERS/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/SABAM, BRUSSELS. GIOVANNI DE ANGELIS/COURTESY MONTORO12 CONTEMPORARY ART, ROME.

Where Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku What The Turner Prize-winning British sculptor has brought a selection of both monumental and small-scale work from the past decade to Baku. His form-defying pieces (such as Congregate from 2011, above) demonstrate Deacon’s inventive use of materials such as wood, metal and ceramics, bringing a particular logic and beauty to his work. heydaraliyevcenter.az

Atelier Swarovski has collaborated with furniture designers Fredrikson Stallard on the 11-piece Armory collection, which will appeal to both jewellery lovers and those with a penchant for avant-garde design. The sharp metallic lines create cages and webs that each house a carefully chosen, eye-catching crystal. swarovski.com

Culture vultures will soon be swooping down on the fourstar Joan Miró Museum Hotel in Palma de Mallorca, where original works by the Catalan artist are on display. The luxury hotel is also conveniently close to the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation, so afcionados can get their fll in one trip. hoteljoanmiro.com

Knit Wit British knitwear brand Unmade has collaborated with London-based designers Studio Moross and fashion designer Christopher Raeburn on a customizable range of sweatshirts and scarves. The position, orientation and colour of the design can be changed to your liking online before being printed onto a merino wool jumper. unmade.com

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Metallic Wonder

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Accommodating Surrealism

PHOTOSHOT.

Spanish Designs The work of architect and sculptor Santiago Calatrava inspired Amanda Wakeley’s spring/summer 2016 collection, which features pretty pastels and graphic prints, as well as chains and ribbons layered over sheer tulle. amandawakeley.com

Wild at Heart Illustrations by Leyla Aliyeva have been transformed into pieces of wearable art, including this striking tiger scarf. The silk scarves and iPhone covers feature black-and-white illustrations with a pop of colour, and have just gone on sale in Baku Cafe. bakucorner.az 39 Baku.

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Park Life

Art doesn’t have to be in a plain white room, as these sculpture parks prove. Artwork by GAIL ARMSTRONG

1 Olympic Sculpture Park, 4 Yorkshire Sculpture Seattle, Washington, USA Park, Wakefeld, UK The park follows a linear Z-shaped The YSP in northern path through downtown Seattle, England has works by Ai and has some outstanding works by Weiwei and Anthony Caro, and artists such as Louise Bourgeois, has one of the largest open-air Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra. displays of Henry Moore’s work seattleartmuseum.org in Europe. ysp.co.uk 2 Storm King Art Centre, Mountainville, New York, USA If it’s big-name artists you’re after, head for these rolling 200-hectare gardens in the Hudson Valley, where works by Barbara Hepworth and Alexander Calder sit among the collection. stormking.org

5 Vigeland Museum and Park, Oslo, Norway Built jointly by the city of Oslo and sculptor Gustav Vigeland (d. 1943), this unusual museum and park houses his oeuvre and runs a full exhibition programme. vigeland.museum.no

3 Pablo Atchugarry Foundation, El Chorro, Uruguay First displayed in 1974, the sculptures of Pablo Atchugarry were given a permanent home in 2007, along with a selection of work from international artists. fundacionpabloatchugarry.org

6 Park Güell, Barcelona, Spain High above the city stand mosaiccovered buildings and walls as envisioned by Antoni Gaudí at the turn of the 20th century. Prepare to be mesmerized by his use of colour and fantasy, epitomized by his famous lizard. parkguell.es

40 Baku.

7 Memento Park, Budapest, Hungary This park contains epic Cold War statues from post-Soviet Budapest. It even has a Trabant car. Surreal, but a reminder of art’s potential for propaganda. mementopark.hu 3

8 The Boulevard, Baku, Azerbaijan At 16km long, Baku’s extensively planted waterfront promenade is home to a host of whimsical statues, mostly unsigned, including one of a character from the popular Azerbaijani flm Bizim Cebish Muellim. azerbaijan.com 9 Billy Rose Art Garden, Jerusalem, Israel The Zen design by JapaneseAmerican sculptor Isamu Noguchi makes this a tranquil corner of the Israel Museum in which to gaze upon the works of Rodin, Picasso and others. imjnet.org.il

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COMPILED BY FRANCESCA PEAK.

10 Nirox Sculpture Park, Johannesburg, South Africa This foundation, in the pristine, 1,200-hectare Khatlhampi Private Reserve, runs artists’ residencies, after which the resulting work becomes part of the permanent collection. niroxarts.com

13 Hakone Open-Air Museum, Odawara, Japan The striking buildings that house the indoor exhibits are works of art themselves, never mind the sculptures by Takao Tsuchida, Jean Dubuffet and Marta Pan. hakone-oam.or.jp

11 Rock Garden of Chandigarh, 14 Macquarie University Chandigarh, India Sculpture Park, Sydney, Started by the late Nek Chand in Australia 1957, with sculptures made from Founded in 1992 to make use waste materials such as ceramic, of the college’s open space, a this garden has grown to cover 16 lush range of fora accompanies hectares and see visitor numbers work by emerging Australian and in the thousands. nekchand.com international artists. mq.edu.au 12 Changchun World Sculpture Park, Changchun City, China This park is well worth the trek from Beijing. With works from Canada, Vietnam, Guyana and Uruguay, it truly brings the international art scene to this pocket of China. jl.gov.cn

15 Connells Bay Sculpture Park, Waiheke Island, New Zealand A secluded park accessed via guided tour that champions native talent – not only was it designed by New Zealand artists but it features works exclusively by them, too. connellsbay.co.nz 41 Baku.

Portrait by Paul Hermes

icholas Mangan grew up in the post-industrial seaside town of Geelong, Australia. As a child he was “obsessed” with taking objects apart and reconstructing them in new ways: “Although my concerns were purely intuitive, I came to understand that reconfguration and assemblage could be facilitated through the language of art.” This impetus still underlies his work. Mangan’s rising success is also due to his engagement with the question of how humans relate to the natural world.“Every action has ramifcations,” he says. “I’m interested in the ideologies that drive such actions.” In his breathtaking video A World Undone (2012), the artist took a sample of zircon, a mineral more than four billion years old found in Western Australia, crushed it, and flmed the fne dust. The high resolution camera he used captured the most minute details of the zircon, confusing our sense of scale so it looked like planets and galaxies. Beyond just tricking the eye, the play here is complex, as a remnant of the earliest part of our world is returned to a state of immateriality. For his next project, Mangan is going to the island of Yap in Micronesia, which is famous for its stone currency, the rai. Because of its unwieldy nature, physical payment has been replaced with an honour system, “a kind of virtual exchange”, as Mangan describes it. “I plan to activate a series of transactions between the rai and Bitcoin to draw on the social as well as material dimension.” It’s his sensitivity to such recondite social relations that promises so much for his future work.

( on the RAdAR

Australian artist Nicholas Mangan transforms the world around him by taking it apart, says Jarrett Gregory.

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Rip It Up and Start Again

Nicholas Mangan in his studio in Melbourne, Australia. Below, from top: still from A World Undone (2012) and a detail from h (2013).

Jarrett Gregory is an associate curator at LACMA in Los Angeles. 43 Baku.

ILYA S. SAVENOK/GETTY.

Sketches

ashion designers are extremely adept at blurring the boundaries between what’s authentic, pastiche or innovative, and this season the quixotic gaze falls on Latino and Spanish culture. Open-shoulder gypsy tops, tiered dresses, matador trousers and hotblooded red, black and white appeared on catwalks to drum and guitar soundtracks, heartwrenching ballads and remixed tango tunes. The normally poker-faced audience would often fnd itself swooning and swaying in delight. An enigmatic beauty emerged from this anthropological surfng, a kind of woman far removed from the androgynous pin-up of last year. “We wanted to move away from anything over-laboured, to let the clothes fall off the body,” says Lazaro Hernandez, who is one half of the duo Proenza Schouler, and whose roots are Cuban. “We wanted the collection to have a soulfulness,” adds the brand’s other founder, Jack McCollough, of their emotive show. They combined artisan techniques with superlative fabrics on silhouettes that turn the dial on fashion. Off-the-shoulder dresses in lacerated cotton came with tiny pompom trims; giant mesh was crafted into asymmetric tube styles; and high-waisted matador trousers were topped by ruffed blouses suspended on halter-neck ribbons. The two men might live between Manhattan and a Lincoln-era farm in upstate New York, far away from Latin America, but perhaps it is this distance that allows the pair to breathe new dynamism into the Latin-style look. Clichés can, of course, provide a good starting point when approached with a sense

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Pre-Rio Olympics, Latino pompoms, founces, frills – and an uncompromising colour palette – all promise to get us dancing to the rhythm of the conga beat, says Harriet Quick.

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La Vida Loca

Models at the Isa Arfen show during New York Fashion Week, September 2015.

45 Baku.

“AFTER SO MANY SEASONS OF SLIM LINES AND SOBER DESIGNS, I WANTED SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL GOOD. FASHION IS ABOUT ESCAPISM AND DESIRE, AFTER ALL.” of humour. Serafna Sama, an Italian designer based in London and the founder of the label Isa Arfen, devoted her resort line to the Latino feel. “I was thinking of this old-school notion of a cruise collection and what glamorous women would pack for the Caribbean or Cuba in the 1950s. That’s where the festa feeling came from. I wanted it to be lighthearted and fun, almost overly feminine,” says Sama of her joyous black, red and pink tiered styles in fresh cotton, trimmed with grosgrain braid. (Ribbons, pompoms and braid are a thing this spring.) “On my mood board, I had images from the 1970s and 1980s from Yves Saint Laurent and Christian 46 Baku.

Lacroix, and also photographs of my aunt and my mother dressed for summer parties and over-enthusiastically getting it a bit wrong. After so many seasons of slim lines and sober designs, I wanted something that makes you feel good, like you want to go out dancing. Fashion is about escapism and desire, after all,” says Sama. There is a clutch of talents emerging from Latin America who are proving themselves naturally gifted at this mix of festa and soul. What one might typically expect from a Brazilian designer – namely, tropicalcoloured body con – is not what one gets from Barbara Casasola, who is half-Italian/ half-Brazilian and who trained at Central Saint Martins before joining Roberto Cavalli. Her design language speaks of gentility and a quiet luxury that appeals to women in the know. “My principal infuence is the universal visual language of my native homeland of

Brazil – pared back and sensual,” says 31-year-old Casasola, who was raised in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, which has a rich cultural mix of Italians and Germans. “My clothes are minimal in design and I like them like that. But the woman who wears them is often complex and I think she likes to express herself in many different ways, not just in the way she wears clothes.” Casasola showed her collection at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where beauties emerged through a hanging trellis of macramé wearing micro-pleated ft-and -fare dresses with side cut-outs, matt and sheer striped knitted circular skirts and cropped tops (revealing those

“I WAS THINKING OF WHAT GLAMOROUS WOMEN WOULD PACK FOR CUBA IN THE 1950S. THAT’S WHERE THE FIESTA FEELING CAME FROM.”

JAIME SALDARRIAGA/ENRIQUE CASTRO-MENDIVIL/REUTERS/CORBIS. VICTOR VIRGILE/GAMMA-RAPHO/EDWARD JAMES/ WIREIMAGE/EAMONN M. MCCORMACK/ILYA S. SAVENOK/DAVID M. BENETT/JP YIM/GETTY. STEFAN ZANDER.

4. bare shoulders again). “I like the idea of wearing a special dress in which to celebrate life with the people you love,” says Casasola. “The off-shoulder dresses were inspired by Brazilian indigenous body paint. They decorate their bodies to celebrate life and to step into mystical powers. How beautiful to wear a dress and feel like that.” Her supple pleated silk pieces (it takes three metres of fabric, handmade in Italy, to make one metre of plissé) are the ideal ‘roll in the bag’ travel pieces. Fellow expat, Brazilian jewellery designer Fernando Jorge, who plies his craft between São Paulo and east London, has a similar passion for fuid, organic forms. His pieces wrap and slither around the body erotically rather than shout ‘show-off’. “I have so much material I am inspired by – there is always an element of jewellery technique from some era but there is also shape, movement and the stones themselves that

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bring my work together,” says Jorge. His highly crafted pieces might see hand-carved Brazilian stones set into his sinuous ‘Stream’ rings and cuffs; or earrings set with a multitude of fne diamonds or emeralds in contrasting cuts that dazzle like a cosmic burst. His own epiphany happened as a young boy when his grandparents presented him with a small box of Brazilian gemstones. “I don’t wear jewellery myself but I love its tactility,” says Jorge, who trained at a fne jewellery atelier in Brazil before studying for an MA at Central Saint Martins. Johanna Ortiz, from Colombia, has a neat way with celebratory designs, too. She trained at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida before returning to her homeland to launch a line of swimwear followed by readyto-wear. Her watchwords are ‘feminine’ and ‘festive’ but her speciality is combining frivolity with the restrained – for example, a ruffed peplum top in silk denim will be matched with tailored trousers and fanciful white lace cut into a streamlined kaftan gown. Optimistic colours – cerulean blue, persimmon orange, canary yellow, scarlet and watermelon – and tropical fower prints give her designs an exoticism. The power brands also have their sights set on Latin America. The Olympic Games that kick off in Rio this August, combined with this new taste in fashion for all things Latino, have neatly converged to create a cultural magnet. In May, Chanel will be taking its travelling cruise collection to Havana, inviting dignitaries and ambassadors to indulge in the crumbling romance, hypnotic beats and cinematic delights of Cuba’s port capital. Meanwhile, Nicholas Ghesquière, creative director of Louis Vuitton, will be transplanting the team and guests to Rio to debut the pre-summer collection with plenty of sweet and sour cachaça cocktails to fuel the party mood. There’s a parallel surge of interest in the art world. Oscar Murillo’s large-scale tactile works, created from seemingly chaotic dense layers of type, line, paint and dust, are gaining collectors worldwide. Seek out the work of Brazilian Christian Rosa, a White Cube artist, who works between LA and Vienna. His minimalist abstract canvases ripple with kinetic energy and spontaneous expression. Whether it’s a twisting and founcing dress hemline, the undulating lines of a gold cuff or an oil-stick swoop on a canvas – the new spirit in fashion and art is moving forward to a mesmerizing and irresistible beat.

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1 & 3. Models at the Cali Exposhow, October 2015, in Colombia, show off creations by (2) Johanna Ortiz. 4 & 8. Designs by (12) Barbara Casasola at London Fashion Week s/s 2016. 5. An emerald ‘Stream’ ring by (10) Fernando Jorge. 6, 7 & 13. Proenza Schouler’s designs for s/s 2016 at New York Fashion Week, and the label’s designers (14) Jack McCollough (left) and Lazaro Hernandez. 9. Isa Arfen’s spring show at New York Fashion Week, September 2015, and (11) the house’s resort collection.

47 Baku.

Illustrations by CHARLOTTE DAY

t’s been a busy time over the past few months but David Macdonald doesn’t feel the need to switch off from work. “Maybe it’s some ghastly character faw, but when people talk about a work-life balance, I don’t understand what they mean,” says the Oxford University professor of wildlife conservation. It doesn’t hurt that, in a feld that often leads to a life of isolation and unsociable hours, he works with his family. “My son is now a colleague. My partner works in the offce next door. To be with the people I love doesn’t require me to stop being at work.” He thinks for a moment. “Maybe that’s part of why I don’t feel I’ve ever actually had a proper job.” Maybe it’s also because “being at work” means spending his day in Tubney House, a magnifcent listed building set in 18 hectares of idyllic Oxfordshire countryside. Miles Blackwell, of Oxford publishing royalty, gifted the house to Macdonald’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU). A gift from a billionaire philanthropist provided the cash required to restore the crumbling architecture. On refection, it’s hardly surprising that work-life balance is not an issue.

Looking around Tubney House, it’s clear that the money hasn’t gone on fripperies such as interior decoration. Macdonald’s offce is unremarkable: there’s a vast bookcase stuffed with highly specialized texts, its bottom shelf displaying his students’ PhD theses. There’s

( Sketches

When Cecil the lion was killed by a hunter last year, conservationist David Macdonald remained philosophical. After all, a galvanized public can really effect change, as he tells Michael Brooks.

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Friend of the Earth

Left: Professor David Macdonald CBE, director of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU).

a tired-looking carpet topped with a tired-looking rug. The offce refects the unfussy tastes of its occupant; Macdonald follows the conservationist stereotype – he is bearded and booted, with faded jeans, a khaki safari shirt and large glasses. All the polish is beneath the surface, it seems. Macdonald’s work has earned him CBE status. In 2012, WildCRU received the coveted Queen’s Anniversary Prize “in acknowledgement of its outstanding work in 49 Baku.

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Kimmel, asking for donations after Palmer’s “vomitous” act, crashed frst WildCRU’s web servers, then Oxford University’s. Around 4.5 million people visited the site on one night, then, when the servers recovered, they were getting 50,000 hits an hour for the next few weeks. “Never in Oxford University’s thousand years of history have they had an engagement with the global public like this one,” Macdonald says. Upset as he is about Cecil’s fate, Macdonald sees this moment as a turning point – and not just because of the million dollars’ worth of recent donations. The point is, he says, the money came from “individual people feeling upset”, and they were upset about more than just a lion. “It seemed they were saying they care about wildlife in general, and how 21st-century people are going to live alongside nature. It was a momentous expression of how the human enterprise wants to go forward.”

that, he pursued a PhD in conservation. Only then did he see the faw in his plan: even at the end of the 1970s there was no university job to be had in wildlife conservation. He spent the next seven years begging from charities and businesses. Eventually he handed Oxford University enough money to endow what he believes was the world’s frst research post in wildlife conservation. Somewhat humiliatingly, he then had to apply for the job. “Fortunately, I got it,” he says. “I’d have been bloody annoyed if I hadn’t.” Things have continued in much the same vein ever since: money has always been tight. “We have no core income – if I don’t bring in donations, we don’t eat,” Macdonald says. That said, things are now looking up, thanks to Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Palmer is the man who shot Cecil, one of the Zimbabwean lions Macdonald and his colleagues had

“NEVER IN OXFORD UNIVERSITY’S THOUSAND YEARS HAVE THEY HAD AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE GLOBAL PUBLIC LIKE THIS ONE.” a boy marked down as a lowachiever in his early days. Macdonald spent much of his youth coming bottom of the class in school. Change came when his father, a Glasgow GP who was also a Scottish international golfer, sourced some plaster of Paris from his surgery. Young David would tag along on his father’s golfng trips, enjoying the freedom of the links. “I was a wee boy who really loved nature in any form at all,” he says. The plaster of Paris enabled him to turn that love into something he could touch: he made casts of the animal footprints that he would fnd on the course, and when he took the casts into school, he won a prize that took his love of nature to a new level. It was enough to give him ambitions beyond continuing the family medical practice. “I had found something that was mine,” he says. And so, at the end of the 1960s, Macdonald went to Oxford to study zoology. After 50 Baku.

In the field: David Macdonald (1) with a cheetah in Namibia and (2) tracking lions in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. His study subjects include (3) the Ethiopian wolf and (4) Cecil the lion, who was killed by (5) Walter Palmer. 6. Macdonald at Tubney House, Oxfordshire.

been studying – alongside other species, such as the rare Ethiopian wolf – for the past 20 years. It was, Macdonald says, a “scurrilous and illegal” act, but it has had some positive consequences, largely to do with the world’s outrage over the killing. While Macdonald talks about Palmer in a calm, matterof-fact tone, others have responded with less reserve. Palmer has received death threats and had to stay away from work for six weeks. In fact, that tearful pleading by

Macdonald is not impressed by the current conservation ecosystem and wants to leverage the ‘Cecil moment’ to change it. “The world is vastly overpopulated with aspirant conservation biologists, there are enormous numbers of NGOs and research units, but there is still a crisis nonetheless; extinctions are happening at a geologically impressive rate,” he says. To do better means going far beyond biology. WildCRU has just hired a social scientist from the London School of Economics and is about to look for someone with expertise in geopolitics. “These people will sit in meetings alongside people who know how to follow the underground movements of a badger,” Macdonald says. The future of conservation is “inescapably, exhilaratingly interdisciplinary”. It’s also inescapably international. He has met with the likes of Azerbaijan’s IDEA Public Union to discuss conservation, and has also set up the WildCRU Panthers programme. With funding from US minerals magnate Thomas Kaplan, WildCRU has trained young people from over 30 nations to establish conservation programmes. “It’s a completely transformative experience; we’ve never had one that wasn’t a success,” he says. This is the source of his copious fan mail; graduates write gushing letters of thanks from all corners of the Earth, detailing successful programmes in the Bolivian Andes, Tanzania, China and elsewhere. “This extraordinary diaspora is our sparkling jewel,” he says. “Why would I want to switch off from this?”

PREVIOUS PAGE: GARETH PHILLIPS. THIS PAGE: GARETH PHILLIPS. PAULA FRENCH/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK.

wildlife and environmental conservation”. At the end of last year, US chat show host Jimmy Kimmel exhorted millions of American viewers to donate everything they could to further Macdonald’s research. He has an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), and a couple of decades ago made a documentary that BBC viewers voted the best wildlife flm of all time. Every year, Macdonald receives letters from young conservationists all over the world. With some embarrassment he admits that the letters are “heartbreakingly wonderful”: his correspondents tell him he has completely changed their lives. Not bad for

Sketches

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Design for Living

blank slate is the dream of every designer, regardless of their feld. Robert Angell, one of London’s most respected interior designers, certainly knows all about starting from scratch. Renowned for creating luxurious and elegant hotels, bars, restaurants and residences around the globe, as well as for winning a clutch of industry awards, he brings a coherent and sympathetic eye to modern luxury, never overdressing a space and always seeking to explore new forms, the latest materials and the best methods of craft and fabrication. Most recently, he has been tasked with creating a coherent design amid the foundations of an allnew urban district, harnessing his many years of experience to bring contemporary luxury to an emerging city: Baku. Angell began his career in collaboration with the late David Collins, one of the instigators of the modern interior design industry. In many respects his portfolio has continued Collins’s legacy while also bringing his own distinct vision to hotel projects such as the Savoy, Berkeley and Connaught hotels in London, and projects

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With a portfolio that includes London’s Savoy, Berkeley and Connaught hotels, interiors wizard Robert Angell is now conjuring up a new luxury look for Baku, says Jonathan Bell.

DAMIAN RUSSELL. SIMON JOHN OWEN.

1. Robert Angell. 2. The Library Suite at the Connaught hotel in London. 3. (inset) Perforated pendant lights reference the Wiener Werkstätte in Brasserie Emile at the Hilton Vienna Plaza.

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for Hilton Worldwide, as well as restaurants and private residences around the globe. The elegant luxury of top London hotels seems a long way from the Dorset farm where Angell grew up. “From an early age I experienced beautiful brick and fint buildings with ancient timber trusses alongside these new steel frame and timber modern buildings,” he recalls. “It engaged my senses for both the traditional and contemporary.” A love of creating objects was parlayed into interior design, which he studied in Nottingham. “Creating an interior that brings an emotion to a setting is an amazing feeling and designing beautiful furniture and fnishes is very rewarding,” he explains. After a chance meeting through a mutual friend, Angell was invited to join David Collins’s studio – “the very next day”. And so followed 15 years at the pinnacle of the industry. “I was in my element and working with David was a great period of my life that I will always remember,” Angell says. “His passing was a tragic loss to the industry.” Angell’s reach has now extended to Azerbaijan, where his designs include the new Boulevard Hotel in Baku. “I was put forward to work there by a company who knew I’d worked with Collins,” the designer says from his Thames-side offces in east London. “I jumped at the chance to design a hotel. Baku is one of those cities that’s on the cusp of being amazing,” he continues. “The First Lady has an incredible vision of how to transform it into a European cultural city. They have a fresh beginning, with a lot of the old industrial wasteland making way for the new city. It’s a blank canvas and Baku is connecting with architects and masterplanners around the world.” At the heart of this is the White City development Angell has been involved in, its name refecting the regeneration of Black City, the Caspian-side former centre of Baku’s oil industry. For Angell, these have been challenging but rewarding briefs. “Azerbaijan has a great culture, steeped in art and heritage, but White City needs an authenticity,” he explains. “You can’t just design new interiors that become dated within fve years… people need soul and heritage. Our approach is to create restaurants and interiors that look like they’ve been there for 50 years.” 54 Baku.

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1. Angell and his team shape timeless design from the very best materials, drawing inspiration from the surrounding city and landscape, as well as the very best of modern luxury. “You take the setting, the location, the authenticity of the city. You research and bring in those elements that will bring it all together – there’s a provenance to everything,” the designer explains. “People tell stories and connect on social media. If they know something about a building or location or interior, then they want to share that experience.”

“YOU CAN’T DESIGN NEW INTERIORS THAT BECOME DATED WITHIN FIVE YEARS... PEOPLE NEED SOUL AND HERITAGE.”

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The language of international luxury has become somewhat ubiquitous in the past decade as the borderless space occupied by the world’s wealthiest people keeps expanding into new territories. Angell is well aware that he has to not only satisfy expectations and bring the same levels of quality and thought seen in London, Paris and New York, but also integrate the crucial elements of local craft and culture that give a project its own identity. “Part of my philosophy is that unique design requires a unique approach,” he explains. “For the Boulevard Hotel in Baku, we referenced the landscape of the Caucasus mountains and abstracted them into decorative elements, and the Caspian Sea is such a beautiful body of water so we took colours and tones from it – it gave us the look and feel of the rooms.” In London, Angell fnds himself constantly challenged to exceed already high expectations, noting that regular visitors bring with them a vast store of knowledge about the world. Engaging them afresh is a central focus of his work. “What I try to do is persuade the client that they need to lead and set themselves apart from their rivals,” he says. “We design everything

from scratch.” Part of the problem is dealing with the visual overload of the modern era. “I think it’s really diffcult to pinpoint a particular style now,” Angell muses. “There’s an emphasis on creating individual designs and looks.” With no defning aesthetic of the age and a panoply of styles to hand, Angell prefers to emphasize timeless simplicity, traditional craftsmanship and modern materials. “Today there’s a huge resurgence in crafted products,” he says. “In a way, personalization is the ‘massifcation’ of luxury – it embodies where we are in terms of what people want, whether it’s bespoke furniture or lighting or something else. Essentially, people want to stamp their personality on an interior.” In areas like fabric design, for example, Angell and his team have been able to seek out the very best. “At the moment we’re working with Jude Cassidy, an amazing Irish weaver, and she creates these beautiful bespoke fabrics with metallic threads for upholstery and blinds. We try and do this intensive development for all our materials.” He draws on a range of exclusive suppliers, from Nepalese carpet makers through to the American company Kinon,

GERRIT MEIER. DAMIAN RUSSELL.

which produces handmade resin panels with unique fnishes. At London’s Berkeley hotel’s new-look Caramel Room, the wall coverings are 21st-century chinoiserie, made exclusively by traditional Chinese craftsmen. “That’s the exciting thing,” says Angell. “You can pick the best from around the world.” Ultimately, Angell defnes the modern era as being “poststyle”, allowing a much-needed focus on function, elegance and simplicity. “Function is something that runs parallel to technological advancement and design,” he explains. “Merging those things together seamlessly is how one creates something really luxurious. For example, we put charging pads for phones into a nightstand, concealed beneath a thin layer of veneer, so all you have to do is put your phone beside the bed at night.” Elsewhere, however, he believes the relentless drive for innovation often clouds the

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1. A rendering of a Robert Angell Baku spa design concept. 2 & 3. Views of the Caramel Room in The Berkeley, London, its wall coverings made by Chinese craftsmen, and (10) an example of its seating. Angell’s designs for the Hotel Vienna Plaza, including (4) the Art Deco-style lobby, (5) a banquette for a bar, and (8) one of the light fittings in the Brasserie Emile. 6. The Library Suite at London’s Connaught Hotel with (9) a sculpture. 7. The 1920s-inspired bar in Kaspar’s at The Savoy, London. 11. The Boulevard Hotel, Baku.

view. “Modern lighting systems are a classic example of how technology is almost forced on you – when you try to work it you almost need a degree in lighting to fgure it out. Complexity has gone too far.” Ultimately, timeless design requires great insight into the mind of the client. “With interiors, the one thing I gleaned from David was that you’re not there to follow people and trends, but to create beautiful interiors that stretch the imagination. Don’t take the easy option,” says Angell. “All our projects are dream projects. It’s just designing something that the end user really appreciates – creating a space that they talk about and which inspires them. Design has to be innovative. True luxury is noticing things gradually. And when you come back, you notice something different. It doesn’t show. You could always say it’s been done before, but you can do it better and exceed expectations. I want people to feel that they’ve arrived.” In Baku, visitors to Angell’s projects will certainly experience their destination through fresh eyes.

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onducting an interview on FaceTime across the internet could potentially be fraught with technical diffculties, but, with Menzer Hajiyeva on the other end of the line talking to me from Baku, it is something of a delight. The designer, who launched her eponymous scarf brand in 2012, is charm personifed – engaging, entertaining and all smiles. But perhaps such a cool head is to be expected. Overseeing a fourishing business that boasts four members of staff and a profle that sees her on the covers of local magazines, Hajiyeva – a striking woman with a fowing mane, ready smile and eyebrows that Cara Delevingne would be jealous of – is, it becomes clear, the kind to take everything in her stride. In three years, Hajiyeva’s label has gone from pipe dream to one of Baku’s most watched brands. She says the idea for the label came from decorating scarves for friends. “It started with me in my bedroom with a suitcase of scarves,” she explains. “The frst year was really trial and error.” It also coincided with her return to Azerbaijan (where Hajiyeva grew up, along with periods in Istanbul and Moscow) after studying and working in Paris and New York for fve years. “There was a fresh fashion scene in Azerbaijan with lots of local brands,” she says. “I thought if I was going to do it, I should do it now.” She was quite right – things have changed at breakneck speed in Baku. “A lot of that has to do with social media,” she says, “people looking at things online and seeing examples of designers

Sketches

Photography by NATAVAN VAHABOVA

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Menzer Hajiyeva is going places with her scarf designs that make the traditional new, as Lauren Cochrane fnds out.

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Silk Road

Menzer Hajiyeva in her studio in Baku.

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Some of Menzer Hajiyeva’s scarves and (below) a child’s dress designed by her.

who have made it, and thinking they could do that as well.” Hajiyeva is one such example. She currently has nearly 9,000 followers on Instagram, her feed showcasing her own designs, plus out-and-about shots of a life that involves fashion parties and couture shows. The experience she gained while working for brands such as Zac Posen, Lanvin, Narciso Rodriguez and Michael Kors during her time abroad was invaluable, says Hajiyeva, and arguably gave her the edge. “Zac Posen was probably the one where I learnt the most because it was very competitive, which means you fnd your strength, what sets you apart,” she muses. Surface detail, as she puts it, was Hajiyeva’s USP: “I did all the dyeing and surface design projects. At Lanvin, I worked on the beading rather than the cutting of garments.” When setting up on her own, scarves, for which print, embellishment and colour are key, made perfect sense. They were a savvy choice, too, for the Azerbaijani market which Hajiyeva was now designing for, as the scarf is a long-established component of daily dress there. Women regularly wear the kalaghai, a brightly coloured square silk scarf that is decorated using ancient wax techniques for the patterns and colours. It is so associated with Azerbaijani culture, in fact, that it became part of the Unesco Representative List of the 58 Baku.

who can have a career and, when she’s ready, a family. “Azerbaijan is very family orientated so choosing not to have children early on breaks the stereotype but it’s also good because people look up to it,” says the 29-year-old. “You can have an effect on younger people, make them less afraid to go for their dreams.” She now has a fanbase that extends from women in their twenties to their mid-sixties. “They come along to events or stop me in the street,” she says. “There is an aspiration for my scarves.” Her own dreams have been helped along by her parents, a doctor and a mathematician, who cultivated her talents early on. Initially sceptical of a creative career, they were convinced by Hajiyeva’s teenage artistic experiences and “helped me set up my frst exhibition at 13 or 14”. Her husband, a French former banker, has also been invaluable in turning a creative idea into a viable business. “Sacha created our fnancial model and consults for me on marketing and sales tactics, which I tend to drift away from,” she admits. Sacha might have to be on hand in the near future to keep Hajiyeva in check – her creativity is in full fow. After dipping her

“PERHAPS BECAUSE OF MY CHILDHOOD, I LIKE LIVING IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. I LOVE EXPLORING NEW CULTURES AND CITIES.” Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014. The kalaghai is, for Hajiyeva as an Azerbaijani woman, part of her sartorial DNA, and she brought her own aesthetic to it early on in her design career. She changed the designs just enough, while maintaining the traditional bright colours and foral patterns, to make them a ftting tribute, and they swiftly became bestsellers. The signifcance of the scarf in Azerbaijani culture has played an important part in the growth of her business. “Ninety per cent of our sales are gifts, either for a special anniversary or an engagement, when it is traditional to give a scarf to the bride-to-be,” she explains. Certain scarves are particularly popular for these occasions, such as the pomegranate design, and anything green or blue. “Black is seen as mourning here, so it’s a no-no as a gift,” she says. “For me it’s a colour associated with elegance, so I had to learn about that.” Hajiyeva is passionate about her heritage. “Azerbaijan was on Marco Polo’s route and silk from here was exchanged for Murano glass from Italy,” she explains enthusiastically. “It felt natural to tell that story. Silk is fragile yet strong.” Her mood board includes references as diverse as the 2015 Ai Weiwei exhibition in London, street fashion, and images of Azerbaijani culture, from the mud volcanoes that dot the country to its time as part of the Soviet Union. Hajiyeva is never one to think small – she has the world in her sights. “My story is in my brand,” she says. “I am traditional and modern, local but global, too.” Happily, scarves are enjoying a moment in the wider fashion world, with Chanel and Gucci both including scarves in their collections, and Liberty, the department store in London, opening a dedicated scarf room. “The scarf is part of the wardrobe of accessories,” says Hajiyeva. “They’re everywhere now – people tie them on to bags, or they might wear one with a simple T-shirt and jeans.” As someone who sits between tradition and modernity, Hajiyeva represents a still new idea in Baku – a woman

toe into ready-to-wear through a project with an artist friend, Narmina Valiyeva, the designer now wants to do it all. “We are introducing a men’s collection, scented candles and pillows,” she says. “I would love to do clothes in 10 years’ time.” And with a global presence for her brand – and herself – in mind, Hajiyeva remains nothing if not international. “Perhaps because of my childhood, I like living in different countries. I see myself moving again in the future. I love exploring new cultures and cities,” she says. “I am currently based in Baku but hope one day to have a second base for the business in a more metropolitan city.” With her track record over the past three years, there’s little doubt that this will happen.

Spring Issue

IGOR BYSHNEV. LAUREN ROLWING.

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The colour of my room See the noble child The footsteps of Marquez Twenty-four circles Darling, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the Croisette! In the shadow of giants

s a clutch of nineties memes sweeps through fashion – slip dresses, tracksuits, camisoles and hoodies – Chloé, the Parisian fashion house that has always played with insouciance and sophistication, fnds itself at the top of wish lists again. When referencing eras, it makes a poignant difference if the designer came of age during that time and such is the case with the brand’s creative director, Clare Waight Keller. “I pointedly went for the London girls as my reference for the spring/summer 2016 show as well as the culture of the early nineties with its sense of freedom,” Waight Keller tells me as we sit in her all-white offce at Chloé’s HQ in Paris’s elegant eighth arrondissement. “Those girls inspired and drove fashion in so many ways and they were great characters themselves. It was the period when Kate Moss was evolving into a fashion icon, Stella Tennant emerged as the aristo tomboy and Cecilia Chancellor as a poetic beauty – I loved those strong personalities and their carefree work hard/party hard attitude. Rave culture was a big part of that time.” 62 Baku.

Camisole tops, tassels, gypsy blouses, studs and slouchy pants – Clare Waight Keller, creative director of French fashion house Chloé, brings the London look to Paris – via the nineties. Words by HARRIET QUICK Illustrations by CHRISTINA K.

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Like her infuential peer group, Stella McCartney, Julie de Libran at Sonia Rykiel and Phoebe Philo at Céline, Waight Keller is now in her mid-forties. Raised in Birmingham, she is also a mother of three, and her impressive career spans Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Pringle. On completing her masters degree in fashion knitwear at the Royal College of Art, she moved to New York at the start of the 1990s to work for Calvin Klein. At the time, New York was witnessing an infux of Brits, including hairdresser Guido Palau, photographers David Sims and Corinne Day, stylists Melanie Ward and Anna Cockburn, as well as London models such as Emma Balfour, Rosemary Ferguson and Kate Moss. These collective authors of the ‘dirty realist’ trend were highly sought after by magazines, which scrambled to reclaim a sense of 64 Baku.

1–9. The Chloé s/s 2016 collection, Paris Fashion Week, October 2015.

“In t 1990s, there was a relaxed atitude and a powerful confidence. That’s how women dres now – they mix a T-sirt with a chic skirt, o denim with an amazing dres.” 5.

DOMINIQUE CHARRIAU/WIREIMAGE/PASCAL LE SEGRETAIN/VICTOR VIRGILE/GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY.

Manifesting that spirit and making it relevant today is a deceptively hard task. Yet if Chloé’s line-up of young beauties with tumbling, breezy curls and contoured cheekbones, dressed in rainbow-striped track pants and camisole tops, crinkly ice-cream-hued maxi dresses with fying tassels, and off-theshoulder silk gypsy blouses and frayed-edge denims is any indication, then Waight Keller managed to decant that sweeping nostalgia and thirst for that spirit into one of the season’s best collections.

‘cool’ as the allure of the glossy, airbrushed supermodel glamour of the late 1980s began to fade. A haphazard mix of thrift, designer and boy’s school uniform, slept-in make-up, fat Converse shoes and clogs was suddenly madly desirable. “Call it gamine or call it new bohemian. Either way, spring ’93 heralds a refreshing style that’s half feminine, half tomboy and wholly pretty,” wrote British Vogue as it introduced a league of bare-faced waifs – subjects of a fashion shoot by Corinne Day shot on location on a damp drizzly, suburban football pitch. “In the 1990s, there was a relaxed attitude and a powerful confdence. That’s how women dress now – they mix a T-shirt with a chic skirt, or denim with an amazing dress. The nineties girls were the start of this,” says Waight Keller. Dressed in a grey cashmere sweater and high-waisted white jeans with windswept tawny hair and armfuls of bangles and friendship bracelets, she 7.

walks the walk and appears authoritative yet approachable. As a creative director, that is no bad place to be. “Back then, I was wearing sandals, long skirts, skinny T-shirts or boyfriend jeans and little camisoles,” she recalls of her New York days, when she lived in the distinctly edgy neighbourhood located near midtown and the West Side Highway, the area known as Hell’s Kitchen. “Luckily, my parents never visited my apartment – they would have had a heart attack! Manhattan is so clean now – that gritty side has disappeared.” Those seminal years in New York gave Waight Keller an understanding of big business and brands. “All the people I have worked with have given me a lot of freedom. The bigger learning is about brand development and how you protect, nurture and push 65 Baku.

“The Chloé girl is our brand – fesirited, chic, cool and somewhat urban, somewhat boho.”

a brand forward,” she says. This knowledge has proven invaluable in today’s overheated and overcrowded fashion arena. In 2000 she moved back to Europe to join the Gucci team, working under Tom Ford and alongside Francisco Costa (now creative director at Calvin Klein) and Christopher Bailey (now CEO and creative director of Burberry). Jointly, the ace team helped engineer the renaissance of the fabled Florentine leather house into a luxury power brand that supercharged the appetite for sex, power and bling. After fve years in that position she moved to Pringle,

2. the Scottish knitwear company (owned by the Hong Kongbased Fang family) to launch its ready-to-wear collection and elevate the brand from a men’s golf/casual line into a signifcant fashion player. As knitwear specialist, she injected style, texture and a sprinkling of naturalistic romance. Then, in 2010 Chloé CEO Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye tapped Waight Keller for the plum role at the French maison, impressed by her vision and, pertinently, her managerial strengths. The Chloé she stepped into was at a crossroads. Over the decades, this quintessentially Parisian house, founded by JewishEgyptian émigré Gaby Aghion in the 1950s as a pioneering ready-to-wear company, has employed a whole series of designers at the helm, including Karl Lagerfeld (1963-78 and 66 Baku.

1, 2, 3, 4, 6 & 7. The Chloé s/s 2016 collection, Paris Fashion Week, October 2015. 5. Clare Waight Keller with (left) Maggie Gyllenhaal at the opening of Chloé’s Madison Avenue store, New York, June 2014.

VICTOR VIRGILE/GAMME-RAPHO/PASCAL LE SEGRETAIN/ANTONELLO TRIO/GETTY. MATTEO PRANDONI/BFA.COM/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK.

1992-97) and Martine Sitbon (1987-92). The brand, and its trademark round label in the house shade of sunset pink, became synonymous with a serene, liberated image of women: think signature silk blouses, cotton and lace boho dresses and fuid jersey pieces. Christina Onassis apparently purchased 36 of those blouses in one shop. In the noughties, the brand (now owned by Richemont) was pulled out of the shadows by Stella McCartney (1997-2001) and her right hand, Phoebe Philo, who together injected a timely sense of girl power â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;coolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; into the collections with 4.

mirrored aviators (etched with a love heart), skinny tank tops, spaghetti-strapped maxi dresses, combat trousers and extra spikes of urban attitude. ChloĂŠ certainly has a thing for Brit girls. Philo took over the helm from McCartney until 2006 before taking a much talked-about career break to raise her children in London. The brand then saw a quick succession of designers who struggled to reclaim its character. While the other Brits made frequent commutes between London and Paris, Waight Keller committed to moving her family and life to the City 67 Baku.

The apartment is decorated with an artful mix of sixties and seventies chairs and lights found at the city’s fea markets. “It takes a while to assimilate: change is subtle and less radical but it is more carefully considered and that is why everyone loves Paris. There’s a sense of continuity and a drive for conservation. It’s why people love Chanel and Hermès. It feels very concrete,” she adds. Reinforcing a sense of stability and continuity is one key element of the umbrella role of creative director. Another is making sense of the product and the alignment of eight ready-to-wear collections a year (across Chloé and See by Chloé), plus accessories and children’s wear in a rapidly changing style arena, in which there is always the danger of brand overload and trend fatigue. The trick, as Waight Keller says, is to keep absolute faith in Chloé. “The Chloé girl is our brand – free-spirited, chic, cool and somewhat urban, somewhat boho. I’ve underlined the British, boyish, street infuence as that is what I grew

Clare Waight Keller with (1) Chloë Sevigny, New York, 2013; (2) Geofroy de la Bourdonnaye and Pixie Geldof, London, 2013; (3) Jada Pinkett Smith, Paris, 2015; and (6) Karl Lagerfeld, Paris, 2012. 4. Anna Wintour attends the (7) Chloé show at Paris Fashion Week, October 2015. 5. Waight Keller appears at the end of the Chloé s/s 2013 show during Paris Fashion Week.

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up with. The mix and the tension is interesting and I’ve emphasized that as my thing at Chloé.” But can too much insouciance eventually seem shallow, leaving one yearning for a sense of the prim and proper? “I believe in the Chloé woman!” Waight Keller insists. “She’s not intimidating and you do feel you could share something with her. There’s the boyish yet ultra-romantic girl with a fou dress, fats and fyaway hair – ultimately it is the attitude that you are buying into,” she adds. Ambassadors and fans including Sienna Miller, Karen Millen, Florence Welch and Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley, and its campaign models, Céline Bouly and Ari Westphal, give the brand a sexy-sweet, alluring halo. But with many of the signature pieces carrying eye-watering price tags, as a customer you also require commitment. The handbags (the saddle design, Drew,

was a big hit in 2015) and shoes plus the lower priced sister line, See by Chloé, are much more approachable. Trophies for spring include a rainbow-hued strappy sandal, a leopard-print belted jacquard coat and slouchy track pants. Waight Keller oversees a large international studio team (Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Spanish included) and an atelier where new cuts, techniques, fabrics and silhouettes can all be explored. “The power of the image is so much more important than ever before and that has much to do with social media. But when brands don’t feel true to themselves, it can be less convincing,” she says. And she is constantly tending to those brand roots. In a fashion calendar that now requires four collections a year there is no let up. “I like the pressure – there are lots of things to juggle but I enjoy that sense of focus and making strong decisions.” Her family is tight-knit and supportive. Her daughters are now old enough to appreciate that to be successful and to be able to mould your career and who you want to be in life is a great thing. Their big getaway is not to the Caribbean or to Ibiza but to a second home, designed by her husband, perched on the ragged Lands End coastline in Cornwall. From Paris, the journey takes 12 hours by car. Arguably, this summer that sense of work hard/play hard might feel even better when dancing in a tasselled maxi dress, some big, round Isidora sunglasses and a pair of those rainbow heels.

RABBINI AND SOLIMENE PHOTOGRAPHY/DAVID M. BENETT/PASCAL LE SEGRETAIN/IVAN MATHIE/ GETTY. BENOIT TESSIER/REUTERS/CORBIS. WWD/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK. WENN/ALAMY.

of Light. “I felt like I was going to have a different experience exposing myself to the house of Chloé and to French culture,” she explains. “There’s a precision and carefulness, and a way of living on a daily basis that is fundamental to all. There is a real sense of heritage and of the true Frenchness of things. The country is very patriotic and cares deeply about – and will always protect – that sense of rootedness. In other cultures, we embrace newness. Being here, you see that contrast on many different levels.” Today Waight Keller lives with her American architect husband, Philip Keller, and her twin teenage daughters, Amelia and Charlotte, and young son Harrison in a leafy residential area near the Bois de Boulogne.

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Tokyo

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Tokyo and Beijing are home to some of the world’s biggest art stars. But both are now seeing an explosion of new talent that’s shaking up the scene. William Andrews in Tokyo and Iona Whittaker in Beijing report.

Beijing

The Inside Track TOKYO: Japan, the 1990s: the economic bubble had burst and society faced woe after woe. But the so-called Lost Decade also provided ample inspiration for art, cinema and literature, which led to the international rise of artists such as Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and Koki Tanaka. Over the past 30 years Japan went on a museum-building spree and more internationally minded galleries also began to appear. Simultaneously, established art stars attained truly global status. Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infnite Obsession’ touring show attracted two million visitors in South and Central America in 2014. “What’s interesting about Japan is that there are lots of different art contexts existing in parallel,” says Kiichi Kitajima, managing director of Art Fair Tokyo, which last year attracted more overseas 71 Baku.

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4. BEIJING: Contrary to what many still think, the transformation of Beijing into a contemporary art centre did not happen last week. The 1990s saw a new breed of Chinese artists emerge. They worked with direct, unforgettable motifs: widely grinning faces or so-called political pop compositions invaded by contemporary branding – Coca-Cola, Gucci, Porsche. In 2006, three tour buses from New York’s MoMA arrived to inspect this nascent scene. A huge volume of foreign press and the sudden attention of the global art market propelled contemporary Chinese art to the fore and made overnight millionaires of many gallerists, artists and collectors. While that bubble burst around 2008, the scene in Beijing has nonetheless continued to mature. In contrast to its glamorous southern sister Shanghai, it has witnessed ground-up development with fewer creature comforts, a sensation still palpable today. Thousands of artists, many of them graduates from the prominent Central Academy of Fine Arts, work away in large studios that are often chilly in the freezing winter. In the persistent absence of much state support, the scene is gallery-led and concentrated in art districts – former industrial areas in which exwarehouses and factories have been adapted to show the grand installations and works it is possible to produce here. Artists haven’t yet been priced out as they have in New York or London. The districts 798 Art Zone and Caochangdi, close to the airport, are where the gallery action happens. As Phil Tinari, director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing says, “What’s been created is an entire art world”. The young artists at work in Beijing are ambitious, dynamic and highly astute, their sensibilities locally informed but internationally directed. The lags of time and place that once kept Beijing peripheral have evaporated.

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: LUCAS VALLECILLOS/ZUMA PRESS. GAVIN HELLIER/ROBERT HARDING/CORBIS. THIS SPREAD: DAVE TACON/OFELIA DE PABLO/JAVIER ZURITA/POLARIS/ EYEVINE. KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/ANDREW TOTH/CHINA FOTO PRESS/GETTY. WORLD DISCOVERY/FRANCK ROBICHON/EPA/WU CHING-TENG/MA ZHIYU/ZINHUA/ALAMY. TAKUYA SHIMA. REN ZHENGLAI/XINHUA PRESS/JEREMY WOODHOUSE/FREDERIC LARSON/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/CORBIS.

visitors than usual. Its goal is to achieve 60,000 visitors overall in 2016. The city also offers “safety and hospitality”, notes Mori Art Museum’s Kenichi Kondo. Artist Sputniko!, meanwhile, points to the “chaotic mix of old/new, calm/ hyper and East/West”. “The cultural scene here as a whole is unrivalled in Asia,” says Ashley Rawlings, co-director of Blum & Poe gallery’s Tokyo branch. He also highlights renewed interest in post-war Japanese art movements. Roger McDonald, deputy director of the non-proft Arts Initiative Tokyo, agrees that stars like Murakami and Kusama are raising Tokyo’s profle, but there’s also a newer generation of artists helping. “Partly, it’s the buzz around the 2020 Olympics.” Curator Keisuke Osawa likewise looks to the upcoming Games: “With 2020 round the corner, Tokyo is trying to express itself through culture.” To this end, Arts Council Tokyo was set up to fund cultural programmes, while a Cultural Olympiad will offer privileged exposure to certain artists and designers.

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Key Players

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TOKYO: Two fgures dominate – Yuko Hasegawa (chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art) and Fumio Nanjo (director of the Mori Art Museum). “Hasegawa’s curation is experimental and she’s very internationally minded,” says Kondo. However, a new generation of curators is catching up fast, including Kenji Kubota, Mizuki Takahashi, Mizuki Endo, Fumihiko Sumitomo, and Kenjiro Hosaka. “These are thoughtful but edgy curators, with a social and political sensibility that has been missing in the past,” says writer Adrian Favell. Artists are also calling the shots. Takashi Murakami runs a business empire centred on his artistic vision. Yoshitomo Nara and Makoto Aida can pull off blockbuster exhibitions (the latter’s controversial Mori Art Museum show drew 488,951 visitors), while Masato Nakamura also runs 3331 Arts Chiyoda out of a former school in Akihabara. Somewhat younger are Yuko Mohri and Koki Tanaka, both winners of high-profle awards.

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Previous spread: Kabukicho, Tokyo, and Beijing’s Forbidden City. This spread: 1. Dinh Q. Lê’s Le Barricade (2014). 2. Takashi Murakami. 3. A detail of Ming Wong’s Next Year (2015). 4. Yayoi Kusama. 5. UCCA and (12) work by William Kentridge, 2015. 6. Sputniko!. 7. The Crowning with Thorns (2009) by Yue Minjun. 8. Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. 9. Makoto Aida, and (11) his work on show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2009. 10. Shibuya crossing, Tokyo. 13. Yuko Mohri’s work at Art Taipei, 2015. 14. Student show, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

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1. Art Beijing, 2015, with (9) Bi Sheng’s Iron Panda. 2. Hollow (2011) by Odani Motohiko, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. 3. Ming Wong at Next Year, UCCA, Tokyo. 4. Kobayashi Erika’s Children of Light (2013) at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. 5. Fumio Nanjo. 6. He Xiangyu’s Everything We Create is Not Ourselves 60-3 (2015). 7. White Space Beijing. 8. Yuko Hasegawa. 10. Tokyo Design Week 2015. 11. Takashi Yamauchi’s on the summit, Art Fair Tokyo, 2011. 12. View of the China International Gallery Exposition, Beijing, 2012. 13. Vivienne Sato. 14. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. 15. Keiichi Tanaami’s The Uncrossable Upswept Bridge (2014), Art Basel Hong Kong, 2014. Opposite, background: detail of Flower Matango (2010) by Takashi Murakami.

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2007 by Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens and is directed by Philadelphia-born sinophile Phil Tinari. Add to this mix a stock of articulate young artists often educated abroad, aspiring curators from America or Europe and a solid crew of hip Chinese kids dressing well and going to shows and you have an idea of the ecosystem.

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DAVE TACON/PIERO OLIOSI/POLARIS/LI MINGFANG/XINHUA NEWS AGENCY/EYEVINE. KIM KYUNG-HOON/REUTERS/FRANCK ROBICHON/EPA/CORBIS. COURTESY LITTLE MORE, GALLERY 360°, TOKYO. COURTESY MORI ART MUSEUM, TOKYO. MUNSHI AHMED/BLOOMBERG NEWS/ JUNKO KIMURA/PATRICK AVENTURIER/GETTY. COURTESY HE XIANGYU AND WHITE SPACE BEIJING. VISUAL JAPAN/DANITA DELIMONT CREATIVE/ALEX HOFFORD/EPA/ALAMY.

BEIJING: “Beijing isn’t full of cliques… it allows more natural, uninhibited collaboration between curators and artists,” says young independent curator Jiaxing Chao. Here it’s about working hard for what you believe in; it’s direct, it’s competitive and it’s cool. The gallerists and the artists they manage are vital. The kings of this castle include Leng Lin, president of Pace Beijing, and Lu Jie, the steely founder and director of Long March Space. Leng is also behind Beijing Commune, a gallery focused on young artists, some of whom gravitate to Pace Beijing’s stable (see the thirtysomething Beijing-based painter Qiu Xiaofei, about to have a solo show in New York). The vision of British-born curator Billy Tang is propelling Magician Space, a small indie gallery. White Space Beijing features emerging artists like Liu Shiyuan and video artist Li Liao, and White Cube has them to thank for noticing conceptual artist He Xiangyu. On the non-commerical side, UCCA was founded in

Conversation Starters TOKYO: While the upcoming Tokyo Olympics may be primarily about sport, almost every major art event seems determined to name-check the Games in their promo materials. Saying that, at the moment few are confdent about the success of 2020 due to a series of scandals over the stadium and logo design. “Is it on MuPon?” Check if an event is on the popular discount app frst. And if you spot a tall drag queen at a vernissage, be sure to ask, “Is that Vivienne Sato?” Chances are, you’ll be right.

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After Dark TOKYO: Though spread out, the art world still feels intimate. “It’s easy and quick to get to know the gallery and museum scene,” says Favell. Attend gallery openings to mingle with the informal set, or talks and events at venues like FabCafe in Shibuya or SuperDeluxe in Roppongi. For drinks, head to the tiny yet arty mybar after touring the cluster of Roppongi museums and galleries. Alternatively, try the chic Sezon in Jingumae, which has galleries and eateries spread across three foors. BEIJING: Beijing’s artist tribe used to hang out in grungy bars in the Lido area and play pool. Nowadays, Beijing has no shortage of places to go after the sun goes down. Close to 798 Art Zone, the Xian bar at East hotel hosts many UCCA opening afterparties – head down to the basement games room or sneak into the hotel pool at 2am for an impromptu swim. Stay until morning and you might catch regular hotel resident Ai “I am everywhere and I am nowhere” Weiwei at breakfast – even world-famous dissidents have to eat. Downtown, the hutong bars boast world-class mixologists. Hit up Mai bar for a passionfruit Mojito or Mas for Cuban rum cocktails. Whisky bar Amilal is another favourite, complete with a quiet courtyard and languid cats (the owner is a photographer whose misty inner-Mongolian scenes hang on the walls). Dancers should hit up Lantern, Migas (for Dim Sum Disco) or Dada, where cool kids stay till sunrise, and get dumplings afterwards.

BEIJING: Anything as long as it isn’t “Chinese contemporary artist” – a guaranteed conversation stopper. No one wants to be put in a box.

Dates for Your Diary

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TOKYO: Buzz is building around Art Fair Tokyo and its satellite events in mid-May. By then, ‘Roppongi Crossing 2016’ (26 March–10 July), the latest in Mori Art Museum’s series of triennial shows on current trends in Japanese art, will also be in full swing. Tokyo’s balmy autumn also has a packed calendar, including Design Week (October) followed by performing arts event Festival/Tokyo (November). Need more ideas? Pick up the bimonthly Art Map, or check out the Tokyo Art Beat website and app for the latest events. BEIJING: Four words: Art Basel Hong Kong. Although Beijing has two fairs of its own – Art Beijing and CIGE (China International Gallery Exposition) – galleries defnitely save their best for the titan Swiss brand’s Hong Kong edition, where strong spaces from the Chinese, wider Asian and other regions collide in every way you’d expect from a global art fair. Everyone who is anyone (or wants to be) is there, including international gallerists, curators and collectors. For slightly better weather (your coiffeur will thank you) and to avoid awkward confict with other international fairs, ABHK has been moved from May to late March. Combine it with a stopover in Beijing to catch the spring exhibition openings.

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From look-at-me sequins to statement frills, this season brings frocks that rock right around the clock. Photography by MARCELO KRASILCIC Styling by SORAYA DAYANI

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Previous spread. Dress by David Ferreira, shoes by Lanvin, bag and earrings by Eddie Borgo This page. Top by Anne Sofe Madsen, bra by Christopher Kane, briefs by Houghton, earring by Amanda Pearl Opposite. Dress by Sally LaPointe, shoes by Lanvin, earrings by Monica Sordo, necklace by Lanvin, clutch by Amanda Pearl

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Opposite. Dress and bra by Christopher Kane, briefs by Eres, shoes by Jean-Michel Cazabat for Sophie Theallet, earrings by Monica Sordo This page. Top and leggings by Discount Universe, shoes by Jean-Michel Cazabat for Sophie Theallet, earrings by Lanvin

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This page. Top and skirt by CĂŠline Opposite. Dress by Roberto Cavalli, shoes by Sergio Rossi, rings by Amanda Pearl, clutch by Rocio

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Opposite. Dress by Markus Lupfer, lingerie by Houghton, shoes by Sergio Rossi, earring by Amanda Pearl This page. Dress by Lanvin, earring by Amanda Pearl, clutch by Rocio

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Opposite. Top and skirt by Sophie Theallet, shoes by Jean-Michel Cazabat for Sophie Theallet, earring and bracelets by Amanda Pearl This page. Dress by Anthony Vaccarello, earring by Amanda Pearl, bag by Lanvin

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Previous spread. Dress by Antonio Berardi, shoes by Jimmy Choo, earring by Amanda Pearl Opposite. Dress by ChloĂŠ, shoes by Lanvin, earring by Amanda Pearl This page. Dress by Peter Pilotto, shoes by Oscar de la Renta, earrings by Monica Sordo

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This page. Dress by Erdem, coat, shoes and bag by Fendi, earring by Amanda Pearl Opposite. Dress by Blumarine, lingerie by Houghton, shoes by Jimmy Choo, earring by Amanda Pearl

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Hair Keiichiro Hirano at David Artists using Bumble and Bumble Make-up Michael Grey at David Artists using Sisley Model Alina Krasina at New York Model Management Casting Maurilio Carnino at MTC Casting Inc. Photography assistant AurĂŠlien NobĂŠcourt-Arras Fashion assistant Marie Manley Creative director Daren Ellis Producer Maria Webster With special thanks to Four Seasons Hotel, Baku

t is priceless. Hidden away behind locked doors bearing “No photography” signage, in a maze of shelves in the darkest recesses of the Vitra Campus, is the world’s most dazzling collection of 20th- and 21stcentury furniture. The scene is reminiscent of the closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which the Ark of the Covenant is put into storage in Hangar 51 in Nevada’s desert. These are astonishing hidden treasures, a privately owned archive beyond compare. There are one-off pieces by Jean Prouvé alongside the greatest 94 Baku.

With Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best archive of modernist furniture, vast production facilities, and a collection of buildings designed by leading architects to house it all, the Vitra Campus in Germany is a powerhouse of 21st-century design. Words and Photography by MARK C. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;FLAHERTY

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“I LIKE MUSEUMS THAT HAVE A MORE CAREFREE ATTITUDE TO THEIR EXHIBITS. WHY CAN’T YOU SHOW DONALD JUDD NEXT TO A CHAIR?” collection of vintage Eames in existence. One whole room is set aside for Alexander Girard’s textiles, including samples in 1950s boxes that bear Girard’s handwriting. Along one wall stand brightly coloured Memphis cabinets from the 1980s that look like retro MTV hip-hop Aztec totems. A few metres away: a Marc Newson Lockheed Lounge – still, offcially, the world’s most expensive design object (one sold for £2,434,500 at Phillips in London last April). When a defnitive book of Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum’s collection comes out later this year, it will be one of the weightiest coffee-table volumes produced this decade. And although tours of the whole archive are currently reserved for a handful of VIPs during Art Basel, as of summer 2016 there’ll be a bold new red-brick Herzog & de Meuron building in which to see highlights. “We showed some of the collection in 1989, the frst year the museum was open,” says Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Museum in Weil am Rhein, where Germany meets both France and Switzerland. “People think of us as a place that represents furniture design heritage, and they expect to see it. But we had to focus on temporary exhibitions after

our inauguration because of our remote location – if we only showed the chair collection, we wouldn’t have many return visitors. Now, 27 years later, we fnally have the second space to display it – in chronological order.” The recent Bauhaus show at the museum building will, like the ‘Making Africa’ show before it (which went on to the Guggenheim in Bilbao), take on a life of its own on tour. Both shows contain elements of Fehlbaum’s collection, but these items were by no means the starting point for either – the Vitra Museum is an institution run entirely apart from the Vitra production facility and VitraHaus showrooms on the campus. “It is wonderful and unique,” says Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London. “It could have just been a company museum on a business park, but they have put together a series of great architectural projects.”

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Previous spread: the exterior of the Vitra Design Museum designed by Frank Gehry. 1. The interior of the Design Museum. 2. Claes Oldenburg’s sculpture Balancing Tools (1984). 3, 4, 6 & 7. General views of design displays in the VitraHaus, with (5) the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956). 8. The exterior of VitraHaus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron.

6. The new Herzog & de Meuron space is effectively one vast windowless gallery showcasing 450 key pieces from Fehlbaum’s private collection of 7,000. It will add yet another Instagram-friendly building to what Fehlbaum, on taking over the family-run business in 1977, envisaged as a kind of ‘Vitraland’. “The result was extraordinary,” says Didier Krzentowski, an infuential design gallerist. “Of course it includes one of the most important collections of design in the world, but the campus boasts industrial manufacturing facilities, and buildings by some of the world’s greatest

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architects.” These include Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Prouvé and Sejima and Nishizawa, usually known as SANAA. There is also a vertigo-inducing viewing tower by Carsten Höller, complete with slide, that is equal parts inspiring and terrifying. Visitors to Vitra get so much more than the opportunity to see an Eames offce chair being made in the factory. 97 Baku.

“I’VE NEVER LOOKED FOR AN ARCHITECT WHO HAS THE MOST PRACTICAL SOLUTION. I AM INTERESTED IN FINDING THE RIGHT PERSON.”

When Fehlbaum took over the company, renowned for producing the iconic Herman Miller and Charles and Ray Eames collections alongside its in-demand shop-ftting business, he already had an impressive private collection of furniture. Four years later the Vitra factory, responsible for producing design classics including the profoundly pop Panton Chair, the mid-century modern Eames DCW and the fanciful George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa, burnt to the ground. Necessity would be the mother of invention: Vitra’s insurance policy required them to be back in business in six months. Fehlbaum employed high-tech British architect Nicholas Grimshaw to create a sleek, sci-f facility: “His technical aesthetic and construction with prefabricated elements – stemming from the ideas of the Eameses – greatly appealed to me.” The new-look Vitra facility inspired Fehlbaum to take things further. He scrapped plans to have Grimshaw extend his vision across the campus and began inviting other architects to break new ground. Fehlbaum’s private collection was the starting point. “I had begun to collect pieces of furniture,” he says. “More and more people were interested in viewing them. I thought a small building for exhibiting furniture could be placed in front of a new factory.” Things didn’t quite go to plan – with wonderful results. When Vitra founder Willi Fehlbaum turned 70, his children commissioned a Claes Oldenburg sculpture for him, to be installed in front of the campus. The result was Balancing Tools – a supersized collection of the implements used to create an Eames chair. During the project, Claes

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introduced Rolf to Frank Gehry. A shared passion for form led to Gehry designing both the museum and a production building, the frst projects Gehry completed outside the US, and the frst to display his now distinctive, fantastical style. “I’ve never looked for an architect who has the most practical solution,” says Fehlbaum. “I am interested in fnding the right person, someone I would like to solve a problem with.”

6. 1 & 3. VitraHaus interiors. 2 & 5. The campus fire station designed by Zaha Hadid, and (4) with the Alvaro Siza factory to the rear. 6 & 7. Tadao Ando’s Pavilion. 8. The Grimshaw factory building. 9. The Carsten Höller viewing platform and slide.

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Fehlbaum was the frst, and still one of the few, to greenlight a Zaha Hadid building. It was decided that Vitra would build its own fre station to serve the campus and nearby areas (the existing one had been too far away to save the buildings in the 1981 fre). The imagery Hadid supplied for the building, created in 1993, barely suggests a building at all. The result incorporates a dazzling concrete canopy that is slowly collapsing, a terrace deemed unsafe after an inspection by safety legislators, and toilet doors without locks (“they are glass, you can see if someone is inside!” went the reasoning). The whole thing is as fawed as it is glorious, a deconstructivist funhouse, intended to keep its frefghting staff on edge, ready for action. Tadao Ando’s building (his frst beyond Japan) is, in contrast, a place of contemplation. “Ando and I frst talked of it as a meditation space – a pavilion of silence,” recalls Fehlbaum. The front door of the concrete building is deliberately narrow, reached by a winding path that can accommodate people in single fle only. Once you’ve walked Ando’s way, and slid down Höller’s slide, Fehlbaum’s original vision for the campus as a kind of theme park dedicated to great architecture seems perfectly apt. It supports the idea that all architecture should be experiential – only truly bad architecture doesn’t consider the end user at all. Other structures on the Vitra Campus include a 1950s prefab petrol station by Prouvé, a bus stop by Jasper Morrison and a 1975 dome by Buckminster Fuller. There is also a 2013 prototype of Renzo Piano’s Diogene – a single-room dwelling that can be installed anywhere, which was a project Vitra had brought so close to market as to price it, before abandoning it. Herzog & de Meuron’s VitraHaus comprises 99 Baku.

a series of showrooms styled for fctional residents, curated by, among others, Ilse Crawford, and a timeline of Vitra furniture. The largest structure on the campus is the white SANAA factory building, its enormous size hard to gauge, thanks to its irregular circular structure. Inside, because SANAA didn’t want anything other than white to refect on the pale concrete walls, there are no hazard patterns, or colours at all. White, bright and serene, it’s an inspiring, superbly 21stcentury working environment. Vitra is a powerhouse of design production. There’s so much more to it than the Eames Lounge Chair and the Charlotte Perriand Potence lamp. Having acquired Artek – the modernist carpentry brand founded in the 1930s by Alvar Aalto – in 2013, it then introduced Bouroullec designs based on Artek classics. And

THE BUILDINGS ON THE CAMPUS COST BETWEEN 10 AND 15 PER CENT MORE THAN THE INDUSTRY ‘STANDARD’ BUT THEY RECOUP THAT TENFOLD IN MARKETING VALUE. fashion brand G-Star RAW, which is owned by particularly obsessive Prouvé collectors, continues to collaborate with Catherine Prouvé on Vitra pieces that put twists on her father’s classic designs. While Vitra remains a commercial juggernaut, it is a crucible and champion for the avant-garde, too. The buildings on the campus cost between 10 per cent and 15 per cent more than the industry ‘standard’, but they recoup that tenfold in marketing value. Most signifcantly, the way the Vitra Campus has developed refects the changing culture of design globally. “We opened in 1989, at the same time as the Design Museum in London,” says Kries. “In

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1 & 3. The Vitra Design Museum. 2 & 4. The Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. 5. The SANAA factory. 6. Renzo Piano’s Diogene. 7. The new Herzog & de Meuron museum. 8. The production building designed by Gehry. 9. Jean Prouvé’s petrol station.

6. the 1990s, exhibition design in a museum was prosaic: ‘Here is a red and blue chair’. Now it’s not about a single piece, it’s about society and context, the development and manufacture.” Like many, Ron Arad – whose work was the subject of one of the Museum’s frst exhibitions, in 1990 – believes the uniqueness of the Vitra Museum is its attitude to what constitutes ‘design’. “I am truly indebted to Rolf,” says Arad. “He ordered work from me back when I didn’t really have a design business. He saw a picture of my Rover chair in blueprint, and commissioned me to do something for him.” The commission led to the Vitra solo exhibition in 1990, ‘Sticks and Stones’. “I had a workshop adjacent to the exhibition space,” recalls Arad, “and I was experimenting with materials that I had never used before. I still use them. It changed my way of working forever.”

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The coming of spring is fêted worldwide, but in Azerbaijan it is extra special and part of a month-long celebration leading up to the new year known as Novruz Bayrami. Words by ANNA WALLACE-THOMPSON Photography by RICHARD HAUGHTON Styling by TOM WOLFE

ovruz means ‘new day’. It falls on the vernal equinox, when day and night are of equal length. So? So it means nights are getting shorter and days longer. Winter is fnally over, spring is just around the corner, and with it, a new year. New year, new you – time to put the past behind you and celebrate a fresh start. In Azerbaijan, this is also a time of togetherness and family. The cobwebs are swept away and houses are given a thorough spring-cleaning. New clothes are bought, delicious pastries and traditional dishes cooked up in the kitchen, and neighbours visited and fed. Abundance and prosperity are the name of the game, and it’s all much more fun if you share. The four weeks leading up to Novruz are flled with celebrations and various traditions and rituals. Each Tuesday is set aside to celebrate one of the four elements – water, fre, earth and wind. And then comes the day itself. 103 Baku.

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, or Water Tuesday, symbolizes water as a source of life. After winter, the ice thaws and water begins to fow again, replenishing rivers and streams and nourishing the dormant land around it. Some of the monthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s activities include egg decorating (eggs, of course, symbolizing fertility), while unmarried girls may throw tokens into a jug flled with water. Before sunset, the jug is emptied outside â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ridding them of bad luck.

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is Fire Tuesday, evoking rebirth and purifcation. In fact, throughout Novruz, fre plays an important role, with jumping over bonfres an integral part of the celebrations. In the evenings, households light torches â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one for each member of the family, who then jump over a fre while reciting a spell. The embers of the fre are then gathered and scattered outside, symbolically discarding the problems of the year before.

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celebrates the element of wind. With its sweet breath, the wind opens up the leaves of the trees and the buds of the fowers. Families also make the rounds of the neighbourhood carrying a tray, known as a khoncha, laden with homemade goodies including pastries such as shekerbura and pakhlava. On this day, there is also a tradition of fortune-telling to fnd out what lies ahead.

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Torpaq chershenbesi

is the fnal Tuesday and brings us to a celebration of Earth â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as water fows and nourishes and fre cleans and purifes, so earth becomes fertile and ready for the frst green shoots of spring. Whether digging up the garden or having a picnic, families pay homage to the life-bringing properties of the earth. It is around now that seeds are sewn â&#x20AC;&#x201C; wheat, known as semeni, is grown on a plate, and will later become the centrepiece of the Novruz table.

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On the eve of Novruz

, the graves of family members are visited and tended, and special prayers said. A feast is laid out at home, including traditional dishes such as plov, and stuffed fsh (sturgeon is popular) and aubergines. Your semeni is now part of the table setting, along with items such as a mirror, eggs, and seven dishes starting with â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; including sumakh, sabzi (greens), skad (milk). The head of the family leads, and guests are offered rose water to wash their hands and served tea. On the last day of the old year, it is traditional to spray one another with water to wash off the previous 12 months and proceed cleansed and ready. This ritual is then repeated on the frst day of the New Year, ideally in a spring or river.

Producer Maria Webster

113 Baku.

afta-winning flm director Asif Kapadia enters the Damien Hirst artwork-adorned offces of the media company where we’re meeting, clutching a coffee cup and bag while apologizing for his tardiness: he’s been doing the school run. If Kapadia seems more frazzled than the average parent, that’s because he’s got a lot going on. Tomorrow he’s off to Finland; yesterday he got 114 Baku.

back from Berlin, where – in another contrast – he was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sir Michael Caine at the European Film Awards. “They’re a big deal but small, and done in a nice, friendly way,” says Kapadia. “People aren’t surrounded by publicists, so you can talk to whoever you want. Michael Caine is lovely.” Kapadia wasn’t just there to make small talk but to collect his Best European Documentary award for Amy (2015), which since then has also received both a Bafta award for the Best Documentary and a Grammy for Best Music Film. The almost unbearably poignant portrayal of gifted singer Amy Winehouse’s life and untimely death from alcohol intoxication at the age of just 27 has struck a chord with audiences and critics alike. So

much so that it has overtaken even the success of Kapadia’s breakout documentary, 2010’s Senna, about the legendary Formula One driver Ayrton Senna. Like Winehouse, Senna was prodigiously talented and died tragically young, killed in a crash during the San Marino Grand Prix at just 34 years old. Ripping up the form’s rulebook by dispensing with the conventional talking heads and using only archive footage to

From the adrenalin-fuelled thrill of Senna to the tragedy of Amy, director Asif Kapadia knows that truth can be stranger than fction. Words by JAMIE MILLAR Portrait by JILLIAN EDELSTEIN

propel the narrative as quickly and skilfully as if the driver himself was behind the wheel, Senna claimed Baftas for Best Documentary and Best Editing, the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the record for the highestgrossing British documentary of all time – until Amy, that is. And while the former was mystifyingly overlooked by the Academy, the latter has been

justly rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Documentary Feature. Kapadia, it seems, is earning increasingly widespread recognition for a particular brand of cinematic true story that is more compelling than any fction. “I want to make a movie,” he says. “It’s about telling the story in an exciting and original way that makes audiences lean forward.” Softly spoken but fasttalking, Kapadia’s forensic

approach and sheer enthusiasm have resulted in him being painted in profles as obsessive. “I don’t think I am!” he exclaims, while at the same time admitting, “It’s hard work and it takes a long time. There’s an element of trying to know how it all works and then trying to get it right, as much as I can. Maybe that is obsessive...” A frequently used phrase in conversation is “It’s interesting”, which points to an enquiring mind. At 43 years old, he’s an avid player of fve-a-side football as well as a keen – though not obsessive – Liverpool fan. 115 Baku.

Previous spread: (from left) Ali and Nino (2016); Asif Kapadia. This spread: 1. Far North (2008). 2–4: Amy (2015). 5 & 6. Senna (2010). 7. The Return (2006). 8 & 15. Ronaldo (2015).

Language Film category at the 2003 Oscars, only for the Academy to decree that Hindi wasn’t a language indigenous to the UK. Kapadia’s travels have taken him to Svalbard in Norway for 2008’s Far North, starring Sean Bean as a wounded soldier who is found in the snowy wilderness by two women. Most foreign of all, they’ve even taken him to Hollywood, for 2006 horror flm The Return, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as a woman who starts having visions of an old murder; seemingly his brush with the studio system has frightened Kapadia off going back. But while he has subsequently become known for documentaries, he declares himself “a fan of different genres”, which, unbeknownst to most, he’s been making all along. For instance, he describes The Warrior as “a Western but set in the east: an Eastern”. Senna was an “action flm”. And Amy was his “Bollywood moment”, which seems an incongruous characterization. “The songs in Bollywood flms are narrative, like in any musical,” he explains. “They’re written frst. They’re often released frst and become big hits. People go to see the flm because of them. They know a piece of the story, but they don’t know how it fts together. Amy is exactly the same. You think the song ‘Rehab’ is ironic, but it’s not. It’s a cry for help.” Aside from the sad fate of their protagonists, what Senna and Amy have in

While maybe not quite a household name yet, the quality of Kapadia’s output is making him synonymous with one style of flm-making. “Most people just know me as ‘the documentary guy’,” he admits. “They had never heard of me before Senna. Which is fne – I don’t mind.” But this zoomed-in focus on a small part of his flmography isn’t really representative of his overall oeuvre – and does an injustice to his extensive dramatic credentials. Born in Hackney, east London, and of Indian descent, he was a 17-year-old graphic designer planning for a career as an architect when a friend asked him to help out as a production runner on a student flm. The experience led him to literally and metaphorically change course, studying flm-making at Newport Film School and London’s Royal College of Art. Inspired by world cinema generally, and specifcally the unique perspective of Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo (1995) – flmed in Vietnam by a French director 116 Baku.

7. of Vietnamese descent, using a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors – Kapadia made his graduate flm The Sheep Thief (1997) with a similarly composed cast. A short fable about an orphaned street kid, shot in India, in Hindi, it shows a degree of gumption beyond that of most students, and won numerous plaudits including second prize in the Cinéfondation for Short Film category at Cannes. His debut feature, The Warrior (2001), about a sword-wielding enforcer in feudal India who renounces violence, was similarly flmed and acclaimed. Drawing comparisons with the work of Akira Kurosawa, it was picked by Bafta to represent the UK in the Best Foreign

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common is a remarkable ability to move you even if you weren’t especially interested in their subjects to begin with. “I wasn’t a big Amy fan when I started off,” Kapadia admits. “Now I think she’s great. Same thing with Senna. It’s like doing a degree in the subject. I don’t start off knowing everything. I fgure it out and hopefully fall in love along the way. Hopefully the audience will as well.” Clearly they do. “People loved Senna and it opened doors,” says Kapadia. “Every sportsperson in the world got in touch after that: ‘Can you make a flm about me?’” Among them was footballer Cristiano Ronaldo: 2015’s Ronaldo was produced but not directed by Kapadia under the auspices of his company On The Corner. Musician Noel Gallagher is another who reached out: Oasis – again, produced but not directed by Kapadia – is currently underway. “There are a few other projects that I’m in conversations about,” says Kapadia. “We have found ourselves in a nice place. But

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I still like making movies. The flms I watch are European and world cinema so I’m interested in the dramas.” Kapadia’s latest project as a director, Ali and Nino (2016), is simultaneously a departure and not: an adaptation of the Azerbaijani novel of the same name about a romance between a Muslim boy and Christian girl, set largely in the cultural melting pot of Baku as, initially, the First World War and then the Bolshevik Revolution boil over. A sweeping romantic epic in the vein of Doctor Zhivago (1965), with a backdrop of distant vistas and historical tumult, it’s about as far removed from the

“I DON’T START OFF KNOWING EVERYTHING. I FIGURE IT OUT AND FALL IN LOVE ALONG THE WAY. HOPEFULLY THE AUDIENCE WILL AS WELL.”

east meets west, north meets south, Christian meets Muslim,” says Kapadia. As a Muslim with a Christian wife, he’s well positioned to sensitively handle the issues. Part of that is using local cast and crew instead of English actors with heavy accents and/or make-up: “Most of them could talk to each other. They just couldn’t talk to me.” But while the themes are relevant today, there isn’t an overt message for the audience: “I hope they connect with the characters, connect with the story. And I hope, like I did, that they learn something about a place that they knew nothing about that’s actually quite an important part of the world.” What did Kapadia learn about Azerbaijan? “It’s far more modern than I expected it to be,” he says. “The landscape is incredible and no one had really used it in a movie before. It’s a mixture of the very old and the very new. And it changes every few minutes. You go and look at a location, then you come back a week later and it’s gone. Which isn’t necessarily great

snow sequence ended up being used elsewhere in the flm.) “Films like this are physically demanding,” Kapadia says. “But that’s the fun of it. I like being in challenging places. Somehow the movie still gets made.” So what’s the jet-setting auteur’s next challenge, beyond ferrying the kids to school in rush-hour traffc? “Another mad doc about someone well-known,” he says. “Then a few dramas, a couple of TV shows and movies... And, honestly, I need a holiday.”

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13. urban grit of Amy as he could get. “I read the script, then the book,” says Kapadia. “I’m always interested in flms that are set in new places and fnding out about them. And I like doing the opposite to the previous flm. It’s a love story, a war movie, an action flm – it’s all these genres mixed together in a place where I don’t think anyone’s really made a flm before.” Far from trawling archives, part of the reason Kapadia got into making flms originally was because “I like being on location”. The entries on his wide-ranging CV can be read as points on a compass: The Sheep Thief and The Warrior were east; Far North was, well, north; Senna was south-west. Ali and Nino, then, is the centre. “It’s where

when you’re trying to make a period flm…” Thankfully, there was enough left of old Baku, like the square where many of the flm’s – and indeed history’s – key sequences unfold. “The main characters are fctional but the book is based on fact and a lot of the real locations still exist,” says Kapadia. “There’s a battle in there which I think is quite fun.” He also fell in love with the mountains – even though they presented not inconsiderable obstacles. At one point, unexpected snowfall forced a hasty, on-the-fy rethink of the flm’s long-planned ending; the next day, it cleared, so they shot the intended fnale after all – in half the time originally scheduled. (The improvised

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16. Kapadia with (9) Richard Attenborough, (12) Mark Ronson, (13, from left) Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Krusiec and Sean Bean, and (14) his wife Victoria Harwood. 10 & 16. The Warrior. 11. Amy wins at the European Film Awards in 2015. 17. Senna’s Baftas in 2012.

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Illustrator Tatiana Plakhova interprets Bakuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dynamic architectural future.

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Built on reclaimed industrial land overlooking the Caspian, White City has been designed by British architecture frms Atkins and Foster + Partners. This substantial development – it will cover over 200 hectares – is divided into districts that combine commercial and residential buildings and plans to house some 50,000 people once complete. It will feature a range of architectural styles, and while the past is echoed in blocks of classic Parisianstyle buildings, it’s White City’s waterfront that looks to tomorrow with futuristic designs in the form of a circular hotel sweeping up to a point and a pavilion for modern and contemporary art straight out of a sci-f fantasy.

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120 Baku.

Created by innovative Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au, the new building for the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (situated near the Zaha Hadid-designed Heydar Aliyev Centre) will comprise two twisting glasswalled towers, the taller of the two reaching 140m in height. A multi-storey glass atrium is to be sandwiched between them, which will connect the towers across a number of foors and feature meeting spaces, walkways linking offces, as well as hanging gardens. With a focus on sustainable energy, the new Central Bank will harness solar energy, passive sun protection and natural ventilation for cooling and heating.

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122 Baku.

Crescent Bay is a multipurpose development currently under construction on the Baku waterfront. Designed by Korea’s Heerim Architects (who also designed the Baku Olympic Stadium), it will include a business centre (Crescent City), residential tower, and a retail and entertainment centre (Crescent Place). However, it is the striking Crescent Hotel (you can see a theme here…) that looks set to be the project’s crown jewel once complete. Its dramatic arc-like design is intended to emulate the shape of the crescent moon found on Azerbaijan’s fag.

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124 Baku.

Zira Island, some 10km from the city’s waterfront in Baku Bay and 3km long, is the subject of ambitious plans to create a self-contained, carbon-neutral development. Designed by Copenhagen and New Yorkbased Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the intention is to harness renewable energy using solar panels and an offshore windfarm, creating an eco-friendly hub for its residents – combining highend living with low-end resource usage. The buildings, called the Seven Peaks, are to mimic the silhouettes of particular mountains in Azerbaijan. Zira’s most innovative idea, however, may be its desire to harness the winds created by these ‘mountains’ (yes, you read that right) to determine how the various areas around the island are best planted to support the leisure activities and other needs of its residents.

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126 Baku.

Prolifc young Colombian artist Oscar Murillo may be the darling of collectors but his ambitions aim far beyond the gallery walls. Words by WILLIAM REES Portrait by ANDREW TESTA

t makes no difference what time of year it is, as Oscar Murillo’s studio remains a hotbed of activity regardless. The past year has been non-stop for the 29-yearold artist. As well as producing new work, he has been busy with exhibitions all over the world, from the United States to China (including shows in his native Bogotá and his home town of London), and recently shipments have been coming in from these shows. But Murillo is an artist who famously likes to keep busy. As well as the newly arrived crates, the spacious studio is flled with works in progress. On rusting steel trays and abrasive morguelike tables are dozens of corn sculptures, made by grinding up dried maize, cooking it and adding clay to the mixture. Having been left to dry out and decompose, they have the appearance of volcanic rock. Elsewhere, treacle-black canvases are piled around the space, much like those that have frequented many of Murillo’s recent exhibitions, most notably at Okwui Enwezor’s 2015 edition of the Venice Biennale. The pungent smell of oil paint is pervasive. These works may seem a far cry from what Murillo is best known for: large, frenetic canvases, covered in scribbles, thick with impasto, dirt from the studio and large words scrawled across them. Pollo. Chorizo. Yoga. Painting, however, has always been just one among the many media Murillo works in, with performance, video, drawings and printmaking also central to his practice. In 2015, Murillo showed a newly commissioned 127 Baku.

performance as part of Performa 15 (the performance art biennial in New York established by RoseLee Goldberg) and a major new video work at David Zwirner, London (of Murillo acting as a fâneur in a New Year’s Day street scene in Colombia). It was his paintings, however, that frst caught the attention of Don and Mera Rubell, collectors and early supporters of many now prominent artists, including Keith Haring and George Condo. In 2012 – the same year Murillo graduated from the Royal College of Art – the couple saw Murillo’s canvases at the Independent Art Fair, where he was showing

Murillo in the studio’s library. He has just arrived back from a third visit to Azerbaijan in preparation for his show at Yarat, the contemporary art centre in Baku established in 2011 by artist Aida Mahmudova. As expected for an artist so prolifc, he is brimming with ideas for the upcoming show. I ask him how his impression of the country has changed over time. “We can have this conversation in two ways,” Murillo says, speaking with a quiet and concentrated sincerity. “One would be to talk about a pre-judged idea of what Azerbaijan and Baku are, and the second is actually arriving and being taken by the culture of the region. Either we can talk about Baku superfcially, or we can have the more interesting conversation about the country’s diverse history.” The superfciality Murillo is alluding to, it transpires, is Azerbaijan’s oil industry

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with former gallerist Stuart Shave. Murillo was swiftly invited to partake in a fveweek residency at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. By then, he had also appeared on the radar of mega-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and later that year he was to stage a performance at the Serpentine Gallery in London as part of their Park Nights programme. The next three years saw Murillo exhibit at public art galleries (South London Gallery, The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, Artpace in San Antonio), museums (MoMA), biennials (Venice, Ljubljana, Rennes) and commercial galleries (Eva Presenhuber, Marian Goodman). Now represented by two galleries worldwide – Carlos/ Ishikawa in London’s East End and David Zwirner in New York and London – it seems Murillo’s meteoric rise has given way to a truly secure place within the international art community. Away from the activity of his workspace, I speak with 128 Baku.

and the reputation that comes with it. This notion is something Murillo was quick to dispel upon visiting the country. Instead, he began by looking for materials with which to make new works for the show. “And so textiles was the obvious entry point,” he explains. After visiting the Carpet Museum in Baku, Murillo became fxated upon working with silk. It was a material he had never used before. “It has very different properties to cotton canvas, but ultimately offers new possibilities for my painting. And so I rooted myself in silk and its history. It was the perfect comfort zone, and how I came to understand and ground myself in the local context.” For Murillo, this approach to making works is instinctive. Born in the town of La Paila, Colombia, he moved to the UK with his family at the age of 10. The many conceptual themes of his work – migration, globalization, labour and production, to name a few – are addressed on both a micro and macro scale, with references to these wider issues alluding back to Murillo’s own biography. The most notable example is ‘A Mercantile Novel’, his 2014 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, for which Murillo transported a working factory line and 11 employees from Colombina, the candy factory in La Paila

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PANOS PICTURES. THIS SPREAD: HEMIS/ALAMY. ALEX DELFANNE. MARIS MEZULIS. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK/LONDON. BRIAN MONIKOFF/DEMOTIX/CORBIS.

5. Previous spread: Oscar Murillo in his studio in east London. This spread: 1. Murillo’s first solo exhibition at 40mcube, Rennes, France, 2014. 2. meet me! Mr. Superman (2013–15) at David Zwirner, London, 2015. 3. Detail of Frequencies at the Venice Biennale, 2015. 4. Untitled 2012, at Saatchi Gallery, London, 2014. 5. Detail of signalling devices in now bastard territory (2015) 6. Detail of pieces from ‘A Mercantile Novel’ at Frieze London, 2014.

that employed his family for multiple generations. Recently, Murillo’s exhibitions have taken on the political issues of their locations. In February an exhibition in Madrid saw Murillo engage with the city’s current dialogue of protest by creating an installation of over 150 placards. (He had initially planned to stage an actual protest in the city, but the organizers immediately vetoed the idea.) Murillo is not trying to speak on behalf of anyone; he realizes that the issues he is dealing with are more complex than this. Instead, it is his background and position as an artist that allow for an honest engagement with the subject matter. “I guess because I too sit in between this duality of not exactly being this completed or fully Western subject, and so I have an awareness,” he explains. “There is an empty space I have to occupy, to see how my own concerns in my practice can infltrate and immerse themselves into that new context.” After discussions with Suad Garayeva, Yarat’s curatorial director, Murillo decided to visit Sheki in the north-west of Azerbaijan. He tells me about the history of the town, which was once a stop on the Silk Road and continued production throughout the rule of the Soviet Union. I suggest there is some correlation between the silk factory in Sheki and Colombina in La Paila. “There are similarities,” Murillo agrees. “But what’s really sad is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the factory has lost its prosperity. The last time I visited, just a couple of weeks ago, it was on the verge of shutting down. You could even say it’s lost its soul, in a way. But what is interesting is that, within that nostalgia, there is potential. Within this feld of destruction and decay, there is the potential for something to… I guess in a flmic way, this idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes.” The duality between the wider issues Murillo’s work

“WE CAN HAVE THIS CONVERSATION IN TWO WAYS. EITHER WE CAN TALK ABOUT BAKU SUPERFICIALLY, OR WE CAN HAVE THE MORE INTERESTING CONVERSATION ABOUT AZERBAIJAN’S DIVERSE HISTORY.” 129 Baku.

“WITHIN THIS FIELD OF DESTRUCTION AND DECAY, THERE IS THE POTENTIAL FOR THE IDEA OF A PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES.” way. “Exactly. You have the marriage of a utopian infrastructure, which is effectively dead, to a very small and humble system.” For Murillo, the potential of these materials is in what they symbolize – the memorialization of an industry that has ultimately broken down. We go on to speak about Frequencies, the project set up by the artist in 2013. Working alongside members of his family and political scientist Clara Dublanc, Frequencies visits schools across the globe. Canvas material is attached to the desks of children aged between 10 and 16, where it is left for a semester. The canvases act as a journal of sorts, recording the thoughts and musings of the students. Murillo takes me to the studio and shows me where he houses the thousands of canvases from the project. Italy, India, Kenya – one locality’s canvases look hugely different to another’s. Those from Kenya have a red patina as the school desks were outside and so are covered in a layer of dust from the clay landscape. Those from Singapore are very sparse, with some having barely been touched by the children. The project has also visited Azerbaijan, with canvases currently installed in two schools in Baku. Frequencies was shown for the frst time at last year’s Venice Biennale, but Murillo explains that it is very much ongoing. 130 Baku.

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SCOTT RUDD. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK/LONDON. STEFANIE KEENAN/NICK HARVEY/ JOSHUA BLANCHARD/WIREIMAGE/GETTY. COURTESY RUBELL FAMILY COLLECTION, MIAMI.

addresses, and the fnished look of the work itself, is something Murillo grapples with as an artist. “I’ve taken it upon myself to think about how the world works, while also consciously recognizing that I am an artist who enjoys aesthetics. How can I attempt to continue this dual existence between the pleasures of aesthetics within the context of painting, and the responsibility, the weight, of knowing these things? Being ethical, it brings in to question how one deals with that.” Back to Baku, and I ask Murillo about the other works that will make up the show. In Sheki, he also encountered a small workshop that made stained-glass windows, and shows me a sample, an intricate pattern of coloured glass supported by a timber framework. He says that the same family has owned the workshop for almost a century and, for Murillo, it presented an antithetical form of production to the previously Sovietrun silk industry nearby. “I made a simple intervention, I swapped the materials. So, rather than having beautiful stained glass with light passing through it, I decided instead to get hold of decaying machinery and salvaged rusted, rotting steel sheets, and replace the glass with these.” It seems Murillo is increasingly drawn to the possibilities within these unstable materials. I refer back to that “phoenix rising” comment Murillo made earlier, and suggest that the use of the derelict factory material could be seen in the same

6. 1. poker (2014–15) by Oscar Murillo. The artist with (2) art collector Michael Chow, (3) Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones at Museo Jumex, Mexico, (4) friends and family at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, 2014, and with (5) Rachel Barrett at The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, in 2013. 6. Murillo during his Rubell residency in 2012. 7 & 8. Installation views of ‘A Mercantile Novel’, at David Zwirner, New York, in 2015.

8. “The project has just visited China, where it undertook its most extensive analysis of a country to date: 10 schools in six cities, with over 1,500 canvases installed.” And what will Murillo do with all this material? Each canvas is uploaded to an online archive, and he plans to keep the material itself. His hope is that it will be used as a research tool for a multitude of disciplines, from art history and anthropology, to child psychology and educational studies. Murillo shows me the tables from the Venice installation, a world map printed on each, with the locations the project has visited and their distance from the equator. I ask if he sees a link between the equator and the Silk Road. He nods. “The Silk Road tells you how certain trades moved from one country or one continent to another. The equator is a geographical reference point, but that then becomes political. If you look at how the world is divided, whether it is coincidental or not, it is strange. In the northern hemisphere you have these dominating societies, while in the south you begin to see a shift towards weakened power. However, this idea is slowly eroding.” Murillo has noticed this change in Colombia. “In the last few years, [Colombia] has suddenly evolved through tourism and trade. The moment you fnd yourself with a direct fight from London to Bogotá, you know something is happening.” Murillo is in high demand around the world for 2016. Besides Baku, his works will be shown at the Marrakech and Sydney Biennales, the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art in China, and Japan’s Aichi Triennale. Such a schedule would seem daunting to even the most seasoned artist, but as I leave the studio and Murillo returns to work, something tells me he’ll be fne.

Oscar Murillo’s work will be on show at Yarat, Baku, from 19 May to 24 September 2016. 131 Baku.

132 Baku.

Shirvan National Park is home to a wide range of the protected species that make up Azerbaijanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fora and fauna. Belarus-based wildlife flm-maker Igor Byshnev selects some of his images to illustrate the breadth of the biodiversity to be found there.

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134 Baku.

Previous spread: a black francolin in silhouette against the setting sun â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one of up to 65 species of birds found in Shirvan National Park. This spread: some of the varied fora and fauna found in the 54,374-hectare park, including the protected goitered gazelle, the bearded reedling, famingoes, semi-desert and marsh terrain, tiger moths, striped lizards and the Levantine viper.

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Eye.

THE GLOBAL CULTURAL BAROMETER ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAUREN ROLWING

1 Cultural MRI

CULTURAL MRI Bonjour Beirut.

MEME We can be heroes.

STATE OF THE ART Opinionated art talk.

ARS LONGA Dare to be diferent.

SCIENCE X ART Artists and the Machine.

Against all odds, the Lebanese capital has seriously upped its art game, says Shirine Saad.

n October 2015, a few weeks before the devastating bombings in southern Beirut, and in the midst of a rubbish collection crisis, over 2,000 artworld luminaries, fashion leaders, socialites and journalists crossed the grand marble lobby of the Aïshti Foundation in the city's north. Dealer Jefrey Deitch, curator Massimiliano Gioni, auctioneer Simon de Pury, and artists Daniel Buren and Maurizio Cattelan were among the guests of fashion and retail mogul Tony Salamé for the inauguration of the 460,000sq m, $100m seaside art and shopping oasis designed by David Adjaye.

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“This really is a preview,” said Salamé at the press presentation, while hordes of workers hurried to clean up the construction site before the gala. “We built this space from scratch in two years and four months in a country where nothing is working. I made it a personal challenge to achieve this goal. In this part of the world if you don’t set a target, nothing gets done.” Adjaye, who was staring pensively at the Mediterranean from the mall’s terrace

restaurant that afternoon, said he’d conceived the brick-red aluminium bunker as a respite from the chaos of the city. “It’s an oasis looking at the sea, away from the trafc,” explained the architect, who lived in Beirut in the early years of the civil war. “We need romance, we need poetry. If there is no romance there is nothing. We need ideals.” Among its endless political, economic and military crises, Beirut is constantly negotiating complex realities and bleak outlooks. Artists here refect and process this tortuous life, voicing protests, fears and hopes, and inconvenient truths, braving censorship and taboos. Several generations have risen 138 Baku. Eye.

2,000-work-strong Aïshti Foundation and the recently renovated Sursock Museum, the country's rich and diverse artistic life is gaining traction. The artist Lamia Joreige, who is also the co-director of the Beirut Art Center, says the city has been on the art world’s map since 2005 – the year the centre opened. “While the post-war decades saw artists working in isolated environments, and devoid of a real art market,” she explains, “the scene really grew in the mid-2000s – both locally, with a boom in gallery openings, regionally, with the rise of the Middle Eastern art scene, and internationally, with several exhibitions and activities dedicated to the region. Now

Beirut is a thriving intellectual, artistic and commercial centre for the art world.” Any night in Beirut might start at a glitzy gallery opening, where the city’s creative crew mingles over champagne while discussing the latest rubbish collection crisis or politics. There might then be a series of parallel artist talks, book launches and cocktails, and eventually the posse will meet at Lux, the industrial-themed restaurant in the South Port designed by local architect Karim Bekdache. There, freshly crafted cocktails and delicious local seafood and meats are served accompanied by a trendy soundtrack. For post-dinner drinks, the set moves to Centrale, architect Bernard Khoury’s sublime converted 1920s building topped by a tunnel-shaped bar, to drink and party until the morning. On a balmy night, the windowed panel behind the bar opens up to the starry sky and shimmering mountains, letting in the fragrant breeze, and Beirutis, joyous and intoxicated, can almost forget their daily woes.

1. Sursock Museum. 2. Centrale. 3. Paintings by Laura Owens and sculpture by Sterling Ruby, Aïshti Foundation. 4. Walid Raad's work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 5. Beirut. Sfeir-Semler Gallery exhibits including (6) Wael Shawky, (8) Mounira Al Solh, and (9) the show 'Gallery 3010'. Beirut Art Center’s (10) launch, October 2013, and (12) founders Lamia Joreige (left) and Sandra Dagher. 7. Ziad Antar. 11. Angelika von Schwedes, Beirut Exhibition Center. 13. Akram Zaatari.

MARO KOURI/ROBERT STOLARIK/POLARIS/EYEVINE. PATRICK BAZ/AFP/GETTY. BRYAN DENTON/JAMAL SAIDI/ REUTERS/WAEL HAMZEH/J. CASARES/EPA/CORBIS. JUSTIN LANE/EPA/ALAMY. COURTESTY THE ARTISTS AND SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY, BEIRUT. WOLFGANG STAHR/LAIF/CAMERA PRESS. GUILLAUME ZICCARELLI.

to international fame, beginning with pioneers such as Etel Adnan, post-war conceptualists Lamia Joreige and Walid Raad, and younger talents, such as Ziad Antar and Mounira Al Solh. Their work is particularly poignant, and aesthetically powerful, because they use innovative forms and practices, often conceptual in nature, to write alternative narratives of the country’s varied histories. Meanwhile, public and private cultural institutions are fnally receiving the international recognition they deserve. With the international reach of the dynamic art space Beirut Art Center and of Ashkal Alwan (the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, which organizes Home Works, the regular multidisciplinary forum on cultural practices), and with commercial galleries such as Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Agial Gallery and Galerie Tanit, Beirut has become an important destination for gallerists, curators, dealers and collectors. Now, with the rise of new institutions such as the

PLACES TO GO 7. 9.

1. AÏSHTI FOUNDATION The new Aïshti Foundation hosts works from local businessman Tony Salamé’s massive contemporary art collection. It is designed as a sprawling lifestyle and culture destination, with boutiques, a restaurant, spa, seaside terrace, sculpture garden and rooftop bar. Exhibitions are curated by guests such as Massimiliano Gioni from the New Museum in New York, and showcase Salamé’s taste for work from Arte Povera to stars such as Josh Kline and Urs Fischer, and to Lebanese artists. aishti.com

10. 11. 12. 13.

NAMES TO KNOW LAMIA JOREIGE One of Lebanon's leading visual artists, Joreige is also one of the founders of the Beirut Art Center and uses painting, writing, video and installation to examine the memories and trauma of the country’s history. AKRAM ZAATARI The lauded conceptual video artist and photographer represented Lebanon at the 2013 Venice Biennale with a solo presentation. He uses old photographs, among other materials, to reveal and explore the country’s untold stories and to look at provocative subjects.

2. BEIRUT ART CENTER With its cutting-edge programming focused equally on artists associated with the region such as Mona Hatoum and international names such as Gerhard Richter, this has been a central point in the development of the local art scene. It also hosts screenings and performances, and has collaborated with New York’s New Museum, among others. beirutartcenter.org

ZIAD ANTAR The probing flm-maker and photographer documents the changing landscapes of the region, infusing documentarystyle photographs with poetry and nostalgia to explore notions of archiving and memory.

3. SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY This private gallery represents a roster of stellar international and Lebanese artists, from Walid Raad and Wael Shawky to Akram Zaatari and Rayyane Tabet. Inaugurated in 2005, the Beirut outpost of the Hamburg gallery has contributed signifcantly to the success of the best of the region’s talent. The vast, industrial space is one of many in the Karantina area, home to factories and alternative spaces. sfeir-semler.com

MOUNIRA AL SOLH This artist, who lives between Amsterdam and Beirut, works in a variety of media – from photography, painting and video to embroidery and performance – to create fantastical and often funny scenarios which centre on ideas of identity, language and communication.

BEIRUT 1

South Port

Karantina

4. SURSOCK MUSEUM Inaugurated in 1961 in a grand Lebanese mansion, this museum has just reopened with a revamped interior and programme. Grab a light salad or an Arabic ice cream at the tranquil cafe downstairs. sursock.museum 5. LUX This farm-to-table spot in Southpo (South Port), designed by Karim Bekdache, is where the city’s artists mingle with socialites after hours to a soundtrack by the hottest local DJs. Order a thyme gin gimlet and the grilled octopus. Dress up. facebook.com/ luxrestaurantbar 139 Baku. Eye.

Meme From geek subculture to multimillion-dollar global concern, cosplay has come of age. Sally Howard meets some of the Lycra-clad fans of this fantastical parallel world.

very summer for the past 40 years San Diego has played host to hundreds of thousands of devotees of a world religion, and this year will be no diferent. Many will be dressed in top-to-toe Lycra, body paint or organza insects’ wings; others, the religion’s demigods, will arrive with handlers in tow, followed by feets of fans toting digicams. Hot on its heels and 5,000 miles away a similar sight will unfold as a quarter of a million fervent young and middle-aged Japanese descend on the Big Sight Conference Centre in Tokyo dressed in shimmering sentai bodysuits

encompasses American ComicCon fandom (in which fans dress up as their favourite characters from American Marvel comics and spin-ofs); anime cosplay, or players paying tribute to characters in Japanese graphic animation and manga comics; and Asian idol culture, which worships cosplayers (typically young girls) as the living embodiments of cartoonish anime cuteness. Dr Kane Anderson spent fve years conducting feldwork at San Diego Comic-Con for his forthcoming book Superhero Performance and Anxieties of Cultural Change in 21st-century America (due 2017). “There are a couple of reasons for cosplay’s

with items from her ownbranded collection, show of a busty physique uncommon in a woman of Chinese-American heritage. Mindful of the "ComicCon gawpers", she nevertheless sees cosplay as being much more than sublimated fetish. “Cosplay is art,” she says. “It’s about making the physically impossible from the cheaply

2. available. It’s also a scene dominated by women and their ingenuity. Women make – and display – these incredible outfts, often as complex as structural engineering, from items they fnd in their closets.” Experience has made Rebecca Flint, a 20-year-old from the Isle of Man in the UK, philosophical about the motivations of the otaku, or Japanese anime geeks, who worship cosplayers. At the age of 13, she became a superstar in Japan after a YouTube video, in which she sang along in cosplay costume to the tinny beats of Japanese pop, went viral. Flint’s looks led to her adoption by the Japanese nation as a ‘moe idol’, her small face, large eyes and slender limbs believed to embody characters from anime in human form. Within six months of posting the video, Flint was rebranded as Beckii

4. [muscular Japanese hero outfts], spiked wigs and footwide papier-mâché head masks. Welcome to the otherworldly world of cosplay, a dressingup fad-meets-performance art form that’s graduated from the margins of American and Japanese geek subcultures to an international industry worth hundreds of millions of US dollars a year in conference ticketing and costume sales. Cosplay (a portmanteau word combining ‘costume’ and ‘play’) is a broad church. It 140 Baku. Eye.

broadening popularity,” he told Baku. “On one hand, the tech heads at Silicon Valley have made geek culture cool; on the other, cosplay taps into consumer culture’s fascination with bodies: the remaking of our bodies, and pursuing idealized forms of those bodies.” Yaya Han, one of a number of American-born cosplay stars to have achieved parallel fame in East Asia, is fully aware of the centrality of body image to her fame. Han’s superheroine outfts, all handmade and accessorized

Cruel and performing on stage in front of a crowd of 50,000 at anime music festival Animelo Summer Live. “One moment I was at school, the next moment I was on a plane to Tokyo with 24 hours to learn a dance routine,” laughs Flint, who is now launching a couture brand of the back of her moe-idol career. Flint’s look – sailor suits, bunny ears, polka-dot kimonos and doll-like hairdos – corroborates Anderson’s take on the diference between the Western and East Asian cosplay scenes. “On the surface, Japanese idol culture is about celebrating innocence,” Anderson says, “and American cosplay is all Lycra and overt sexiness. Both traditions, in truth, trade on the tease between childhood and adulthood.” Cosplay superstardom has its downsides. Flint is still unsettled by the barrage of vitriolic comments posted below her YouTube videos, and a recent panel at Tampa Bay

Comic-Con was given over to trolling in cosplay in general. “Cosplay fame was once a very safe form of celebrity,” says Anderson. “Today, with the scene becoming mainstream and with social media being so integral to fame-making, there are tensions between ‘real’ cosplayers and ‘play’ cosplayers. Such territorialism provokes open hostility. Anderson notes a pecking order in which Twilight cosplayers are viewed with derision as ‘Vampires-lite’ by Bufy the Vampire Slayer cosplayers and their followers.

Cosplayers attend (1) Japan’s Cosplay Festa TDC (Tokyo Dome City), January 2015, (2) Stan Lee’s Comikaze Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center, USA, November 2015, and (5) New York Comic-Con at The Jacob K Javits Convention Center, October 2015, where (4) Yaya Han greets fans. 3. Rebecca Flint aka Beckii Cruel.

Yet, at its best, cosplay celebrity is about the cosplayer’s fnesse in bringing to life a much-loved character. Derek ‘Dragon Ball’ Gahl, a successful male cosplayer from California who is currently interpreting Reeveera Superman – all pomaded hair and muscly torso – sees cosplay as a form of cultural critique. “I make a case for my interpretation of Christopher Reeve’s Superman as other cosplayers, for example, argue for the 1930s Superman with the fowing cape, or Earth23’s black Superman, who was modelled on President Obama,” he says. In summer 2015, in a sign of cosplay’s rising might, the US publisher behind American cosplayers’ most dearly loved characters, Marvel Comics, gave the scene its blessing in a series of covers featuring cosplayers’ takes on Marvel characters. These included British cosplayer Allen Lee

TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/ALBERT L. ORTEGA/KATSUMI KASAHARA/ GAMMA-RAPHO/JOHN LAMPARSKI/GETTY. ROGER KISBY/REDUX/EYEVINE.

Hansard as Doctor Strange and Yaya Han as Medusa from the Inhuman series. So what will the coming years bring in cosplay? “The arrival of sentai suits on the American scene indicates that we’ll see more communication between East and West,” says Anderson. “We’ll also see more cross-play, or women and men changing characters’ gender and race.” Anderson also speculates that more celebrity cosplayers will, like Han, make a full-time income from their fame. For all of these cosplay superstars, those US and Japanese conference halls will still be peopled with more pedestrian souls such as smiling wonderwomen, batmen and incredible hulks. “After all, even a novice can aford a pair of tattered shorts and some green paint, can’t they?” laughs Anderson.

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The State of the Art Has contemporary art hit its limit? Kenny Schachter weighs in.

ver the past 10 years or so, with little or no historic precedence, record prices have been achieved for contemporary art. Guess what? Boom, and before you know it, the game is over. Wrought by the greed associated with anything too good to be true and too easy to come by, fast money for quickly made art with little or no merit has hit a brick wall. Full recuperation will be a long time coming, if at all. The backlash is now in full efect against what has been termed, for lack of a better name, Zombie Formalism – art made in vast series, largely efortless to produce, easy on the eye and not having much for the brain to pick over. Some of these artists are super-bright and talented and have had little or nothing to do with the machinations that raised swift profts for short-term speculators. There were cases of frst pieces appearing at public auction by artists such as then 25-year-old Lucien Smith, whose work reached $400,000, before falling hard by 80 per cent in a heartbeat. Or Alex Israel, not yet in his midthirties, whose value has defated from his frst auction price, an unfathomable $1m, to a bit closer to earth at $450,000–750,000 – still exorbitant, none the less. Others, like Israel Lund, went from $200,000 to under $20,000 in what seemed like all of 20 minutes. The fact is that a few of these artists could very well turn out to be notable and signifcant practitioners of their time, but art is a slow-burning, organic process that takes decades – not insta-moments – to resonate and stick. So now is the time to consider canonized, more established Modern art. Sure to enjoy a renaissance, here are obvious versions of art by obvious artists sold in obvious venues such as a handful of top galleries like Hauser & Wirth, Acquavella, David Zwirner, Dominique Lévy, Matthew Marks and Marian Goodman. For the same money, or less, as many sought-after contemporary artists (like Wade Guyton and Mark Grotjahn, both in their forties and both with auction records over $6m) you can own super works by Léger, Dubufet, Miró, Picasso, Calder and many others. You won’t be able to aford the very best, not close, but great pieces can still be attained, whether smaller canvases or glorious works on paper (which I adore). Most people wouldn’t even imagine that such works are afordable. I won’t go as far as saying the whole of contemporary art is a bubble about to burst, it isn’t, but now is the time to look back as much as ahead to fnd value in an overheated art market.

Museum wonderland: an extension for Tate Modern, a new wing for the Met, and an outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. Time to rack up the air miles.

Instagram exhibitions: frst Richard Prince at Frieze New York, then Amalia Ulman at Tate Modern – let's move on and see the real thing.

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Ars Longa 1. Arne Jacobsen’s 1958 Egg Chair. 2. Corso Como, Milan. 3. Andy Warhol in front of his cow wallpaper at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1966.

You wouldn’t buy a car inspired by a toaster, so don’t do it with your art, says Dylan Jones, British GQ’s editor-in-chief.

sn’t everyone a design afcionado these days? Doesn’t everyone have some kind of grasp of the modern world? Judging by the way in which design has now infltrated traditional mainstream media, one would have thought so. In 2016 I wouldn’t have thought that there were many people who weren’t aware of the fact that mid-century modern furniture has replaced Edwardian and Victorian furniture in many country houses, and I wouldn’t have thought that there were many others who weren’t aware that the coolest way to decorate your apartment is with original 1960s op-art prints rather than irritatingly small oil portraits from the Pre-Raphaelite era. Once upon a time the best way to pretend you knew about design was by buying Wallpaper* magazine and having a glance at the contents page. But the world moved on,

JACKSON/ARCA ID/STEV E SCHA PIRO/CORBIS.

1. and reading design magazines can often turn you into a macchiato-sipping bore. The trick is to follow your heart while looking at the market. Years ago I was on holiday in LA and taking a tour of the local art galleries. In one I spotted some vintage Andy Warhol cow wallpaper. It was expensive, I thought there may be transportation issues, and so I passed on what would have been a stupendously clever investment. I love Warhol, and that evening back in the hotel I spent several hours wondering whether I had made a mistake. And I had.

2. So I would always advocate checking to see what kind of prints, furniture or objets d’art are holding their prices, and then see if this dovetails with what you actually like. I have never seen the point of buying anything simply because it’s fashionable – and this applies to art and furniture as much as it does to music and fashion. However, I think the most important thing you have to grapple with these days when you’re investing in design, is to know exactly what is authentic and what is just a cheap imitation. If you wander into a big city gallery, you’ll see lots of things that use modern iconography as design motifs. Someone may have ‘adapted’ a Warhol print for a sofa covering, or designed a chandelier in homage to Jef Koons, or produced a desk set ‘inspired’ by Mies van der Rohe. Trust me, if you haven’t seen anything resembling these things, you will soon. You’ll also no doubt see a shoddily produced neon, spelling out some idiotic epigram, accompanied by a price tag that would have bought your frst car three times over. So stop. Stop right there and ask yourself exactly what you’re buying. If it’s something that is going to look overdone in a year’s time, then stay clear. Likewise if it’s something that is currently being bought by hundreds of others around the world (perhaps the only disappointing thing I saw on my frst visit to Seoul last year were the Corso Como shops, which looked dangerously similar to the ones in Milan). What you don’t want to end up with is a house full of artefacts which remind you (and others) of other things, other artists, other art. In the same way that you wouldn’t want a

house full of pieces produced by Mr. Brainwash, so you wouldn’t want a house that has been kitted out entirely by a buyer at The Conran Shop. Don’t get me wrong, The Conran Shop is probably better now than at any time since its heyday back in the early 1990s, but nobody wants to buy everything from one place. Because then your home will look and feel like a shop. The other thing I would advise is to buy everything yourself. I know so many people who have hired design consultants to decorate and fll their homes and many of them have started to look identikit. Some of these consultants may be able to get you better deals on art and furniture, but they tend to have a homogenous look. And while nobody would want their home to look like the dodgy hotel I stayed in while in York recently (Was it the Marriott? Yes it was…), you also don’t want your home to look like a show fat or the set of a television chat show. Read a lot, spend a couple of evenings wandering all over the internet, trust your judgement, and then start buying everything yourself. Job done, almost.

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Tech has transformed the possibilities for artistic creation, and social media for relational connectivity, says Michael Brooks. But can the human hard drive handle it?

ifty years ago this year, an extraordinary set of performances took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. Over nine evenings, artists including John Cage and Yvonne Rainer collaborated with engineers from Bell Laboratories to create Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT). Now, at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the legacy of these groundbreaking events is being celebrated in ‘Electronic Superhighway’, an exhibition featuring more than 70 artists. Within a year of the Bell Labs collaborations, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the US Army’s research wing, published the idea of enabling computers to talk to each other. ARPANET began with four networked computers in 1969, by which time Experiments in Art and Technology had become an established movement involving celebrated artists such as Andy Warhol and looking to catalyse “new art through new technology”. The scientists and engineers actively sought the

1. input of the artistic community, which could “give human scale” to their work. Twenty years later Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), unveiled the public version of ARPANET: the world wide web. On display in London are works that explore every facet of a medium that has become astonishingly familiar almost overnight. Douglas Coupland’s 2015 work Deep Face, for instance, explores the implications of facial recognition software that enhances experience of technologies such as Facebook while raising questions about consent.

Work by the late South Korean video artist Nam June Paik, credited with coining the term ‘electronic super highway’, is also on view. Internet Dream was created, astonishingly, in 1994 and raises prescient questions about information saturation. Amalia Ulman's work, meanwhile, examines how attitudes towards the female body have been infuenced by social media. In many ways, we are all experimenting on ourselves with the internet. Humanity evolved while living within small social groups and is now expanding its relational horizons beyond anything our brains are prepared to deal with. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has worked out

1. ‘Excellences & Perfections (Instagram Update, 18th June 2014)’ (2015) by Amalia Ulman. 2. ‘Internet Dream’ (1994) by Nam June Paik.

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that we can comfortably enjoy stable social relationships with around 150 people. Most regular internet users are connected to far more minds than that – social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can push our connections into the thousands or even millions, giving us the potential for unprecedented strain on our resources. Only time will tell whether this has a positive or negative outcome. Omar Kholeif, curator of the exhibition, reckons the overall impact is positive. “For me, the world is a better place,” he says. People, not scientists, should take the credit, he adds. “The speculative role of science is certainly important to me, however, I am more interested in

the sociological impact of these technologies and how they create aesthetic formations.” In his book The FourDimensional Human (2015), Laurence Scott states that every generation is currently navigating these waters. He describes a conversation with a grandfather grateful that he can video chat with his granddaughter, but is both warmed and chilled by the revelation that the toddler hugs the iPad when it is time to end the call. To the child, Scott says, the iPad is more than technology, it is something undefned: “a part of Grandpa’s body, an extension of him, a rectangular, coherent presence hovering by the high chair.” That would certainly please the originators of the Experiments in Art and Technology movement. Its early documentation, on display at Whitechapel, makes clear its goals: “EAT is founded on the strong belief that an… efective working relationship between artists and engineers will lead to new possibilities which will beneft society as a whole.”

Science x Art

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Azerbaijan Fashion Week, November 2015: 1, 4 & 7. Chapurin designs on the catwalk. 2. The Serebroya show. 3. Fashion’s front row pass comment on the action. 5 & 6. Behind the scenes. 8. Models for Bernard Chandran await their cue in the wings.

1. litz and glamour abounded when Azerbaijan Fashion Week frst burst onto the scene in the spring of 2015. Last November saw its second edition, held in the Ballroom of the Boulevard Hotel and supported by M.A.C. Cosmetics, with a series of runway shows celebrating some of the hottest trends for spring/summer. From vibrant, Spanish-inspired reds to crisp spring whites and even fantastical neo-Romanticism, the catwalk was full of bold colours, sharp metallics and foral infuences. Pop-up shops and showrooms were also present, along with the launch of an annual competition for up-and-coming designers, with an internship at the prestigious Istituto Europeo di Design in Italy up for grabs. Meanwhile, catwalk highlights included Russian designer Igor Chapurin, the event’s frst show, alongside popular Azerbaijani designers as well as international names hailing from Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and France. Azerbaijani Leila Akhmedova presented a series of bold and vibrant creations. With their bustles, ruffes and bold embellishments, each design was more dramatic than the last, including a series of fabulous tuxedos for women, with a touch of the Mad Hatter to them. The event was wrapped up in style with a closing runway show by celebrity favourite Bernard Chandran. Known as the ‘King of Fashion’ in his native Malaysia, he has dressed the likes of the Malaysian royal family, Lady Gaga and Rihanna.

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FRONT ROW

We had Access All Areas at the second edition of Azerbaijan Fashion Week to bring you the best of the catwalk and backstage action. Photography by NATAVAN VAHABOVA

1. A model prepares for the Leila Akhmedova show. 2. One of Jamila Melikovaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creations, and (6) the rest of the collection. 3 & 5. Backstage touch-ups. 4. A one-shoulder Rosa ClarĂĄ evening dress. 7 & 9. Models in designs by (right) Bernard Chandran. 8. The Turan catwalk show.

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xx Baku.

5. 6.

8. 7.

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1 & 3. The fantastical Leila Akhmedova show. 2 & 5. Models for Turan. 4. A Bernard Chandran design.

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epal and Bhutan are two of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great conservation success stories. Nepal, in particular, is something of a geographic marvel. The surrounding Himalayas create a degree of natural isolation and protection. In addition to this, there are vastly different ecosystems, from mountain terrain to tropical forests, and I was impressed to learn that this biodiversity makes Nepal home to 10 national parks, six conservation areas and three wildlife parks.

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Under the Roof of the World

From snow-capped peaks to tropical forests, Nepal and Bhutan are home to some of the planetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most diverse ecologies, Leyla Aliyeva discovers.

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I was also eager to explore the Unesco World Heritage site Patan Durbar Square and the historic Swayambhunath, a religious complex in the Kathmandu Valley that unites both Buddhists and Hindus. It is also known as Monkey Temple, after the animal – considered holy – that lives there. In fact, Nepal has an extensive list of protected species, including the Asian elephant, Indian rhinoceros and several big cats (such as the lynx, clouded leopard and Bengal tiger). Such is the country’s conservation success that it now faces the prospect of capping species growth, after seeing a rise in rhinoceros and tiger populations. The architecture and vistas in Bhutan are equally exciting. 154 Baku.

These include Rinpung Dzong, a traditional fortress, as well as the stunning Taktsang Monastery (also delightfully known as the Tiger’s Nest). Conservation is a priority here, too. Over half of its land is preserved under forest while 40 per cent comprises nature conserves. Its efforts have paid off, as it now has only one mammal on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species – the giant fying squirrel. The fact that both Nepal and Bhutan have such a progressive stance towards conservation is heartwarming and rare. If only more countries would realize that the key to sustainable progress lies in the marriage of industrial development with natural conservation, we might have a healthier planet.

BISHAL GAUTAM. LHENDUP.

Previous spread: (main picture) Mount Everest; (left) Leyla Aliyeva in Patan Durbar Square, Lalitpur, Nepal; (right) a reminder to support conservation efforts in Bhutan’s Paro district. Opposite: (from top) Taktsang Monastery; Leyla Aliyeva with Mount Everest in the distance. This page: (right, from top) views of Bhutan’s Rinpung Dzong and its surroundings; (below, from top) a farmhouse near Paro; Paro Dzong; and prayer flags near Drugyel Dzong.

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PROFILE: International Man of

Hospitality

istening to Ricardo Acevedo’s employment history is to tour some of the world’s most exciting destinations: “I’ve worked in Lisbon, Mexico, Miami and Singapore, and now Baku.” The New Yorker has been general manager of the Four Seasons (pictured above) in Azerbaijan’s capital since June last year, and already he’s made the city’s grandest hotel his new home. “This is the most luxurious residence I’ve ever worked in, by far, and it has to be one of the 156 Baku.

most glamorous in the company.” When Acevedo visited Baku for the frst time early last year, the 61-year-old was immediately bowled over by the architecture and atmosphere, which reminded him of Paris. “Also, the people are so welcoming and lovely, which makes my job a lot easier! You can’t teach people to be nice, so all we have to do is polish these gems up to our standards.” The tri-lingual Acevedo is surprised that his social life in Baku is the most active of any city he has lived in. “There’s so much to do here in terms of culture and the arts, you can go to new galleries and see exhibitions all the time.” He picked a prime time to begin his new role, following a successful European Games, and he’s making the most of this exciting time in the capital. “I’ve been bowled over by the city and the people, it’s so great to be here.”

When Acevedo is not at work, he is…

Playing a few rounds I’ve always been an enthusiastic golfer, and the newly opened Dreamland Golf Club is so well maintained, and only a 15-minute drive from the hotel.

Catching the waves Shuraabad is one of my favourite places. It’s isolated but has kitesurfng facilities on both the ocean and a lake. I like to keep active on my days off.

Rocking out Listening to heavy metal music (such as Motörhead, above) and playing electric guitar is one of my favourite ways to relax.

Getting a culture fx I love the Museum of Modern Art – it’s wonderful. I’ve already been fve or six times to see what’s on display.

NATAVAN VAHABOVA. EMIL KHALILOV. PAUL THUYSBAERT. PETE CRONIN/REDFERNS/GETTY.

Not even looking after guests across three continents has prepared Ricardo Acevedo for the glamour of Baku and its Four Seasons hotel, as Francesca Peak fnds out.

New York

Panorama of the City of New York, Queens Museum. Photography: Spencer Lowell

Randall’s Island Park May 5–8, 2016 Preview May 4 Tickets at frieze.com

MY ART:

Fashion Exchange

London-based Richard Nicoll’s cult clothing brand is known for mixing masculine and feminine. His other passion, as Lauren Cochrane discovers, is art. Portrait by DYLAN DON

Which artists do you admire? I don’t have a huge disposable income for art but I have a collection through people I know. In addition to Sterling pieces, Julie Verhoeven gave me some of her paper plates and I just bought a Juergen Teller print of Kristen McMenamy in a lace mask. I also love William Eggleston, Wolfgang Tillmans, Peter Doig and James Richards. Polly Morgan wears a lot of my clothes and I keep meaning to do a swap for one of her pieces. Is there one that got away? One of my biggest regrets was not buying an Ettore Sottsass sculpture for £1,000 a few years ago. By the time it had sold, the dealers realized they had got the price wrong and it was actually worth £10,000. Then I went to Frieze Masters and saw a similar piece for 10 times that again. Not that I would have sold it anyway. I love his stuff. Where do you think your taste in art comes from? I have been surrounded by art ever since I can remember. My dad collected photography and he and my mother used to drag me to exhibitions. I remember being really bored but something obviously got through to me. I studied art at school and then moved to London to do a foundation course in it. That’s when it dawned on me that there was such a thing as fashion, and I had a knack for it.

Main picture: Richard Nicoll in his east London studio. Above, from top: Oh Grateful Colours, Bright Looks (2009) by Linder Sterling; Stacked Against Us (2015) by Polly Morgan; a NicollSterling design at the 2009 London Fashion Week; detail of Fannying Around (2009) by Julie Verhoeven.

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How close do you think fashion and art are? The relationship between the two is healthy. The medium that artists and designers work in might be different but the creative process is the same. Working with an artist challenges you to leave your comfort zone. I wouldn’t search out another collaboration but if it came along, then great.

TIM WALKER. COURTESY LINDER AND BLUM AND POE. COURTESY POLLY MORGAN. JORGE HERRERA/GETTY. COURTESY JULIE VERHOEVEN/CLM (LONDON).

Does art inspire your work? I approach design from an artistic place. It’s not always about explicit references, but rather, something channelled subconsciously. My 2009 collaboration with British artist Linder Sterling, for example, happened quite organically.

DESTINATION:

Nakhchivan

Where is it? Amid the peaks of the Southern Caucasus sits Nakhchivan, an autonomous republic and exclave of Azerbaijan. Situated to the south-west of Baku, approximately 380km as the crow fies, it can be reached by plane in an hour. A region of great religious and cultural signifcance for many, legend has it that Noah founded the area, and that the name Nakhchivan (from the original Nukh chikha) can be translated as “the land of Noah’s followers”, or “Noah’s land”. The keel of his Ark is said to have formed the cleft summit of one of the region’s most famous mountains, Ilan-dag, and his relics are reputed to lie beneath a mausoleum in the capital city of Nakhchivan. Fiercely independent and proud, the people of Nakhchivan fought hard to gain autonomy. The region passed through Iranian and Imperial Russian rule until, in 1920, it was cut off from the rest of the country by a Soviet decision to transfer the Azerbaijani Zangezur region to Armenia. It fnally received its autonomous status within Azerbaijan in 1921.

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What’s to see there? The region is not only a centre of cultural importance for the country, boasting museums, art galleries and theatres, but is also home to some striking architecture, including a number of intricately decorated mausoleums. One well-known example is for the celebrated locally born poet and playwright Huseyn Javid (1882–1941). Much older are the spectacular mausoleums for Momineh Khatyn and Youssif ibn Kusseyir. Designed by 12th-century architect Adjami ibn Abubakr Nakhchivani, they are two of the oldest monuments in the city. Perhaps the real impact on visitors to Nakhchivan is made when they travel to the mountains where the site of Askhabi-Kahv can be found.

Nakhchivan, in Azerbaijan’s far west, may be remote but there’s much in its history, landscape and architecture for the intrepid traveller, says Helen Graves. Photography by RICHARD HAUGHTON

BAKU

NAKHCHIVAN

About 12km from the city of Nakhchivan, this cave is mentioned in the Holy Qur’an as a place of refuge for the so-called Seven Sleepers, who fed there to escape persecution and were spared due to their unwavering faith in God. It is considered a site of great religious importance and people travel far to visit it.

The remote landscape of Nakhchivan, with its lakes (such as Lake Batabad, opposite) and mountains, supports flocks of sheep and goats and is where monuments such as (far left) the Momineh Khatyn Mausoleum and (opposite top left, and this page, top left) Askhabi-Kahv can be found.

What’s it like? Elsewhere in the mountains, sheep, bred for their meat, milk and wool graze the open pastures. Flushes of green surround glassy lakes, while eagles soar overhead, and winding roads lead to orchards of trees. The fruit of Nakhchivan is highly prized, and includes many stoned fruits such as apricots and plums, which are

dried or preserved in syrup and used as an accompaniment to tea. Lemons from the city of Ordubad, Nakhchivan’s second city, are particularly revered, costing up to 10 times as much as their Turkish counterparts. This tranquil landscape reveals another side to Azerbaijan, and its relaxed pace of life and clean mountain air appeals to visitors with a love of history and the great outdoors.

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@artdubai

ALL IN THE MIND:

Sound Baths

WORDS BY ANNA WALLACE-THOMPSON.

Sonic therapy is the way of the future. Boasting the ability to revitalize and heal on a cellular level, no wonder so many are sounding off about it. Illustration by JONNY WAN

ilent retreats may once have been the ‘fnd yourself’ experience of choice but wellness for 2016 is shaping up to be a distinctly noisier affair, thanks to the growing popularity of sound baths. The premise is fairly simple. Participants are ‘bathed’ in sonic waves (rather than the watery kind) created by gongs, crystal singing bowls, tuning forks and even the occasional didgeridoo. Devotees believe that sound

has restorative properties, with sonic waves resonating on a cellular level to realign our energy centres – or chakras. Hippy-dippy nonsense, surely? Well, maybe not. It is claimed that sound can stimulate brainwaves, plunging participants into what sound therapist Peter Whitehart describes as “a dreamlike meditative state”, which is the optimum “consciousness to be in for healing to occur”. Sound bathers count among the results a profound sense of calm, a heightened sense of awareness, total relaxation, euphoria, and, in some cases, even the curing of ailments, such as tinnitus.

Sound baths are becoming increasingly cool, with celebrity practitioners including Charlize Theron and Robert Downey Jr. This also might be down to the legendary Integraton. Described as “right out of The X-Files” by actress Molly Ringwald, it was built in 1957 in the Mojave Desert by the ufologist George Van Tassel for human rejuvenation but today it is used for sound baths. The truth, and sonic renewal, is out there.

Play that funky music right.

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THE ARTIST: never wanted to be anything but an artist. When I lived in Ganja as a child, I drew and painted constantly – someone gave me watercolour paints and a sketchbook, which are with me still. I studied at the Art College in Baku, then later at the Art Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania. Painting is my passion, my love and joy, pain and clarity. To describe my art, I would say it isn’t abstract, nor is it realistic. I paint what’s around me but refracted through my perception and understanding. I love experimenting with materials and forms, but the key to expression for me is spirituality and emotional impact. Colours are my feelings. My studio is in Baku in an old building on the seventh foor which is flled with daylight. My technique begins with the application of patches of colour on to the canvas in a chaotic and discordant way. This is done independently of what I’m going to paint. As a theme emerges, a formal rhythm and harmony of colour develops and objects and events appear. I prefer oil paint – it lets me experiment with multi-layered painting yet allows me to create a delicate texture. In the end, nothing remains of the expressive beginnings. I begin several canvases at once, but paint them at different rates; sometimes it takes a few weeks, sometimes months. Lately, I’ve been working on collages on canvas, using newspapers from various countries with oils. When script is combined with paint in colours refecting common human values, such as love and joy, the effect is beautiful. I am also extending my long-running ‘Prayer’ series of yellow pastel drawings with people and angels. I’ve had solo shows in various galleries in Baku, with another at the Qiz Qalasi gallery in June, as well as in Oslo, Copenhagen, Moscow and Berlin. My work is also in the Baku Museum of Modern Art and the National Art Museum of Azerbaijan. Of the work of contemporary artists, I particularly admire Banksy’s playfulness set against the gritty urban background, and the monumental rhythms of Richard Serra’s sculptures.

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His True Colours

Azerbaijani painter Namik Mammadov is inspired by pure colour as he explores his feelings for the world around him. Photography by NATAVAN VAHABOVA

Opposite: Namik Mammadov in his studio in Baku. This page, paintings by Mammadov: (clockwise from above) Blue City (2014), Thirst (2014) and Fruits (1998).

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HISTORY LESSON:

Room with a View

EMIL KHALILOV.

Galarsan Gorarsan fortress in the mountains of north-western Azerbaijan may be a ruin now but it holds a special signifcance in the country’s history and legend.

Galarsan Gorarsan? That’s an odd name. What is it? It’s a legendary fortress in north-western Azerbaijan, high above the historic town of Sheki which lies at the foot of the Caucasus mountains. The town is popular with tourists who come to see the splendours of the 18th-century palace of the Sheki khans, the erstwhile rulers in that region. The more adventurous visitors will climb up the steep mountainside to see Galarsan Gorarsan.

the prevailing Iranian ruler Nader Shah. This might have seemed rash considering the military power that the Iranian empire had at its disposal, but Chalabi had a plan. He holed up in the fortress above Sheki with the town’s population and when Nader Shah demanded Chalabi’s reasons for this defance, the reply was, as legend has it, “Galarsan gorarsan”, or “Come and see”. Thumbing his nose at the Shah like this led to a siege, yet somehow the rebels survived. Recent archaeological study has shown that they used nearby caves for storing food and treating the injured. The strategy worked and eventually the Shah’s forces retreated.

What happened there, then? In 1743 the local ruler Haji Chalabi led a rebellion against

And what’s to see there now? Well, there are some impressive ruined walls among all the trees. It’s clear that it was once

a massive defensive structure with commanding views over the adjacent valleys. Its place in the history of the nascent Azerbaijan gives it a certain aura, too.

The ruined walls of Galarsan Gorarsan fortress.

So what became of Chalabi? He went on to found the Sheki khanate, the frst and most powerful of the Azerbaijani kingdoms. Later, he laid siege to the castle of the Karabakh khanate, a campaign which he lost to the defending Panah Ali Khan, of whom he allegedly said, “He had declared himself a khan, but I acknowledged his rule with my defeat”, which was very generous of him.

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THE ILLUSTRATOR :

On Beauty By Leyla Aliyeva

CREATIVE BUSINESS:

ntil recently, mainstream electric motoring was closely associated with the hybrid Toyota Prius, which has a strong following among Hollywood stars, notably Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman. However, the Prius has a whiff of muesli and sandals about it. It feels environmentally friendly frst and a car second. It is not cool. Tesla, however, has changed the way that the world thinks about electric cars. Founded in 2003 and named after the inventor Nikola Tesla (d. 1943), the company is something of a phenomenon. It makes fast, good-looking, wellengineered sports cars. They’re not hybrids, they’re fully electric. But most importantly, they’re cool. Tesla has a buzz about it that is comparable to Apple, and

2. its CEO, Elon Musk, is often said to be the true heir to Steve Jobs. One of Musk’s most famous quotes is the Jobs-esque “Good ideas are always crazy until they’re not.” This sort of model – a company with a charismatic engineer as a fgurehead, which is future-focused, and makes products which will change lives – is very much part of the Silicon Valley myth. But does it stack up? At the moment Tesla is a niche, high-end manufacturer whose customers are drawn from the ranks of the tech-savvy wealthy. Musk says that this has always been the strategy. The frst stage of Tesla’s grand plan was to build a sports car. The second, to use the money from the sports car to build more affordable cars. The third is to use this money to build truly affordable cars. This spring the company launches the Model 3, priced at about $35,000, which will compete with the BMW 3 Series and the Mercedes C-Class. This would suggest it’s somewhere at the beginning of stage two. “Their specifc

3. 4.

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customer,” says Dr Paolo Aversa, an expert in the automotive industry and technology at London’s Cass Business School, “likes luxury, doesn’t want to compromise on performance and cares about the environment”. Such people are also the product’s greatest evangelists. I recently spoke to a few members of the UK Tesla Owners Club. One said, “Tesla customers turn into advocates simply because no car manufacturer has ever connected so emotionally deeply with their customer base.” So why do Tesla drivers love their cars? Partly it’s the product itself and the emphasis on design. Then there’s the great service. Even better, the car’s software updates itself wirelessly. Gaining new features, such as the ability to change lanes with minimal driver input, is little different to updating your iPhone. Then there’s Musk. He is a brilliant, diffcult, workaholic visionary and the company and its products are inextricably linked to this Silicon Valley demigod. Which is the way customers like it. So, are there any downsides? Well, there’s one problem that is common to all electric vehicles – battery power has some way to go before it can truly compete with petrol. Tesla’s driving range is great compared to other electric cars – and the highest claimed is 330 miles. But some ordinary cars claim they can do three times this on a single tank. Then there’s the charging. At home, using 240V, it takes around nine hours. Tesla has rolled out a network of Superchargers, which take around 30 minutes, but there are very few of these. “With electric

WINNI WINTERMEYER/GETTY. NANCY PASTOR/POLARIS/EYEVINE.

Electric Dreams

When it comes to making electrical motoring cool, Tesla – and the company’s larger-than-life CEO Elon Musk – are frmly in the driving seat, says Rhymer Rigby. 1. The Tesla Model S, launched June 2012, and (6) one parked in front of Maiden Tower, Baku. 2. An automated production line at Tesla Motors, Fremont, California. 3. Elon Musk. 4. Charging in progress as seen on Tesla’s iPhone app. 5. A Tesla showroom. 7. One of Tesla’s high-speed Supercharger stations, in Columbus, Texas. 8. An illustration of the car’s autopilot function.

cars, there’s always the problem of infrastructure,” says Aversa. “You’re binding yourself to a system of recharging which may not be available.” A better battery, then, is the Holy Grail of electric car design. Tesla, believing the future of these cars is too important not to share, in 2014 stated: “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.” But how long can the company sustain losses? What will happen when the big car makers really get going on electrics? Who will be Tesla’s main competitors? What does cheap oil mean for electric cars? Perhaps a more philosophical question is the future of the car itself. A recent report from the University of Michigan showed that just 76.7 per cent of 20 to 24-year-old Americans now have a driving licence. This is down from 91.8 per cent in 1983. Possible factors behind this include the rise of services like Uber, the resurgent fashion for urban living and the use of

6. 7.

social media negating the need to physically meet up. Tellingly, a 2015 survey by the German innovation company Frog Design showed that 30 per cent of people would give up their car before their smartphone. Self-driving cars (which both Tesla and Google are leaders in) could also have an impact here. Will people still want to own beautiful cars if software has replaced them behind the wheel? We may know the answer to this pretty soon. In December 2015, Musk announced that he expected to have fully selfdriving cars in two years. Teslas already have a ‘summon’ feature, which allows you to use your smartphone to ask your car to drive itself out of the garage. And this January he said, “In two years you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country. If your car is in New York and you are in Los Angeles, it will fnd its way to you.”

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WHO, WHAT, WHERE:

Movers and Shakers

2 Reem Fadda The moment is now: fying the fag for Middle Eastern art. Reem Fadda is associate curator for Middle Eastern art at the Abu Dhabi branch of the Guggenheim Museum. She has also been busy curating the sixth Marrakech Biennale, titled Not New Now, which opened in February. The biennale promises to be an interesting one, as Fadda has set aside our contemporary obsession with newness and is instead interrogating the notion of ‘now’, while speaking specifcally to Morocco’s position in Africa and the Arab world.

1 Benjamin Genocchio From editor to art fair director, the divisive Australian art critic continues to make waves. Until very recently Benjamin Genocchio was the editorin-chief of Artnet News. In a surprising turn of events, he took the post of executive director of The Armory Show (main picture) in New York, a position left vacant when Noah Horowitz joined the Art Basel team last year. Until now, Genocchio has made his career as a writer and critic; being a director of a major art fair is not exactly in his wheelhouse. However, following Horowitz’s great achievement in revitalizing The Armory Show, we are optimistic that the powers-thatbe know what they’re doing.

ARCO Lisboa Madrid’s famous art fair sets its sights on the Portuguese market.

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ARCO is synonymous with Madrid, but this May the fair is spreading its wings and opening a second outpost in Lisbon. ARCO Lisboa will be housed in an 18th-century factory (opposite, main picture) that supplied rope, sail and fags to the Portuguese maritime industry. Against a backdrop of a slow economy and recent political instability, the outcomes of this development are uncertain but it is exciting to see whether ARCO will succeed in revitalizing international interest in Lisbon as an art hub.

BILLY FARRELL/BFA.COM. COURTESY INKWELL MANAGEMENT. SOFIA DADOURIAN. RUI SALTA. CÁMARA DE COMERCIO DE BOGOTÁ. COURTESY THINGS THAT CAN HAPPEN. ANNIK WETTER.

From curatorial stars to game-changing career moves and those foraying into new territories, these are some of the art names to keep an eye on in 2016, says Jarrett Gregory.

5 Chantal Wong The Hong Kong-based curator ensures that if it can happen, it will.

Chantal Wong is an emerging curator based in Hong Kong who is helping the city to blossom creatively. Wong currently holds a position as the head of strategy and special projects at the Asia Art Archive, an organization dedicated to documenting contemporary art within Asia. It contains some 34,000 records and access is free of charge, with much available directly online. Most recently, Wong co-founded the non-proft arts space Things That Can Happen (pictured), which opened in Hong Kong last September. The mission statement says the space is intended to foster curiosity and support the creativity of local and international artists. Thanks to Wong and her collaborators, there are many growing dimensions to the art scene in Hong Kong.

María Paz Gaviria Opening the world to Colombia, and Colombia to the world. María Paz Gaviria is the fearless leader of ARTBO, the growing art fair based in Bogotá, Colombia. Gaviria has turned ARTBO into one of the most talked-about fairs to explore, and each year it welcomes thousands of visitors from around the world. Gaviria has added a curated section for modern and conceptual art, titled Reference, as well as Artécamara, devoted to emerging talents in Colombian art. Gaviria is looking to put Bogotá on the cultural map and it seems like she’s achieving everything she sets her mind to.

Lionel Bovier The pen is mightier than the sword – or should that be keyboard? Lionel Bovier founded the publishing house JRP Ringier over a decade ago and in that time has collaborated with artists and thinkers to create an astounding catalogue of publications even amid the move to digitalization. JRP Ringier is testament to the irreplaceable qualities of a book in hard copy. In January 2016 Bovier took up the post of director of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Geneva (MAMCO), citing his desire to return to his curatorial practice.

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ENDANGERED NO. 4: Caucasian Brown Bear They look endearing but these rare bears have had no escape from hunting and habitat loss. Only now are these little-understood creatures fnally being protected. Illustration by NADIA TAYLOR

Found: The Caucasian or Syrian brown bear (Ursus arctos syriacus) is a subspecies of brown bear native to the Caucasus. Once common across the Middle East from Egypt to Pakistan, it is now extinct in many of those countries, including its eponymous home of Syria. Genetically speaking, this particular bear should probably not be regarded as a subspecies at all, but having said that, in size (it is the smallest of the brown bears) and colour (with generally lighter strawcoloured fur and, unusually, pale claws), it is quite distinct in appearance. It lives in the highland forests and occasionally in lowland woodlands in the hills and mountains of northern and southern Azerbaijan. Under threat because: Caucasian brown bear numbers have suffered badly in recent decades as a result of trophy hunting and the trade in bear bile for Asian traditional medicine. Habitat destruction, too, is a major problem for bears, with the cutting down of forests for frewood and lumber. Brown bear population numbers may be stable across their global range, but this particular bear is seriously endangered in the region. Outlook: Despite a particular Caucasian brown bear being one of the most famous bears in the world (Wojtek, a cub adopted by the Polish army in the Second World War before living out his days as a celebrity in Edinburgh Zoo), little has been done to halt their declining numbers. Special nature sanctuaries in Azerbaijan have provided safe havens, but there needs to be more research to establish population numbers and effectively combat the threats they face.

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y sister and I frst visited Baku in March 2015 for the opening of Yarat contemporary art centre. We were fascinated by the city and its mix of modern architecture and traditional beauty, while also being amazed by the speed of development. The city has an atmosphere similar to my home town Cherkessk – the pace isn’t as crazy as Moscow, people are very supportive, and we are lucky to have good friends here. The only drawback is the traditional Azerbaijani breakfast – such a threat to a slim body! Artwin Gallery shows emerging Russian artists and encourages creative exchanges across post-Soviet countries. We’ve developed a non-commercial programme in Baku to promote our concept and support cultural dialogue between Russia and Azerbaijan. We want to show our contemporary artists in Baku, and tell Muscovites more about this beautiful country and its artists. I love the work of Azerbaijani artists Rasim Babayev and Tahir Salakhov, whose brilliant exhibition is on at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Art in Azerbaijan is developing fast, and it’s crucial that its importance is not underestimated.

Mariana Gogova is the founder of Artwin Gallery. artwingallery.com 176 Baku.

MATTHEW SOULNECHNII/COURTESY ARTWIN GALLERY.

Tabula Rasa MARIANA GOGOVA

Mariana Gogova in front of photographs by Olya Kroytor, on show at Artwin Gallery, 2015.