In the Studio Cecilia Vicuña, New York

Cecilia Vicuña’s practice moves fluidly between poetry, sculpture, textile, and performance, always returning to what she calls arte precario: an art built from debris, unspun wool, feathers, and stone that she has been making since 1966. Rooted in Indigenous Andean knowledge systems, and above all in the khipu—the knotted cord long dismissed as a mere accounting device—her work reframes precariousness and fragility as forms of consciousness rather than loss.

Person with long wavy hair sits on a stool in a gallery, looking at the camera, wearing a navy jacket; left wall covered in blue Life posters.

In the Studio Robin Kid, Rambouillet, France

Robin Kid works with images that feel less made than encountered. Cowboys, cops, fragments of cartoon Americana: images that existed long before he picked them up, suspended somewhere between memory and mass culture. Raised in the south of the Netherlands by his grandparents, in a former mining neighbourhood bordering an American army base, he grew up with the idea of the U.S. glowing faintly from the other side of the fence.

Adult female with blonde ponytail in a dark sweatshirt stands with arms crossed amid tall cacti in a sunlit garden.

In the Studio Megan Plunkett, Los Angeles, CA

American artist Megan Plunkett turns away from depicting people, instead focusing on everyday objects. Drawn from consumer culture, and the film industry, her carefully constructed photographic series cultivate a sense of estrangement within things that might otherwise feel familiar.

Adult person in a navy suit sits at a table, hands clasped, speaking, in a room with built-in white bookshelves, a black fireplace, and red chairs

Collector Stories Robert Punkenhofer, Barcelona/Vienna

For more than 20 years, Robert Punkenhofer has been involved in international corporate and art management. His agency Art & Idea considers itself a nexus between art, architecture, design, and economics. He has curated more than 100 exhibitions, among them the annual Vienna Art Week. He has served as Trade Commissioner for the Austrian Foreign Trade Organisation in Mexico City, New York, and Berlin, a role that he currently holds in Barcelona. We spoke with the unusual collector about art, his ability to repeatedly create things from nothing, and about his passion for Vienna’s brilliant k. and k. period.

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Where to meet art, culture and creativity

Nordic Notes

Adult with glasses sits on white sofa in a bright living room, gazing to the right; large windows, greenery, stack of books nearby.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Helsinki
Most video works by Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila take place on multiple screens, producing different vantage points of a story simultaneously. She intentionally floods or overwhelms the viewer's senses in order to produce a strong emotional impact, abandoning the traditional moving image script.
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