Tom de Freston: Small Worlds
Originally published in The Double Negative
Literature grants us access to imaginary spaces removed from reality, spaces where wonder and fear cohabit, allowing us readers to both escape and face the world we live in. In 2021, Oxford-based visual artist Tom de Freston gave shape to the magic of Kiran Milwood Hargrave’s tale Julia and the Shark. A year later the duo collaborated a second time in Leila and the Blue Fox. In August 2023, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of David Almond’s novel Skellig, he provided the drawings for its very first illustrated edition.
Review: Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
Originally published in The Journal of Visual Culture
Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl contributes a collection of opinionated, creative, far-reaching public talks and essays successfully urging the reader to rethink the dynamics behind present currencies of art. It plunges crucially into an ever-growing feld that embraces art, contemporary politics, unleashed consumerist systems of economy, and growing digitalization. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War situates art at the crux of present questions of confict, surveillance, and virtual corporate domination. For Steyerl, art is both the object of, and symbolizes, tax-free markets and extra territorial geographies, removed from the nation’s history and sovereignty.
From Darkness
Originally published in Fused Magazine
Violence, loss and fear change us. We seldom like to revisit or to share the stories of our tragedies, but their transformative qualities guide us nevertheless. Oxford-based visual artist Tom de Freston opens this Pandora’s box. His works are at the crossroads of fear and hope, visual vessels containing stories of pain and sorrow, connecting personal trauma to universal truths while hinting at ways in which the individual can rise again.
Through the Lens of the Camera: Propaganda, Identity and Nostalgia in Cuban Cinema
Originally published in Strife Journal
The literary Western eye, as a subject that purports to see and interpret the cultural and ethical values of the non-Western has been qualified by Kwame Anthony Appiah as a ‘relatively small, Western-style, Western trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism and periphery’. Rising from this perspective is the development of a one-sided, goal-specific and commonly simplistic reading of both historical facts and cultural production. The latter is used as an apparatus to justify, or even strengthen, a dominant socio-political hierarchy and the pre-eminence of a mode of analysis based on Western parameters. Exploring, therefore, the Cuban Revolutionary discourse from positions beyond the literary Western eye necessitates a deeper vision that will afford space to voices within the island: thinkers, artists, politicians and viewers alike. The exploration of this discourse cannot be uniquely orchestrated by an outside ‘mediator’, as Appiah would have it.