Kati Laakso, Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux in Brussels, talks to TLmag about the Institute’s unique initiative, Together Alone, created after the spread of Covid-19 to support Finnish artists during the pandemic, and how she sees the artistic community changing in this new environment.

Using various textile techniques like knitting, embroidery and tufting, Paris-based textile artist Manon Daviet transposes her drawings into tapestries, creating what she calls “volume paintings”. Here, she talks TLmag through her multidisciplinary practice, finding inspiration in comic books and her embracing of mysticism in nature.

Mounir Fatmi has always been curious about the transformation of objects and how, with a slight change of context or position, they can take on entirely new meanings. Now, he regularly goes back into the archive, transforming materials into a highly charged body of work.

Multi-disciplinary artist Igshaan Adams unpacks his identity through ritualistic performances and his use of handicrafts such as embroidery and beading. Delving into personal topics that look toward the environment in which he was raised, he resolves conflicting identities in a quest for spiritual enlightenment.

This summer, Galerie Templon will be filled with the spectacular woven work of Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Two in-situ installations and a series of new sculptures explore the “Inner Universe” that some may see as the mind, others as consciousness, and which transcends the body, connecting beings to each other.

Greek artist Athina Ioannou maximizes and reinterprets painting through minimal and economic means. Her sensuous ‘abstract’ painting – what she refers to as ‘plus-painting’ – arises from the ‘intensification’ of ready-made carriers through the patient all-over saturation of her work with linseed oil.

Continuing the ecological conversation that “Broken Nature” at Milan’s Triennale brought forward last year, the 22 designers selected for Schloß Hollenegg for Design’s latest exhibition tap into the design world’s collective consciousness.

Relating to the theme of TLmag’s 31st print edition, Islands of Creation, we present an extract from ‘The Island of the Colourblind’ by Dutch photographer Sanne de Wilde.

Here, TLmag presents a conversation between Lebanese artist and designer Ali Cherri and professor and the director of International relations of the DAI in Berlin, Friedrich Lüth.

TLmag spoke to Taiwanese designer Chen Yi Fei about her work COVID-19 which explores the discussion around the appearance of the facemask.

Creative director, speaker, consultant, teacher and author – this multi-faceted designer and theorist gives TLmag his vision on the past and future of design and the profession of the designer in relation to the COVID-19 crisis.

Using wet plate collodion photographic processes from the mid-19th century, the intimate portraits taken by Italian photographer Silvano Magnone give shape and feeling to suspended time.