Curious about
their work,
not the moment.
Leila Antakly has spent over twenty years in conversation with artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and thinkers all over the world who are making work that matters. These are the conversations.
Interviews from the Archive
Explore all our conversations
Etching Palestine
A conversation with Palestinian artist Samira Badran and independent curator Àngels Miralda on art, guardianship, and the responsibility to keep looking. Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana 2026.
Food Art Is Not a Trend
There is a moment, if you have ever stood in front of Laila Gohar's work, when you forget entirely that what you are looking at was made to be eaten. But the story of food art is older, stranger, and far more serious than any single moment of cultural virality can contain. From Roman frescoes to Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art movement to butter sculpted into fragments recalling ancient Greek marble — food has always been a carrier of meaning. Labor and land, culture and class, memory and desire, compressed into something you hold in your hand. This is a cultural essay about what happens when the most basic human material asks the questions the cameras do not know how to frame.
Shifting the Silence at Lenbachhaus
One of my favorite artists was on the walls at the Lenbachhaus in Munich— and I had no idea she would be there. Shifting the Silence, built around Etel Adnan's final book, is an exhibition about the difficulty of saying what a work of art is. It left me thinking about language and its limits, about what images do that sentences cannot, and about an artist who, knowing she was dying, chose to write about the beauty of the world.
Chasing Rainbows: Charlotte Colbert on Dreaming the World Differently
It's like the horizon, she says, always just within reach, always eluding us. In New York, her surrealist sculptures now rise from the street at monumental scale, asking strangers to stop, look up, and perhaps speak to each other. For Charlotte Colbert, that is not a small act. It is the whole point.
“Visibility has never been our measure of significance. We seek out artists and inspiring individuals whose work sparks curiosity, challenges assumptions, and leaves a lasting impression.”