In conversation with Jules Julien

Earlier this summer, the Obama Presidential Center opened on Chicago's South Side, home to one of the most ambitious public art programs in recent memory: more than 28 site-specific commissions by artists including Nick Cave, Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin and Theaster Gates. Among them is Jules Julien, the French artist based in Amsterdam and represented by Bisou, who spent over two years creating two permanent works for the museum, 'All Together', an immersive digital mural built from more than a million individually placed dots, and 'The Balance of Power', a triptych in the museum's Civics gallery.

We spoke with Julien about the making of 'All Together': the two years spent living inside a single project, the million dots placed and coloured one by one, and what it meant to build a work of this scale for an institution like this one.

Mind Games

Amsterdam-born and raised artist Faan Olgers is featured in the latest issue of Manera Benelux. Get it now while still in store, or online here.

Photographer Anwyn Howarth visited Faan in his Amsterdam studio, and what a pleasure it was to work with her. Writer Charlotte Boates spoke with him about a practice built on self-imposed rules and apparent impossibilities, with someone who, by his own definition, is not an artist but a constructor. “The work pulls me, and I follow.”

Maria Bodil, 'Body'

When I first saw Maria Bodil's new work 'Body', I found myself reaching for two very different reference points. One pointed backward, to the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, to Balla and Severini painting the human form at the exact moment industrialisation was rewriting what it meant to move through the world. The other pointed sideways, to Donna Haraway, to Björk, to Sevdaliza, artists and thinkers who have spent decades asking what happens to the female body when it enters into dialogue with technology on its own terms.

Both feel true to what Maria Bodil have made here, and true in different ways. The first is about the eye, what this work looks like, and why that visual language keeps returning at moments of technological rupture. The second is about the body, who it belongs to, what it means to feed yourself into a machine and take back something transformed. Together, I hope they offer two ways into a body of work that rewards more than one reading.

Selected by Samir Bantal

In 'Eyes of Gold', we invite some of our favourite tastemakers with a golden eye to select three works from the Bisou collection. Each guest explains their choices and shares how these pieces might live together in their space.

For the latest edition of the series, we invited Samir Bantal. Samir is an architect and the director of AMO, the research, strategy, and design arm of OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture. At AMO, he works at the intersection of architecture, politics, culture, fashion, media, and the built environment, shaping ideas that often extend far beyond buildings alone.

Samir and I have known each other for a long time, we went to high school together. I have fond memories of us playing basketball on the school team and sharing art classes during our graduation year. Back then, architecture wasn’t yet his main focus, but the curiosity and openness that would later shape his work were already there.

Samir is not an architect who simply designs buildings. Over time, he has developed into a sharp and critical design thinker, using architecture as a tool to question systems and narratives. It’s a quality I’ve always admired, and one that clearly resonated with Rem Koolhaas as well.

In this image by Mounir Raji, Samir is photographed at his home in Rotterdam, sitting in front of a beautifully faded Kumi Sugaï lithograph, an artist we both admire greatly. For his Eyes of Gold feature, however, Samir selected three works by other artists represented by Bisou.

Faan Olgers x Rosewood Amsterdam

Bisou Gallery’s Faan Olgers was commissioned to create a bespoke sculpture for the lobby of the Rosewood Amsterdam. The Amsterdam-born artist (b. 1947) drew inspiration from the building’s four iconic pillars, which serve as a strong base for the piece...