It would be convenient to say that Barbara Kasten works in photography or sculpture. The output of this Chicago-based artist certainly fits within these traditional categories. Over the course of her decades-long career—from her 1970s experiments in abstraction using cyanotype photograms to recent ballroom-scaled commissions—she’s skirted categorization, producing images and installations that capture, sometimes fleetingly, that which is ineffable. Which is to say, her true mediums are neither film nor stone, but rather light, space, and time.
Artist Arash Nassiri makes work about Tehran, but not the city as it exists today. His films reconstruct the capital’s Western fantasies from the dreams and memories of the Iranian diaspora. In Tehran-Geles (2014) and City of Tales (2018), Nassiri interweaves the two urban fabrics — the Iranian capital and Los Angeles — projecting the past of one place onto the future of another. His latest work, which has been co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery and Fondation Pernod Ricard for two solo exhibitions in 2026, focuses on “Persian palaces,” the ornate mansions built by Iranian families in Beverly Hills. Although their decorative style is often derided by neighbors, these grand homes are, for Nassiri, heritage sites that simultaneously represent émigrés’ cultural baggage and their pursuit of the American Dream. PIN–UP caught up with Nassiri while he was in L.A. for the prestigious Villa Albertine residency to discuss the complex meanings contained within these monumental homes.
I have yet to make a pilgrimage to The Sphere, but I think about it more than I’d like to admit, searching for tickets to see Dead & Company under its dome of high-resolution screens or doling out Instagram likes to friends who road-tripped east on Interstate 15 in search of immersive communion. As Las Vegas’s newest attraction, The Sphere opened in 2023, but the values it embodies were there all along. These are captured in the latest photo book from Iwan Baan, Rome – Las Vegas: Bread and Circuses: desire, spectacle, the “horror” of global tourism, as contributing essayist Ryan Scavnicky puts it after Nikola Tesla. For all the earthly talk of showgirls and slot machines, fear and loathing, ducks and decorated sheds, Sin City is a place of passion and transcendence: a truth closer to godliness than devilish temptation.
Hartt’s nuanced approach to addressing identity and colonial history is evident in his way of thinking about images.
TUVALU IS SINKING. In a few decades, the island nation in the South Pacific might be mostly waves. Many of us know this from the internet, the island’s submersion a de facto symbol of climate change, much like starving polar bears stranded on floating icebergs. The artist David Hartt knows about Tuvalu because he went there in 2015 to make a film called Adrift and to witness firsthand the effects of rising sea levels. He’s traveled to swamplands in Florida and to Jamaica, where the artist Frederic Church sketched plein air studies. And he found the exact location in Ohio where the landscape painter Robert Duncanson set his easel for Blue Hole, Flood Waters, Little Miami River (1851). For more than a decade, he’s made artworks—photographs, essayistic films, sculptural and sound installations— that examine place and history.
Author Frances Anderton, environmental artist Lauren Bon, and urban historian Norman Klein approach the city of Los Angeles from different perspectives and fields: together they will discuss how L.A.’s unique history, architecture, and environment have shaped the city. The conversation will be moderated by L.A.-based critic, editor and curator Mimi Zeiger.
By valuing small spaces, we find pleasures through design more generous and more humane than solutions made for bigger projects—adding to the case for living with less.
This past summer, Barbie Dreamhouses sprawled out across our collective imagination like a rose-colored suburban subdivision. They feature prominently in Greta Gerwig’s movie, where a solitary Barbie occupies each multistory home. Notably wall-less and stair-less (who needs a staircase when a spiral slide will do?), the toy houses reflect vast expansiveness—in pink. Boundless, they combine manifest destiny, the American dream, and a pop feminist utopia. If Virginia Woolf wanted a room of one’s own, Barbie craves the world.
Kasmin Books is pleased to present Alma Allen: Nunca Solo, a catalogue accompanying the artist’s exhibition at Museo Anahuacalli, Diego Rivera’s iconic museum in Mexico City. With translations in both English and Spanish, this volume delves into Allen’s ongoing engagement with time, form, and hybridity through twenty-six newly commissioned sculptures installed among the volcanic architecture and grounds of the museum.
The demise was probably inevitable, foretold by an Ed Ruscha painting. William Pereira’s LACMA opened in 1962, but the buildings were never great. Its corporate modernism was inward‑looking, and its flourishes didn’t age well. Later additions by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (1986) and Renzo Piano (2008, 2010) atomised the campus, but there was always something pleasant about sitting in the plaza and watching museum‑goers drift from building to building – a piece of pedestrian urbanism in a town long blasted for not having any. (It does.)
Out of the windows of Lenny Steinberg’s Venice Beach living room, there are a few hundred metres of sand, a line of white surf, then the grey-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a remarkable, pinch-me view, the kind most folks only see from the nearby boardwalk at Muscle Beach, where tourists and roller skaters glide through a perfume of cannabis dispensaries and fish taco stands.
The LA-based designer’s home is just a few doors down from Frank Gehry’s Norton House, a mid-1980s landmark that mimics a lifeguard tower. She and her husband, Bob, a prominent lawyer, moved here in the 1990s, transforming a 1960s post-and-beam duplex into a minimalist roost that now houses an archive and showroom of five decades of her work, alongside her art and object collection. Each piece – from the Lucite high heels on a table by the front door to the Frank Stella print in the main bedroom – reflects, in short, the fruits of a highly creative life.
Lesley Lokko’s sprawling, dense Biennale asks us to engage different representational languages. It’s a slow burn, but finding new legibility takes a moment.
“Zt. Zzt. ZZZzzzZZZzzzzZZZzzzzzzZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzzzZZZzzzzo’ona,” begins The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell’s 2019 novel set in Zambia. The insistent whine of a mosquito. Her pesky, omniscient narrator traverses generations and geographies. It’s a tale of violence and the folly of colonization. That hum, indigenous and persistent, singular and swarm, is the consciousness of the African continent.Those ZZZs droned through the Arsenale and Giardini as participants, journalists, and VIPs gathered to kick off the eighteenth International Venice Architecture Biennale, and echoed across alleys and piazze made damp by unseasonal rain and high tides. Venice, after all, is a reformed swamp with mosquitos of its own.