Interviews

Zuzanna Czebatul: ‘People have to talk and dance with each other’

The artist talks about tigers, tarot cards, the vast carpet she made for this year’s Art Cologne and what it means to be the hired critic
Joan Jonas: ‘I often went to magic shows as a child, and the idea of magic and sleight of hand had a big effect on me’

Joan Jonas talks about her multidisciplinary installation works currently on show at Tate Modern and the live performances undertaken for the 2018 Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights programme
Inti Guerrero – interview: ‘I am trying not to fall into the cultural production and consumption of difference’

The curator of this year’s EVA International, Ireland’s biennial, talks about how the country’s history and heritage and, in particular, the forthcoming referendum on abortion have shaped his thinking behind the event
Mariele Neudecker: ‘I get labelled as a climate change artist at times, but I don’t look at it that way’

Bristol based artist Mariele Neudecker talks about how Cern inspires her, why you shouldn’t call her a climate change artist and why flight recorders are like the human soul
Nancy Fouts: ‘I once made a slingshot out of Jesus and had his head worn like a necklace. Someone stole it. That was a nice compliment’

Nancy Fouts brings her trademark baroque theatricality, dada mischief and love of a good pun to Flowers Gallery in London with a decade’s worth of visual treats
Phillip K Smith III: ‘The earth and the sky are the things that bind us’

As he prepares to mount an illusionistic new installation in Milan, the American space and light artist talks time, technology and theatricality
José Parlá: ‘It challenges me to work against the grain of the status quo’

For his most ambitious project to date, commissioned by the Landmarks public art programme at the University of Texas at Austin, Parlá transforms a 4,000-sq-foot site into a panoramic landscape evocative of Austin’s natural and urban environment
Clementine Keith-Roach: ‘I think of domestic objects and furniture as physical extensions of our body’

The artist and set designer discusses casting her mother’s breasts for one of her nipple urns, breast milk for bodybuilders and the problematics of bodies and economies
Dawn Mellor: ‘It is not surprising that activism and resentments due to economics, class, racism and gender are emerging’

The artist best-known for her parodic portraits of celebrities talks about taking a year of from painting, exploring social media and satirising identity politics
Jedd Novatt: ‘I feel the same tension about the next work as I did 40 years ago – the same tension of wanting to achieve something I’m looking for’

In advance of an exhibition of new works, Novatt talks about his long career making geometric sculptures in industrial metals and discusses the thinking behind them
Cary Leibowitz: ‘I hate my aesthetic. I wish I was delicate and elegant and smart and earth-shattering’

For his first major retrospective, the undersung American artist fills the ICA Philadelphia with more than 300 works that span a 30-year career. Leibowitz discusses how he established himself as an artist in the 1980s and 90s, and the origins…
Alge Julija Kavaliauskaitė: ‘There is something about glass that I am continually drawn to’

Kavaliauskaitė, originally from Lithuania but now living in Finland, talks about art and alchemy, haunted mansions, her latest exhibition and why she was drawn to live in Nuutajärvi, a village famous for its glass-blowing
Anthony McCall: ‘The sculptural aspect of a piece occurs only at the moment of projection’

The pioneer of immersive, sculptural light installations explains his process and procedures, interests in performance, film and architecture, and his new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield
Sam Stewart: ‘From a psychological perspective, working in someone’s home is a loaded experience’

For his first solo exhibition, artist-designer Sam Stewart transforms an unoccupied space within a New York townhouse by imagining the life of its mythical occupant
Claudia Wieser: ’I know there is the danger of beauty in my work, or a danger that it becomes purely decorative’

Ahead of the opening of her current show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Berlin-based artist Claudia Wieser discusses her references from 1970s TV to Greek plays, and the danger of making work that is too beautiful
Evelyn Hankins: ‘Mark Bradford’s project directly challenges the idea of a single or objective transcription of history’

Hankins, senior curator at the Hirshhorn museum, explains how a collaboration with Mark Bradford led to the artist’s monumental cyclorama Pickett’s Charge, and why the subject, the 1883 Battle of Gettysburg, still resonates today in the US
Andy Holden: ‘A lot of my work is a fidelity to what feels right more than an objective truth’

Andy Holden talks about his relationship with his father, the ornithologist Peter Holden, nature verses nurture, and sentimentality in the animal kingdom
Zhang Enli: ‘I pay attention to the subtle things that you might usually ignore’

The artist known for focusing on the poetic aspects of daily life talks about new approaches to painting as seen in his current series of works, which draws on gardens situated in the bustling urban environment of Shanghai
Yto Barrada: ‘The whole thing is a dance between a mad poet, children and ghosts’

Yto Barrada discusses her new exhibition at the Barbican Centre, which draws on a calamitous earthquake and the remarkable text it prompted
Lydia Ourahmane – interview: ‘Working with this personal history is something I have to deal with now, as a way of moving forward’

Lydia Ourahmane talks about her exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery, allegiance, betrayal, drawing on her Algerian family history for her work, and why she nearly dropped out of art school
Maija Luutonen: ‘I’m not a big fan of monuments’

Maija Luutonen is the inaugural recipient of the Kiasma Commission by Kordelin, a project to promote contemporary Finnish art. Here, she discusses her exhibition at Helsinki’s Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, community-building, monuments and painting on paper
Michael Armitage: ‘Can an art space function in the same way as a chapel?’

The artist weaves multiple narratives to evoke the complexity of East African society. Here, he talks about his exhibition The Chapel, at the South London Gallery, and how it gave him the chance to think about religion, spirituality and politics…
Encountering the Buddha and the Kandell Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room – an interview with curator Debra Diamond

The curator talks about Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia, the current exhibition at the Arthur M Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, which took three years to organise and brought together more than 200 objects spanning two…
Tabita Rezaire: ‘Reclamation allowed me to glow into my blackness, womanhood and queerness’

Tabita Rezaire talks about ‘decolonial healing’, her response to cyber-racism and the distorted representation of black people on the internet, communication technologies from the spiritual world, and empowering artists to have self-respect