Tennis is Giasco Bertoli’s passion. “There’s a kind of electric energy about it: two magnificent bodies facing each other, the regular sound of the ball hitting the racket… Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz said tennis is youth multiplied by youth”. Yet the Swiss-Italian photographer snaps courts only once the lively excitement of a match has died down. His latest book is a compilation of vacant tennis courts photographed around the world in various states of abandon. Tidy and well-lit at dusk against a palm-tree backdrop in California. Completely concealed under the snow near Berlin. Forsaken, invaded by fallen leaves and growing trees in a London park. Some of them are slowly merging with the nature around them; all are filled with nostalgia, like silent witnesses of the traces of experience. “They all have one thing in common about them: the mark of time”.
"There’s a kind of electric energy about tennis: two magnificent bodies facing each other, the regular sound of the ball hitting the racket…"
Bertoli started taking pictures of courts in 1999 in southern Switzerland. “I was walking in the woods near where I grew up and I came across an abandoned tennis court. Its spirit was fascinating.” He then went on to photograph other courts in the area, and what started as a pastime gradually developed into a creative obsession. Nowadays the photographer travels the world in search of these magical spaces, empty yet heavy with emotions. “Over the years I’ve come to realize the evocative power of the sport”, says Bertoli, whose work is strongly influenced by filmic language. “Tennis-related elements are often present in movies as metaphors. The feline elegance of Guy Haines, the professional tennis player in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. The love story between Dominique Sardà and Helmut Berger, dressed in pristine tennis attire as they clutch their rackets in Vittorio de Sica’s Il Giardino Dei Finzi-Contini. And of course the pantomime game played by a group of students in Blow Up… All of these scenes have shaped my own views.” Bertoli has even revisited Maryon Park, where Antonioni shot his legendary tennis scene, capturing the court as it is nowadays, not devoid of a certain neo-existentialist essence. “After all, these pictures are a reflection of our interior state.”
Last month marked the 18th edition of Art Dubai, located in the city’s picturesqueMadinat Jumeirah resort – all palm trees and turtle-filled lagoons (not a white tent in sight). There, alongside a bustling programme of talks and special commissions, around 120 galleries from over 40 countries foregrounded some of their most exciting artists, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, North Africa and the Global South. Here are eight exciting discoveries from this year’s event, ranging from unexpected works by old favourites to emerging talent to watch out for.
At Ronchini’s stand, the spotlight was directed at Brazil-born, New York-based artist Paula Querido, courtesy of a dedicated, and no less dreamlike, solo presentation. Querido delivers a singular take on landscape painting, one that honours both the physical reality of our natural surroundings and the landscapes that exist only in our mind – a merging of mood, memory and imagination dictated by our internal states. This sense of surreality is sparked by her bold colour choices and soft-edged brushwork, which conjures figures engaged in various tasks (acrobatics, ladder clambering and more) against minimalist backdrops with which they are neither fully merged nor entirely separate from. The resulting works are both familiar and mysterious, igniting nostalgia and narrative intrigue by turns.
Following a stand-out show with Richard Saltoun in New York earlier this year – her first solo exhibition – Iranian-born, New York-based artist Samira Abbassy’s work made a notable appearance at the London gallery’s Art Dubai stand. Abbassy’s oneiric paintings and drawings explore the multi-layered physical and metaphysical elements of the self, conjuring something at once deeply personal and universal. Her intricate practice draws on a mixture of European and Iranian-Persian artistic traditions that reflect the complexities of diasporic identity – something she experienced first-hand growing up in London. She is also deeply interested in Jungian psychoanalysis, as embodied by her recurring use of mirrored figures – an allusion to Jung’s Ego versus Shadow model, demonstrated here in her 2021 piece The Soul is the Face You Had Before, with its captivating cascade of falling heads.
Palestinian-Saudi artist Dana Awartani’s latest work made a striking impression at Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s stand. Made from handcrafted silk fabrics – stretched on frames, and dyed with herbs and spices used in South Asian and Arab traditional medicine – the pieces are conceived to hang serially alongside corresponding typewritten texts. Closer inspection reveals that holes have been torn into the textiles, and thereafter hand-darned. “Awartani’s material choices speak to the work’s ethical and ecological terms of production,” the gallery explains. “The dual emphasis on artisanal production and indigenous medicinal knowledge ... [represents] acts of resistance against mental and technological colonial violence.” The repaired punctures in the textiles, meanwhile, correspond to “the silhouettes of physical violence enacted on buildings in Arab nations at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists” – the specific details of which are listed in the accompanying texts. A powerful ode to, and evocation of, collective healing.
Adesola Yusuf, Attension Seeker., 2025Courtesy of the artist and Gazell.io
Adesola Yusuf at Gazell.io In the significantly sized digital art section, one work in particular jumped out. At Gazell.io, Gazelli’s digital branch, Nigerian painter and digital artist Adesola Yusuf presented two on-screen collages, Do You Listen To LoFi? and Attension Seeker, both depicting snappily dressed figures framed by patterned tiles. Objects from daily life (an apple, a record player) as well as more elusive symbols (a human heart, a sword) serve as attributes of sorts, lending the protagonists a saint-like quality. Indeed, art historical references abound in Yusuf’s work, ranging from the High Renaissance to Pop Art, albeit with their own distinct edge. Fascinated by the possibilities of uniting tradition and technology, Yusuf describes his work as a “visual soliloquy” that uses “dynamic colours and layered compositions to explore personal narratives, sociopolitical themes, and the cultural landscape of Lagos.”
Did you know that Andy Warhol once painted a BMW? Well, he did, in 1979 – a BMW M1 racing car that raced at Le Mans the same year, finishing sixth. The tradition of artist-decorated BMW race cars began four years earlier, in 1975, when the French racing driver Hervé Poulain called upon Alexander Calder to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL. This year, to mark the 50th anniversary of the initiative – which continues to this day, with everyone from Julie Mehretu and Jenny Holzer to John Baldessari and Cao Fei having taken their turn at transforming a sports car into a moveable sculpture – BMW are showcasing all 20 Art Cars at different cultural institutions and events on all five continents. In Dubai, it was Warhol’s wonderfully adorned automobile that took centre stage: a chance to admire the hand-applied swathes of paint – six litres no less – up close. Warhol painted the entire vehicle in just 28 minutes, his frenetic, multicoloured vision an expressionistic meditation on speed itself. “I attempted to show speed as a visual image,” the artist said. “When an automobile is really travelling fast, all the lines and colours are transformed into a blur.”
Iran’s Sarai Gallery compiled a fantastic array of paintings by four Iranian artists on their roster – Morteza Khakshoor, Abbas Nasle Shamloo, Azin Zolfaghari and Orkideh Torabi. It was hard to choose a favourite, but two pendant paintings by the Tehran-born, New York-based artist Torabi, proved particularly enthralling. Carried out with dye on stretched cotton, these portray a cock fight in which the two feathered contestants appear far less combative than their respective gaggles of supporters, who scowl and sneer at one another, fingers pointing, teeth bared. These cartoonish, theatrically staged figures are typical of Torabi’s style, which fuses personal narrative and cultural heritage, drawing on Persian miniature painting techniques to challenge “traditional notions of femininity, power dynamics and identity”. Here, she casts a distinctly female gaze on a traditionally male-dominated pursuit, highlighting the displaced aggression such animal fights inspire.
At Galleria Continua’s booth, the media-traversing talent of the acclaimed Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou was on full display via a lively tapestry of sewn towels and one of Tayou’s Poupées Pascale (or Pascale’s Dolls), an ongoing series of hand-blown crystal figures embellished by fabric, wood, beads, rope and other such accoutrements of assemblage. The poupées are caricatures of humankind, their diverse symbolism and material hybridity a means of interrogating the cultural and societal influences that shape our identities in a globalised, postcolonial world. This notion is playfully elucidated here by the four painted figurines that flank the doll, each representative of a different profession. No matter which mode of expression Tayou embraces (from videos to sculptures to vast installations) or which theme he tackles (be it climate change or globalisation), he always does so with joy. As he once said, “If I want to talk about an injury, I’ll do so by talking about the cure, trying to bring a kind of comfort.”
Last year, Anindita Bhattacharya took up position as the Frere Hall artist-in-residence at Oxford’s Ashmolean museum, the first Indian artist to do so. And standing before her sprawling multi-panelled painting at Gallery Threshold’s stand, it’s evident that further recognition awaits. Bhattacharya’s extraordinarily intricate fine-brush painting style deliberately recalls “a language forged in the imperial Mughal courts of Delhi, Agra”, but her references extend much further, from medieval Gothic gargoyles to the Turkish monsters of Siyeh. While traditional techniques and storytelling inform her practice, however, the themes she explores are unerringly relevant. This piece depicts a swirling body of water, which, upon further scrutiny, is found to contain “monstrous forms and crocodilian figures” – one of whom is consuming a nude human figure whole. The discreet inclusion of these carnivorous creatures symbolises “nature’s relentless cycles of life and decay”, not always visible but ever-present.
Find out more about Art Dubai here. With special thanks to BMW.
The first time photographer Cam Lindforsvisited Isla Vista, a coastal enclave just north of Santa Barbara, California, it felt like stepping into a sun-drenched dream. Two young men were standing around a battered Coleman grill, blackening meat beyond recognition in the bed of a lifted pickup truck, just blocks from the Pacific. It was an absurd and completely sincere day. “I instantly fell in love,” Lindfors recalls. “This is the place – this is the bee’s knees.”
It was the first photograph Lindfors took for what would later become One Half Paradise, his newly released photo book that blends photography and film to create a vibrant portrait of Isla Vista as a fleeting college town. The book depicts Isla Vista as equal parts paradise and collapse: a place where cliffs crumble into the ocean and mould-stained houses sag under the weight of many tenants; where the mood is both euphoric and apocalyptic. “That perfect California glow, the one we’ve seen in movies and on TV, is constantly clashing with the lived-in reality of Isla Vita,” Lindfors says.
The book, shot over the course of a year, documents the place in all its contradictions. “It has all the vibes of Baywatch, American Pie, Endless Summer, even Lords of Dogtown. But the roofs are leaking. The plumbing is falling apart. There are cracks in the walls ... Climate change isn’t a metaphor here – it’s a certainty.”
Photography by Cam Lindfors. Courtesy of the artist
What emerges is a kind of environmental portrait, but also an emotional one. Three friends, barefoot, half-dressed, and unhurried, bask in the late-afternoon sun. Two boys lock into a sunlit wrestle by the ocean against a backdrop of fading light. A girl swings from the rafters of a cluttered garage as her friend reaches up towards her. The images feel undeniably youthful: alive with sweat, chaos, and closeness.
But Lindfors insists he never set out to make a book about youth culture. It felt too easy, too clichéd. “I’ve never been particularly interested in youth,” he says. “Not as a cultural fixation, not as something to archive.” Perhaps that’s because, for the photographer, youth was never something to document, but a time during which to recover. “When I had cancer in college, I didn’t get to experience much of what I ended up photographing in Isla Vista,” he says. “That time in my life didn’t stretch outward. It folded inward.”
Photography by Cam Lindfors. Courtesy of the artist
But One Half Paradise resists the trap of nostalgia. The intimacy it captures is unsentimental, even sharp-edged. Working quickly, sometimes photographing 30 or 40 strangers with the help of collaborator and friend Em, Lindfors developed what he calls a “slick tongue,” a way of cultivating trust with just a few words. “I had to read the room’s energy … make [people] comfortable in front of my camera,” he says. “I wasn’t after staged moments. I wanted things to feel remembered – like they had already happened on a different day, and might happen again, with or without me.”
In the end, One Half Paradise is less a photo book than a time capsule – a truthful record of a place suspended between seasons, decades, and states of being. “You have no idea which decade anyone belongs to,” Lindfors says. “That creates something euphoric, yes, but also grotesque and vivid. Almost like a T-shirt left too long in the sun.”
Photography by Cam Lindfors
If the photographs carry an afterglow, it’s the traces of something that’s already fading. “Paradise is never built to last,” Lindfors says. “It just exists.” The town is slipping into the sea. The students will graduate and move on. But for a flicker of time, in this crumbling, radiant corner of California, something beautiful held, and Lindfors was there to capture it.
Dancing on the Fault LinePhotography by Nick Haymes. Courtesy of the artist and Kodoji Press
Charting the emotional ride of friend and muse Bailey’s transition, Nick Haymes’ expressive new book is testament to the power of letting someone come into focus on their own terms
Connection, for photographer Nick Haymes, is a long game, requiring presence, patience, and resistance to the quick grab of an image. “I like to use it as a language,” he explains, “rather than a single shot as a punctuation mark.” His latest book, Dancing on the Fault Line, traces this philosophy across 14 years of photographs made in collaboration with Bailey, a magnetic and uncompromising subject who became both muse and friend. What unfolds through the photographs, which are anchored by a raw essay by Bailey herself, is not a traditional portrait, but an unscripted choreography of a life lived – and the quiet devotion it takes to let someone come into focus on their own terms.
Haymes first encountered Bailey on Facebook in the mid-2000s, at a time when he was stepping back from editorial photography. “She reached out to meet on Facebook and I thought, ‘You’re an interesting character,’” he reflects. “She had a photo of her in a tutu in front of a bunch of jocks at her high school prom that she got kicked out of.” Bailey invited him into her world – her life in Los Angeles, her farm in conservative Temecula (a sanctuary she founded where queer and trans people could gather and express freely), her friendships – which would eventually become the ground from which the book emerged.
Over the 14 years the photographs were made, their own relationship naturally unfolded into a unique way of working together that was immersive rather than extractive. “I don’t like to go in and take a photo and move out,” Haymes says. “I find that a little bit touristic.” His approach favoured proximity and ease over production. “Some weekends, I’d go wanting to take a picture at sunrise, but then we’d just end up sitting, talking all weekend and I wouldn’t take a single photo.”
Dancing on the Fault LinePhotography by Nick Haymes. Courtesy of the artist and Kodoji Press
During this time, Haymes also watched Bailey shift and resurface – sometimes vanishing for months, sometimes drawing him back in. “You sort of measure time when you can flip through the book and see a little 17-year-old twink and then a 30-something-year-old woman,” he laughs. The title of the book – Dancing on the Fault Line – speaks to that sense of instability, both emotional and geographical. “The life that Bailey lives is sort of always teetering on something being cataclysmic or disruptive at some point,” he reflects.
Haymes’ images beautifully hold this fractured arc without forcing it into narrative; instead, they gather the texture of a life, wildly different to his own, unfolding in motion. Moving between black-and-white and colour, the photographs oscillate between moments of furious expression and throbbing intimacy, charting not only Bailey’s transition, but the emotional terrain and support networks that carried her through it.
Dancing on the Fault LinePhotography by Nick Haymes. Courtesy of the artist and Kodoji Press
This, perhaps, is what lies at the heart of Haymes’ work: a persistent belief in our potential for kindness. “I love people,” he says. “You can be burned by them all the time … but in general, I’m forever an optimist.” His faith is what allows the photographs – often of revelry, vulnerability, and the heat of unbridled bodies – to hold such emotional proximity without ever tipping into voyeurism. “You have to be in love with whoever you’re photographing at some point,” he muses.
Looking back through the book, Haymes sees his own growth mirrored in the photographs. “Hopefully I’ve matured in how I see and edit,” he reflects. “Some of the images I’d take now, others I only could have made in my thirties.” Editing the book meant returning to thousands of negatives, images he’d often left untouched for years, and confronting his earlier instincts. But when Covid forced a pause in shooting, he began to sense that the project, long open-ended, might finally be complete. “It felt right,” he says. “I was ready.”
In The Kitchen (oven), 1977Courtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick and Richard Saltoun Gallery
Manipulating urine, chocolate, and rotting vegetable matter into disruptive forms, the late British artist was a taboo-shattering force of nature. A major new show at Hepworth Wakefield surveys 25 years of her work
Over the course of her short life, Helen Chadwick left an indelible mark on British art. Whip-smart and punkishly irreverent, much of her work explores the complex, often contradictory, experience of life – and death – in a woman’s body.
Chadwick grew up in Croydon, born to an estate agent father and a mother who emigrated from Athens as a refugee. Her prolific output went hand in hand with work as a much-loved university tutor (although Chadwick failed her own art ‘O level’), and advocate for artist communities. She became the first woman to receive a Turner Prize nomination in 1987, and had a solo show at MoMA in 1995. But, disliking fame, she longed to escape to a dilapidated house she’d bought in her mother’s native Peloponnese. Tragically, in 1996, aged 42, Chadwick died suddenly from heart failure following a day of meetings.
Life Pleasures, a new exhibitionat Hepworth Wakefield, is the largest survey of Chadwick’s work to date. The exhibition demonstrates her restless innovation, materially and conceptually, working across performance, photography, metal, installation, print and book-making, lightboxes and textiles. At the Hepworth, interrogations of class politics, gender and sexism sit alongside deeply researched enquiries into, in the artist’s words, the “enigmas and riddles of selfhood”.
Here, AnOther explores the defining chapters of Chadwick’s life and work.
In The Kitchen, 1977Courtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick and Richard Saltoun Gallery
1. She performed as kitchen appliances for her MA degree show
For Chadwick’s 1976 undergraduate exhibition, the artist painted her naked body with latex and performed farcical, erotic scenes with a group of women in a piece titled Domestic Sanitation. The following year, she made a series of costumes resembling whitegoods for her MA at Chelsea College of Art. During what was to become a seminal performance, Chadwick and her collaborators were rendered immobile within expertly crafted metal and PVC structures. The action was set to collaged radio segments, one of which proclaimed: “Well, here is ‘kitchen-lib’, where a woman can do time in her kitchen and actually enjoy herself.” Equal parts witty, unnerving and angry, In the Kitchen mines and troubles the language of fashion and fetishism.
Latex costumes, Domestic SanitationCourtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick
2. Contemporary feminists took issue with her using her naked body
In the 1980s, agitprop feminists criticised what they perceived as Chadwick’s rewarding of the male gaze. She maintained, however, that, as the “subject and the object and the author” of the work, “the normal situation in which the viewer operated as a kind of voyeur broke down”. Nevertheless, under fire, she shifted focus to more explicitly socio-political work, including a replica dole office playing audio interviews with welfare recipients in Model Institution (1981). Having reintroduced her body in autobiographical installations such as 1983’s Ego Geometria Sum – in which plywood forms representing her physical mass at key life stages were innovatively printed with her photographic image – she abandoned her naked form entirely in 1988, exhausted by the debate.
The making of Piss FlowersCourtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick
3. Her seminal Piss Flowers were about penis envy
Subtler manifestations of the body recur in Chadwick’s later work, including Piss Flowers (1991–92), made with her husband David Notarius in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. There, she used a sheet metal mould to pack dense blocks of snow, which her and Notarius took turns to piss into. Chadwick made casts of the sprays and apertures caused by the urine and inverted them to create bronze towers. She described the work as a “penis-envy farce” – her piss made strong, phallic forms because women’s urine is typically hotter than men’s, and is expressed with greater force. Notarius’s, meanwhile, has a softer, more dispersed effect.
Helen Chadwick, Carcuss, 1986Courtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick
4. She was obsessed with ideas of excess and repulsion
Chadwick was disinterested in traditional hierarchies of materials and regularly worked with organic matter. Her media ranged from snow, food, window cleaner, engine oil, animal carcasses, urine, the cells and form of her body, flowers, chocolate – in Cacao, a huge vat of molten, bubbling liquid – fur, hair, bubble bath and bronze. She often alluded to the notion of the ‘abject’ – the socially reviled and discarded, which was crucial to feminist thought – enacting a push and pull of repulsion and intrigue, mental and physical. For her 1986 ICA show, Of Mutability, she presented Carcass, a vast vitrine filled with her studio neighbours’ food waste and the remains of matter used in other artworks in the show. During the exhibition, gas from the vitrine’s fermenting contents blew its lid off, spraying waste through the galleries.
The residents of Beck RoadCourtesy of Estate of Helen Chadwick
5. She was a mentor to artists Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas
In 1977, Chadwick squatted a run of derelict buildings due for demolition in Beck Road, Hackney with a group of artists. After lengthy campaigning, the building was eventually licensed to the artists by Acme, and Chadwick threw herself into creating a series of affordable home studios. Beck Road residents included Cosey Fanni Tutti, Maureen Paley and Genesis P-Orridge. Chadwick also taught at the RCA, Goldsmiths, Chelsea and Central Saint Martins, and her students included Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Her influence can clearly be seen in the work of artists who became known collectively as the YBAs. Gallacio remembers in the Life’s Pleasures catalogue: “As a woman artist, by being visible, and importantly accessible, she made the idea of being an artist real … Her work was initially beautiful, it seduced you into looking closer, but on second view was alienating, ambiguous.”
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