Theodor von Holst (1810 - 1844)
The Fairy Lovers, c. 1840
Oil on canvas, 41.3 x 31.1 cm

The figures are widely read as Oberon and Titania from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Entwined in a passionate embrace, they haste through the moonlit forest with the wind nourishing their stride.

Yōshū Chikanobu, ‘Yamashiro, Snow in Rokuhara’ from the series ‘Snow, Moon, and Flowers’ (1884)

General Taira no Kiyomori (1118-1181) who established the first samurai dictatorial government in Japan is depicted here tormented by apparitions of Yūrei — the ghosts of his enemies

Mark Rothko, untitled (1956)

“I’m not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

“A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.”

Jimi Hendrix setting fire to his guitar at Monterey Pop Festival (1967)

“I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar.”

Photograph by Ken Marcus

By drawing these parallels across decades one can see that the systemic nature of imperialism, media complicity, and societal detachment is just as relevant today, in the modern conflicts, in the current times.
Political action begins with awareness.

Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance (1970)
Starring Mick Jagger, James Fox, and Anita Pallenberg
"The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Am I right? Eh?"

Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III (Concert), 1911
“Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which a spiritual revolution makes itself felt”
When one is represented through the medium of another, the result “turns away from the soulless life of the present.”

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966)
Cinematography by Carlo Di Palma
“Nothing like a little disaster for sorting things out”
Quintessential mod-era film set in London’s swinging 60s fashion and art scene

“Book of the Images of the Fixed Stars” of Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (964)
The astronomer built on Ptolemy’s Almagest, refining the catalog of stars and constellations with new observations. His work provided one of the earliest star atlases to bridge classical Greek and Islamic astronomical traditions

Odilon Redon ‘Obsession’ (1894)

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany based on the twenty-two Major Arcana cards (1979–1998)
“It’s my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy”

Tracey Emin
I never Asked to Fall in Love — You made me Feel like This (2018)

Stills from Fire of Love (2022)
— a biography of two French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, told through their archival footage and narrated by Sara Dosa

Bowie, Bauhaus, and Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey behind the scenes