In this issue

Tenzing Barshee is a columnist for Starship, and freelance writer and curator who has moved to Berlin while still being quite nomadic. “Le Mérite” is a recent group show he originally conceived of for the exhibition space Seize in Paris, which then travelled to the Berlin based gallery Oracle.

John Beeson is a writer, critic and columnist for Starship. This issue of his column Critic on vacation continues his reflection on the notion of ‘Access’, something he introduced in Starship No 14.

Leo Bersani is a literature theoretician, scholar and writer. The book Intimacies (2008) written together with Adam Phillips was one starting point leading into a possible theme of this issue of Starship.
The text published in Starship is a transcript of an interview originally conducted by Katja Diefenbach in Berkeley in 1995.

Gerry Bibby is a Berlin based artist, columnist, and with the latest issue, also editor for Starship. He is currently involved in the project KLASSENSPRACHEN, whose program has begun in Berlin.

Matt Billings, a Berlin based individual, has gathered a text for us from the headings, tabs, and menus featured on a popular social media site.

Kaucyila Brooke is an artist and faculty member of Cal Arts, Los Angeles. We invited Kaucyila together with her students from the Queer Crit Potluck class: Boz Daid, Tyler Lumm, Josh Winklholfer, Blake Jacobsen, Giselle Morgan, Ace Shi, Louis Coy, Jennifer Green, AJ Strout, and Vickie Aravindhan, to think up recipes without food.

Mercedes Bunz writes about digital media and philosophy of technology and is a regular Starship Columnist. Having been the co-founder and editor of de:Bug, an influential Berlin based magazine, she now lives in London. She writes a blog at http://mercedesbunz.net/, and has recently been thinking a lot about machine learning to be published in her next book about The Internet of Things (Polity Press 2017) which she co-authored with Graham Meikle. 

David Bussel is a writer and curator living in London who has contributed to Starship before. We thought it is a great moment to reach back across the channel and ask for his thoughts again.

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was an American Science Fiction writer who, noticing the prevalence of white male heroes in this genre, began to remedy that blind spot, and in the process, invented a whole new direction in modern Science Fiction. The material presented in this issue is also part of the exhibition: “Octavia Butler: Telling My Stories” at The Huntington Library, Los Angeles (until Aug.7, 2017).

Bonnie Camplin is an artist living in London.
We are featuring a selection of drawings, some of which were recently shown in her show at Camden Arts Center, London, last year.

Eric D. Clark is a DJ and music producer based in Berlin, and a new columnist for Starship.

Jay Chung, a regular columnist for Starship, and his art collaborator Q Takeki Maeda, have been researching the Japanese photographer Teruo Nishiyama for some time now. We were able to print an abridged version of their interview with Nishiyama, along with some selected photographs that together will be included in a forthcoming publication.

Leidy Churchman is an artist living in New York. Giraffe Birth is a new painting realized for the exhibition “Kindly Bent to Ease Us”, curated by Piper Marshall at Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Hans-Christian Dany lives in Hamburg, and writes in the morning.

Katja Diefenbach is a theoretician, and long-term member of the publishing collective b_books. She has worked as a journalist for magazines like Jungle World, and SPEX, where a different version of the interview with Leo Bersani was published in 1995.

Nikola Dietrich is a Berlin based curator and editor of Starship. Last year she curated the exhibition “Adrift on Plastic Island”, that expanded on the insert she put together for Starship No.14, at Gallery Bernhard, Zurich.

Francesca Drechsler has written since the 1980s, mainly for the Neue Züricher Zeitung, and has been a Starship columnist since the beginning.

Martin Ebner is a Berlin based artist, filmmaker, publisher, and a founding editor of Starship. Currently on view is the joint exhibition with Ariane Müller “Swiss Cheese Plant” at Kunstverein Göttingen.

Stephanie Fezer is a Berlin based writer, editor and translator. She was editor for Starship No. 7, the Y (or feminism) issue, and was our columnist on literature ever since. She shares the feminism column entitled “Clouds” with Vera Tollmann.

Julian Göthe is a Berlin based artist and regular apologist for Starship. For this issue he excused himself from producing something specifically for us because he was holidaying in Mallorca.

Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter are artists, both currently on residency in Berlin. They are part of the collective Taylor Macklin, an exhibition space in Zurich. Most of their work, based in performance, is developed together.

KARL HOLMQVIST is an artist, writer and columnist for Starship based in Berlin. This issue features a new poem “Animal Farm,” his two feet can be seen in a photo by

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, an artist duo also based in Berlin.

Cornelia Herfurtner, David Iselin-Ricketts and John Allen MacLean, artists from Berlin, have produced two collage works as an original contribution for this issue. These are the fourth public iteration of the project “Flipping the Stationary Car”, a yet-to-be-released anaglyph film they shot in ’15 and ‘16 with Merle Richter and Lysander Rohringer.

Nadira Husain experiments with painting to question how cultural and economical globalization conditions our relation to images. The Hyder Manzil series uses photos taken in her father’s house in Hyderabad, India, where her family kept some objects over generations, a time that witnessed deep transformations of the country. She introduces a character “Bader Badru” to interact with the anachronic decor in order to appropriate this history and to give it some movement.

Monika Kalinauskaite is a curator currently working for the CAC Reading Room in Vilnius, and writer who regularly contributes to art journals and publications. In her writing she explores the ways in which the imaginary and the absurd bleed into reality and its discourses, erasing the self and making room for new histories of objects, people, phenomena.

Heinz Peter Knes is an artist living in Berlin, and co-editor of the fashion magazine have not, released in Berlin in April. He has selected three of his recent photographs, and has chosen to pair them with a poem by his friend and sometimes collaborator Sokol Ferizi.

Jakob Kolding is a columnist for Starship. For this issue he worked with artist Søren Andreasen on “lllustrations of Notes for Palomar.” Beginning with a month in Rome, their intention was to make illustrations for Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. However, in the end they realized that they found the book to be perfect and that any illustrations would simply distract from this. Notes were taken, and conversations while reading the novel were recorded, replacing the linear structure of the novel with the ambiguous situation of reading and conversation. Rather than illustrating the writing, their contribution illustrates the reading.

The bicycle of Klara Liden has left a trace on the cover of each and every copy of this issue, thereby effectively gifting each magazine buyer with a unique copy.

Michael Krebber recently moved to New York where he developed a series of new drawings that were shown in parallel exhibitions at Daniel Buchholz Gallery, Cologne and Berlin. A few of them are printed in this issue.

Robert McKenzie is a curator and art-adviser based in New York. He is a columnist for Starship and frequently sends notes from New York’s ever fascinating art scene. The conversation he had with the artist Peter Fend sheds light on his influential career.

Robert Meijer is the music columnist for Starship.

Ariane Müller is a Berlin based artist, writer, and a founding editor of Starship. Her column Kinderkommunismus is published in Starship since 1998. She is currently on a residency in Naples to research separatismo, autocosciencia, and unexpected movement.

Christopher Müller is a gallery owner (together with Daniel Buchholz) whose column for Starship focuses on one specific book, text, or prominent character in each issue.

Henrik Olesen is an artist based in Berlin and editor of Starship. He recently had a solo exhibition “The Walk” at The Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Mark von Schlegell is a Cologne based writer and columnist for Starship. We recently participated in the book fair he organizes called “Pure Fyction” at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, where he also teaches the Pure Fiction class.

Dan Solbach is the graphic designer of Starship since 2015.

Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, novelists from the UK, are writing a book together and publishing chapters as they write them. diegogarciabook.tumblr.com

Katrin Trüstedt is a Berlin based writer and literary scholar. In her teaching and academic writing, she deals with questions of law and literature, comedy and modernity, theory and life from Shakespeare to Joyce, Kafka and Arendt. Her next book addresses figures of legal and literary representation and the fact that we cannot do without proxies.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang is an artist based in Amsterdam, and a new columnist for Starship. Her contributions to this issue draw from posts to her Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Scott Cameron Weaver is an independent curator based in New York, and longtime friend of Starship,.

Amelie von Wulffen is a Berlin based artist. She is a regular contributor for Starship, often providing us with comic strips influenced by her daily life.

Florian Zeyfang is a Berlin based artist. He is a columnist for Starship, and writes for the second time about the impact of recent developments in Turkey on Istanbul’s art scene.

We would like to extent our thanks to Jacob Fabricius, Trine Friis Sørensen, and the whole team of Kunsthal Aarhus, where we produced this issue of Starship in April 2017 during our stay for the Timeshare project.

And also thanks to Freddie Checketts from Cabinet Gallery, London, for providing us with the material for Bonnie Camplin; and Dennis Kuhlow from Südblock, Berlin, for providing space to produce Klara Liden’s cover.