Somesuch Stories 8 (2024)17 Images
The latest issue of Somesuch Stories is “intense”, admits its editor Suze Olbrich. Now in its eighth year, the provocative annual arts journal’s latest issue is composed of several series by artists and photographers alongside works of poetry and short fiction which all speak to the theme ‘tension’. Including contributions from visual artists Elsa Rouy and Nanténé Traoré, photographer and poet Caleb Femi, and acclaimed novelist Rita Bullwinkel, the publication is fraught with tension manifesting in all its myriad forms. While carefully selecting work that will resonate “experientially, culturally and socially” with a wide audience, an important guiding principle for Olbrich is humour. “The darker, the better,” she says. “Every issue needs at least one ‘what the actual fuck’ moment. This one has a fair few.”
By Olbrich’s own admission, this issue is “breathless” – rather than easing the viewer in, it launches into its exploration of tension with Birk Thomassen’s explicit photo story, Please. The opening page is a close up shot of hands throttling a compliant neck; anonymous head flung back in the throes of asphyxiation. From that point on, says Olbrich, it “just gets weirder, featuring mystery, mayhem, madness, murder and more”.
Thomassen’s own relationship with tension is one that has informed his life as well as his practice as a photographer. “I think this word, ‘tension’, carries a lot of different meanings for almost every queer person. First of all, growing up queer, you are the tension. You are the tension in a room full of cis straight people, at Christmas with your family, in your classroom at school, in the showers after PE class and even among your friends and peers when they start discussing love and sexuality,” the Danish-born photographer tells Dazed. “All of us have had to deal with this somehow. Perhaps we exaggerate it and make it part of our identity to be in constant opposition. Maybe we try to defuse it with humour, sarcasm and irony. Or we just assimilate and try our best to suppress ourselves and hide. The tension, however, does not go away. Instead it becomes something we have to deal with internally.”
Meanwhile, British painter Elsa Rouy’s series Mortal Coil oscillates between tender vulnerability and vaguely unsettling. ”My work is filled with tension,” she tells Dazed. Often drawn to depictions of bodies, she explains, “I’m interested in the subtleties of bodily expression and how it can change the narrative between figures, or the figure and the onlooker.” Here, as elsewhere, the work features tangible, visceral elements of corporeality, “hair, pubic hair, blood and eyes… and I quite like teeth.” While the individual paintings in the series are different, they each fulfil Rouy’s intention: “I simply wanted all of them to stir up slight unease, I don’t want the viewer to be bored.”
Artist Elio Mercer’s series Bucking Broncos is subtler than some of the more explicit imagery in this issue, but nonetheless subversive in its intent. Taking inspiration from the pageantry of hypermasculinity, the British-born, Copenhagen-based artist’s paintings recall Tom of Finland in their exploration of masculine archetypes. Here, Mercer’s depictions of cowboys explore the status of this potent cultural signifier. “I have been really drawn to the grey area of queerness and masculinity that can be played with, and the quite subversive masculine tropes of loneliness and tenderness that I took from it,” Mercer explains. “I find myself always returning to masculinity and how that can be expressed aesthetically, either figuratively or through materiality. Within portraits the friction living within the intimacy depicted points towards the erotic, while also examining the sexualised gaze. It asks what we see when we look upon male intimacy and tenderness.”
Looking through the pages of Somesuch Stories, what keeps returning to me is Olbrich’s thoughts on tension. Ostensibly, it’s a force generated between two or more oppositional states, ideologies, desires, belief systems, people, things. In this way, it’s an agency that permeates so many aspects of our lives, from the minutinae of daily experience to global conflict. “I read a New Yorker interview with Justin Torres about Blackouts, where he discussed how interest is sustained by the tension between exposure and concealment, and that felt like an extremely rich seam to mine.” She concludes, “Once I started seriously contemplating tension as an issue theme, its inherent instability and volatility as both a motivating factor for, and anticipatory state embedded into, every single encounter, relationship and situation, from the incredibly personal to the pan-global rendered it irresistible.”
Take a look at the gallery above for a closer look. Somesuch Stories 8 is available to order here now and an exhibition accompanying the launch is running until October 24 (11am-5pm, Mon-Thurs) at Have A Butchers, Dalston.