We seem to pass through eras faster than we can name them, moving from one aesthetic threshold to the next long before we’ve had time to understand the last. In this continual churn, labels dissolve almost as soon as they appear, leaving us suspended in a state of cultural overexposure, where every “new wave” is both urgent and already outdated. “The z issue” emerges from this condition of perpetual motion: a moment to consider how art is shaped when time feels accelerated, identities feel fluid, and generational markers blur at the edges. Rather than searching for a definitive term to encapsulate the present, we turned to the artists who are living it most intensely—those under the age of thirty whose practices reveal an era not defined by a singular style but by a restless negotiation between authenticity and sacrifice, solitude and collaboration, the physical and the digital. Their work does not describe the times; it metabolizes them. 

The winter issue gathers five cover stories that chart the shifting textures of a generation in motion. Rene Matić — photographed by Benedict Brink in their studio at Studio Voltaire in London, dressed in Kiko Kostadinov — joins Bianca Stoppani in a conversation in which love, memory, and disruption thread through reflections on belonging and faith. From the ferocity of This Is England to tender “beyond repair” Black dolls and self-portraits, they discuss how Matić turns political fracture into a search for the closest thing to freedom. Josiane M. H. Pozi, who created a new artwork titled in my home, in my studio, for flash art! (2025) for the occasion, moves between Nasra Abdullahi’s lucid review of her show at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, and the bedroom play-script she performs with her sister Emily, until their voices merge into a single consciousness — a choreography of getting ready, in which clutter becomes ritual and attention becomes devotion. In New York, Olivia van Kuiken — photographed by Ian Kenneth Bird and wearing New Balance — anchors her cover story within P. Eldridge’s exploration of how bodies, seams, and multiplied limbs smuggle duration into stillness. Through refusal, mess, and provisional meaning, Eldridge traces an ethics of looking where delay becomes the real timekeeper. Olivia Kan-Sperling, captured by Diane Severin Nguyen in New York wearing Commission, meets psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster on the shared terrain of modernism and psychoanalysis: dissolving narratives, unstable identities, and the hysteric’s slippery relation to language. Calling her writing practice “hysteric literature,” Kan-Sperling turns bad English, Orientalist kitsch, and fanfic desire into tools of self-sabotage and revelation, exposing the traps of authorship and representation. The final cover features Tasneem Sarkez — photographed by David Brandon Geeting in her New York studio, wearing Kuboraum eyewear and Stone Island — whom Leo Cocar frames as an artist who treats images like linguistic seeds: compressed objects and portraits behaving as morphemes of cultural meaning. Working in the gaps of translation shaped by her Libyan heritage and the Arab diaspora, Sarkez lets drabness flicker between specify and universality, withholding and revealing in equal measure.
 
Also in this issue: a drifting exchange of voicemails between alfatih and Jazmina Figueroa maps how travel, play, and machine systems structure his sensory, strategic approach to art making. Ruoru Mou speaks to Olivia Aherne about how she transforms factory waste, family remnants, and bureaucratic residue into shifting systems of value, care, and desire, revealing how bodies and labor are continually reimagined. In conversation with Marie Catalano, Megan Mi-Ai Lee unpacks replicas, “failed dupes,” and Vegas-inflicted installations that expose the fragile architectures of fantasy and deception — why we keep believing even when the illusion is doomed to break. Matthew Lawson Garrett’s essay elucidates how Ruofan Chen’s encounters with arctic exposure, particulate air, and the slow violence of labor environments shape a practice preoccupied with dust, shelter, and breath as interlocking forces of survival. Tommy Xie and Moa Jegnell explore how Xie’s melancholic, erotically charged figurations recast vulnerability as strategic soft power, building queer cosmologies where desire, violence, and tenderness coexist. Mateus Nunes traces davi de jesus do nascimento’s river-born poetics — shaped by loss, lineage, and sedimented memories — as they merge language, water, and ancestry into one continuous, trembling current. A visual essay by Zora Sicher is introduced by Rose Higham-Stainton, who traces how her photographs reimagine intimacy as a fluid, queer, and ever-circulating state of being.

In her latest episode for Unpack / Reveal / Unleash, Margaret Kross follows how Siyi Li turns cringe, cliché, and lo-fi digital feeling into a quietly radical inquiry into connection and sincerity in an image-saturated world. The new installment of Studio Scene brings Michela Ceruti into Adam Patrick Grant’s London studio, where she traces how his practice transforms photographic fragments of urban life into tender, ambiguous paintings that hold presence and disappearance in the same breath. This issue’s city focus turns to Mexico City: Luis Ortega Govela reflects on a metropolis built atop a drained lake, tracing colonial hydrological violence, infrastructural fragility, gentrification, and cultural memory to reveal a city perpetually oscillating between water, absence, and survival.

The issue also includes a special visual essay by Versace, featuring Tyrone Lebon’s photographs and a text by Hugo Bausch Belbachir, reflecting on how Dario Vitale restored the house’s emotionally charged glamour through archival rigor, intellectual depth, and subtle eroticism.