mono.kultur #43
The latest issue of occasional interview magazine mono.kultur has been out a while but has only just arrived in London. Featuring a lengthy interview with Kuwait-based musician/artist Fatima Al Qadiri, the magazine arrives in the familiar A5 size with seemingly little of the special effects and format design we’ve come to expect.
Designed by Berlin studio Fuchs Borst, the interview proceeds simply, set in a plain and monochrome Times New Roman (above). Run through a few of these dense pages and you hit the glossy central image section, where the fun begins. The 16 pages feature Al Qadiri’s younger sister posing in their father’s clothes in his ‘hunting room,’ a series of photographs (below) first published under the title ‘Bored 1997.’
These photographs are embellished with ‘stickers’ from another of Al Qadiri’s projects, stills from a 2012 video project . A subtle creative touch, these additional images are fixed to the pages using static electricity. In a satisfyingly tactile manner, they can be peeled off and replaced (below).
It's a really clever use of a commercial technique; the peel-off images are printed on a special acetate substrate called Stafix, generally used for point of sale and marketing purposes. It’s a typically astute appropriation of a production technique by mono.kultur, which always seems to be able to spot another neat idea for its issues. We love a bit of print experimentation, and for that reason this issue is our Magazine of the Week.