PostPostPost #2
150 x 225 mm, 600+ pages (1.5kg!)
Los Angeles and Dubai
Annual
First published in 2023
Editors: Al Hassan Elwan and Ruby Al-Sweel
Creative director: Al Hassan Elwan
Design: Jake Buckley and Meara Withe
Launched in 2023, PostPostPost is a heavyweight annual featuring cultural critique that responds to our current (post-post-postmodern) media landscape. Initially marketed as a once in a century publication, this expanded sophomore edition, themed ‘Real’, returns just three years later—providing further proof of its status as a suitably unpredictable zeitgeist barometer for our ever-shifting world. Interestingly, both editors cite personal bouts of illness as a driving force behind its premature return, a reminder of their humanity that runs counter to the digital acceleration the publication seeks to document.
Featuring a colossal 666 pages—the pop cultural symbolism of which is not lost on us—inside readers will find essays, interviews, and images from over 60 international contributors, combining ‘contemporary critique and brainrot theory’. Nestled at the centre of the issue is a 28-page cover story on and by Australian performance artist and internet personality Bianca Censori—known for her exhaustively documented and controversial romantic relationship with Kanye West—in which she responds to the team’s request for an interview with a self-reflexive musing on the function of interviews in flattening identities, accompanied by an uncanny series of progressively digitally-rendered headshots.
Elsewhere, Aidan Walker makes a case for the mobilising potential of the ‘citizen-led communities, niche subcultures, and creators’ behind the widespread circulation of internet phenomenons such as ‘67’ and ‘Tung Tung Tung Sahor’, positioning ‘the process that brought Tung Tung Tung Sahor from shitpost to real-life toy’ as the same process by which a revolutionary movement could be realised. And, Shadeh Kavousian crowns Addison Rae ‘the heroine of reality’.
Plus, contributions from Jack Self, Beck Dawson, Dilara Findikoglu, Sarah Chekfa, Stephanie LaCava, Victor Unwin, and more.