A sense of transformation, rebellion, hope, and play suffuses the multifarious art of Nicola L. (b. 1932, Morocco; d. 2018, US) in ways that make it ever more relevant in our present times. The exhibition invites new lines of inquiry into her five-decade-long experimentation with painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, performance, and film.

In our conversation, the French architect talks about the innovative vision at the core of this particular design. Nouvel reflects on the tension between permanence and mutability, speaks of his notion of the “plasticity” of the contemporary museum space, and of architecture as an act of quietly radical experimentation. 

The Italian-born and Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba makes work that investigates the conceptual and material qualities of film in idiosyncratic ways. Rail Editor-at-Large Francesca Pietropaolo met with Barba over Zoom as she took a pause from her preparing her solo show The Ocean of One’s Pause at MoMA. In their conversation, the artist reflected on time, space, inscriptions, the flickering moment of film, sound, science, poetry, the invisible, collaboration, and anarchism.  

Following the opening of his solo exhibition at Galleria Lia Rumma, Haim Steinbach sat down with art historian and curator Francesca Pietropaolo to discuss—among other things—art as “display,” the object, language, the vernacular, the everyday, architecture, social exchange, the digital, and music. What follows is the edited version of a much longer conversation.