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Abstractions – Staging – Esse

Summary

Image de la couverture du numéro Esse 114 Abstractions.

114

Abstractions

Spring Summer 2025

Yet what about abstraction today? Long confined to formalist and self-referential imperatives, abstraction has gradually freed itself from the modernism yolk to recapture its evocative power. This issue proposes to turn away from the dogma of Abstraction as a historical genre to consider its various plastic and semantic avenues. In this invitation to explore abstractions, we wish to re-establish a dialogue between content and form, between the political and the poetic, by engaging with works that evoke reality differently. Whether they are qualified as abstract, non-figurative, or non-objective, these works certainly tell us stories.

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Image de la couverture du numéro Esse 116 Immersion

Current Issue

Immersion

Winter 2026

This issue is interested in all forms of immersion in contemporary art. How are artists critically engaging with immersive technologies? Conversely, what kinds of practices are challenging technology in their pursuit of immersion? How are these experiences breaking down the boundaries between spectator, body, and art? We put forward proposals that rely on listening and sustained attention rather than on amplification and sensory overload – works using devices that are sometimes relatively simple and non-invasive, sometimes a little more elaborate, but in which participation is, with a few nuances, neither passive nor devoid of critical thinking.

Cover: doux soft club
bleu de lieu, 2023-2024.
Photo: Cléo Sjölander, courtesy of the artists

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