Your guide to… Krass Journal #3

You might know Krass Journal for their typographically stunning covers, but the quality essays and interviews inside the issues should be treated with no less reverence. Next to conversations with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Hans Ulrich Obrist they manage to pack piercing photo series highlighting issues of the refugee crises.

Issue three is doused in silver and dripping with another custom font by Frame Creative — the gothic, brutalist ‘Sinner’. For a magazine with such a strong, distinctive vision, we thought it best for the co-founding editors Sanja Grozdanic and Tess Martin to introduce their latest issue in their own words.

A Brief History of Work by Shane Levene
Shane is an incredible writer I discovered some years ago via his blog, Memories of a Heroin Head. I read it like a novel, in the opposite direction, whilst working in a high-end boutique on a very quiet Sunday; my vision of a familiar and unfamiliar London interrupted only by the strange sale of a $500+ dress. It was an odd day. The beauty and brutality of Shane’s words shook me. He is a singularly talented writer I am so glad to feature him in Krass. — Sanja

Mother / Death / Acceptance by Raquel Nave & James Hartley
“Mother has no face; she is a thing. A role. A new identity with a lot of rules,” writes model, photographer and actress Raquel Nave, who gave birth to her daughter Eagle at the tender age of 23. She writes about her strands of identity, where they conflict and contradict, where she is restricted, and ultimately, where she finds balance and freedom.

She is photographed first by James Hartley, who succeeds in capturing both her intensity and humour, and then, she photographs herself (below). Her incredible self portraits – ranging from a pregnant nude to a family candid – display her vulnerability, which is ultimately her power (and every onlooker’s power). Grotowski said that in life one must be armed, and in art, disarmed. Raquel is both. — Sanja

A series by Moonassi
Seoul illustrator Daehyun Kim works under the penname ‘Moonassi’. As the artist explains, ‘無’ Moo means nothing or empty and ‘나’ Na is ego or the conscious ‘I’ — the two conjoined means an ‘empty ego that can contain anything without ego’. In his series featured in the issue, Moonassi uses pigment marker on paper, playing with a black and white palette only. While simple in form, the drawings depict illustrative confections of cogent human truths through hushed gesture, which ultimately act as the container of universal sensibilities of isolation, decay, anguish and disparity. — Tess

A conversation with Siri Hustvedt
We talked to novelist, poet and essayist Siri Hustvedt (below). I discovered Siri via The Blazing World, which tells the story of artist Harriet Burden – fierce, caustic, tender and nurturing, she uses the guise of male artists to front her works, due to assumed greater public acclaim. It challenges our faith, as a reader, of the roles and temperaments we ascribe to characters in the arts, based on gender.

So in issue three, our subject centres on gender and polyphonic characters in fiction, and the oblique perception it builds. You will read Hustvedt in her acme; her prodigious intellect mixed with a touch of rancour. By way of example, Hustvedt says, “I continue to find myself with men at dinner parties, who deign to lecture me on subjects upon which I am expert. Not only do I know ten times more than these fellows do, I know a thousand times more than they do.” Hustvedt does not let such condescension stand uncorrected. — Tess

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