About

Tangents is an English-language online review platform focused on writing about the Dutch art scene — on what is happening both within the borders of the Netherlands and about Dutch-based artists presenting work beyond them. Born from a frustration with the prevalence of objectivity and imposing house styles in the majority of art writing commissioned by leading platforms, Tangents instead encourages contributors to approach criticism from within the specificities and focuses of their own writing practice. Tangents publishes a monthly review written by a writer from our stable of permanent contributors, who each takes a turn to write and (lightly) edit another's work.

Editors:

Becket Flannery

Becket Flannery is an Amsterdam-based writer and artists who has written texts responding to the work of Marina Pinsky, E.T. Wang, Philipp Gufler, Alison Yip, and Kelly Akashi among others. His writings inhabit the textual spaces which frame and mediate exhibition spaces, often using these "paratextual" fields for experimental writing. He has been commissioned by Shimmer (Rotterdam, NL), S.M.A.K. (Ghent, BE), If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, NL), and Revue Initiales (Lyon, FR) among others. In addition to writing, he exhibits his artworks and installations under the name Becket MWN.

Annie Goodner

Annie Goodner is a writer, critic and educator living in Amsterdam. She teaches theory and writing to design students at the University of the Arts, Arnhem, and frequently contributes to the international art press.

Isabelle Sully

Isabelle Sully is an artist, writer and curator. Originally from Melbourne, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-curator of Playbill and assistant director-curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam.

Contributors:

Artun Alaska Arasli

Artun Alaska Arasli is an artist and writer based in Amsterdam. Presentations of his work include Bird-Time, bologna.cc, Amsterdam; Prose, Kantine, Brussels; Cardena: Warming Up, Rozenstraat, Amsterdam; Porcupine, Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht; The Beauty Commission, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. His texts have been published in Le Chauffage, nY, Interjection Calendar (Montez Press). Since 2017 he has co-authored theater plays for i.a. NTGent, Toneelgroep Oostpol, and Het Zuidelijk Toneel.

Amelia Groom

Amelia Groom is a writer whose current research looks at the art and antifascist activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through the lenses of queer and trans ecologies. As part of the Afterall One Work series, Groom published a book on the Marsh Ruins (1981), a swampy, environmental sculpture by the artist Beverly Buchanan, who made secretive and ruinous monuments to Black history in the Deep South of the US. Other recent publications include essays on: mud and decolonial ecologies; on Mariah Carey’s refusal to acknowledge time; on Scheherazade and the possibilities of “oblique parrhesia”; on queer, feminist and antiracist practices of gossip and “grapevine epistemologies”; and (co-authored with M. Ty) on the aesthetics and politics of rust. Together with Rachael Rakes, Groom co-edited the online journal No Linear Fucking Time (published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht). Groom’s work often returns to questions of time: its undercurrents, its blockages and trickling detours, and the possibilities for its re-routing.

Ash Kilmartin

Taylor LeMelle

…works as a curator (of sorts) and certainly as a writer of ante-modern and anti-modern criticism; off-kilter catalog essays and more artistic subgenres of fiction; as an editor and publisher of several collections of science fantasy, theory and poetry; as a researcher into plants, property and physical experience—bodies, the social kind with reluctance, and the flesh kind with enthusiasm— cultivating perception and proprioception through experimentation.

…is one of several co-directors of London-based workers cooperative not/nowhere, whose primary occupation is with building a just infrastructure for artistic practice via the circulation and distribution of 8mm and 16mm moving image formats.

Previous presentations include: Deviant Research, Van Abbe Museum (cur. Yolande van der Heide, N Aikens); Research Fellowship (org. F Dodzan/A Groten), Sandberg Instituut; Amant Foundation Residency, Brooklyn (cur. J Berrios); Text Exercises, Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (cur. Richard Birkett); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (cur. Amanprit Sandhu).

Recent Writing: Anthea Hamilton: Mash Up, Triangle Books; Otobong Nkanga: Unearthed, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Renee Green: Inevitable Distances, Hatje Cantz; DNA6: Carrier Bag Fiction, Spector Books.

Christy Eóin O’Beirne

Christy Eóin O’Beirne is a curator and writer whose work investigates fragmentation, land, shibboleth, mourning and decay. O'Beirne's research unearths the debris of displacement and explores the ways in which intergenerational colonial trauma is inscribed into bodies, bogs and borderlands.

Temra Pavlović

Temra Pavlovic is an artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam with a background in experimental filmmaking and media studies.

Lou Vives

Lou Vives works with the rehearsal as a zone of transition. Through writing, performance, and drawings, they explore the intersection of memory, pop culture, and authorship. In 2022, they graduated from the Moving Image Department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He has presented work in various institutions and contexts such as Arti et Amicitiae, Perdu, Garage Noord (Amsterdam); La Casa Encendida, Matadero (Madrid); Fundació Miró (Barcelona); ICA London, and Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon)

Nadia de Vries

Nadia de Vries is a poet and cultural critic. Her books include Know Thy Audience (2023), I Failed to Swoon (2021), and Dark Hour (2018). Her poems have been featured in the European Review of Books, The Poetry Review, and Hotel, among others. She also writes fiction in Dutch.

Dido VW

Dido VW is an artist and writer with a fascination for language and spatiality. Her work plays with the concepts of order, hierarchy, truth and their absence.