Editorial Picks: Freya Dean
The Hinterland editorial team share some of their cultural highlights.
After the wasteland years of the pandemic, I’ve continued to feel something close to desperation to visit as many museums and galleries as I can. Even more than my usual piles of reading, that’s what has defined the last 18 months of my leisure time. A brief, recent survey:
MK Gallery’s gorgeously curated presentation of Saul Leiter’s photography was time travel at its best; capturing a New York that no longer exists but that is possible to visit through his lens. The accompanying catalogue All About Saul Leiter published by Thames & Hudson is worth poring over. I’m now keeping a keen eye on upcoming exhibitions at MK; next up is Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour, opening 19 October.
At the Tate Modern’s Expressionists show it felt like it was possible to see a blaze of so many brilliant minds chasing across the walls in works that often become disturbing when set (as this shows ensures) in their proper historical context of the early 1900s. I am going back for a second jolt before the show ends on 20 October.
Another gem is not so much a show as an experience: the Boijmans Depot in Rotterdam. Mad and brilliant, it is ‘the world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility.’ Go for the building itself, and the treasures within. I had a spine tingling moment when I walked into the 3rd floor gallery and encountered Carel Fabritius’ self-portrait head on – and then discovered I could walk around the back of the canvas and see Fabritius’ workings on the reverse. Art is displayed here like nowhere else.
Alongside this feasting on visual art, I’ve just finished reading Janet Malcolm’s pictographic memoir (is that a term? It is now!) Still Pictures; The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden; Parade by Rachel Cusk; and (Pulitzer Prize-winner) The Years by Annie Ernaux – a mesmeric delve in and through one woman’s life bookended by WW2 and contemporary events. So good that for most writers it’s likely to feel despair-inducing in its brilliance. Read it all the same!
Freya Dean is of Dutch-British descent; one of the founders of Hinterland, she combines writing and editorial work with a career in teaching English, currently at a state-funded secondary school in Cambridgeshire. Her poetry and non-fiction has featured in Visual Verse, The Real Story, Hinterland and UEA's Anthology series. She has been the recipient of UEA's Lorna Sage Award and an Elizabeth Kostova Foundation finalist.