MAI: The New Face of Scandinavian Cool ★★★★★★★★★☆ (9/10)
Forget the clichéd Scandi aesthetic of beige cashmere and designer bicycles. DJ Mai Schaarup represents the Denmark tourists rarely see—disciplined, emotionally restrained, fiercely creative and quietly rebellious. From Copenhagen’s underground clubs to solitary studio sessions, she proves that true Nordic cool isn’t performed. It’s simply lived. A sharp portrait of the modern Scandinavian heroine, where fashion, music and authenticity meet without ever asking for attention.
Author: DT 500 MAG LONDON DISPATCH
I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT THE CLITORIS. I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW ABOUT OPEN NON-MONOGAMY AND SEXUAL FLUIDITY. I WANT US TO GET AWAY FROM A POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE. WE NEED TO STOP IDENTIFYING WITH SEXUAL ORIENTATION MODELS, WITH SEX AND GENDER BINARIES, WITH ANYTHING THAT LIMITS AND POLICIES OUR DESIRES
SOHO REZANEJAD: WHEN COPENHAGEN STOPS PLAYING NICE
Scandinavia has mastered polished pop. Soho Rezanejad has little interest in behaving.
Born to Iranian parents in a refugee camp outside Copenhagen, the musician has become one of the Nordic underground’s most compelling voices, blending industrial electronica, cinematic soundscapes and haunting vocals into music that refuses easy definition.
In this exclusive feature, Rezanejad reflects on identity, artistic freedom, exile, collaboration, and the creative communities quietly reshaping Copenhagen’s cultural landscape. Through intimate conversation and striking photography, the feature explores the city beyond its postcard perfection—where independent venues, artists and experimental musicians continue to redefine what Scandinavian music can sound like.
Part cultural portrait, part music profile and part visual essay, this is Copenhagen through the eyes of one of its most fearless artists.
James Lazar Braathen represents a rare position in contemporary Nordic fashion: emotionally maximal, structurally controlled, and deliberately unbothered by Scandinavian branding expectations.
In conversation, he rejects fixed identity in favour of “daydreamed” construction, framing fashion as obsession-driven authorship rather than product design. His silhouettes combine disciplined sensuality with historical romanticism, while his references move between Oslo’s architectural fragments and cinematic European nostalgia.
The result is a designer operating in tension—between elegance and excess, feminism and fantasy, control and creative possession. Not Scandinavian minimalism. Something sharper, stranger, and far less obedient
Benedicte Aubert Ringnes’ “ARNOLD” positions the body as both icon and image-system—where bodybuilding, classical sculpture, and digital collage collapse into a single visual language of control and distortion. Presented at Gallery A, Oslo, the exhibition reworks Arnold Schwarzenegger not as celebrity, but as cultural framework: a figure through which masculinity, symmetry, and spectacle are continuously reframed under post-digital conditions. Drawing on pop art lineage, experimental film, and Photoshop-based construction, Ringnes produces works that resist resolution in favour of layered instability. The result is a sharply contemporary inquiry into how images construct power, and how power is sustained through repetition, editing, and visual myth.
A razor-sharp portrait of Clayton Patterson and the Lower East Side as a battleground of culture, law, and survival — where art was not a career but evidence of a city in freefall and reinvention. From police surveillance and court battles to the rise of gentrification and curated “authenticity,” Patterson’s archive exposes how urban life is documented, controlled, and ultimately rewritten. A story about New York then — and every major city now — asking a brutal question: who owns reality when the streets are no longer affordable to live in, only to consume?
Arthur Sopin & Andreas Rod’s No, It Is Not; Not Always (DT500mag, London) is a sharp post-conceptual rupture disguised as an exhibition — where portraiture, performance, and moving image collapse into controlled instability. Born from a 150+ artist open call, it reframes eccentricity as structure, not exception, and turns identity into a flickering system rather than a fixed subject. Positioned between Venice Biennale discourse and post-internet fatigue, it doesn’t explain the contemporary condition — it destabilises it, elegantly and without apology.
” IS IT IMPORTANT TO BE A SEER? MAKE ONESELF A SEER? THE ARTIST BECOMES A SEER THROUGH A LONG, BOUNDLESS AND REASONED EXPLOSION OF ALL THE SENSES. ALL SHAPES OF LOVE SUFFERING AND ALL KINDS OF MADNESS. HE SEARCHES HIMSELF, HE EXHAUSTS ALL POISONS IN HIMSELF, TO PURE HIS UNIQUE QUINTESSENCES. A HEAVY TORTURE WHERE HE BECOMES AMONG ALL MEN THE GREAT PATIENT, THE GREAT CRIMINAL, THE GREAT ACCUSED ONE -AND THE SUPREME SCHOLAR! THUS HE REACHES THE UNKNOWN!… -THE ARTIST, A THIEF OF FIRE! “
” My best talent is turning everything into a light game. I approach everything I do with a sense of playfulness. I play games, even in projects that demand a lot of energy and effort. I decided to try to sustain our playful quality when we were kids – to avoid limiting myself and use my imagination freely. We must never forget how to play: So many great things can come out!”
Jo Bentdal’s Common Sensibility treats photography as a pressure system rather than a document—where images refuse resolution, meaning is delayed, and perception itself becomes unstable. Positioned between physics, philosophy, and contemporary image culture, the work dismantles the expectation that photographs should explain the world, insisting instead on a slower, more unsettling form of looking.
CREEPER CREEPER BY DAMEHT. NYC
” A NEW VIDEO FOR THEIR SINGLE “CREEPER CREEPER” AND IT’S A CAMPY BLAST. TAKING CULTURAL HINTS FROM THE LIKES OF STEVE STRANGE, SOO THE CAT WOMAN AND NEW ROMANTICISM, THE VIDEO IS A VISUAL TREAT AND AN APPROPRIATE ODE FOR A BAND KNOWN BEST FOR THEIR SECRET SHOWS.” NYLON MAGAZINE
Anthony Lister, the celebrated Australian painter and installation artist known for his provocative blend of high and lowbrow culture, is set to unveil his latest body of work in a highly anticipated exhibition in Sydney. Lister’s artistry transcends conventional boundaries, drawing inspiration from street art, expressionism, and contemporary youth culture. His work has garnered international acclaim, with solo exhibitions across Australia, the United States, Europe, and the UK.
Forget nostalgia. Mariann Rosa returns with a riot of distorted pop, punk attitude and fearless reinvention—a new album that proves the wildest artists never really fit the algorithm.
Forget dopamine pop. Bastian Emil’s solo debut is all velvet darkness and existential glamour—a soundtrack for those who find beauty in the crash rather than the finish line.
Stefan has spent a lifetime looking at the world through the frame of a camera—but insists photography was never really about images. It was always about questions. In this wide-ranging conversation, the veteran photojournalist reflects on philosophy, technology and the unsettling speed at which truth itself is being rewritten. From the ethics of artificial intelligence to the fragility of perception in an image-saturated age, he argues that the real crisis is not information overload, but the erosion of critical thinking. Neither utopian nor dystopian, his view of the future is disarmingly simple: technology is neutral—people are not.
Cover Teaser
Frédéric Chaubin doesn’t photograph buildings—he photographs the dreams they were built to contain. Between forgotten monuments, cinematic landscapes and the poetry of concrete, the French image-maker reveals why architecture remains one of fashion’s most enduring sources of fantasy.
IDENTIFY YOURSELF / STELLA MWANGI. OSLO
http:// STELLA MWANGI HERE’S HER NEW SECOND RECORD: “IDENTIFY YOURSELF” A MESSAGE: -SELF DISCOVERY, WHERE SHE WRITES ABOUT […]
ON FRIDAY THE 17TH APRIL, THE NORWEGIAN CLIMATE- AND ENVIRONMENTAL MINISTER TINE SUNDTOFT GAVE HER APPROVAL FOR A PROJECT WHERE ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF MINING TAILINGS WILL BE DEPOSITED IN THE FØRDE FJORD.
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