Fall 2025 Issue
In this ongoing series the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment of 2025, we are honored to present Marina Tabassum, the architect behind this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London, A Capsule in Time.
Hans Ulrich ObristWhat is your unrealized project?
Marina TabassumA studio and a workshop, for the longest time, till I gave up. Now it’s a farmhouse where I can become a farmer.
HUOWhat role does chance play?
MT50 percent, if I act on it. 0 percent, if I don’t.
HUOWhat keeps you coming back to the studio?
MTA sense of purpose that defines my existence.
HUOThe future is . . . ?
MTWaking up in the morning to face the day.
HUODo you write poems?
MTWith bricks . . . I try.
HUOHow would you like to die?
MTWith an awareness of death—as my lived life flashes by.
HUOYour favorite color?
MTThe dusk in a clear sky.
HUOHas the computer changed the way you work?
MTPartly. In a good way. With caution. Not to lose my ability to think.
HUODo you have rituals?
MTWhen my mind goes wild, I meditate for a sense of calm.
HUOIs the mirror broken?
MTNo, not yet. But there’s a crack.
Marina Tabassum: A Capsule in Time, Serpentine Pavilion, London, June 6–October 26, 2025
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell
Marina Tabassum is an acclaimed architect and educator who has received numerous international recognitions for her contributions to the field of architecture. Before founding Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2005, Tabassum was a founding partner, with Kashef Chowdhury, of the Dhaka-based firm URBANA between 1995 and 2005. Her practice remains consciously contained in size, undertaking a limited number of projects annually and prioritizing climate, context, culture, and history. Tabassum is a professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She held the Norman Foster Chair at Yale University in 2023 and has taught as a visiting professor at numerous universities. In 2024, Tabassum was included in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.”
On the eve of ECHOES FROM COPELAND, an exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York, Nathaniel Mary Quinn met with Ashley Stewart Rödder to discuss the genesis of the works he’s been creating, their literary origins, and his evolving approach to the practices—and intersections—of painting and drawing.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas spoke with artist, writer, and podcaster Joshua Citarella inside Kulendran Thomas’s exhibition Peace Core at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. The pair discussed the makings and meanings of the exhibition, which juxtaposed a video work of infinite duration that continually remixes and reedits American television footage from the morning of September 11, 2001, with six expressionistic paintings based on AI-generated images depicting a largely undocumented massacre in Sri Lanka in 2009, perpetrated in the wake of the “war on terror.”
Ahead of her exhibition over the summer at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jenny Saville met with the novelist Douglas Stuart to discuss Glasgow, the beauty and blemishes of bodies, and their respective creative processes.
Maximiliane Leuschner speaks with South Africa’s most-sought-after emerging choreographer, Mthuthuzeli November.
The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Kernan narrates the wild turns in the poet’s life with great skill, from his peripatetic youth, through his years in the influential circle of W. H. Auden, on to his critical friendships with poets and artists such as John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and Fairfield Porter. Here Raymond Foye, a friend of Schuyler’s (and the poet’s literary executor), talks with Kernan about the genesis of the project and some of the breakthroughs and challenges he encountered in its construction.
A dedicated gardener and writer, Olivia Laing has authored two books on the subject: The Garden Against Time and A Garden Manifesto. Here, Salomé Gómez-Upegui speaks with Laing about the wisdom they’ve gained from working on these books and how writing has shaped their understanding of the ever-evolving relationship between gardens and the art world.
Tory Burch, chairman and chief creative officer at her namesake brand, which she launched in 2004, met with the Quarterly’s Derek C. Blasberg this past June. The two discussed Burch’s Fall/Winter 2025 runway show at the Museum of Modern Art, her collaboration with Rashid Johnson and Janicza Bravo for the 2025 Met Gala, early encounters with art and its lasting effects on her process, and the ethical core of her approach to good business.
Carlos Valladares talks with filmmaker Abel Ferrara about Turn in the Wound, Ferrara’s recent documentary exploring the experience of art and the war in Ukraine.
For Art Basel 2025, the fair has commissioned Katharina Grosse to create CHOIR, a large-scale, site-responsive painting for the Messeplatz Project. The curator for the project, Natalia Grabowska, met with Grosse in her studio in Berlin ahead of the work’s creation to talk through the process; Grosse’s approach to the specifics of the Messeplatz’s architecture; and the importance of unscripted encounters.
Architect Carlo Ratti has long worked at the crossroads of technology, design, and urban planning to see how digital tools can help create smarter cities. On the occasion of Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.—the Venice Architecture Biennale he curated, on view until November 23, 2025—Bartolomeo Sala asks him about the ideas driving his curatorship, what he means by architecture of adaptation in the face of climate change, and how different types of intelligence—natural, artificial, and collective—will be shaping the cities of the future.
Péjú Oshin visits Christine Checinska, senior curator of African and diaspora textiles and fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum. From her London office, Checinska shares her curatorial insights into the international traveling exhibition Africa Fashion, which originated at the V&A, and the Costume Institute’s current show Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The conversation delves into notions of diaspora, memory, homecoming, and the freedoms of being “anti-disciplinary.”
In 1990, postmodern dance pioneer Molissa Fenley performed Bardo at Keith Haring’s funeral. She created the piece as an homage to the artist and the creative friendship that he and Fenley had developed since they first met in Haring’s hometown of Kutztown, Pennsylvania. In honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary of Haring’s passing and with the support of the New York City AIDS Memorial, Fenley restaged the work with an ensemble cast on May 4, 2025, at the LGBT Community Center. Here, Fenley speaks with Tess Michaelson about the passage of time, the truthfulness of performance, and the expansion of empathic experience.