Ex-Plain, Author at Ex-Plain

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80s Youth Culture in a Dying English Industrial Town

Between 1979 and 1989, photographer Christopher John Ball documented the people of Blackburn, the Lancashire industrial town that shaped his…

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In the postwar era, pharmaceutical print advertising, especially for psychiatric drugs, was blunt, graphic, and often disturbing, using fear and…

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Moving to West Berlin, David Bowie and Iggy Pop found unexpected inspiration in German Expressionism, most notably in the form…

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The version of romanticism truly unique to the 21st century experience may have already come from a lesser-known Swedish artist…

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Beginning the 80s, Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki has quietly built one of the most revealing visual records of London street…

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In the summer of 1981, Japanese photographer Joji Hashiguchi left Tokyo on a self-directed journey through Liverpool, London, Nuremberg, West…

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During the Cold War, access to music in the Soviet Union was tightly restricted by state censorship. Despite the risks,…

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Founded in 2018, COMRADE Gallery has grown into one of the most compelling new archives of Eastern Bloc visual design.…

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London-based artist Louis Pohl Koseda is emerging as one of the most distinctive chroniclers of contemporary British life. His intricate,…

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Art collector Désiré Feuerle has spent a lifetime dissolving the boundaries between ancient and contemporary Asian art. Having transformed an…