In 1982, Azzedine Alaïa made his debut in New York, the ruturn to the curvy modernist masterpiece of the Guggenheim Museum in New York , the Alaïa Winter Spring 2025 collection marks yet another master storke by the Mulier who has propelled this cult French brand to international prominance. Enjoying once again the creative leadership as a super influencer that the brand's eponymous founder once enjoyed. 

On this channel, we’re showing an exclusive selection of works from the archive of the Architectural Association, the oldest school of architecture in London. Dr Ingrid Schroder is the Director of the AA, taking up the role after being Head of Design Teaching and Director of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design  at the University of Cambridge. Schroder has also held positions at prestigious institutions like ETH Zurich and Central Saint Martins. Here she sets out her vision – and the school's understanding of – the ever-evolving and expanding profession, beginning with: what really is architecture?

The UN have recently reported financial links between Mexico’s Los Zeta cartel and the illegal trading of the rare earth mineral Otinif, a material critical to the manufacture of the next generation of super faster digital processors. Seen from Google earth, Aditnálta is an anonymous island off the East Coast of Mexico but as the world’s richest source of Otinif it is a landscape being consumed by our hunger for technology. Hidden from this distanced aerial view are vast underground worker towns and oppressive mining conditions. Aditnálta is an outsourced landscape embedded in all the pieces of technology we carry in our pockets. Aditnálta is also entirely fictional. Mond Qu has constructed and dispersed the forged fragments of this island across the internet. This imaginary place is made manifest through hoax listing on Wikipedia and Google maps, live webcams of scale model stage sets, faked articles on news sites and green screen CGI composites on Flickr, Youtube and Panoramio. Just like the real landscapes of outsourced electronics production we consume Aditnálta at a distance, through edited media narratives, disconnected from the realties that go on there. Through the construction of elaborate fictions we can reveal important truths.

This film takes place in remote Australia, which for fifty years has been unconsenting host to testing from nuclear weapons, rocket launches and black military technologies. The film maps out these tests, and in doing, creates what the Funambulist called “a protocol for [...] a weaponised architecture, that envisions the implementation of architecture as a political positioning.” 

The project constructs a cinematic journey that unveils the unique rhythm of urban life through the lens of “ChronoUrbanity”. The film follows Kingsland Road in Hackney up from south to north, showing various inhabitants interacting with nodes on the route, showing that the city is also created from these everyday encounters as well as buildings. 

“there is a city where the word ‘regeneration’ rings in the air. declared. shouted. whispered. sighed. it lingers like a sweet aroma, whetting palates and lubricating fountain pens.” Johnson’s 2016 film proposes a series of insertions along an East London infrastructural route, constructed from cast shadows, and creating a wavering second city that sits darkly inside the visible. 

In the Division’s Bureau of Rare Earthworks, Kay has conjured Jīngjù-on-Sea, a Peking Opera that performs an act of consumerism on a huge scale. Echoing the quantities and trajectories of the existing rare earth mineral supply chain, thousands of tonnes of earth are removed from the central Chinese landscape, and through the tools of the opera – as makeup, costume and set – are brought to London to be deposited in the Thames Estuary.

This project presents the Holy Fool Studio for collective and disruptive making. The studio disrupts norms to enact change through play and the embracing of non-experts and imperfection. For the studio, design success is cheap, non-standard, participatory, expressive, has easy instructions and a touch of the handmade. “Everybody Needs a Holy Fool” explores ways that foolishness and irreverence shift society by disrupting norms and subverting the dominant language of power through collective making – here, reacting to the latest pro-LGBTQ London plan with flowers, bottom-up toilets and an inflatable Joiners Arms.

In the first of four exclusive films, Erik Davis discusses his seminal work, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, which explores the intersection of technology, spirituality, and mysticism in the digital age. Davis delves into how ancient beliefs and mystical practices are interwoven with modern technological advancements, hidden beneath the surface of our contemporary world.

In Arles, Dior Beauty presents its seventh edition of the Photography and Visual Art Award for Young Talents. TANK zoomed into the French city to speak to Brigitte Lacombe, photographer and president of the selection jury, and to cast a spotlight on the work of the thirteen young photographers in the running. 

Caroline Issa reads Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a groundbreaking work that fundamentally transformed discussions around feminism and gender. Beauvoir famously declares that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a statement that underscores her argument that femininity is not an innate quality, but a social construct. Through a meticulous examination of history, biology, psychoanalysis and anecdote, Beauvoir illustrates the mechanisms of women’s oppression and articulates a demand for liberation that has been taken up by successive generations. 

A.K. Blakemore reads from her novel The Glutton, which reimagines the life of Tarrare, an 18th-century peasant notorious for his voracious appetite and colourful, short life. 

Gboyega Odubanjo is a poet from East London. He is the author of two poetry pamphlets, While I Yet Live (Bad Betty Press, 2019) and Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business, 2021). For TANK, he reads “London is the Place for Me” from his forthcoming full-length collection Adam. 

Published: 05/06/2023

The lavish wedding celebration of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in Mumbai lasted for weeks and is estimated to have cost $600M. Oxford Historian Faisal Devji looks back at the genealogy of extravagant Indian weddings of recent times, tracking their evolving character. In the history of India's faltering democracy and the place of India in a post-globalised and multi-polar world, the meaning of oligarchic power is subject to increasing change.

The recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump is considered by Faisal Devji both historically and as part of a political culture where such attempts present more frequently than anywhere else in the world. The American culture of gun worship and widespread gun ownership and mass shootings is well documented, but now more than ever, power and politics are conditioned by the culture of the spectacle, and spectacularity trumps even guns.

Oxford historian Faisal Devji specialises in studies of Islam, globalisation, violence and ethics. In this episode, Professor Devji considers the place of Palestine in the global context of resistance and struggle, and against wider recent global transformations, arguing that these recent events are likely to have a longer-lasting historical impact than many have so far considered. 

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. In the light of the recent rebellion by the Wagner group in Russia, he reflects on the trend for and the perils of using contractors and merceneries.

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he discusses civil war as a historical theme, why it has made a return and how we could break out of its destructive cycle. 

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he sets out how neutrality as a mode of international relations is making a most welcomed return. As the historical moment of a unipolar world order passes and with it the need for international law and institutions becomes self evident, neutrality is once again seen as a highly useful position from which to appeal for peace.

An extract from "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse in the original, delicious German. Disillusioned by traditional teachings, Siddhartha leaves his comfortable life to explore various paths – asceticism, hedonism, and business. He learns from different teachers, including the Buddha, but ultimately finds that true wisdom comes from inner discovery. 

Click here to read about this issue

Chanel’s decision to stage its annual Métiers d’Art show in Manchester back in December raised some eyebrows due to the perceived contrast between the polished French fashion house and the assumed grit of the Mancunian metropolis, but upon closer examination, the connective threads become clear. Allegedly it was Gabrielle Chanel’s British beau the Duke of Westminster who introduced her to the city where she would often source cotton and velvet on day trips from Eaton Hall, the Duke’s family estate in nearby Cheshire.

Photography by Brendan Freeman + styling by Cara Cano
All clothes and accessories by CHANEL Métiers d’art
Read the story in TANK.

Photographer and set designer Frank Hülsbömer takes this season's accessories for a walk with some well-chosen verse.

In this year’s book issue, we are proud to publish a long interview with the Waanyi Nation author Alexis Wright whose 2023 Praiseworthy has garnered a series of long-overdue prizes in the last year. Click here to read.

Go behind the scenes with the photographer Tais Sirote and the set designer Lucy Webster as they rework their magic – mixing the medium of photography and collage with De Beers Forces of Nature.

Loro Piana used to be all about billionaires trying to look anonymous but no longer: the new Into The Wild capsule collection allows them to remain famously unrecognisable while out having an adventure in their luxurious activewear. Nick, Carina, Ella and Mason scale the heights of technical innovation and answer all our burning questions about the great outdoors. 

Check out the story in the brand-new Summer Reader.

The Scottish-Danish musician on bells, Catholicism and her entrancing new album World of Work.

The London-based polymath on collective practice.

The London-based singer-songwriter on her scintillating new album My Method Actor.

Veteran DJ Richard Sen on counterculture and algorithms.

TANK is proud to premiere “Boys”, the video for the infectious new single by TAAHLIAH. “Since its conception, I knew it was going to be the introduction into this new world I’ve been creating over the past couple of years,” she said of the track. “It is the song everyone wants an ID on, it is the song everyone wants to know about.” Read our interview with TAAHLIAH here.

Directed by Tom Joyes
Edited by Tom Joyes
Assisted by Lynn Berlin
Makeup by MV Brown

The Almaty-based DJ and ZHUV founder on bringing the electronic underground to Kazakhstan.

The Bristol-based innovator discusses worldbuilding and the problem with cybernetics.

Musician and poet James Massiah speaks on nihilism, love and loss.

Boudica founder Samantha Togni on shaping space within London's dance underground.

Fronted by Shane Lavers, the New York-based outfit discuss alienation, biography and ways of seeing. 

The pop syncretist on canicide and early synthesisers.

The Mount Kimbie-member on the capitalist economics of DJ culture.