Some artists use collage to assemble images. Mikill Skugga uses it to turn meanings inside out — to extract something from cultural codes that was always there but never visible. It’s a method that Dennis Busch and Francesca Gavin, editors of The Age of Collage series, put their finger on years ago: collage isn’t a craft technique, it’s a way of thinking. This issue sits at that intersection — between the personal and the structural, between the artist working alone in a room and the broader argument that collage is exactly the tool the 21st century needs for questioning what it’s been given.
Born in Warsaw, shaped by New York, Belgrade, Brussels, and stretches of solitude in between, Mikill Skugga works with collage the way some writers work with etymology: going back to the root of a meaning to see what was lost in translation. Her diploma project at the Academy of Fine Arts treated human skin as photographic paper. The minimalism of that early work — stripped of everything incidental — has stayed with her. Her collages are spare and don’t explain themselves.
She calls her process exorcism. An inner tension builds, an urgent need to name something that has no name yet, and collage gives her the speed to move from subconscious to image before the rational mind can interfere. Her current obsession is the myth of the Minotaur: its familial trauma, the shame that gets inherited, the child at the center of the story who has been turned into a monster by the retelling. She started making collages about it. Then collage stopped being enough, and she moved into music. She’s now deep inside an album that, as she puts it, is a descent into the labyrinth.
“I read the world inside out.”
In 2020 we spoke with Dennis Busch — artist, editor, and curator of The Age of Collage exhibitions — and Francesca Gavin, author of six books and contributing editor at publications including the Financial Times. Together they edited The Age of Collage 3 (Gestalten), the third volume in the series that has done more than any other publication to argue that contemporary collage is a serious, expansive practice — one that uses appropriation and recontextualization not as aesthetic choices but as ways of questioning reality.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and read the episode notes on TWS.
As TWS enters its next chapter as a registered non-profit, we’re looking for people who want to be part of what we’re building. For almost 15 years, this has been run by a small group with a large conviction that contemporary collage deserves serious institutional attention. We’re now in a position to grow, and we need committed collaborators to help us do it.
We welcome applicants from any country and background. We ask for a minimum commitment of 5 hours per week. The application form takes about 5 minutes to complete.
TWS has always run without institutional funding. If you’ve been reading us for a while, you know how much is here — over 250 artist interviews, a decade of exhibitions, podcasts, publications. A subscription helps us keep producing it. There are tiers for every level of involvement, from Collage Friend to Collage Legend. Everything helps.
Stay Weird
The myth is never finished. Someone always retells it differently.
— The Weird Show
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.