Art Insider

The Stack Edit: The Exposed

Official Media Partner to The Other Art Fair, Stack selects the best independent magazines and delivers them directly to you via a monthly door drop service. As Guest Editor to The Other Art Fair Canvas blog, Stack founder Steven Watson spotlights one of his favourite independent magazines. 

I love magazines. And I love podcasts. So when I first saw The Exposed I knew I’d come across something special.

Based in Copenhagen and with contributors from all around the world, it’s a print magazine that comes loaded with added audio and video content; point your phone at a specific page, and it will start playing the media associated with that story.

I should say that I’m not generally the biggest fan of print magazines layering digital bells and whistles on top of the page. Normally, when you’re asked to point your phone at a printed page it’s to launch some kind of attention-grabbing gimmick, with adverts animating, covers coming to life or text literally running across the screen. The thing I love about print magazines is the way they can draw me into the intimacy of their stories, and these digital pyrotechnics almost always end up distracting and detracting from that.

But The Exposed has taken a different approach by beginning with the audio and video content, and using the print magazine as a gateway to the stories. In The City of Possibilities, for example, Etienne Malapert recalls his experience of travelling to Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, to see the contradictions and complications at the heart of the world’s first proposed zero carbon city.

Beginning with Etienne’s photography on the page, the reader is then carried away with him as he narrates his journey from a sweltering bus stop in the desert to the air-conditioned towers and growling supercars of Masdar. It’s like listening to a podcast while also viewing the narrator’s photography, and the effect is beautifully slow and meditative.

By contrast, the pictures of Alia Ali’s textile sculptures stand alone as strange and beautiful objects, and her videos serve to show the contemporary background of where these fabrics came from. Her People of Pattern project aims to show the cultural provenance of textiles, and she travelled far and wide to Mexico, Yemen, Vietnam and beyond to understand what these materials say about the people who made them, wandering down back alleys and browsing markets to put the viewer right in the heart of the places.

We delivered The Exposed to our subscribers this month and it was an excellent way to start the year – an ambitious and adventurous magazine that shows the enormous potential for print. We’ll be switching back to a more conventional format of words and images on the page next month, but I guarantee that the storytelling will be just as fresh.

If you’d like to have next month’s magazine delivered to your door, go to www.stackmagazines.com and sign up using the code OTHERART to save 10% off our regular prices.