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MAGNIFIED FUKT Fukt is a magazine for contemporar
y drawing, originally established in Norway in 1999 and now based in Berlin. We talk to its creative director Ariane Spanner. words Michael McDermott – You are the creative director of Fukt, ‘a magazine for contemporary drawing’ since 2006. What changes have you overseen during your time in this role? In the past 13 years (oh my god!) that I have been the creative director for Fukt, we worked for a long time without any themes other than ‘contemporary drawing’. We just gathered what we considered an interesting mix of international positions in the field of the medium. Our choices for selecting works were driven by our personal taste, visual rhythm, gender and age equality of more and lesser established artists. For a long time the magazine was purely visual, with almost no text interrupting the visual flow. We didn’t want to create a magazine that looked like your typical art catalogue. Also both Björn (Hegardt) and I have visual backgrounds as an artist and graphic designer. We didn’t feel like writers. But then Instagram came along and all of a sudden people looked at easy consumable images all day long. This made a picture-only magazine somewhat redundant. At that point we began to dare to ask artists some questions, we started to have conversations with them about their work, the whys, the hows and whatever else came up in these interviews. That was a big step for us. In a way it was leaving our visual comfort zones of selecting drawings we liked or designing some funny covers. And three issues ago we began to publish themed issues. For many years this seemed ridiculous to us because contemporary drawing is already a niche field – why should we narrow it down further? And on top of that we only publish one is58