Current Issue

The great divergence issue, Spring 2022 from TANK Magazine.

The global-village aesthetic of the mid-1990s conjured a visual language of unity to come – the world as one. Over the past decades, however, and particularly in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap between this utopian vision and our lived experience has widened, propelling us conversely into an age of fracture. This issue of TANK seeks to take stock of this accelerating fragmentation and divergence across global culture, and asks what an alternative aesthetic vision of our present and future might look like.

Author Preti Taneja goes back in time to imagine the future, while writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede looks forward to the end of the world. Sarah Nuttall considers the afterlives of post-apartheid South Africa while Sofia Samatar meditates around opacity. Elsewhere, we revisit and recontextualise Benetton’s controversial ad campaigns of the 1980s and 90s, novelist Hari Kunzru parodies the globalists and artist Lucy Raven trains her lens on the extraction and exploitation of the American desert. Plus, we talk to Olga Ravn on her acclaimed novel The Employees, Alejandro Zambra on Chilean literature, Sena Bas ̧öz on art and trauma, and Alexander R. Galloway on digital infrastructure.