Category Art
Published November 12, 2025
FANTASMA FEMININO / FEMININE GHOST, film by Aun Helden
Story scent: A smell of a freshly bought and polished latex dress (with a hint of vanilla left from the scented polish)
Story best enjoyed with a taste of: A can of Ghost Labs Gin with grapefruit, lychee and cucumber (or any other lychee and cucumber mix)
Play on repeat while reading: ‘MACHINE BEAT HEART’, by SISSY MISFIT
I once again found myself entering a new reality.
The invite to the ‘ENGINES OF UTOPIA’, a video art exhibition curated by Sissy Misfit in celebration of the Rick Owens x Dr Martens collab, came as a surprise. Mentally, it was a ‘yes’ before I even finished reading the email. Cut to me fighting off an anxiety attack in the bathroom. But we’ll get to that.
The day came, and there I was, on the District Line, on my way to the event. I was supposed to go with a friend, but she couldn’t make it, so there I stood, at the door, alone.
For someone whose job consists of a lot (and I mean a lot) of talking, networking, and communicating, I still struggle to enter any space on my own. Nobody told my social anxiety that this is my life now, so she remained.
I grabbed a drink and looked around the open space. The bar towered directly opposite the entrance, with the brand new Rick Owens x Dr Martens boot proudly standing on the side, ready to be admired. Dimmed lightbulbs lit the walls, leading to the end of the room, where the DJ was playing familiar music. On the sides, small TVs placed on white blocks played video art. There they were, the engines.
In the middle, people were standing and chatting. As I tried to make the first step in their direction, I felt an invisible force pull me back. I headed to the bathroom instead. I stood by the mirror, feeling the anxiety creeping in, and told myself, very firmly, to get my shit together, get out there and meet people.
Sepheryn, film by Antre Sezgin & Syntia
Surrounded by the systems that made up the ENGINES OF UTOPIA run, I felt happily disoriented. The crowd, all dressed so well — I found my eyes lingering on the elaborately crafted corsets and shiny latex accessories — felt intimidating. All of them, existing in their own creative space, sharing it with each other, and soon, with me.
I pushed my nerves away, chasing them down with a can of gin and went out for a smoke where the crowd was buzzing with laughter. Approaching people like I would in first grade, I simply stated that I came to the event alone and needed someone to talk to. I never met friendlier people.
United by the common goal of celebrating the voices of incredible artists whose work was glistening under the light shared by the talented Sissy Misfit, people were eager to discuss the art, their thoughts on it and how happy they were to be present for such an important moment.
There was a sense of pure pride in the air. Artists, so happy to have their voices shared, people, so excited to support them. Not. A. Single. Bad. Vibe.
Engines of Her, film by Kaiden Ford
After a brief cigarette intermission, I went back inside and moved from screen to screen as each film played itself out. The video exhibition focused on spotlighting trans and non-binary voices, giving them a platform to tell their stories.
More than just an exhibition, it felt like a rebellion against the performatively polished brand collaboration events. Instead of a celebrity host with no affiliation to the brand, we got Sissy Misfit, an artist with something to say and a long-time Rick Owens girly. Instead of a carefully decorated room, with logos being shoved down our throats, we got a display of genuine talent and a chance to see independent artists in action. No promotion, just expression.
The authenticity of the video storytelling was fascinating. This wasn’t art made for the sake of being made, or to please the unassuming observer. I felt the hearts of the artists pour into the small screens. It’s incredible how a collection of TVs placed along a white wall can transport you to the world beyond your imagination.
ENGINES, film by Charlie Jimenez
Each time I took a step, it felt like a jump between realities. Some were bright and daring; others enveloped the mind with their black-and-white magic. Each one was perfectly curated. Under the veil of an East London night, Sissy Misfit has built a safe haven for her community. Unapologetically, this art persisted, pushing back against any constraints our messed-up world tries to impose on it.
Once I was done with the inter-dimensional travel experience of the exhibition, I faced my greatest challenge yet, asking people for quotes, photos and interviews. To no surprise, it ended up being as pleasant an experience as the rest of the night. Once I spoke to one or two people, more started coming forward, eager to share their stories.
Every time an artist told me about their work and its meaning, I felt myself submerged deeper. They felt like proud parents, sending their kids off on the first day of school. Excited for their creation to be exposed to the world, slightly anxious that the outside world might taint its innocent beauty, but in that moment, overwhelmed with joy.
Still of Sissy Misfit
I wasn’t familiar with these artists’ work before, but now I can’t imagine not knowing them. I will be obsessively following the works of everyone I have met, from guests who shared their work and life stories with me, to artists who stood by their films dissecting them with me, to, of course, the queen herself, Sissy Misfit.
P.S. When I told Sissy the name of the magazine I am reporting for, she told me she had heard about it before, and that might have been the highlight of my year.
“Engine in me, shine
Until the day it dies
Like a machine that beats like a heart,
Through the tears of an angel cry
As I fall, I rise
As I become, I rust.
Gears turn in my spine,
Becoming an insect inside
The world can not be pure evil
Or in absolute harmony
Satan exists in the memory of God,
Pain pulses through lust
But as the moon rises and muses arrive one by one
You must know that, this suffering is what we call
SHOWTIME”
– Sissy Misfit
AX IN FATHOMLAND - UNBIRTHDAY, film by GAME NOVA
To finish this story, I will add the names and profiles of the artists, shared with me before the event. I will leave them here, unedited, so they can speak for themselves and give you the chance to familiarise yourself with their stories and work. Honestly, follow all of them, you won’t regret it.
Antre Sezgin is an Istanbul-based photographer and visual artist working at the intersection of queer activism, portraiture, and experimental mediums like scanography and video art. Segin focuses on body autonomy, gender fluidity, and the transformative power of marginalised voices. This collaborative practice is developed with fellow LGBTQI+ artists, thinkers, and night workers.
Sepheryn by Antre Sezgin & Syntia – A fashion editorial styled as a commercial, featuring Syntia as a futuristic ‘product’ suspended in space. Through sculptural poses and close shots, she blurs the line between human and machine. A poetic monologue and immersive sound design by Jtamul turns the piece into a sensory critique of consumer desire.
Aun Helden is a São Paulo-based artist working across dance, performance, photography, and video, investigating identity through semiotic and epistemological research. Her work explores transfiguration, autonomy, and subversive otherness, merging synthetic and organic materials to create provocative, living sculptures that challenge the social imaginary and destabilise conventional perceptions of the body.
FANTASMA FEMININO / FEMININE GHOST — Feminine Ghost is a self-portrait video looping violent yet delicate images like a prayer. It explores the body’s transfiguration-painful yet creatively transcendent-through a trance of freedom and communion with an extinct, otherworldly species. The work embodies iconoclastic opacity, merging myth, fiction, and the remnants of transformation.
Charlie Jimenez is a London-based multidisciplinary artist and creative director exploring the human body as a vessel of mythology, memory, and transformation. Through photography, film, SFX, and performance, they create surreal, ritualistic works merging the ethereal and grotesque. Exhibited across Europe, their award-winning practice spans art, fashion, and performance.
Engines by Charlie Jimenez ENGINES is a micro-short set in an abandoned underworld. Shot on Super16, ENGINES is a visual-ritual of becoming, where the mechanical and the divine fuse. Phanes, a wounded intersex god, is reborn from fire. Their body, both scarred and sacred, becomes a living engine: a vessel of light.
GAME NOVA is a Xeno-feminist artist whose work explores the AX Simulation – a speculative, perverse evolutionary reality where bodies, technologies, and identities entwine. Their practice merges myth and method, creating visceral encounters with the somniferous snake, a symbolic figure challenging normativity and fate, producing provocative, immersive experiences of transformation and entanglement.
AX IN FATHOMLAND – UNBIRTHDAY is a two-minute filmic exorcism from the AX Simulation universe, exploring refuge as psycho-sexual mutation amid industrial violence. The body appears as a ruptured, post-organic interface – both prototype and parasite. The film meditates on pleasure after flesh, where desire mutates into code, ritual, and mechanical divinity.
Kaiden Ford is a non-binary artist known for creating immersive fantasies that blur reality and imagination. Their work spans performance, film, poetry, and personal aesthetics, weaving sadness, sensuality, sexuality, and heartbreak into a singular, powerful artistic language that communicates and embodies their unique vision.
Engines of Her — A manifesto on the corruption and commodification of creative identity: a body becoming machine, a machine becoming body. This performance is survival, not spectacle. HER is both captive and engine—a symbol of resilience, where fragmentation ignites creation. “Hello, my name is HER. I am here at your service. Please press play to continue.
Syntia is a multidisciplinary artist and drag performer from Turkey. She alchemises her emotions, opinions and beliefs into art, demonstrating a trans perspective to the material realm she lives in. Some of the current themes in her art are trans experience, questioning love and relationships, concerns about patriarchal and capitalist order, and finding meaning in life.
Sepheryn by Antre Sezgin & Syntia – A fashion editorial styled as a commercial, featuring Syntia as a futuristic ‘product’ suspended in space. Through sculptural poses and close shots, she blurs the line between human and machine. A poetic monologue and immersive sound design by Jtamul turn the piece into a sensory critique of consumer desire.
