Cars and debauchery
Vehikel is a magazine about art and cars — which, if you’re not massively into cars, doesn’t sound that exciting. But what’s inside is experimental. One of the best series is entitled ‘Exquisite Realities’: hallucinatory images of cars in sickly pinks and yellows, twisted, like balloon animals, into monstrous shapes.
Vehikel takes the car as a kind of muse, concentrating on how it has inspired different works of art. In one feature, about the American photographer Alex Prager, cars are shown to be intrinsic to her surrealist vision of Los Angeles: “In Prager’s world they crash into each other causing massive traffic jams, they gather dust in parking lots, and they are the vehicles in which you actually make eye contact with another person”. In another piece called ‘Debauchery’, about the work of the painter Mark Tennant, cars appear in the background. Teenagers sit on them while they get drunk.
There’s a lot of sponsored content here (eg. “On one sunny weekend in September, we happened to have a driving experience with Kia’s brand new XCeed”). This is a little disconcerting, as it’s not clearly marked. But skipping over that, Vehikel is imaginative, and immaculately put together. One of my favourite pieces in the magazine is a series of photographs of extremely well dressed motor taxi drivers in Nairobi.
