Category Archives: Reviews

Read Palestine, Read Graffiti

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Seeing as today marks the start of Read Palestine Week I thought I’d see if I could find something about Palestinian graffiti to review. Almost everything I’ve seen about graffiti, or more precisely street art, from Palestine has been related to the West Bank Wall. In some ways the art that has been painted on the wall has drawn attention to it in a similar way to that which was put on the Berlin Wall. Various high profile street artists have travelled to the West Bank to make their statement on the wall, some largely with their western audience in mind, others more in earnest, before flying back home. So I was quite pleased when I came across Mia Gröndahl’s Gaza Graffiti: Messages of Love and Politics.

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Treats from Canada

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On their recent return from a tour of Canada a friend came back bearing a slightly dog-eared copy of a publication titled Bucket-List and another, named after its protagonist, DRIFO: BTH CMP’S. The former publication opens with the description of a planned mission that was disrupted by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown in Canada. Having already stocked up on supplies, the duo behind the zine began to form new, ever more ambitious, plans. With the result that “what was originally a one spot mission, turned into a bucket list.” The resultant zine documents some of the pair’s activities. There’s lots of action shots and a brilliant series of kinda delayed shots of some excellent freights being painted.

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Echoes of Oulu

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Kaleva is a fun magazine covering the graffiti scene across the region of Lapland and the northern city of Oulu in Finland. The content is a right-old mixture of legal walls, semi-legals, commuter trains, freights, rooftops, and tags. Various figures make an appearance along the way such as road maintenance vehicles, random people relaxing on park benches, and an assortment of characters climbing, bending, and leaning out of boats whilst creating graffiti. 

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Reading Paris

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Introduced as an attempt at “catching the graffiti twinkle of Paris”, this is the latest publication from New Utopia Press. Documenting a short trip made by Potiks to the French capital Lire Paris is a tourist’s-eye-view of the city captured between stops at the many boulangeries and cafés to be found there. Potiks takes on the role of a self described flâneur; observing and soaking up the atmosphere of Paris. Or, more specifically its famous graffiti culture. 

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The Myths That Make Our Rivers

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By Andrew Finch

There was once a sprawling network of river people who inhabited the banks of Britain’s waterways. They had their own economy, customs, mythologies, and methods of reading the water’s flow to indicate incoming storms and floods, a vital role in informing land dwellers of when the foreboding channel was prone to causing destruction. They had a desire to live away from the order of natural belonging on the inner land, seeking refuge where the river flowed like jewels through the city…

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A Fond Farewell

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It’s not too often that publications focusing on a single artist are featured on the Graffiti Review. In this case Schnellbahn is a photographic monograph presenting the work of Astro Polygon over a two and a half year period. More specifically the book focuses on the body of work produced by Astro on the ET4020 model of electric multiple units that operate on the Vienna S-bahn. Spread over nearly three hundred pages, short essays by various contributors narrate the pieces documented within. The 4020 is currently in the closing stages of being withdrawn by Austria’s national rail operator and so this project serves as something of a nostalgic farewell. 

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Keepin’ it Offline

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Fade is a new magazine produced by Backyard Parking, a self described ‘street culture’ publisher based in Milan. This initial issue, in Italian with an English translation, revolves around a single writer, Rised, and their personal ‘metro war’. Now, before going into its content it’s worth mentioning just how nicely produced this publication is; the magazine feels quality, with nicely sized images, and well edited content. The first half contains a sort of informal interview interspersed with various photographs of trains alongside associated actions and paraphernalia. Meanwhile the rest of the magazine is given over to trains from Italy and beyond that have been given a fresh coat of paint by the artist in question.

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New Kassel Graff

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Located in the German federal state of Hesse, you could probably be forgiven for not having heard of the modest town of Kassel (although regular readers of Graffiti Review may recall the region from previous posts). ASAP Legends is a bit of a novelty in that it unashamedly covers newcomers to the streets of Kassel. Now, my immediate question on picking this magazine up was “is this just a load of toys?” However the magazine is built around a novel concept that unites newcomers to graffiti with old hands who are merely new to their adopted town. The publication is structured as a series of interviews with individual writers about their experience of the graffiti scene in Kassel. The result is a fairly text heavy publication, all in German, accompanied by a cool variety of styles and surfaces.

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Radom Now (and then)

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Radom Teraz is a newly published magazine about graffiti culture in the central European city after which it’s named. Taking ‘Radom now’ as its focus the publication showcases images of graffiti taken in the city from around 2019 to 2021. Basically, every aspect of graffiti writing in Radom is covered here from trains to legal walls and street tags to sketches. There’s a series of particularly nice then-and-now photographs of typical Polish housing blocks showing the ageing of fresh chrome into faded white ghosts, or, in other cases, their complete obliteration by the new beige range of colours painted on the buildings’ façades. The images of graffiti are presented in a variety of formats so there’s a spread of full-colour legal walls on one page, followed by some atmospheric black and white yard photos on the next, then on another a selection of cut-and-paste style street scenes. Not all the images are strictly from Radom but, as explained in the publication’s intro, the city’s graffiti writers always carry the spirit of Radom with them. 

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