Title: Closed System Experiment

Artist: Dragan Velimir Kostić

Red Sharpie marker ink on sketching paper.

Photographed by the R9 Media Collective with a Leica Q3 43.

Prints available on request.

A refrigerator still holds what someone intended to return to. Containers are stacked without care, but not without purpose. Drinks remain half-considered. A freezer carries the logic of preservation, even as nothing within the space appears to have been preserved. It is not neglect in the immediate sense, but something slower—an erosion of intention that leaves function intact while meaning slips away.

A figure stands partially turned, neither subject nor intruder, but something closer to a witness. The posture suggests hesitation, or perhaps recognition, as if the act of looking itself requires adjustment. Nothing in the room resists observation, and yet nothing offers itself fully to it.

The table suggests order that was never sustained. A binder lies open, its contents concerned with the human body—anatomy, physiology—rendered in the language of structure, systems, coherence. It is the kind of material that assumes a body can be understood, mapped, accounted for. Here, it rests without commentary, its clarity intact but its context displaced. Nearby, a hanger lies flat, no longer serving even the minimal function it was designed for. The objects do not contradict one another; they simply fail to align.

There is, however, a presence that exceeds what can be seen. A chemical odor, sharp and insistent, occupies the air with a kind of authority the images cannot reproduce. It is not tied to any single object, nor does it reveal its origin. It lingers as a condition rather than an event—pervasive, inescapable, and ultimately untranslatable. The photographs remain silent on this point, and in doing so, they remain incomplete in a way that feels appropriate.

The architecture of the space continues to perform its intended functions. Doors open. Closets hold. Cabinets close imperfectly, or not at all. The bathroom retains its fixtures, its reflective surfaces, its suggestion of routine. Yet each of these elements appears slightly misaligned with its purpose, as if use has outpaced care. The hole in the door is the only overt gesture toward violence, but even that reads less as an incident than as a remainder. It has already passed into the background of the space, absorbed into its general condition.

Carpeted surfaces carry the most persistent traces. Impressions remain where objects once rested. Debris settles into fibers, resisting easy removal. The floor records duration rather than action, the slow accumulation of presence rather than any single decisive moment. In the larger room, light enters through broken blinds, diffused and uneven, illuminating nothing in particular. A candle sits unlit. A piece of clothing has been left behind without indication of return. The room does not appear abandoned in haste; it appears abandoned in stages.

There is no narrative here that insists on itself. The evidence does not cohere into explanation. Even the knowledge that the space was used for the consumption of illicit substances does not clarify what is seen. It only adds another layer of abstraction, another condition that resists visualization. The images do not confirm it. They do not deny it. They remain, instead, committed to what is observable, and to the limits of observation itself.

What persists is not chaos, but neglect. And neglect, unlike chaos, does not announce itself. It does not disrupt so much as it withdraws. It allows structures to remain while intention recedes. It leaves behind objects that continue to exist without context, without urgency, without claim.

The space is not empty. It is simply no longer inhabited in any meaningful sense. What remains is the trace of use without the presence of the user, the outline of a life that has moved elsewhere or ceased to cohere. Nothing here asks to be understood. It only asks to be seen, and even that feels like more than it requires.

There is a tendency, when confronted with works such as these, to describe them as studies—as preparatory, provisional, incomplete. This is a mistake. Erdenebat Tömörbaatar does not study form; he subjects it to conditions under which it must either persist or fail. What we are given are not sketches, but tests.

In Angularity Study, line behaves less as a boundary than as an assertion. The overlapping planes refuse stable hierarchy; no single geometry is permitted to dominate. Instead, the drawing distributes tension across a field of competing vectors, each one provisional, each one capable of collapse. The small interventions of color—those sharp, almost surgical reds—do not embellish but expose. They mark points of stress, as if the structure were being observed at the moment before fracture. The work does not resolve; it sustains.

The so-called Brutalist Chair Study is, in fact, an argument against the object it names. What remains of the chair is only its insistence on right angles, stripped of comfort, stripped even of usability. It is not a chair but a memory of orthogonality, held together by repetition rather than function. The lines accumulate not to describe volume, but to deny it. One begins to understand that for Tömörbaatar, the right angle is not a solution but a constraint—one that must be tested until it reveals its inadequacy.

The paired frames of the Perception Study introduce a more insidious instability. At first glance, they appear ordered, even decorative, but the diagonals quietly undermine this order. Each square contains within it the possibility of division, of asymmetry disguised as symmetry. The repetition of color bands suggests containment, yet the eye is continually drawn inward, toward a line that refuses to align with the frame that holds it. Perception here is not corrected; it is unsettled.

In Connection Study, the vocabulary shifts, but the problem remains. Points and lines assemble into what might be mistaken for a network, yet no hierarchy of connection is established. Each node is equally contingent, each link equally uncertain. The alternating red and blue markings suggest dual states—agreement and disagreement, presence and absence—but the system offers no resolution between them. It is a structure that records relation without ever stabilizing it.

Bent and Split States is perhaps the most overtly composed, and therefore the most deceptive. Circles and cubes, arcs and planes, intersect in a manner that suggests synthesis, but this synthesis is false. The forms do not integrate; they coexist in a state of negotiated tension. Color here becomes weight. The red fields press forward, the blues recede, and yet neither achieves dominance. The work proposes balance only to demonstrate its impossibility.

Finally, in Inter-mixing Unstable Coefficients Study, Tömörbaatar arrives at a condition approaching systematization, only to dismantle it from within. The grid—if it can still be called that—is both constructed and violated by diagonals that refuse obedience. The blue squares act as temporary anchors, but even they are insufficient to stabilize the surrounding field. What is most striking is not the complexity of the arrangement, but its refusal to settle into pattern. It is a system that resists becoming one.

Across these works, one observes a consistent refusal: the refusal of hierarchy, of resolution, of the comfort of completed form. Tömörbaatar does not produce images that can be consumed; he produces conditions that must be endured. The drawings do not ask to be understood. They ask whether understanding, as a stable endpoint, is ever available.

In this sense, these works are less about geometry than about the limits of control. Line, angle, and color are not tools of construction but instruments of pressure. They reveal, with a quiet and persistent severity, that structure is never given—it is only ever temporarily maintained.

- Sarnai Enkhjargal, critic and lecturer based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

video courtesy: South China Morning Post

What strikes me first is not the subject, but the distance—the quiet, almost reverential distance this image insists upon. The figures are small, nearly swallowed by the geometry of the observation deck, and yet they anchor the entire frame. A couple, or perhaps simply two people momentarily aligned, leaning into one of those coin-operated viewers that promise access to the horizon but deliver, instead, a curated fragment of it. That gesture—of looking outward from a place already elevated beyond necessity—feels central to me. It is a doubling of perspective: to stand atop the World Trade Center in the summer of 1980, already above the city, and still feel compelled to look further, to magnify distance, to search for something just beyond reach.

Knowing this was originally captured by Allan Smessaert on a Leica M using Kodak film situates the image firmly within a lineage of observational discipline—one that resists spectacle in favor of quiet structure. There is nothing hurried here. The composition is patient, almost architectural in its restraint. The railings guide my eye laterally, while the receding deck creates a shallow corridor that draws me toward the figures without ever collapsing the space between us and them. I don’t feel invited into the scene so much as permitted to observe it, and only at a remove.

My act of rephotographing this image—now with the Leica Q3 43—introduces a second temporal layer that feels far more than technical. It becomes interpretive, even philosophical. This is no longer simply a photograph of a moment in 1980; it is a photograph of a photograph of that moment, seen through my own sensibility decades later, looking back at an image that was itself about looking. The recursion is subtle but, to me, quite profound. The original gesture—two figures peering outward—is mirrored in my own gesture of re-seeing, re-framing, and re-presenting.

The adjustments I’ve made—cropping, color correction—may be minor in execution, but they carry weight in how the image now breathes. The warmth that permeates the photograph, that slight amber cast, lends the scene a kind of suspended atmosphere. It feels less like nostalgia and more like residue, as if the image has absorbed time rather than merely survived it. The blue of the deck, slightly muted, plays against the warmth of the sky and the red signal light on the right—a small but critical counterpoint that keeps the palette from drifting. That red light becomes a kind of quiet punctuation mark: fixed, functional, and indifferent to the fleeting human presence at center.

What I find particularly compelling is how the photograph resists the gravitational pull of its own historical context. It would be easy to read this image through what the World Trade Center would later come to represent, but I find myself resisting that instinct. I want to let the photograph remain where it was—in 1980, in a moment of ordinary human curiosity. And yet, in rephotographing it now, I can’t entirely escape what I know. The image seems to hover for me between innocence and hindsight, never fully settling into either.

There is also a tension here between intimacy and anonymity that I can’t ignore. The figures are close to one another—physically intimate in their shared act of looking—but they remain indistinct, almost archetypal. They could be anyone. That anonymity matters, because it allows me, as the viewer and now as the one re-presenting the image, to project into it without constraint. The photograph becomes less about them and more about the act itself: the human impulse to seek vantage, to elevate oneself, to look out and, perhaps, to understand one’s place in relation to what is seen.

I’m also aware, in rephotographing this, of the material life of the original print. There’s a softness at the edges, a slight degradation that speaks to its physical history. But rather than diminishing the image, this deepens it for me. It reminds me that photographs are not just images; they are objects that age, that travel, that accumulate the marks of time and handling. My intervention here is not about correcting that history, but about extending it—allowing it to continue, to be seen again, differently.

In the end, what I’m left with is not simply a document of a place or a moment, but a layered meditation on seeing itself. Smessaert’s original act of observation, my act of re-observation, and the viewer’s act of looking now—all of these seem to exist within the frame at once. The photograph becomes, for me, a kind of temporal corridor—not unlike the deck it depicts—through which the eye travels, guided but never confined, always aware that what is seen is only part of something larger, and ultimately unknowable.

- Will Hazlitt, R9 Media Photo Collective

Original photo courtesy the photographer:

Lisa Howe-Ebright

Taken on a Leica M on Ilford film in 1979 at the Musée du Louvre-Paris, France

In 1979, inside the august corridors of the Musée du Louvre, Lisa Howe-Ebright made a photograph on a Leica M using Ilford film. It is, at first glance, a modest image: a man in a fedora, turning slightly, his face illuminated by the soft interior light of the museum. The paintings behind him recede into blur. The Louvre, that immense theater of cultural validation, becomes backdrop rather than protagonist.

This inversion is not accidental.

The museum is constructed to direct our gaze toward sanctioned masterpieces — toward what history has already approved. Yet Howe-Ebright’s frame refuses that directive. The subject does not gaze at the art. Nor does the camera. Instead, the photograph attends to the living presence situated within the institutional space. The canon stands behind him; consciousness stands before it.

There is something quietly radical in that orientation.

The Ilford grain lends the image its particular tactility — a silver atmosphere that breathes rather than insists. The tonal compression of film produces a softness around the edges of the gallery walls, allowing the fedora’s clean line to assert itself against the architecture. The subject’s glance is neither staged nor defensive. It suggests awareness — of the photographer, of the moment, perhaps even of being observed within a space dedicated to observation.

Decades later, the image is rephotographed on a Leica Q3 43 and lightly edited — undertaken with the full permission of Lisa Howe-Ebright. This detail is essential. The act is not extraction; it is collaboration across time. Rephotography here does not erase authorship but extends it. It acknowledges origin while introducing mediation.

The digital sensor renders micro-contrast differently than silver halide. Blacks settle with a different authority. Edges clarify. The grain, once inherent to emulsion, becomes an artifact of history, now reframed. Yet what remains untouched is the psychological nucleus: the eyes. They carry forward with undiminished presence, bridging 1979 and the present moment.

Rephotograph of original 1979 photograph

Courtesy: R9 Media Photo Collective

Photographer: W. Hazlitt

Studio Assistant: A. Smessaert

Video courtesy: R9 Media Photo Collective

What emerges is a layered authorship — not competitive but sequential. The original image belongs to its era: a late-1970s museum, a young man caught between looking and being looked at. The rephotograph belongs to ours: a time preoccupied with archives, with memory, with recontextualization. In bringing the image forward, the contemporary gesture does not claim ownership; it claims conversation.

It is also worth noting that the Louvre itself functions as silent co-author. Museums are institutions of hierarchy. They determine which objects merit preservation, which narratives endure. Yet in this photograph, the institution is destabilized. The living subject eclipses the paintings. The canon fades into bokeh. The hierarchy dissolves.

To turn away from the art on the wall and toward the person in the room is not merely compositional. It is philosophical.

The image reminds us that history is not only what hangs in frames. It is also the unnoticed figure passing through the gallery, the fleeting glance, the human presence temporarily intersecting with monumental culture. Rephotography amplifies this realization. By reintroducing the image into contemporary circulation — with permission, with acknowledgment — it asserts that photographs themselves are living entities. They accrue meaning as they move through time.

This is not nostalgia. It is continuity.

In the end, the most striking element remains the subject’s orientation. His body is angled away from the masterpieces, yet his eyes meet the camera. He stands between centuries of art and the immediacy of the present gaze. He becomes, briefly, the axis upon which time rotates.

And perhaps this is the quiet thesis of the work: that the canon is stable only until someone turns away from it — and looks elsewhere.

- Élodie Vasseur

Paris, France 2026

R9 Media Photo Collective

https://vero.co/r9media

Michael Viktor Kilarjian

Associate Editor, The Intelligencer

Additional commentary from:

Tomás Arancibia Lozano

“What is being described here is not an accident of culture but the function of a system. Contemporary literature in the United States — and by extension much of the Anglophone world — is not merely written by the privileged; it is filtered, refined, and authenticated by an institutional machine that reproduces its own class composition.

The associate editor’s critique exposes an uncomfortable truth: the modern literary marketplace is governed less by organic discovery than by credentialed validation. Degrees, fellowships, residencies, awards — these are not incidental biographical details. They are the passport stamps that grant entry into visibility. A writer’s authority is now pre-certified before a reader ever encounters a sentence.

Historically, literary production has often been entangled with class — one need only consider figures such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Emily Dickinson. But what distinguishes our era is bureaucratization. Privilege has been formalized into institutional process. It is no longer merely social positioning; it is a pipeline.

The invocation of Annie Baker and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is not a personal indictment of their talent. It is an illustration of the pattern. Elite universities. MFAs. Prestigious fellowships. Award circuits. These pathways interlock. They produce not only writers, but legitimacy. When such writers depict economic stagnation or existential drift, the cultural establishment receives the portrayal as authoritative — not because it emerges from lived precarity, but because it has passed through approved channels.

This is the literary machine: a self-reinforcing network of MFA programs, grant committees, critics, academic departments, and publishing houses that largely draw from the same socio-economic corridor. It decides what is staged, what is reviewed, what is assigned to students. It determines which narratives become canonical and which remain invisible.

The defense of this system is always meritocratic. The best work rises. But “the best” is defined within institutions that privilege certain forms of polish, certain aesthetic vocabularies, certain intellectual postures — all of which are more accessible to those already equipped with time, financial stability, and educational access. The retail worker writing at night, the warehouse employee with no MFA, the autodidact without institutional affiliation — these voices may exist, but they do not circulate. Visibility is curated.

From Bolivia, where literary production often unfolds outside formal patronage structures, the pattern is striking. When the gates are guarded by those trained within the same academies, diversity of experience narrows even as diversity of theme expands superficially. We are told that literature speaks for everyone, yet the arbiters of literary prestige are drawn from a remarkably small band of society.

The associate editor’s argument ultimately lands here: the contemporary literary world confuses accreditation with authority and pedigree with profundity. The cost is not merely aesthetic dissatisfaction. The cost is cultural omission. Entire strata of lived experience remain uncanonized because they lack institutional endorsement.

The question, then, is simple and destabilizing: Who decides what we read? The answer, at present, is not “the people.” It is the machine.”

- Tomás Arancibia Lozano

La Paz, Bolivia

Having rephotographed these forty-year-old 35mm prints on the Leica Q3 43, I found myself less interested in preservation than in re-encounter. Time had already completed its …

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The central gesture functions as a grotesquely overdetermined emblem of modern agency: an act performed compulsively, almost dutifully, stripped of flourish and therefore swollen with meaning. It is not expressive in the traditional sense; it is procedural. The subject does not appear to choose so much as comply, enacting a script whose origin lies elsewhere—bureaucratic, cultural, cosmic. The absurdity emerges not from exaggeration of movement, but from the grim sincerity with which the movement is repeated or sustained. This is how systems behave when internalized.

Stylistically, the austerity is doing the heavy lifting. The restraint of framing and pacing refuses catharsis. There is no release, no punchline, no visual escalation that would grant the viewer permission to laugh outright. Instead, the work cultivates a dead zone where meaning accumulates without resolution. The camera’s neutrality is its cruelty: by declining to editorialize, it implicates the viewer as a silent witness, perhaps even an accomplice.

Symbolically, the piece operates as a maximalist allegory masquerading as minimalism. What might initially register as a single, isolated act metastasizes into a portrait of institutional absurdity at scale. The gesture becomes labor, then ritual, then doctrine. It is impossible not to read it as a send-up of authority structures that demand participation without comprehension—political, religious, economic, even aesthetic. The body is present, but autonomy is theoretical. The will exists, but only as an afterimage.

There is also something faintly eschatological at work. The action feels less like progress than maintenance of a failing order, a kind of end-times busywork. The subject persists not because the act works, but because stopping would require acknowledging its futility. In this sense, the video stages absurdity not as comedy but as endurance. The joke, if there is one, is cosmic and unamused.

Taken as a whole, the piece reads as a mock-solemn monument to compliance, delivered with such seriousness that parody becomes indistinguishable from diagnosis. It does not ridicule its subject; it treats it with the grave respect reserved for inevitabilities. The absurdity is total precisely because it is never announced. One is left with the uneasy suspicion that this is not exaggeration at all, but reportage—an accurate record of how meaning behaves once it has been fully outsourced.”

- Dr. Alastair Penwyth-Hume

The brand new BMX zine for Asheville, NC has dropped. Grab your copy now!

Contact: @tspec912 INSTAGRAM

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