Cabinet is one of the world’s best and most beloved small magazines. Founded in 2000 by the editor and curator Sina Najafi, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit began with the publication of a quarterly print magazine that brought together visual art, design, literature, history of science and intellectual history in an ambitious and irreverent style.
Cabinet also became known for its legendary exhibitions, events and art projects. (They have, for instance: put themselves on trial for a lack of political commitment, bought and begun documenting a half-acre of land in New Mexico named ‘Cabinetlandia’, and made headlines with a self-declared “absurdist multimedia spectacle of competitive, real-time art making” named Iron Artist.)
In recent years, Cabinet has shifted its magazine arm online while diving further into book publishing, releasing both standalone titles and series. They have also opened an office in Berlin, which is where Najafi works along with managing editor Hunter Dukes and a small editorial team.
So, 25 years of publishing Cabinet! Does the anniversary make you reflect on past triumphs?
Sina Najafi: Yes and no. We’re a very un-nostalgic organisation, and we try not to think about our successes so much – but our failures do obsess us (laughs). When we do that retroactive glance, it’s usually to look at things that have changed for the worse, as opposed to things that have changed for the better.
The magazine has changed a lot since Issue One. The first few issues were more feral, more rambunctious, maybe funnier. Less – what’s the word we want here? – less well-edited, that’s for sure. But it had a kind of energy to it, which came out of ignorance and not caring. There weren’t many readers, and that liberated us.
Hunter Dukes: There is still a big throughline, though. I first started reading the magazine a decade ago, when I was in graduate school – and Cabinet was the first place where I saw the kind of scholarship that I found interesting being presented in a journalistic, highly-fact-checked style. And I think we’re still doing that very well.
How would you describe the magazine’s mission?
HD: Cabinet has always had a way of finding unusual points of entry into certain issues. Editorially, one of the principles we hold is that curiosity can be a form of ethics – and that paying close attention to smaller phenomena often yields insights, points of entry and portals into things that we didn’t know would be revealed.
Is that what the name is from – as in Wunderkammer?
SN: The cabinet of curiosities is certainly one of the references. As is the kind of cabinet that you just see in someone’s house and you open it and there’s all kinds of shit in there, you know? As a graduate student, I read an interview with Michel Foucault where he talks about curiosity as a political tool, curiosity as something that disregards all the lines that police the world and that make it come into being the way it is.
Curiosity would be the thing that, if unbound, would completely disregard those lines, and make you understand that the world was made to come into being this way – so it can also be unmade. The world doesn’t have to be this way. So curiosity, to us, is not just dabbling or dilettantism, but an ethical practice that can undo our certainties about the world.
How did the move to Berlin come about?
SN: It started because I personally wanted to leave the United States. I didn’t know Berlin well, but I had some friends here who told me about what was happening, and the city seemed interesting. My wife and I moved here in 2017. Some of the artists we knew were still in Berlin here then – but it was also that, because of the Arab Spring, there were a lot of Arab intellectuals, filmmakers and artists coming here as well.
And that seemed very, very exciting to see and to learn from. We had an event space and office for five years, plus a little team. And now this is sort of our major office, because there are more people working here than [in the US]. Berlin has been illuminating in lots of ways – some of it negatively, as well. The international scene here is incredible. But what’s happened in the last year and a half, since October 2023, has been crushing.
How has Berlin enabled your current projects?
SN: The Yuliya Komska book I mentioned begins with an incredible photograph of someone walking a high wire over the ruins of Cologne. And that started with somebody at a bar in Berlin coming up to me and saying, “I know your magazine. I know you like interesting pictures. Here’s an amazing picture.” And they just pulled it up on their phone.
And of course we’ve met so many people here. There’s a bunch of articles from people we’ve met in Berlin. We don’t systematically go after people – like every magazine, so much of it is coincidence. You just meet interesting people, you know. We have an editor called Chris Turner, who joined Cabinet after I spent one night with him, chatting. And Hunter – the moment Hunter walked in and we talked a little bit, it was clear that he was going to be an incredible member of the team.
What are your goals this year?
HD: We’re going to be collaborating more with other smaller Berlin magazines – like The Diasporist, which just launched. We’re hoping to start an event series with them moving forward. I like that about Berlin. It seems, compared to other cities, that collaborations like this can happen with relatively low friction. You can will them into existence a bit more. And we had a book fair last year called Too Hot to Read, a joint project with the publisher K. Verlag. We’re going to do another one this summer, I believe.
SN: We are also looking for an event space, at the moment, possibly to share. In Berlin – especially in the past year and a half since the assault on Gaza, the funding issues, and the way those funding issues have been directed at certain kinds of organisations – it means that a lot of spaces you thought were open really cannot discuss a whole bunch of very important political and cultural issues now.
So a big project for this year is to start thinking about an event space, a dedicated space, that we can really make active. As Hunter said, collaboration is such an important part of the Berlin scene. It can be a pain in the ass, but it’s also a wonderful thing. Working at a magazine is very monastic, you know, sitting there and every so often grunting some words to each other. Having events is the way that all that work, and all those connections, get actualised in an interesting way.
- Visit Cabinet’s website to find out more.
