Welcome to the Winter 2018 issue of SLEEK!

The last four decades have been a rollercoaster in self-care jargon. Type "self-care" into Amazon, and hundreds of books appear with cloying names like You Are a Badass and Women Who Love Too Much. It’s easy to forget in our era of millennial self-care-as-a-badge-of-honour, that in the Seventies, it was a buzzword for the desperate. Despite self-care now being one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, as a chaotic 2018 looms to a close, the idea of bubble baths or cancelling plans as routes to self-actualisation is beginning to look a little shallow.

In this issue of SLEEK we wanted to explore self-help. But instead of recommending the perfect perfume or the best film to watch for a night on the sofa, we’re casting a side-eye at a worrying cultural phenomenon.


FEATURING
- Photographer and Instagram icon Nadia Lee’s portfolio looking at our contemporary obsession with the self
- “Just Listen” an exploration of the work of human rights investigator and audio artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Man Booker prize longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh’s self-help inspired short story
- An essay on “The Cult of Self-Care” by Kieran Yates
- Profiles on the London artists fighting austerity and elitism in the art world
- An interview with Los-Angeles based artist Martine Syms on her prodigious 2018 and her upcoming exhibitions in 2019
- A profile on the religious influencer @jstlbby, beloved by the likes of Grace Wales Bonner and Naomi Campbell.
- One of SLEEK’s favourite photographers Ruth Ossai’s exclusive cabinet portfolio “9ja” shot in Lagos, Anamabra and Enugu State in Nigeria