BREAKING #305

It grew dark, but we didn’t need any light.

Nicole Ex

Column

February 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

February 2026

I was sitting across from Li at the kitchen table. She had cooked us food. We ate from beautifully handmade plates with ash glaze. Around us, everything was in its place. Zulu, the cat who looks like a tiger, moved gracefully among us. It grew dark, but we didn’t need any light. That evening, nothing was forced and many things were looked at.

I still consider it a privilege: speaking with a kindred spirit about life and work. Just as I, you may not believe it, still find it a privilege to take the wheel and drive down the street. I experience working professionally with women and driving a car as consciously acquired freedoms. As things that are by far not granted to everyone. I feel this more strongly in light of the revelations surrounding Epstein.

That absolute contempt, not only by him and his accomplices then, but also today. How, with the release of the Epstein files, the names of a number of men are once again shielded, while the identities of all those women and girls are disclosed, sentencing them to a lifetime burden.

I asked: ‘Li, if coercing sex, power, and money is not the ultimate aim, what else can a network be in service of? How, for instance, could you use one for the things you care about: democracy, education, equality?’ To my surprise said Li, who in fact has an answer to almost everything: ‘I don’t know.’

Driving home along the quiet A10 ring road, I questioned my own question. There was something wrong with it, but what? When it came to exploiting a network, Li had given the only right and reassuring answer: she didn’t know how. Soon it will be Women’s Day again. On March 6, we will gather at Felix Meritis. We will not turn it into a hiding place, but into a workroom: building a network that does not take, but sustains.

— Nicole Ex,
editor-in-chief