A hand-stitched board game made in Ramallah  welcomes players to a Palestinian kitchen

Who has the freedom to move unconstrained? In the West Bank, where Palestinian mobility is governed by the Israeli military, nöl collective creates art under illegal occupation that stages the problem of movement. The artisan fashion brand has designed its own version of the two-player Levantine race game, Barjis, a game traditionally passed down from mother to daughter on her wedding day as a gift for her new home. Like Pachisi or Ludo, to win the game you must guide your counters around the board to arrive safely back home to the “kitchen”, represented on the board as a square motif beautifully rendered in Palestinian tatreez. Their board is the product of cross-Levantine artistry and collaboration; the Majdalawi cotton is woven in al-Khalil (Hebron) and the board is embroidered and screen-printed by hand in Ramallah. Instead of dice, the game is played with six cowrie shells sourced from Damascus. The welcome domesticity of the kitchen that animates each game of Barjis in some ways enacts life under occupation, where the private sphere can provide sanctuary from racialised hostility in the public sphere. With their first board game, nöl collective invites hospitality, community, and intimacy through the act of play, continuing to challenge Israeli repression through ancestral tradition and craft. Victory is achieved through movement, creating a psychic space for restoration and imagination that undermines Israeli containment.     Soraya Odubeko

A wall of postcards become pixels in a larger story of community and correspondence

In an age of instantaneous digital communication, physical correspondence can appear as mere curiosity. But in Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska’s new exhibition, Another Chance Encounter at Kettle’s Yard, the artists use old postcards not as anachronistic communication technology but a tool to recover the story of two marginalised historical figures.

At the centre of the exhibition at Kettle’s Yard is Slightly Bitter (2025), a multimedia installation inspired by the surviving correspondence between the Polish poet Sophie Brzeska and the Welsh artist and writer Nina Hamnett. Both were connected to French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Sophie Brzeska’s husband and Hamnett’s one-time lover, but it is little-known that the two women shared their own correspondence between 1917 and 1918, from which only Brzeska’s side of the correspondence survives. In Slightly Bitter, Himid and Stawarska seek to redress these elisions and fragmentations of the archive. The walls of the installation are lined by postcards from Himid’s personal collection, where the artists have rewritten the correspondences originally divulged in Brzeska’s biography Matka. Where there are silences, the artists engage in narrative invention, supplementing the archive with anecdotes and revelations from their own personal relationships. As viewers, it is hard to tell where Brzeska and Hamnett end, and Himid and Stawarska begin.

Another Chance Encounter is an unconventional take on the epistolary that employs postcards over their more serious sibling, the letter. For Himid and Stawarska, postcards are not kitschy ephemera, or anodyne reminders you forget to send your relatives on holiday. In this exhibition, the postcard becomes a vehicle for the thoughtful examination of memory, art history and human attachment. Soraya Odubeko

Clicking down the road, clattered in a heap – what are the political sidequests of the humble Lime bike?

It began with a missing seat here, and a stolen pedal there. Then people started hiding entire bikes in their living rooms overnight, depriving Uber of its late-night profits. Now, the sound of clicking, wailing bike alarms is almost constant urban background noise as people bypass the apps to start up their rides. But the bikes aren’t only for getting from A to B: one viral TikTok shows a Lime bike unceremoniously hauled off a bridge and thrown onto a police car below during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. In another, French strikers line a motley collection of toppled e-bikes across a narrow Parisian street to prevent police cars from crossing their picket line.

Fast-casual chain restaurants fill bicycle baskets with their signature sauces in messy and vaguely disgusting marketing stunts. This summer, pictures of baskets filled with ice, drinks, and oysters went platinum on Instagram Reels. Lime has leaned into the disorder: in a paid collaboration, Timothée Chalamet rode a Lime bike onto the red carpet at the premiere of A Complete Unknown, leaving it parked in a red zone.

E-bikes have transformed pavements into the newest frontier of the platform economy. In many ways, they symbolise what’s wrong: the encroachment of Big Tech into our daily lives, the replacement of ownership with the illusion of convenience, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few absent tech barons. But where Big Tech supposedly tries to introduce efficiency, new and marvellous enactments of disorder naturally follow. New technologies promise to change 21st-century travel, but they will first have to contend with the disobedient publics who address the privatisation and enclosure of their cities in unpredictable ways. Soraya Odubeko

The pocket: not just a repository but a manifestation of how, and what, we carry

Women have long complained that mainstream designers select silhouette over functionality when it comes to pockets, forcing the wearer to slow themselves down or occupy an arm with a bag. Across these pages, we celebrate the humble pocket, not only as a thing of use but also as an important psychic space in which we might place our most treasured belongings. The artist Kalina Sikorska has reinterpreted the pocket variously as a white, vac-formed sheet of plastic (above), which puts the usually hidden contents of the pocket on display, and making the pocket itself not secret but stage. Her metal pockets, overleaf, reconstruct in steel the 18th-century tie-on pockets worn by women across England from the working to upper classes. These pockets, extensively catalogued in collections such as the V&A’s, were an essential part of everyday dress, carrying the most used and valuable possessions, allowing women to carry about letters, scissors, spectacles, books, diaries and pens – the tools, in other words, required for participating in the world. Nell Whittaker

A trio of puff pieces by Mordecei, to help you stare down the winter days in cosy comfort