archive

Writing, Situated: On Constelação Clarice

In the group exhibition Constelação Clarice we can see, for the first time, Clarice Lispector’s writings situated within the art scene of her time. Hannah Bruckmüller reviews the exhibition that has taken place at IMS Paulista in São Paulo, where she finds the egg that is the beginning.

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Tohu Podcast: A Conversation with Hakim Bishara

From researching and re-imagining a 1943 exhibition of modern Lebanese art in Jerusalem to writing for a leading independent arts magazine, to being part of an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, Hakim Bishara has been experimenting with various practices in the past few years. David Duvshani recently met the Palestinian writer, curator, and artist in New York for a conversation about these multiple ventures and about the New York cultural scene in the Trump era.

 

AnArchic Archive: Phenomenal Photographs and Multiple Exposures

In what ways can an archive be regarded as an anarchic practice of collection and circulation? Following his visit to the exhibition Unboxing Photographs: Arbeiten im Fotoarchiv, Saadi Nikro raises some thoughts about the way interventionist archivists, artists, and photographic practitioners work with photographic archives.

 

Two Point Perspective (part III): Forms of Refusal

 The third and final part of the essay by Noah Simblist focuses on Akram Zaatari’s use of dialogical exchange as an artistic strategy. While completely different in their dynamics and outcomes, Zaatari’s conversations with both Hagai Tamir and Avi Mograbi, he argues, reveal different degrees of both personal and political engagement and, at the same time, various forms of antagonism and refusal.

Two Point Perspective (part II): the Dialogical Exchange

In the second part of his essay analysing Akram Zaatari’s 2013 work “Letter to a Refusing Pilot,” Noah Simblist addresses a previous work by the artist that involved a conversation with filmmaker Avi Mograbi. Simblist is reading this work through the prism of dialogical exchange, referencing Grant Kester’s definition of “dialogical art,” as well as Ella Shohat’s observations on the identity politics of Mizrachi or Arab Jews.

Two Point Perspective (part I): Letter to a Refusing Pilot

In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town of Saida that acquired mythological flourishes: One of the Israeli fighter jets that were sent to the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Ain El-Helweh, aborted its mission to bomb a school building, its pilot dropping the bombs into the sea instead. In a text for Tohu Magazine, that will be published in 3 parts, Noah Simblist dives into Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, instigated by this true story.

An Expert Testimony

In Eyal Weizman’s new book, the reader joins the author as he hovers over contested territories in the Middle East, follows him as he traces the histories, ideologies, slippery borders, technologies, and narratives involved in the State-inflicted marginalization and displacement of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert, in Southern Israel. Rotem Rozental reviews “The Conflict Shoreline,” as well as Weizman’s methodology of forensic visual culture research.

Apocalypse Yesterday

The Dome of the Rock – that golden, volatile rock of contention – is at the center of an exhibition at the Bezalel Photography Gallery. Noa Hazan writes for Tohu about the exhibition and about the visual research that has preceded it, which involved studying hundreds of photographs of the site from the last 150 years, and suggested new terms for looking at its visual representations.  

A Particular Shade of Red

A play of accuracy and doubt, Walid Raad’s MoMA retrospective manifests the artist’s distinctive way of relating the affects of war. Naomi Lev visited and took the walkthrough

Stealing from a Thief

What did Michal BarOr do with the Pandora’s Box A. has left on her doorstep? Yair Barak describes the circles of guilt engendered by BarOr’s work, A Non-Private Collection, about a stolen suitcase full of photographs, with hope at the bottom.

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