Between the years 2017 - 2020 the kurdish artist Fatoş İrwen from Diyarbakır was imprisoned for demonstrating against state violence and gender inequality. In the darkness of her prison cell, once vanished from public sight, she worked with the material that gives form to her artistic practice, her own hair.
Latifa Labsir writes about an enormous ecological installation by the Moroccan artist Samir Salmi, on the southern sea front, where his handiwork integrates with the seascape. Salmi has created, together with a group of children, a work dealing with the ecological hazard resulting from the increased amounts of plastic waste, which has become a threat to the marine environment.
Every visitor to States of Violence violates the American Espionage Act. Hagai Ulrich on the a/political and WikiLeaks joint project in London, and the "colossal participatory art" of Julian Assange.
In an era of social distancing, an exhibition about ecology turns into a meditation on human connections. Michal B. Ron reviews the recent “Down to Earth” exhibition at Gropius Bau.
In this Tohu Podcast, David Duvshani meets performance and social practice art pioneer Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Jerusalem for a conversation following her move to Jerusalem and her latest retrospective exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York. They talk about manifestos, authenticity, collaboration, art education, women artists, labor organization, life in Jerusalem, and the state of the political Left in the US and in Israel/Palestine.
Moving across New York and San Francisco, Paris and Munich, Accra and Lagos, artist and scholar Malik Gaines’s Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible offers a lively and affirmative account of stage, dress, film and television, and music performance. Saadi Nikro reviews Gaines’s recently published book, discussing its many intersections of race, theatricality, subjectivity, and sexuality.
Can we talk about gentrification in the context of colonialism and deprived lands? What does it mean to own the land? Rana Asali raises questions after visiting “That Man in That Box”, a performance piece by Palestinian artist Rabia Salfiti.
Hagai Ulrich converses with Nadav Bin-Nun about music and art, improvisation, violence, and narcissism, following the release of his Spiritual Album.
"Pre-Israeli Orientalism: A Photographic Portrait", written by Dor Guez, focuses on a photographic genre from the early decades of the twentieth century as a local, unique, and complex case of visual Orientalism. Hagai Ulrich reviews the book and suggests broadening the conversation through the values and characteristics of performance art.
Dana Yahalomi talks with Elinor Salomon about the work of Public Movement in the public sphere, about the political role of the museum and its collections, and about the technology of knowledge transfer. This is a second conversation in the framework of cooperation between Tohu and Kadist.
