Wor(l)ds: An Eclipse
Reading “Art and its Worlds” sent Michal B. Ron on a journey in time and space between anarchist art collectives, various languages, multidirectional cartographies, and strategies of creating publics for art.
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Lamees Khoury: The Ultimate Observer
Rula Jiryis spoke with the Palestinian artist Lamees Khoury about belonging and identity, memory and intuition, and how form, voice, and movement appear in her artworks.
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.
Zehra Doğan’s Hidden Drawings
In 2017, Zehra Doğan was sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison for “terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred.” An artist and journalist, it was Doğan’s painting of the city of Nusaybin in ruins, adorned by Turkish flags, that led to her arrest. Charlotte Bleicher writes about the artist’s prison works, Hidden Drawings, which have been introduced to the public in the last Berlin Biennial.
On the Corrupt in Art (a reading of Hannan Abu-Hussein's artworks)
The musician, artist, and poet Wisam Gibran suggests a socio-cultural reading of four works by the Palestinian artist Hannan Abu-Hussein's - Agina (Dough), Pouring the Oil, Bukjia (Bundle), In Between the Destruction of the Father - as representatives of inner worlds reflecting art's association with the cycle of life and death, movement and stillness, the sacred and the forbidden, the presence and the absence.
Available in Audio
Tohu Podcast: A conversation with Rafram Chaddad
David Duvshani talks with Rafram Chaddad, artist and connoisseur of cooking traditions of the Mediterranean, who lives in Tunisia. They discuss art and food, wandering, traditions and their preservation, artworks created by Chaddad in recent years, and the contemporary art scene in Tunisia.
The Middle East Film Initiative: A Conversation with Ruth Priscilla Kirstein
“It’s often Terrorist 1, Terrorist 2, Terrorist 3, and for women it’s even worse.” Matt Hanson talks to Dr. Ruth Priscilla Kirstein, the founder of The Middle East Film Initiative in NYC, about discriminatory practices towards and lack of representation of Middle Eastern cultural practitioners, and about some new community-based methods offered by MEFI for addressing them.
On Magic, Illusions, and Tabletop Tricks
Karam Natour's solo show "Repeat After Me," on view now at the Umm el-Fahem Gallery, is a sort of birthday song for a newly-born magician. Bar Yerushalmi has viewed the show, and he brings back thoughts on the difference between trickery and true magic.
Gender and Senses: The Art of Anisa Ashkar
Anisa Ashkar's work uses the different senses to problematize the intersection of categories that compose together her multi-layered identity. Tal Dekel visits her recent solo show and writes about Ashkar's use of the whole sensorium to blend categories, destabilize and dismantle them.
Fricative Consonants
Bar Yerushalmi visits the exhibition of the artists' collective Slavs and Tatars at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius and joins them on a magic carpet ride through the demographic, linguistic, religious, and social realms of the kingdom of Eurasia.