the Middle East

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.

How to Explain Hare Hunting to a Dead German Artist

Joseph Sassoon Semah, a Baghdad-born artist who now lives and works in Amsterdam, is about to embark on an extensive multi-site project, in Amsterdam, Jerusalem, and Baghdad. Berlin-based poet and author Mati Shemoelof talks with him about his years living as an artist in Israel versus being a Babylonian Jew and an artist in Europe. They discuss Judaism, diaspora, exclusion, and acts of concealment and building.

Home Goods

A carpet made of concrete, a ripped duvet, and toy soldiers scattered across a single bed. East of Elsewhere's “While You Were Sleeping” housed a collection of domestic furnishings distorted and deconstructed to reflect the consequences of conflict seeping into everyday life.

 

You are not Nervous, but You Should Be

In a tale full of suspense, surveillence, interrogation, secret meetings, and covert conversations, artist Tea Tupajić describes the 2-year process of devising a new performance work in Tel Aviv, which involved Mossad and Shin Bet officers. A new essay in Tohu Magazine: we recommend reading it in one sitting.

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.