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Articles
Conner Habib
“We pretend that sex is some sort of unified animal instinct and that everyone shares it. That’s true at some level, obviously, but our desires are our own. And they are little pathways into our consciousness.”
Anna Della Subin
Marina Warner
“My favorite present to give people used to be a seahorse. They cost twenty pence or something — in those days it was probably a florin — in a little shop that sold straw and raffia and natural products of that kind. For a long time I wanted to write about seahorses, because the male carries the baby.”
Omar Berrada
Documenta 13
One could argue that the thirteenth edition of Documenta, the Kassel quinquennial that ran for one hundred days last summer, was the most
Bidoun
ever.
Sohrab Mohebbi, Tom Francis, Clare Davies
Vishal Jugdeo’s
Goods Carrier
Jugdeo’s video employs minimal means to inhabit his own outsiderness.
Aram Moshayedi
Zahi Hawass
“Revolution happened. The poor became rich, the rich became poor. The lady that used to have to look in the water to see her face, now she has a mirror. They raped the pyramids. The farmer who used to go to the field with an axe, now he goes with a gun. Three people leave their homes in the morning, two come back in the evening.”
Ursula Lindsey
Larry Gagosian
“I started selling posters because I thought I could make more money that way than parking cars. Simple as that. I saw somebody else selling posters and I basically just copied their business. It was a total lack of imagination.”
Negar Azimi
Jeremy Deller
“Genuine boredom… bloody hell, I remember boredom. It’s amazing! Sunday afternoon, on a wet Sunday afternoon, that’s when you sort of took to your bedroom and got your books out or something.”
Sukhdev Sandhu
Hossein Amanat
“One gets very impressed by the
forms
in Iranian architecture. One of the greatest messages is the sequence of volumes: how an outdoor space, say, can give you an impression of enclosure, and then you come to a smaller space, or a lower or higher space, the interrelations of different volumes and proportions — the time it takes to walk through, the amount of light you experience as you pass…”
Benjamin Tiven
Rokni Haerizadeh’s
The Reign of Winter
When the sheets are all sewn together, the work will represent an unlikely, if not maudlin, take on this exploding piñata of privilege.
Negar Azimi
Tongues: Glossolalia going viral
Amid the rising, falling tide of gobbledygook the preacher would suddenly start to shout in Somali.
Nimco Mahamud-Hassan
The Imaginary Elsewhere: How not to think about diasporic art
The political import of these works has less to do with representation than with the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the effort to recast the everyday into mythical structures that speak to universal desires.
Media Farzin
Aliens: The Arabs of Bosnia and the War on Terror
Banners like Non-Alignment and Islam can be taken down and rolled up as circumstances dictate, but people often get left behind.
Darryl Li
Gulfiwood: Culture and society in South Asian Arabia
There is a body of cinema about life in the Gulf, that is consumed by the majority of the population of the Gulf, that requires no special pleading or state subsidy to exist — the popular culture of the Arab working class, most of whom happen to be Indian.
Sudarshan Purohit
Model UNESCO: A Roundtable: With Sarah Rifky, Nadia Ayari, Annabel Daou, Ranya Husami, and Mahmoud Khaled
American participation in the International Cairo Biennale has been wrongheadedly PC, expensive, beautiful, boring, and/or outright controversial.
Bidoun
Imprisoned Airs: A conversation with Salar Abdoh
In life, Reza Abdoh inspired all manner of fantastical tales.
Daniel Mufson
Haj to Utopia
They were drawn from a seemingly incoherent mix of -isms: pan-Islamism, Irish republicanism and Bolshevism.
Hussein Omar
The Colonel
In 2006, I was asked to address an audience in Tehran on the novels of Orhan Pamuk.
Christopher de Bellaigue
Notes on a Century
Alongside these formidable accomplishments, there is a Bernard Lewis who is reviled by leftish academia and who is surrounded by dubious sycophants.
Issandr El Amrani
Jumana Manna: The apparatus of the game
Here, the touch of her swim coach’s hand can stand in for all the sexual slippage of a woman coming of age in water.
Kate Sutton
A Very Still Life: Jack Kevorkian and the muse of genocide
Quite at home in the museum, the severed head of a young woman dangles by her hair a few feet from the reception desk.
Anna Della Subin
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