Essays
This is a story about a small group of young artists in Romania (zoom-in on Bucharest, please) and their endeavour of trying to make it in the Art world. We do not know how this will turn out.
READE T A J artist-run space, the 'make it' experience in the Art world
Ilina Schileru writes about a group of young artists in Bucharest and their endeavors to make it in an art world that offers no guarantees and is frequently a hostile environment for newcomers to the stage.
Where the striped hyenas are is not only a place in the imagination or in the past. Where the striped hyenas are is also a possibility for what the future could bring. It’s where they lie, waiting for their turn to return from their exile. Where the hyenas are is also where the ghouls and the djinn are, behind seven mountains, dreaming and chasing their world into being again.
READWhere the striped hyenas are, or, a tale is a map and a compass: some fragments on the fantastical, land and remembrance
Shayma Nader on how can the fantastical embody the political; what if all fantastical creatures were to rise up against the dispossessions and alienations from the lands that sustain them, to which they belong?
customer aggressively informs me that he accidentally put in his parent’s address and that i need to take the order to his. he messaged me through the app apparently but, with no signal in the building, i can’t see it. using the younger brother’s phone, i type the address into google maps - it’s two and a half miles away.
READthe brink of the platform: riding with deliveroo
How can algorithmic management lead to authoritarian management and precarious jobs?
To find yourself in a new Syrian school, established in a residential building in Turkey, that teaches the Libyan curriculum to freshly-arrived Syrians, makes you want to tell stories about it.
READTemporary Peace
Shahi Derky’s poignant text about leaving Syria, seeking refuge in different places, and the unending exile of figuring things out, remembering many pasts, and imagined futures.
European and US festivals have played a pivotal role in the global circulation of South Asian films. But their contribution has also been marked by questionable priorities: the near-exclusive promotion of Indian films or of films that speak to European and North American cinemas’ aesthetic affinities. With the new millennium, festivals began to embark on film production. How has this practice impacted South Asian filmmakers—women filmmakers in particular—and the visibility of their work?
READSouth Asian Women’s Cinema: Between Festivals & Streaming
On the questionable priorities of European and US film festivals in contributing to the global circulation of South Asian films, women’s films in particular.
Formal modes of engineering the well-being of the population are oppressive and exclusionary. Activists, scholars and citizens of the world have to find compassionate and strategic ways to enact their power of adaptability. Memes allow us to challenge conventional and restrictive forms of education, policy and collective action, fostering effective solutions for a broken system. Memes, as the new toolkit adopted by Internet users of India, has the potential to nurture democracy and pluralism, with the hope to preserve freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom to resist.
READPOOJA, what is this Behaviour?: Memes as Political participation & Toolkit of Digital resistance in India
Abhinit Khanna discusses meme culture, misinformation, trolling, and data-muddying in times of pandemic and war using the visual language of digital artworks.
I am the type of person who needs names and distinction in characteristics to comprehend whatever is happening in my world. I often blame it on growing up as a middle child in an immigrant family: the constant and urgent need to discern and explain what is mine and not. I am Minjee. I am Korean. I am a woman. Where are you from? What is your pronoun? What do I call you?
READWhat do I call you?
Minjee Hwang Kim on labelling and categorization of people, the power of assimilation, and the denial of structural oppression stretching into the model minority myth for Asians in the West.
Independently from one another, we began reclaiming a loudly crying face to denote the feeling of being overwhelmingly pained by beauty and our inability to grasp it fully.
READAll I want to do is to hold Your hand and cry the tears of Joy
Vera Kavaleuskaya convinces us to evade the rigid notion of professionalism, to not accept the invisible hand, and to kill the joy but to then revive it on your terms.
With this text, I’m probing into ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years, which, among other things, led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021. The story starts in 2016 when something quite special was cooking in the Art, Design, and Architecture School, and a truly radical form of transdisciplinary education was lived and enjoyed by many, thanks to UWAS. I want to make sense of the sad fallout from such dream; a fallout that happened despite countless protests at different levels of the organization’s pyramid.
READTransdisciplinarity in Higher Education: Wicked Problems, Dreams, and Nightmares
On the ongoing processes at Aalto University in the last five years that led to the administrative decision to remove the University-Wide Art Studies (UWAS) program in 2021.
