Essays
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READThe urumi is a physical medium of wood, metal, and skin, created by the hands of working men, metaphysicalised by the Tamil folk artists who, uprooted from political struggle by imperial counter-insurgency, endure the hell of neocolonialism through their mystification of art. Their soul – Tamil soul of Tamil soil – are a decreation of caste, colonialism and capital.
Post-Indenture Sonic Decreation: The Urumi Melam’s Materialist Ruptures
In post-indenture Malaysia, the urumi melam, a Tamil folk drum ensemble, is kept alive by caste-oppressed men who treat their instruments as deities. Celebrated in working-class temples yet policed in elite spaces and shaped by neocolonial power, the music carries devotion and political weight. Can this practice of sonic decreation ever move beyond religious liminalism to become an instrument of emancipation?
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READThere’s a disturbing trend in contemporary photography exhibitions, where everything feels correct but nothing feels thought-provoking. The projects are socially pertinent but their narrative, predictable. They are humanitarian. Let me explain.
Humanitarian Photography and NGO Curating: When Good Intentions Create Bad Art
When moral urgency eclipses aesthetics and critical inquiry, you get humanitarian photography. Jussi K. Suomalainen argues that museums and photo festivals increasingly resemble NGOs and that the result is not just bad art but boring art.
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READI now think that in its waiting, the body experiences those post-poetic iterations that transcend its materiality, mortality, and alienation. It prepares for its future life in a post-poetic Palestine.
Tracing the Palestinian Post-Poetic, or, How to Concretize a Liberated Future?
In exile, the body waits to connect with its soul. Moving between tammadī, mística, Indigenous futurisms, and Palestinian folktales, Sanabel Abdel Rahman argues for the post-poetic: a knowledge constructed outside colonial experience and temporality, in which liberated Palestine ceases to be a rupture between reality and fantasy and instead becomes something lived and experienced in the present.
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READBy positioning itself as belonging to the region, the pictorial periodical hoped to help its readers see and understand different aspects of Asia using photography, alongside text and illustrations.
Revisiting the First Decade of ‘Asia Magazine (1961-1998)’
This essay visits Asia Magazine, the Hong Kong-based pictorial weekly that sought to show Asia to Asians through photography, colour pages and free Sunday distribution across the region’s English newspapers – tracing its founding, Filipino photographic influence, and the visual culture it shaped.
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READIn the context of Vietnam, where ambiguity can act as a counteractive method to conceal intentions and suggest different perspectives on the same ideologies, beliefs, or traditions that we are brought up to follow, the medium of moving image becomes a vessel for artists who have to speak without vocalization, to convey through gestures, and to sing in metaphors. This ‘genre’ of ambiguity desists rigid interpretation that hinges entirely upon research practice.
Trespassing in Plain Sight: Ambiguity as a Generative Force
Through the practices of Hachul Le Do, Lêna Bùi, and Ngọc Nâu, the essay presents an insight into how contemporary artists in Vietnam have adapted moving images into a language that activates intentional ambiguity to subvert direct confrontation.
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READReading my friends’ and co-authors’ essays, I realised that when we are confined by a time and space that limits our bodies and minds, knowledge needs to make sense for the past, present, and emerging – not a distant, unlikely future. Kitchen knowledge reminded us of this urgency. Knowledge must function like food: we gather it and use it, or save it for later, but it is perishable.
Summoning in the Kitchen: The ‘lintas-batas’ politics of Gerwani women
Drawing on prison memoirs, Api Kartini, and Memasak Harapan – a collective anthology co-created by the group of author-friends – the essay recovers Gerwani’s vision of the kitchen as political and boundary-crossing by linking its history to today’s state food interventions to call for reclaiming cooking and care as forms of resistance.
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READAs you approach the entrance of the town, a prominent metal sign spans across the roadway, clearly displaying the inscription: “Welcome to Bint Jbeil, the Capital of Resistance and Liberation.” This sign might read as a mere political slogan or an ideological marker. But this inscription is an organic statement of fact, authored by the very bodies of the South Lebanese people. This sign is a reflection of a population whose relationship to the soil is absolute, visceral, and non-negotiable.
Bint Jbeil: The Town Israel Tried to Erase, and Lebanon Turned into a Symbol of Resistance
Bint Jbeil appears in Western media only when Israel bombs it. But this town in Southern Lebanon has centuries of scholarship, resistance, and memory that no airstrike — or shorthand — can erase.
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READThe bad guest accepts the invitation. She comes, she eats, she is not above the honorarium or the grant. But she behaves incorrectly. She declines to separate the violence over there from the innocence in here. She does not bring her biography as proof. She mentions sanctions at the feminist panel and the war at the vernissage. She asks what the land acknowledgment is for, if the land is not given back.
The Bad Guest: On War, Eligibility and the Manners Expected of the Rescued
Mina Keykhaei traces how diaspora artists become “eligible dissidents”—rescued, programmed, applauded—until their grief implicates the rescuer, asking what it truly means now to become a less welcomed guest.
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READEuropean decision-makers enabled a genocide by failing to uphold international law. The groups involved in protest campaigns and petitions, and people who have found each other at demonstrations, are not under an illusion that joining a strike or protest would somehow save the United Nations. Organizing is driven by solidarity, and the felt effects of militarization, fear of facism and authoritarian politics. People are recognizing more clearly that the rules-based international order was not built to overcome inequality, but rather to provide a legal and institutional cover that sustains it. People want justice.
Black, White, Green and Red at Venice Biennale 2026
At Venice Biennial 2026, the jury tried to exclude Israel over its committing genocide in Gaza and was forced to resign under legal threat. Artists and workers refused complicity, exposing the art world’s crisis of legitimacy.
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READDespite the personal tragedies, Amma Zargul has become a symbol of resistance. She has joined numerous protests, rallies, and sit-ins for her son and other missing persons from Quetta to Islamabad to Mastung, sometimes jailed, sometimes dragged during demonstrations. “But my heart and will are not defeated. I am now part of the resistance,” she declares.
Amma Zargul, Balochistan, and the Weight of Disappearance
In Balochistan’s decades-long crisis of enforced disappearances, Amma Zargul has buried two sons and a daughter to state violence and impunity—yet for sixteen years, she has refused to stop demanding her third son’s return.
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READPeople all around are wearing buttons pinned to their clothes: martyrs’ faces and Chya’s logo. There were a few rows of chairs surrounding the two graves, of which the majority were occupied by grieving women in black. The ceremony begins, speeches and songs are blasted, and we quickly realize that this gathering is a placeholder for remembrance, connectivity between locals, and a venue for awareness-spreading. There is an afterlife of ‘sacrifice’, in this case, for the forests.
Martyrs Don’t Die: An Embodied Dispatch from Zagros Wildfires
On the ground in Kurdistan in Iran, two visitors follow firefighters into the burning Zagros forests, where wildfire and grief converge, and the dead become martyrs who quietly refuse to disappear.
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READ“Chegança” is a playful inflection of formal, cultivated, colonizing language—a challenge to the grammatical norms of the languages imposed across Latin America. Above all, chegança is a political gesture: an inclination toward the popular, toward the people, toward the masses.
Summoning the Presence of Indigenous worlds: A pedagogy of chegança
The curatorial project of Frestas – Trienal das Artes proposes a way of apprehending epistemologies and lifeworld relations that have been stifled by the colonial condition across different countries in Latin America.