Essays
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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.
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READTo understand Associação Cultural Lanchonete<>Lanchonete as a counter-colonial contemporary art project, rather than, as many would have it, merely a social project, is to understand that Brazilian contemporary art can decolonize itself and propose other modes of operation.
Lanchonete<>Lanchonete: A Contemporary Art Studio with Radically Open Doors to Pequena África
Established in Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África, Lanchonete<>Lanchonete proposes a counter-colonial contemporary art practice that refuses institutional charity in favor of radical, two-way alliance with historically excluded Black and Indigenous communities.
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READTo revisit these images today—historical, archival, and contemporary—is to confront multiple temporalities: the gaze of missionary projection, the habitual and the foreseeable. These layers coexist, sometimes always in tension, revealing the land’s persistence beyond imposed narratives. Unbiblifying is not about erasure; it is about recognizing the sacred not as revelation but as habit, not as myth but as presence.
Theology of the Image: Unbiblifying the Sacred
The essay explores the early missionary gaze within European photographic practices in Palestine, examining it in parallel with local photographers’ approaches to distinguish between the sacred as revelation and the sacred as habit.
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READAmidst this uprising, several feminist film collectives emerged, adding to this momentum by making films and videos that disrupted the representations of women on screen, challenged their seclusion from the public sphere, and both fuelled and documented feminist campaigns and events. Despite the magnitude and significance of feminist cinema, its influence remains largely unspoken.
Women’s Uprising and the Latin American Film Collectives of the 1970s and 1980s
Lorena Cervera’s essay presents several feminist film collectives that challenged mainstream cinema by engaging in political debates, documenting activism, and creating spaces for women’s voices across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. By showcasing their largely overlooked work, Cervera emphasises their enduring cultural and political significance.
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READArt functions both as representation and as a tool for shaping society. Independent Iranian cinema could have offered an alternative narrative to the official one, defended Afghan migrants against exclusionary policies, upheld their human dignity, and fostered a more realistic understanding among Iranians. Instead, the Afghan individual has rarely been a concern in Iranian society.
Tracing Hazaras in Iranian Cinema: Historical Perspectives and Reflections
For over a century, Afghanistan’s Hazaras have endured violence, displacement, and marginalization. Their migration to Iran and subsequent representation in the cinema of Iran reveal enduring stereotypes, struggles for dignity, and the intergenerational impacts of historical trauma on this community.
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READTheir perseverance signals that the underrepresentation of Somali voices is not a reflection of lack of interest but of barriers that can and will be dismantled. As their presence grows, so too does the possibility of a cultural landscape that is not only more inclusive but also more honest about the histories, languages, and identities that it is made up of.
On the Cusp: the Underrepresentation of Somali-Finnish Youth in Finland’s Artistic Spaces
From limited mentorship opportunities to subtle cultural gatekeeping, this essay examines the educational, social, and cultural factors that contribute to the persistent underrepresentation of Somali-Finnish youth in Finland’s artistic spaces.
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READIn Sokndal, southern Norway, humans have been digging the earth for generations. First for iron, then for ilmenite – mineral, black, heavy ilmenite. Titanium-iron oxide pulled from the mountain’s dark seams to make the whitest of whites…
How Stone is Made to Disappear: Notes from Sokndal
In the Sokndal region of Norway, ilmenite – the dark mineral crucial for the fabrication of titanium white pigment has been mined for generations. In this essay, writer, artworker Joss Allen reflects on the relationship between humans and a landscape shaped by extraction, delving into geological time, industrial impact, and the persistent traces of removal.