Art Magazine
Cries of Inanna, Êvar Hussayni, mixed media book, 2024
Being nearby might appear effortless, non-spectacular, and quiet. In dailiness, it fleshes out as a nonapparent, voyeuristically undetectable choreography of multiple consensual labours and commitments sore and exhausted with recurring waves of critical awareness about the dynamic injustices of the dominant world. Being nearby is not easy. I imagine its power and radical potential accumulating exactly in its uneasy, laborious nonapparentness: its working might remain undetected for the normative structures and appear inconsequential for the gargantuan dominant world.
READQueercrip Reflection on the Politics of Holding Tight vs. Being Nearby
Reflecting on the politics of holding and being nearby framed through the lens of queercrip experience and world-making to understand themes of embodiment, institutional trauma, and ethical social relationships.
How I come to imagine freedom in the context of the Kurdish struggle is my own form of un-learning. It is an un-learning that has left third-degree burns as I grieve the many magical possibilities I imagined as a child. Firstly, there was always an imagining of a return. Then there was an imagining of a gentler story - one not so filled with the relentless cycle of violence. One where Kurdish women weren’t killed by their own families, their husbands, or whoever it was that imprisoned Öcalan. The third was access. Being able to access my grandparents at any will.
READWho Gets to Live? — On Archives and Kurdish Identity Formation
Êvar Hussayni’s essay is an engagement with her memories through Jineolojî, shaped as they are by a mix of rage, grief and longing. It is an evolving testament to a Kurdishness that is intimately personal and profoundly collective, and continuously shaped by Kurdish women who remember, resist, and redefine themselves to exist outside of the colonial framework.
Toxic mirrors the spirits of a society learning to navigate freedom while haunted by an unresolved past. Here, the idea of the West glimmers like a distant oasis—a place of glossy dreams and bright promises that never quite materialise, as for many, those dreams soon meet harsh reality.
READA Dance of Intimacy, Ambition and Despair: A Review of Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic
In Saulė Bliuvaitė’s film ‘Toxic’, friendship and rivalry weave together in a complex dance, an intricate play of support and silent competition. Filled with both violence and tender moments, in the film it emerges as a fragile lifeline.
The main exhibition, “an operatic exhibition about the space we live in”, is housed in the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall. Its galleries present significant challenges due to their modular white walls and vast areas to fill. This is likely why the main exhibition includes works by 72 artists from 30 countries. The 15th Gwangju Biennale is not the only large-scale exhibition to challenge the concept of a “static exhibition,” but it stands out for its innovative approach. The main exhibition shifts focus from the dominant sense of sight to other senses, particularly listening, based on the visitors’ mobility. Constructed as “a narrative,” the venues connect musical and visual forms.
READListening to the World: A Geopolitical Lens on the Gwangju Biennale
The 15th Gwangju Biennale, marking its 30th anniversary, focuses on sound and ecological themes. Rooted in South Korea’s democracy movement and the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, does the Biennale continue to uphold its founding declaration of a “living memorial” or sidestep the political?
How to transform smell through a painted picture? And what ethical questions are at hand when depicting a friend in a picture? Joel Slotte has, in the past decade, developed a style of painting that reminds of numerous pop culture references and recognizable aesthetics which has been called “slotte-like” and ”slotte-esque” in Finnish art criticism. As an artist, Slotte works across drawing and sculpture in addition to painting, as the different mediums emerge in surprising ways.
READPainting the Self and the Close Ones: An Interview with Joel Slotte
Eero Karjalainen in conversation with Joel Slotte, exploring Joel’s process, the display of reference material in his work, the ethical side of using personal references of an artist and the impact and role of people close to him in his work, and the infrastructures of the art world and the fragility in which we operate.
Photography is an inherently uneven way of viewing. For centuries, there has been a desire to identify with that apparatus in the West, and for mysterious reasons, still to me, as a way to identify with the technology and disavow the messiness of human vision, which is pretty much based on vision, which is very much easily distracted, very much individualized.
READAlienation, Authenticity, and the Human Scale: An Interview with Stan Douglas
Ali Akbar Mehta interviews Stan Douglas on the complexities of photography and its inherent alienation that can be harnessed to disrupt traditional narratives and offer fresh perspectives on history.
So Palestine being temporarily suspended is the basis for how we conceptualize things between the catastrophes of the past, the Nakba, and everything else, and the ambitions for a state that seems to constantly move further and further into the future. And that means that the present remains sort of an unsettled purgatory.
READIn Attempts to (Un)forge Present: An Interview with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind
Rania Atef in conversation with Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind on the occasion of their exhibition at the Amos Rex Museum where they push the boundaries of the audience’s imagination about national identity, loss, memory and trauma.
Dialogue between two or more processes involves transformation at a systemic and structural scale. Other processes at work between the microbes, water molecules, and chemicals the human body encounters in the soil must be reduced to the physics of contact, the chemistry of ionic and covalent bonds, or the ecology of microbial populations in contact. Machine learning is off to a good headstart; how about studying more-than-human assemblages as they interact?
READThinking with the Forest: Roots and Routes for New Knowledges
Highlighting the significance of ecological knowledge practiced by farmers in Thailand, the paper explores how agroecology resists capitalist agriculture, supports farmers’ autonomy and generational knowledge, and fosters resilience and knowledge-sharing among communities.
