Articles

The Garden

No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty.

The Home Front: On Rahmaneh Rabani and Bahman Kiarostami’s Impasse

Come on! Let them go. Let them go to hell. It’s none of your business.

Fractures in the Medium: Kaveh Akbar and Anahid Nersessian in Conversation

I’m trying to describe a cloud from inside the cloud, and you have to be on the ground to see that it’s a giraffe.

Hash Is a Vegetable

Our folk music is slow, like a soft ocean wave.

A Private Ocean: Iman Mersal and Maru Pabón in Conversation

Why should I add to this archive of nostalgic poems? It would be like grabbing the first fruit in the tree.

Days of Grief: Iran Diary 2

Honestly, I was more than happy to freeze.

Anger Piled Atop Anger: Iran Diary

It’s not entirely clear to me when it all began.

Girl on a Train: Getting Real with Fatima Daas

How do you sit with your ass between two chairs?

Laughter Was Our Inheritance: A Beirut Diary

On February 14, 2005, the day Rafik Hariri was assassinated, I was sent to confession for the first time.

Spirit Riders: A Conversation with Mati Diop and Fatima Al Qadiri

In Dakar, the spirits ride at dusk.

Trump Cocktail

Hello, I’m Hadi and this is my art.

Rude Pieties: Six Glimpses of Hervé Guibert

A possible epitaph? Better to remain hungry than to renounce appetite.

Phoneme Riot: A Conversation with Nour Mobarak

The work of Los Angeles–based artist Nour Mobarak can be understood as an open-ended engagement with the promiscuous and constitutive power of words.

General Behavior

When two gooms get each other.

South of Nothing: The Photographs of Soham Gupta

When life’s hard, time’s a motherfucker.

Blasted: On Reza Abdoh’s Tight Right White

He ate camp and shat punk, his style a fizzing intestine stuffed with culture’s slime and scraps.

We Are The Lines of Control: Unraveling Naeem Mohaiemen

Like a kite catching thermal winds.

Matter and Mind

As a child in Tehran, the artist Shirin Sabahi took weekly painting classes not far from Park-e Laleh, or tulip park, in the sprawling city center.

The Night Journey of Ahmed Bouanani

In the stillness of the house at Aït Oumghar there are ghosts of cats.

Book of Judges: Larry David and the War on the War on Comedy

The war of all against all against nothing