1. He is still Here (Wexner Center for the Arts) 2. Lala Rukh’s ‘The Unholy Trinity’ (documenta Halle) 3. The House of the Falling Man (Columbus Museum of Art)
Archives
On page 29 of No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump (which you can order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or the Wexner Center Store), at the beginning of Chapter 2 (‘Mourning Diary’), you can read: [w]e knew that we had something very concrete and specific that we could […]
The Neolithic Revolution in the Levant and Mesopotamia marked the first domestication of plants, animals, and humans. With our sedentarization, we opened ourselves up to cultures being diminished ecologically, nutritionally, and spiritually, and to the construction of hierarchical, centralized, socialpolitical regimes and their inherent inhibition of liberties. Occasionally romanticized by anthropologists as “the original affluent […]
Crisis and failure have always been material and political. The struggle for freedom promises renewed potential for social justice and equality but also the possibility for completely counter outcomes. The struggle must continue to intervene in existing conditions and propose alternative futures, leaving stains and residues that distort the known image. These may induce a […]
It is 1881. She somehow finds herself in London, visiting the British Museum. She is looking at the caryatid from the Erechtheion. As she wonders how much she is missing her sisters (she too is missing her sisters), in walks renowned French sculptor Auguste Rodin, accompanied by a group of gentlemen from the museum. Rodin […]
Francisco Goya, El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid (The Third of May 1808, 1814), oil on canvas, 268 x 347 cm
Today is the first day back at school for my son, Eneko, and the first week of classes at Ohio State University, where I’ll be teaching the class ‘documenta 14 and the ‘decolonial turn’: Contemporary Theory and Art Education’. As a way to celebrate all of the students heading back to class from their summers […]
In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a horse being flogged. In tears, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal’s neck and collapsed. In accounts of Nietzsche’s life, this act of interspecies solidarity heralds his descent into madness. A decade later, one year before his death, a photographer captures Nietzsche in the grip of stroke-induced paralysis. […]
The first time a Syrian was represented in cinema was in 1897, in a film by the Lumière brothers that enacted the assassination of General Kléber by a fanatic names Suleiman.
Pictured in this photograph (sic) is the Scow House that once stood at the shoreline of Gwa’yas’dams (Gilford Island). The Gukwdzi (Big House) that holds the treasure of the Yakala (Undersea Kingdom), it is beautifully illustrated with the Sea Monster across the front. It represents who we are and where we come from: it is […]