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 […]
In my book Vladimir’s Night, the artist Maxim Komar-Myshkin writes a history of Russia as a series of jokes. In the joke “1936 – Persecutions by Stalin,” a Jewish doctor sentenced to death prays for a miracle – and his prayer is answered: “At that very instant an elephant with two trunks was born in […]
The Portrait is a performance by iQhiya, a collective of young black South African female artists based in Cape Town. In April 2017 the work was performed in Athens (at the Athens School of Fine Art – ASFA) as part of the exhibition documenta 14. An endurance and durational piece, that comprised the members of […]
On October 29, 1949, the Gen. Howze pulled into New York Harbor with 1,352 refugees on board. I was one of them. I settled down in Williamsburg, the poorest part of Brooklyn, but that was the luckiest day of my life.