Two summers ago in a restaurant on Center Street in New York City, a line from a ‘90s hit song turned into a concept for a group show. I was sitting with some friends arguing the morality of the art world’s fast rallying around Pussy Riot as the Syrian conflict, then in its sixth month, […]
The initial impetus behind this issue was to reflect on the fanzine as a format. Embedded within histories of self-publishing, niche and underground groups, fandom, pop and rock idols, or even further political pamphlets, zines have fed and resulted from science fiction, comics, punk, queer, feminist imaginaries, and DIY aesthetics for decades. The zine is a […]
In the increasingly monopolized world of mainstream media, it is imperative that works that challenge the status quo, affirm the lives of their creators, and problematize corporate control over the media are available to the widest audience possible. Bookmobile Collective, 2001 The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face […]
These images have been repurposed to unlock and re-engineer associative thought processes attributed to branding. Familiar motifs collide with contrasting, suggestive phrases. Visual associative cues emerge. Form the bond between message and feeling! Join in and participate!
Her long-term friend and collaborator Jutta Koether, once wrote that artist and musician Kim Gordon is “if at all, a fragile super special chick (based on a decision), who plays bass, pushes for improvisation, one who knows and loves the history of the chicks in music and by that obviously serves as a very complex […]
The zine has always had an air of conspiracy theory about it: it’s not difficult to imagine the disarticulated contents of zines– obsessive, selective, forensic snapshots of cultural second-gunmen — redistributed as the autodidact’s bedroom diagram, found typically either in the apartments of detectives or of serial killers. To that effect, the zine can be […]
The Sultan Gallery is an art gallery initiated by brother and sister duo, Ghazi and Najat Sultan, who opened the gallery in 1969 in Kuwait City, and which closed with the Iraqi invasion in 1990. With a mission to promote and exhibit “modern young Arab artists,” the gallery was the first of it’s kind […]
Armenians have had a complex relationship with the Arab world, especially in Lebanon. Remnants of Aghed the Catastrophe of 1895-1923 , meandered there in waves, reconstituting their lost cities over the new geography of a country yet to be born. The more affluent settled in the francophone center of Beirut, where many of the prominent […]
The Lebanese witnessed 15 years of civil war and subsequent decades of random cruelty and political violence. During the lengthy years of the country’s reconstruction no effort was spared to conceal the physical traces of the war, yet its survivors were left uncared for, asked to rise from the rubble, and to raise a new […]
A white square ceramic tiled wall behind a big heavy machine juicing carrots and my impatient need to have that juice: this is the only vivid memory I have from Beirut’s city center before the civil war erupted in 1975. At that time, I was 6 years old. During the last summer before the war, […]