Have we ever heard anyone speak of collective forgetfulness? While the term "collective memory" exerts its power over us, it places a whip in our hands against our attempts at personal forgetfulness.

Imagine, dear reader, waking up each day without a memory of those around you. Amir Nassar’s literary navigations meander between the total recall of Borges’s Funes the Memorious and the complete forgetfulness of diving into Lethe, river of the underworld. Is a life where one never forgets worth living?

Victoria Heifetz argues that in the dialog with Käthe Kollwitz, the artist’s fear of death, bereavement, and nothingness has been forgotten. Is forgetfulness an erasure? Like Kollwitz’s child clutching a mother who struggles with death, Heifetz holds on to herself and her drawings. Still, she says, to rebuild a present and a future, to change – you must let go.

For Palestinians living in historic Palestine and for those referred to as "Palestinian refugees," the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 never ended. This memory shapes Palestinian identity, but is it a lack of narrative that has existed for decades? Nour Saed analyzes factors inhibiting Palestinian society from investing in the arts while emphasizing the importance of storytelling and documenting a national experience versus forgetfulness.

Matt Hanson reviews how, during the summer of 2024, a trio of contemporary art programs in Turkey evoked the passion of historical dispossession, as it has claimed lands, cities, and homes from the Anatolian heartland to the Mesopotamian plain. The critic follows a tension between global art-world tourism that forgets localities and a reclaiming of the right and the freedom to forget by retaining the sovereignty of remembrance to preserve the root of histories and identities.

Between the pain of the body and the fear of loss, a voice is there that attempts to preserve its existence within a deluge of poetic images.

Reading “Art and its Worlds” sent Michal B. Ron on a journey in time and space between anarchist art collectives, various languages, multidirectional cartographies, and strategies of creating publics for art.

Telling you, Salma, about many things that begin with the question of robbery and end with the question of the secret with God.

“Politics of Love: Long Distance Relationship” is a special issue for Tohu Magazine, using Etel Adnan’s text The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay as a compass in the troubled times of COVID-19.

In a very personal writing style, Liz Rosenfeld writes about relationships, memorials, illness, love, the queer body and the experience of transitions.

"An ancient ritual for women", "a longing for true love", "a journey into a cave", Rula Khoury reflects on Saodat Ismailova's work Chilltan (2022), an immersive work in the basement of the Fridericianum, part of Documenta 15

In 2020, Zoya Cherkassky and her daughter entered self-isolation. This series of drawings describes their experience, which was new at the time.

Michal B. Ron follows an archival treasure of Hannah Bruckmüller's. She starts with Marcel Broodthaers’ contribution to James Lee Byars’s World Question Center, where a question about love is calling from a distance of time, and creates a new questionnaire that asks for responses: what do you do for the sake of love?

Rula Jiryis spoke with the Palestinian artist Lamees Khoury about belonging and identity, memory and intuition, and how form, voice, and movement appear in her artworks.

In Raeda Saadeh’s photography series “Great Masters,” the artist challenges four well-known Western paintings. Aida Nasrallah writes about the works of one of the most interesting Palestinian artists, delineating the way Saadeh makes space for herself as an artist and a Palestinian woman who voices her political protests.

Part lyrical essay, part pulp fiction, Noam Toran’s new column is a serial narrative annotated by images and GIFs, that speaks of the problematic imprinting of Western mythologies and imaginaries onto the desert landscape. Drawing from the cultural, ecological, and imperial conditions of the American Southwest where he was born, Toran intersects personal and family experiences with longer and larger histories, hopping across time periods and genres, from 16th century Spanish expeditions to the paranoid atmospheres of the 1970s, and from science fiction to horror-comedy.

Many questions arise when you think about memory, names, the absence of names, questions that essentially rest on senses and spontaneity, which determine our relation to love, hate, intimacy, abandonment, hunger, fear, memory.

In this interview, the artist Youssef Wahboun reveals the secret of his despairing view of the world: love of humanity, independent of identity - ideological, ethnic, or racial. Anything that happens, even in the remotest place, irritates and pains him, and yet he insists on dreaming that the future of humanity will be better. In his exhibition at The French Institute in Rabat, this belief is evident in the butterflies that pervade his works as a chromatic echo conferring glamor upon a dark reality.

"Jerusalem of Gold" is a misrepresentation, a deceptive fantasy of harmonious existence in a united city. It is a far cry from the city's reality. As in David Reeb's painting, behind the gilded holiness lurks a revolting mirror image.

Rotem Rozental looks at the work of artists Zoya Cherkassky, Yevgeniy Fiks, Katia Grokhovsky, and Jenny Yurshansky, raising questions about the existence of a Soviet-Jewish narrative and offering new insights into the culture that has shaped daily life in the Soviet Union, the Soviet-Jewish narrative, and the possibility of the existence of such a narrative.

The Travels of Reb Mendelovitch is an experimental comix strip in the form of a scroll, describing the imaginary adventures of reb Mendelovitch in a chaotic, politically unstable world. The protagonist is based on Schneur Zalman of Hebron, an orthodox artist and a HABAD rabbinical envoy who had traveled around the world, and the author’s great-great-grandfather.

In the final (!) installment Mendelovitch’s children accuse him of heresy, and he returns home to write the scrolls.

In 2017, Zehra Doğan was sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison for “terrorist propaganda and inciting hatred.” An artist and journalist, it was Doğan’s painting of the city of Nusaybin in ruins, adorned by Turkish flags, that led to her arrest. Charlotte Bleicher writes about the artist’s prison works, Hidden Drawings, which have been introduced to the public in the last Berlin Biennial.

In A Place of Our Own, Iris Hassid's new photography project, she reveals the lives, the questions, and the old/new dilemmas of Arab identity within the state of Israel. This time, it is from a woman's point of view. She documents the divided lives and the search for a "third space" that would reconcile those identities.

Why is there so much disappointment around us? How might one explain disappointment? What is the political nature of disappointment? Artūras Tereškinas writes for Tohu Magazine about the notion of disappointment, following ''Bjaurūs jausmai'', his recently-published book, a collaboration with Adomas Danusevičius about ugly/negative feelings.

What does it mean to make art about real feelings, and what does it mean to view it? What happens when integrity is divorced from sincerity? Markus Thor Andresson and Chen Tamir explore how artists reintroduce emotion and concepts like sincerity, integrity, humiliation and the pathetic in contemporary art.

During a conference at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, four art scholars met a live avatar for the first time. The avatar appeared on a screen and was operated behind the scenes by an actor using an animation suit. The text in this video is an excerpt from a letter to the avatar, written by Liat Lavi for the event.

The Travels of Reb Mendelovitch is an experimental comix strip in the form of a scroll, describing the imaginary adventures of reb Mendelovitch in a chaotic, politically unstable world. The protagonist is based on Schneur Zalman, of Hebron, an orthodox artist, a HABAD rabbinical envoy who had traveled around the world, and the author’s great-great-grandfather.
In the eighth installment (the Sack and the Wreckage), Mendelovitch arrives at the conquered city Herbon,* to see it ransacked by the Queen’s armies.

Saadi Nikro writes about Michael Baers’s recent work capturing the invisible mechanism of an impending disaster - the FSO Safer oil ship, abandoned off the coast of Yemen.

The first installment of a new column on studio visits by Michal B. Ron, who lives in Berlin. As the coronavirus pandemic spreads, the column also develops and acquires new forms. At the center of each encounter is a discussion of works by different artists and their thoughts about the current conditions of art and life.

Can artistic strategies of re-appropriation and remediation perform a de-orientalization of an imperialist image? Margherita Foresti writes about Heba Y. Amin’s rendering of a 19th-century photograph of an Egyptian harem in tapestry.

In an era of social distancing, an exhibition about ecology turns into a meditation on human connections. Michal B. Ron reviews the recent “Down to Earth” exhibition at Gropius Bau.

The musician, artist, and poet Wisam Gibran suggests a socio-cultural reading of four works by the Palestinian artist Hannan Abu-Hussein's - Agina (Dough), Pouring the Oil, Bukjia (Bundle), In Between the Destruction of the Father - as representatives of inner worlds reflecting art's association with the cycle of life and death, movement and stillness, the sacred and the forbidden, the presence and the absence. 

At the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the collection show “Chagall, Picasso, Mondrian, and Others: Migrant Artists in Paris” polished the art history of a century past with a gleaming, political immediacy. Matt Hanson reviews the show and its curatorial take on themes of increasing global concern.

Hagai Ulrich talks with Oran Hoffmann about perception, photography, perspective, and optical illusions, about Cézanne, Albers, Vasarely, and about performativity in photography, following Hoffmann's exhibition "Love-Sick Heart," which had recently been shown at The Lobby - Art Space. 

In the third chapter of her column, Goni Riskin takes advantage of the easing of the restrictions to make a series of portraits, with styling and makeup. As a precaution, she works on a rooftop, in natural light and open air. She uses a no-contact thermometer to take the temperature of her sitters, the makeup artist, and herself. She keeps the styling down to clothes from the sitters' closets, with outside loans of items when absolutely necessary.

Goni Riskin joined a residency program at Arthura – a new center for art, design, and community in Emek Hefer (Hefer valley), in central Israel. She has chosen to take mostly pictures of the elderly population, in an attempt to understand how to create interaction while maintaining social distancing and wearing masks and gloves.

In her new column, Goni Riskin looks at how she might continue to photograph under the coronavirus restrictions. In the first installment she creates a series of portraits while trying to observe the rules, which are often not entirely clear: stay within a 100-meters range from home, and then it's 500 meters; maintain a distance of two meters from other people; avoid entertaining at home people who do not live there.

A one-night event in Berlin this February brought Charlotte Bleicher to ruminate about the relationship between two cities - Beirut and Berlin. She writes about processes of cultural loss taking place in both cities, and about artistic acts of defiance against this disappearance.

David Duvshani talks with Rafram Chaddad, artist and connoisseur of cooking traditions of the Mediterranean, who lives in Tunisia. They discuss art and food, wandering, traditions and their preservation, artworks created by Chaddad in recent years, and the contemporary art scene in Tunisia.

How is Palestine represented in contemporary art, and how do Palestinian artists deal with the notions of memory and the past? Larissa Sansour raises in her work many questions concerning ideas of sanctity, homeland, and memory, in a manner that helps turning them into an illusion. In an analytical review and an in-depth critical gaze, scholar Housni Alkhateeb Shehada presents a broad picture of the place, the dialogue, the memory, and the conflict the figures are experiencing in the work recently presented by Sansour, in the Danish Pavilion, at the 58th Venice Biennale.

In her on-going multidisciplinary project, "The Road to Ein Harod," Efrat Galnoor tracks the journey undertaken by Raffi, the protagonist of Amos Kenan's novel with the same title. In a series of exhibitions and events, she raises political questions about borders and freedom of movement, and looks reflexively at the way space is constructed by way of stains – an act that questions not only what you look at, but how.

How should art institutions respond to the current political climate? Michal B. Ron reviews Paper Monument’s recent book, in which various art professionals offer their propositions to six perceptive questions.

From researching and re-imagining a 1943 exhibition of modern Lebanese art in Jerusalem to writing for a leading independent arts magazine, to being part of an artist-run gallery in Brooklyn, Hakim Bishara has been experimenting with various practices in the past few years. David Duvshani recently met the Palestinian writer, curator, and artist in New York for a conversation about these multiple ventures and about the New York cultural scene in the Trump era.

Ammar al-Beik’s film The Sun’s Incubator offers a destabilizing, non-linear view of the Arab revolutions from a domestic setting. Margherita Foresti analyses the film’s complex temporality, manifested mainly through the motif of the TV screen.

In this Tohu Podcast, David Duvshani meets performance and social practice art pioneer Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Jerusalem for a conversation following her move to Jerusalem and her latest retrospective exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York. They talk about manifestos, authenticity, collaboration, art education, women artists, labor organization, life in Jerusalem, and the state of the political Left in the US and in Israel/Palestine.

“What it Means to Write About Art features conversations with writers who average three decades of experience turning phrases that go to press with a bold, uninhibited passion for art.” Matt Hanson reviews Jarrett Earnest’s recent book, a collection of interviews with prominent art writers such as Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, and Yve Alain Bois.

Russian Cosmism is the subject of the widely-exhibited film trilogy by Anton Vidokle, which traces, or better, resurrects the presence of Cosmist ideas in post-Soviet art, engineering, and architecture. Alma Mikulinsky reviews the films' installment in an artist-run space in Toronto, as well as the theoretical corpus that has been developed around the subject in the last four years.

Gvul (Border) Gallery in Kibbutz Hanita, Hansen House in Jerusalem, Art Gallery at the Memorial Center Tivon, and Beit Hankin Museum in Kfar Yehushua: Revital Lessick in another round of drawing reactions.

Among many tragic examples, the murder of South Sudanese national, Lost Boy and Canadian citizen Richard Lokeya, and the abduction of journalist Clement Lochio Lomornana (whose whereabouts are still unknown) by state actors, testify to the life-threatening risks implied in refugee justice work in South Sudan today.

In what ways can an archive be regarded as an anarchic practice of collection and circulation? Following his visit to the exhibition Unboxing Photographs: Arbeiten im Fotoarchiv, Saadi Nikro raises some thoughts about the way interventionist archivists, artists, and photographic practitioners work with photographic archives.

Salma would never tell me about her connection to water. I don't recall ever asking her if she could swim.

Since the winter of 2012 Hamody Gannam has been visiting the village of Iqrith once a month, sometime staying for a few days, capturing the place and the people living there on video and still photography.

“In Esperia, a portrait of a forgotten artist and a former secret service agent is interlaced with a personal narrative depicting the filmmaker’s relationship with her fading grandfather.” Hakim Bishara reviews Haidi Motola’s new film revealing her grandfather Jacques Motola’s double identity as an Israeli painter and secret service agent in Egypt.

A carpet made of concrete, a ripped duvet, and toy soldiers scattered across a single bed. East of Elsewhere's “While You Were Sleeping” housed a collection of domestic furnishings distorted and deconstructed to reflect the consequences of conflict seeping into everyday life.

Moving across New York and San Francisco, Paris and Munich, Accra and Lagos, artist and scholar Malik Gaines’s Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible offers a lively and affirmative account of stage, dress, film and television, and music performance. Saadi Nikro reviews Gaines’s recently published book, discussing its many intersections of race, theatricality, subjectivity, and sexuality.

Can we talk about gentrification in the context of colonialism and deprived lands? What does it mean to own the land? Rana Asali raises questions after visiting “That Man in That Box”, a performance piece by Palestinian artist Rabia Salfiti.

Hagai Ulrich converses with Nadav Bin-Nun about music and art, improvisation, violence, and narcissism, following the release of his Spiritual Album.

From North America to the north of Israel, Revital Lessick presents another series of reaction drawings following a gallery tour in New York, Toronto and Haifa.