Breathe In and Out
“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.
"Politics of Love: Long Distance Relationship" is Tohu Magazine's second special issue, guest edited by Turkish curator Tuce Erel. Its starting point is artist, writer and poet Etel Adnan's text "The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay." Erel invited the contributors to think about the political potential of love and the question of long term relationships in a time of social-distancing. The issue is made possible by the generous support of the Plumas Art Foundation.
Nafssiya: Mediating Emotional Distances
In an essay written for Tohu’s special issue, Saadi Nikro writes about souls and breathing, technology, migration, and long-distance relationships. He discusses the work of two Beirut natives – artist Etel Adnan and filmmaker Ahmad Ghossein, and writes about how technologies help us conduct relationships over distances in space and time.
What you know is sometimes better than what might happen
In a very personal writing style, Liz Rosenfeld writes about relationships, memorials, illness, love, the queer body and the experience of transitions.
Love Letters
Love Letters is an exchange of letters and poems between two collaborators, work partners but also good friends who used to share the same city but departed due to personal decisions. As the co-founders of Collective Çukurcuma, Mine Kaplangi and Naz Cuguoglu have been experimenting on collective writing in recent years. For this special issue they write Love Letters to one another.
Protective Spirits
"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
Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (the touching version)
Noa Giniger has turned her audio installation Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime (2008) into an interactive script, where the reader-viewer-listener can flutter from one line to another but never grasp the text completely. Written in her own handwriting and accompanied by the voice of Peggy Lee, the artist offers an intimate encounter with hope and despair, sameness and the personal, through the digital platform.
Corona Diary
In 2020, Zoya Cherkassky and her daughter entered self-isolation. This series of drawings describes their experience, which was new at the time.
About a Stroll that We Take Every Day – Love
Khalil Barakat has written an essay about love for Tohu's special issue: about the love affairs of the French novelist Marguerite Duras, his love for her, love between men, and love in the shadow of the pandemic.
What to do for the Sake of Love?
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?