Lamees Khoury: The Ultimate Observer
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.
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The World is Alright: an Interview with the Moroccan Artist Youssef Wahboun
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 Khara
"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.
Zehra Doğan’s Hidden Drawings
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.
On Knots, Connections, and Games of Chance
"Gambling, risk-taking, and games of chance are inherent in the way a structure, for instance, a body, can swing between activity and passivity, between control and submission to fate or to another entity." Hagai Ulrich on the sculptures of Daniel Oksenberg in the exhibition "Sweaty Grips."
John Berger: The Transformational Pulse Beats of Art
Following a number of recent books by and on John Berger, coinciding with the renowned critic’s passing away in 2017, Norman Saadi Nikro dives into some of Berger’s writings and drawings. He explores the transformational impulses driving Berger’s relational, molecular, and constellation-like approach, and its relevance to today’s world in crisis.
Black Cottage
Meital Katz-Minerbo visited the Dublin retrospective exhibition of the work of Derek Jarman, a well-known queer filmmaker, visual artist, AIDS activist, and gardener, who had been marginalized for being openly gay and HIV positive. Following the stirring event, she recalls her first encounter with Jarman's work, five years ago, and her visit to the garden he has tended in his home in Dungeness, in the county of Kent, England.
Art as a Retrospective Prediction
Painting, prediction, life drive and death drive, devastation, mourning, and creation. Psychoanalyst Dr. Merav Roth offers a succession of thoughts, insights, and personal associations following a series of meetings with artist Tsibi Geva, on the occasion of his exhibition "Where I'm Coming From," which has recently been presented at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art.
Available in Audio
Tohu Podcast: A conversation with Rafram Chaddad
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.
Whose Land is It?
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.