War Photography: The Anti-War Impasse
How do we respond to suffering in the present without the benefit of historical distance? Amir Nassar suggests we reconsider how we engage with images of suffering.
war
Likeconomy Piece
Despite the nausea she felt at the thought of the war economy, Michal B. Ron writes from this perspective about the summer exhibitions in Berlin. The exhibitions by Yoko Ono and Lygia Clark offered opposite ways of participating in art, one of which is no different from marking a 'like.' So, can marking a like end a war? Or does the like actually feed off it?
Collective Forgetting: Permission to Forget
The editorial tracks the dual axis on which the issue rests: remembrance and forgetting. When erasure will never be complete, and forgiveness is not possible, what can collective forgetting offer?
Between Forgetting & Remembering
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?
Ищи Своих / Look for Your Own
The Ukrainian Telegram channel Ищи Своих began publishing difficult-to-watch images and information regarding dead Russian soldiers, as part of the effort to influence Russian troops not to participate in violent acts against Ukraine. Anushik draws after the channel's photographs, raising questions about anonymity and concealment and about the perception of war between Russia and Ukraine.
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.
Disappearing Cities: Beirut and Berlin
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.
Memory Pictures # 5
Her daughter had painted the view that was hanging outside the window
Of the house that was not her original one.
A Conversation With Jonas Mekas
“If you live in the past, if you can’t escape, then you cannot build a new house, a new future.” Christos Paridis talks with Jonas Mekas about memory, trauma, and the afterlife, about the war years in Lithuania and the 1960’s in New York, and about cinema.
Freeing the Child Soldiers of Salva Kiir
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.