Artist Shahryar Nashat’s latest show at Gladstone Gallery, Beast in Both Palms, happily slips between pussy’s multivalent meanings, using cats to probe the mess of human eros. Anchoring the exhibition are five selections from a new series of solarized digital photographs featuring pairs of fighting felines, both wild and domestic. Nashat is interested in these beasts as uncanny doubles of each other, and of us, so it makes sense that he would swap warm hues for cool ones and dark tones for light. These shifts in color destabilize the images, making it difficult to distinguish where one animal ends and the other begins. But the artist also leaves a few colors untouched, particularly those of the cats’ fleshy mouths. Against the blues of their solarized bodies, their pink tongues read like hot spots on a thermogram, turning the affective register of the photographs on their heads, transforming a hiss into a kiss.

Born in Switzerland to Iranian parents and currently based in Paris, Nashat has spent the past quarter century creating videos, photographs, and sculptures that query how we experience desire and intimacy in a contemporary moment marked by social distance and digital surveillance. His installations typically include abstract sculptures alongside both still and moving images that feature bodies of various kinds. The male nude is a longstanding subject, while the animal is a more recent one; his 2024 exhibition Streams of Spleen at MASI Lugano included a video of computer-generated wolves. Nashat has also excavated the body’s innards. I first encountered his work in the 2022 exhibition, Raw is the Red, at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the artist installed a mixed media work—an inkjet print with acrylic—of a bovine carcass from a slaughterhouse, which he placed in front of a phallic sculpture. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, the “meat object,” as Nashat called it, uncannily resembled the glans of a penis. I was mildly disgusted, yet oddly entranced.

Most of Nashat’s sculptures are made of obdurate materials like stone and resin, but his fleshy color palette always augments their feel. Like Cy Twombly, a queer artist to whom he owes a great debt, Nashat frequently uses rosy hues to signify sex, imbuing an erotic charge within otherwise abstract forms. Also like Twombly, he is obsessed with the entanglement of Eros and Thanatos. Anchoring Nashat’s 2019 show at the Swiss Institute in New York City was the pale pink polymer sculpture, Start to Beg. About six feet long and recumbent on the floor, the object eerily resembled a cut of meat, or perhaps a sarcophagus, deformed by bite marks and scratches. It evoked the erotic as haunted by the specter of violence. Because Nashat prescribes no easy relationship between the figurative and the abstract, his work resists tidy narratives, but a thesis could be written on the film projected alongside Start to Beg, for which a camera explores every pore, hair, and crevice of a male armpit (a much-fetishized body part within the queer community). The film speaks to the persistence of desire amid the steel and concrete forms of a postmodernity that might otherwise neuter or destroy us. Simply put, humans get turned on by the weirdest things.

Memories of these earlier sculptures colored my viewing of the cats in Beast in Both Palms. I couldn’t help but imagine that they were responsible for the maiming of those earlier sculptures, whether due to coitus or quarreling. While the cats in the show’s lead image are clearly engaged in battle, the others seem suspended in more intimate scenes; to my eyes, all project a panoply of emotions. With both mouths open, and one’s paw placed on the other’s shoulder, the tigers in one of the photographs appear lustful, on the cusp of a snog. In another, one placidly looks up at its partner, concerned, as if trying to deescalate a conflict. One of the house cats seems to be yelling at its other for some minor domestic infraction, like failing to take out the trash. The tigers in the exhibition’s pinkest image gaze directly at the camera like they’re posing for an Instagram selfie to reassure their followers that their relationship is 100% secure.

Whether human or animal, the bodies in Nashat’s previous works are typically isolated and fragmented—we see only one creature at a time, and even then, glimpse only parts of their personages. Beast in Both Palms marks a notable departure, presenting bodies in relation to one another and in so doing, foregrounding the social purpose of the aggressions depicted. Cats are not violent creatures by nature; they fight to release the tensions bubbling beneath the surface. Anyone who has cared for a pair of cats knows that their transgressions are temporary, undermining peace only to restore it, allowing them to maintain a healthy relationship to their packs. Ethologist and zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who is quoted in the exhibition text, argues that animal aggression can be a highly stylized form of communicating. Sometimes, it means “I love you.”

Here my thoughts turned to Georges Bataille’s infamous invocation of pussy. In his 1928 novella Story of the Eye, an unnamed male narrator first encounters Simone, “his cousin,” as she lowers her labia into a dish of milk meant for a cat. The narrator is in awe. Acquiescing to her alphaness, he curls up at her feet like a feline. So begins their perverse affair, which sees them engaging in an escalating series of violent acts in pursuit of sexual gratification. “The human spirit,” wrote Bataille in the opening line of his 1962 treatise Erotism, “is prey to the most astounding impulses.” But this is not simply pleasure for pleasure’s sake. An ontologist of the erotic, Bataille believed that sexual taboos shackled man to his worst fears about himself—alienating him both from his body and from the rest of the natural world. By crossing a taboo’s nebulous bounds, Bataille hoped, man might find connection by recognizing that the same dark desires propel us all.

French philosophers love their puns, and erotism is one of the cleverest, combining “eros” and “rot.” Nashat also seems to see sex and death as inextricably linked, bound together like bones of the body. Bataille’s insistence that transgression supports the health of the social corpus is perhaps most clearly mirrored in the artist’s show by a series of sculptures titled Mothers. All are abstract, vaguely resembling fallopian tubes and a pelvis, through which new life is generated and brought into the world. Yet these sculptures are also dull in color and matte in finish, making them feel more like skeletons, less like flesh.

Hung on its own in the gallery’s lower level is a small photograph on acrylic and epoxy, approximately the size of a hand. Nashat bathes his greyscale composition in red light so that it recedes into its surroundings. The photo is easy to miss, but an important index. It features two bodies: a hirsute Persian man (who, as it turns out, is Nashat himself), and a fluffy Persian cat. His face is out of frame; we see only his muscular arms, and his legs peeking through terry cloth shorts. Cradled in Nashat’s lap is the show’s literal beast in both palms. Unlike the cats in the solarized images, this one seems devoid of emotion.

A subtle humor often pulses through Nashat’s work, so I couldn’t help but see the image (virile stud, docile pet) as a sly mockery of the faceless, peacocking men on hookup apps—or perhaps a sendup of a queer man who signals his proclivities via a fancy cat. Together, the two also conjure the complexities of good breeding: one might feel the joys of his animal nature, consensually ejaculating without a condom, while the other has been genetically modified to achieve some other ideal of animality. Though Nashat holds the Persian tenderly, I imagine it is not with this cat that his true allegiances lie. That designation is likely reserved for those fighting and fucking upstairs.

For Asma Maroof, sometimes known as Asmara, collaboration is alpha and omega. The musician has worked with such Bidounish artists as Fatima Al Qadiri, Sophia Al-Maria, and MIA (RIP), along with a slew of others, including Kelela, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Trajal Harrell. Her output spans contemporary art, film, theater, fashion, and club culture; you almost certainly know her by her work, if not her name. Maroof’s most recent release is The Sport of Love (2025, PAN), a sonic meditation on latter-day romanticism, made in collaboration with Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve. Alongside Daniel Pineda, her partner in life and work, she has been making music for nearly two decades as Nguzunguzu—a touchstone for twenty-first century musicians entranced by the possibilities of global club music.

In person, Maroof can be painfully modest. As ardent fans, we asked her to revive the Bidoun Mix tradition with “Moon Bouncers,” a playlist for a waning summer.

What were your primal musical scenes growing up?

I’m definitely an MTV baby: “Video Killed the Radio Star” vibe. I grew up listening to R&B and hip-hop. Especially R&B! In the fourth grade, I sang Boyz II Men’s “On Bended Knee” for the school talent show. I loved Brandy, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey. I grew up outside Washington, DC, in Bowie, Maryland, where there was a really thick go-go music scene—basically gospel and punk and cover songs, everything all at once. Then there was the B’more I would hear on the radio, a genre of music, also known as Baltimore Club, which would sample everything from SWV to the Rocky theme song.

“Gonna Fly Now”?!

Exactly. And then on top of all of that was the music my Indian Muslim parents listened to. They’d stayed in India at partition, and come to the US in the early 1970s, in their mid-20s. Like most immigrants, they ate their own food and listened to their own music, so whenever we were in the car it would always be Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mohammed Rafi, and all the Indian greats, with my mom singing loudly along and my father drumming on the steering wheel.

Beautiful. [Laughter]

And shout out to the soundtrack to the (1994) Hindi film 1942: A Love Story, which left an indelible mark. The film is about the son of a politician who falls for the daughter of a freedom fighter, I think? Though honestly, I mostly just remember the songs on that specific CD, which we listened to every day after it got stuck in our station wagon’s compact disc player until my dad surgically removed it. Indian music left a huge impression on me—the scales, rhythms, the mastery of voice, the ad libs. That mishmash was my acoustic universe as a kid, and it helped inform how I listen to and dig for music even now.

Tell us about the mix. There are some really special encounters between musical traditions. One of the first songs is a collaboration between the Algerian rapper Soolking and the Kosovar Albanian singer Dhurata Dora. There’re all kinds of sounds in play—Moroccan, Angolan, Punjabi. How did you go about putting it together?

Well, the mix is a gumbo of sorts, with some old and new ingredients. I am currently living in Maryland, back where I grew up, so I have been feeling very… nostalgic. I opened the mix with a song called “Straight from the Basement,” and I literally made it in my basement. It’s by Northeast Groovers, a go-go band dear to my heart and important to my musical DNA, and it just felt right. Then I go straight into Nusrat, the live version of “Mustt Mustt.” I know it absolutely makes no sense at all, but they totally relate in my mind. I recently heard that Albanian track in the car with my sister, and it made me want to be on a boat. There’s a track from Meriem Bennani’s Iraqi YouTube playlist, which blew my mind, and then my friend Lou sent me this USB full of incredible goodies, including “Sign your Name Across My Heart,” that Terence Trent D’Arby song that The California Raisins ended up covering. That one took me back to childhood. Also Diamond K’s “Are You the Bomb” was a throwback local radio anthem that still holds strong.

Where do you find stuff?

I’m constantly looking and also… never? I love YouTube and am that naughty girl who plays many rips from YouTube, Bandcamp, dusty Soundcloud, films, old records. Most definitely it’s friends who send me the best of the best music that I cherish and rinse out for eternity—love you guys!—and shout out to DMV [DC, Maryland, Virginia] radio, still and always my inspiration, even though I’m more on the oldies station as of late. I also like to open my ancient hard drives and dig up some lost vintage archival material…

The cover songs on the mix are incredible. A lot of them—like Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” in Tunisian Arabic—have been transformed by the act of translation. What role does diaspora play in your musical universe?

A major role. I think it really informs how I listen and what I want to hear. I’ve always been attracted to songs that are remixed or recontextualized. I love to see how music travels and adapts in new places. Like that Jojo Darbuka song—crazy, right? The way identity itself gets remixed, sort of de centralized, and how the Darbuka remix is an upgrade. And there’s the version of “Take My Breath Away,” the Berlin song, that Sandy Lam did for the soundtrack of Wong Kar Wai’s As Tears Go By—it really transcends the original, don’t you think?’

There’s also a track by Fatima Al Qadiri on the mix, an old mutual friend of ours.

The track is from Medieval Femme, maybe my favorite of Fatima’s albums. We have a beautiful relationship. She’s my mentor, my bestie, my confidante. I feel lucky to have her in my life. She makes me laugh like no one else. In the beginning there weren’t that many women in our music game, so we shared everything from DJ rates to mp3s. And then around 2015, we had a short-lived band called Future Brown that started because we found ourselves, as producers, wanting to make music for vocalists, even pop songs. Future Brown also included Daniel Pineda and Jamie Imanian Friedman (aka J-Cush). It was a mess because we all lived in different places, so to get together in one room was a production feat in itself, and then working with the vocalists required a whole other cat-and-mouse game. After the first LP, we attempted a second, but it fell through and is now buried treasure. That whole process was beautiful, and we still bounce ideas off one another. I hope we have more musical collaborations in our future.

Collaboration is a big part of your practice. You spent years working with the Schauspielhaus Zurich and collaborating closely with Wu Tsang, Tosh Basco, and Josh Johnson. You’ve worked with Kelela, Wolfgang Tillmans. . .

Collaboration is the most fruitful posture for me as an artist. Solo, I tend to overthink and then hate on myself, so it feels good to feel my way through something as part of a team. Stronger in packs. I’ve worked with Wu for twenty years, including on her art films like Wildness and Into a Space of Love. Then one day she said she’d gotten this wild opportunity to direct at Schauspielhaus, a government-funded theater in Zurich that has been running since the 1900s. She invited me, Tosh, and Josh to come along. We made things as Moved by the Motion. The theater had new creative directors, and they wanted to bring younger people in because their audiences were old—quite literally dying. We were there for five years and made some beautiful things: interpretations of Carmen and Robin Hood and Pinocchio. We opened our residency there with Sudden Rise, a collage piece we also performed at the Whitney Museum based on a conversation between Wu, Tosh, and Fred Moten. Eventually there was some backlash as the conservatives in the country were like “this isn’t ‘real’ theater,” which was very confusing because basically all of our shows were sold out.

I’ve also worked with Kelela for many years, Trajal Harrell on a couple performances, Tapiwa Svosve and Patrick Belaga on our PAN EP and scores, Martine Syms, Mahfuz and Chloe Sultan, and also Sophia Al-Maria and C. B. Evans on their films, ads, and fashion shows. My most important collaboration is with my husband, Daniel Pineda. We’ve made music together as Nguzunguzu since the year 2008. He’s been there through it all. We do what many cannot do and work together as lovers. It’s absolutely insane, but I would have it no other way.

What are you working on at the moment?

Daniel and I are working on an album, which has long been a dream of ours. I mean, we have never stopped making music and have maybe five album folders in our Dropbox that have never been released. It’s kind of a combination of a lot of things we’ve been thinking about for the past decade: score work, installation, and our usual club music bag. It’s very hard to explain because, like my tastes, it goes many places—a mishmash, per usual. But you will know when you hear it that it’s Nguzunguzu.

You’re moving back to LA after years away. What are you most looking forward to, musically and otherwise?

I lived in LA from 2009 to 2019—basically until I moved to Zurich. Those were huge DJing years. Many of the venues I played in aren’t even around anymore. Like this place called the Silver Platter where Wu and Ashland and Daniel and I did a party called Wildness for a couple years. Then there was M Bar, a really special after-hours jazz bar in Chinatown that also got shut down. El Cid was where Nacho Nava, a pillar of our community, organized Mustache Mondays for many years. He’s gone, though I believe El Cid is still there. I know it sounds desolate now, but we built a huge community when we were there that I’m excited to return to. I’m also at a different stage in my life and don’t know if I can stay up anymore. Like, sorry, but I turn into a pumpkin at 9pm! But I do love a daytime hang, like Soul Summit or something. Come meet me at the moon bounce in Elysian park at 2pm, and I will bring the trance playlist—wink wink.

TRACKLIST

00:00–00:52 Northeast Groovers — Straight from the Basement

00:52–01:28 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — Mustt Mustt (live)

01:28–2:16 J Dilla — Waves

2:16–3:17 Kumar Sanu — Ek Ladki Ko Dekha

3:17–4:42 Mc Bruninho da Praia, Mc Kevin, Mc IG, MC Magal,

Mc GP & DJ Oreia — Giro dos Artistas

4:42–5:26 DJ A-B — jojo darbuka

5:26–6:00 Dhurata Dora ft. Soolking — Zemër

6:00–6:56 DJ Xtreme — Bollywood Lovers (Wifey Riddim Remix)

6:56–8:08 SISQO SLOW CALL TO PRAYER

8:08–10:24 DJ Sanj — Lishkaray Teray Kokay (MA CHOP)

10:24–11:49 DJ Yannishouu — yanN’ShoU neW Déliire LogobiZouké

11:49–13:10 Pure Elegance — Mix It Up

13:10–13:58 Rufus feat. Chaka Khan — Sweet Thing

13:58–15:48 DJ Radikal — Only TIme Kizomba

15:48–18:12 Fatima Al Qadiri — Qasmuna (Dreaming)

18:12–20:17 Sandy Lam — 激情

20:17–22:29 Ace Of Base — All That She Wants (Tunisian cover)_صو_قرتاج

22:29–23:54 DJ Narciso — Do Jo

23:54- 24:50 جوبي - كل الهلا - حبيبيي اسمر جكليته - يمه الثوب داريه - سوسن نجار

24:50–25:10 Yeshe — Sound of Yonder

25:10–26:14 DJ Figo — مزيكا الخروطه shimmyesque 2010

26:14–27:31 Elyanna — Ganeni

27:31–28:24 Terence Trent D’Arby — Sign your Name

28:24–29:06 Sam Gendel — Sax Market

29:06–29:50 Shabjdeed & Al Nather — Rad Saree3 (feat. Riyadiyat)

29:50–30:20 Diamond K — Are you the Bomb?

30:20–32:10 Kehna Hi Kya (A.G’s VIP Remix)

32:10–34:06 Manara- Dhak Dhak x J Sweet (Live Blend)

34:06–37:16 Morad — Pelele

37:16–38:26 DJ Hakki — Are you from Bubbling?

38:36–39:17 Omar ؏ — KU KU

39:17–41:45 DJ Swami — Pyar Tere Nal

41:45–43:50 Nimco Happy — Isii Nafta UK Drill Remix

43:50–45:50 DJ Travella — Mchakamchaka

WE LOVE KOYO KOUOH’s conceit for the main exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale: an invitation to block out the phallocratic noise and tune in to the whisper, the seam, the off-piste, and the trace. To listen for what might rise from below. At a time when the blundering, self-appointed “masters of the universe” wield their power to devastating effect, Kouoh’s delicately assured proposition seemed poised to deliver one of the more intriguing curatorial experiments in the Biennale’s 130-year history.

So it was devastating that Kouoh herself did not live to see her vision through. The fifty-seven-year-old curator passed away in May 2025, not even halfway through her term with the world’s oldest and highest-profile art exhibition. She was only the second African to serve as artistic director, after Okwui Enwezor, another international art animateur who died too young, at age fifty-five, in 2019. The task of realizing Kouoh’s vision for her exhibition, titled In Minor Keys, was ultimately taken up by a group of her colleagues and friends: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi.

At any biennial, there is always too much happening, at the main events and on the margins: collateral shows, performances, talks, DIY projects. At Venice this year, all manner of controversies gave rise to solidarities in action, direct and indirect—strikes, sit-ins, contestations, and convivialities—like a whole world in parallel. We invited a clutch of curators, critics, artists, architects, and others to write about the art, events, and experiences that provoked them. What follows are thoughts and responses by Sophia Al-Maria, Alia Al-Senussi, Emily Jacir, Quinn Latimer, Momtaza Mehri, Ken Okiishi, Yasmine Seale, Roisin Tapponi, Sam Thorne, and Sumayya Vally.

— The Editors

Momtaza Mehri

More than once, I heard someone describe this year’s Biennale as a family reunion, an ecosystem that brims with tension and tenderness. Step across the threshold of the Central Pavilion of the Arsenale, and the work of the late Senegalese iconoclast Issa Samb greets you in a “shrine” reconstructing his courtyard studio. An untitled painting by the artist hangs there, an apparition-like cloud of fragmented forms against a solitary, wide-eyed African mask, hovering above the prophetic words of Gazan poet Refaat Alareer: If I must die / you must live / to tell my story.

In Minor Keys, the 61st edition of the Biennale, is thick with relational history, the intergenerational and transnational webs of connection and collaboration between African artists, thinkers, griots, and gallerists. At the Giardini and off-site, around dining tables and at vaporetto stops, amidst demonstrations and afterparties, the decades-deep organic bonds were palpable, untethered from the art world’s tokenism, its pick-‘n’-mix attitude towards that heaving mass called the Global South. Dissonance flared up like bad rashes, evident in poster campaigns, shut pavilions, strikes, and jury resignations. Protesters locked arms, countering the spectacle of opening week with their own. Some carried Ukrainian flags, blocking the Russian pavilion from view. Thousands of marchers lined the via Garibaldi with Palestine on their tongues and in their hearts. I saw riot police looking listless. Wherever I went, there it was: the sickly whiff of institutional decay. This Biennale, so passionately rooted in African and indigenous cosmologies, and the first with an African woman at its helm, is engulfed in a moral drama, rife with nightmarish intrusions on the sanctity of “art for art’s sake,” on the very experience of the Biennale as a driver of speculation and spectacle. The event’s resource-gobbling, long-criticized national pavilion model felt exposed and particularly outdated on the cold slab of our political reality.

Dissent and disavowal charged the atmosphere, often scattering my attention. It was a relief then to fall into a bed and stay there. Walid Raad’s Far from quieting (1969–2026), eleven paintings of bedrooms that Yasser Arafat kept in various cities, was a highlight for me. Evading numerous assassination attempts, the PLO leader reportedly never slept in the same place twice. Raad crystallizes the slipperiness of the hunted, the conundrum of a stateless head of state, with images of pristine sheets and spartan rooms from Tripoli to Oslo, each bed exquisitely bereft. Raad offers a reverberant version of history that scrapes against official documents and records, troubling the fraught archive of seemingly endless wars. In these moments, In Minor Keys leaps beyond the calculus of air miles and air kisses that characterizes this pinnacle of the international art calendar, giving way to something quieter, something at once beautiful and besieged.

Sophia Al-Maria

In the art world, there are two kinds of visibility. One arrives via the guest list, whether by name or as the plus one (never a minus one), granting entrance to ever smaller rooms crammed with ever larger egos, swish parties charged to Swiss bank accounts, where you will be tagged in Getty Images photos you never signed a waiver for. The second kind of visibility is posthumous. (The dead were very present at the Biennale this year). To quote comrade-artist Bhenji Ra’s 2021 tweet, “What’s visibility without protection? A trap.” I have to admit, Venice can feel like a trap sometimes, depending on why you are there and who invited you. This was my third dell’arte, a promise betrayed. (After the last one, I swore I’d never go back; I really do have to stop swearing.)

I was in Venice to do the (art)work and to attend a strike. I was presenting an original work, DAMAR TV, Or: How I Stopped Doomscrolling and Learned to Sing, at the temporary home of the new Qatar Pavilion—the first new entry to the Giardini since South Korea’s debut in 1996. The life cycle of this new work was, in a word, brisk, commencing on March 1st, the day the war began to impact Qatar in ways it previously had not, and concluding two months later. It was perhaps an unusual time to be making work for the nation-state themed amuse-bouche-ment park that is the Biennale, especially on a site located across from the Trump-l’œil US Pavilion and the currently out-of-order Israeli Pavilion. Otherwise, my experience was much like it always has been: stressed out about not showing face where face (mine) was expected, about getting lost, usually in conversation with one or another stranger I should not be talking to for so long. Topics this year included: the aberration of German state theater, the feasibility of training crows to attack bigots (it can be done), Toto Koopman (look her up), and the latest permutations of the wars.

I do not have the spatial navigation or facial recognition skills to stay afloat even in the most predictable social tides, so Venice is extra hard for me. I missed almost every event I was contractually meant to be at; it turned out that I was not eager to be anywhere in this age-old city that seems today to serve solely as a scaffolding for being seen. Every bridge here is a runway. Every palazzo (which one chatty stranger assures me means “building,” not “palace”) is a backdrop.

One evening I went to a dinner commando-style (that is, not wearing my glasses) and, upon arriving, found a seat on an unreasonably low sofa alongside the only other person who appeared through the blur to be alone. I took a breather after the exertion of squatting and turned to my left. As my nearsightedness kicked in, I blurted a confused greeting: “Oh! It’s you!” From behind a drape of grey hair, the visage of Patti Smith emerged, saying: “Yep.” I thanked her for holding Palestine close, and she pulled a well-washed white t-shirt out from under her blazer. “I made this myself,” she said, pointing to the word GAZA scrawled in ballpoint. Not long after, the electricity went out (poetic justice), and we were escorted from the palazzo by candlelight.

But the highlight of my Biennale Art Venice 2026 was undoubtedly the impromptu midnight proof-of-life livestream, courtesy of a local CCTV camera, in San Marco Square the night before the press preview. Behold a screen grab captured from many time zones away by the artist Martine Syms, or by my sister, Sarah, an elementary school teacher. Yes: that’s me in the streetlight, losing my battery, stopped smack in the middle of San Marco Square on my way back to my hotel in Sant’Elena. Martine and Sarah were the only ones to respond to the link I’d sent out soliciting soft surveillance as I stomped my way homewards. My sister tried to direct me—“Spin around! Go talk to that person! Collect that coin!”—but Martine, a true comrade-artist if I ever had one, understood that I was just another NPC in the art game and that her role was to bear witness without comment. The next morning, I woke up to a text from her. “That was satisfying,” she said. “Thanks,” I replied. “I feel so seen.”

Sumayya Vally

It feels impossible to separate Venice from the world beyond it. Palestine moved through conversations, readings, walks, gestures, silences.

The work at the Biennale that stayed with me most viscerally was Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s installation in CANICULA titled 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound, an investigation into the alleged use of sonic weapons against protesters in Serbia. Fifteen screens were held like protest placards inside the old music room of the Ospedaletto, frescoes of musicians overhead, testimony unfolding through vibration, frequency, aftermath. Abu Hamdan’s work was forensic and haunting and strangely beautiful. I don’t think I will ever think about post-concert sound in the same way again.

Hearing him speak alongside Ghassan Abu-Sittah at the launch of Palestine Is Everywhere felt like reason enough to come to Venice. They talked about responsibility, about doing whatever we can with whatever we have in the face of genocide. There was also a reading by Palestinian writer Nahil Mohana of diary entries from Gaza that were funny, intimate, and devastating, one describing buying coffee for 170 dollars.

I got caught unexpectedly in the silent walk organized by artists from Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition, which ended with a reading of poet Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die.” Bidoun’s gathering around Etel Adnan also felt deeply necessary, their voices refusing disappearance. So too did Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy, presented by Ibraaz, a performance carried by breath, repetition, and choral lament. In a time when images of suffering are quickly circulated and consumed, the work insisted instead on slowness, listening, and the dignity of collective grief.

And then there were the pavilions: Dana Awartani’s May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, a meditation on grief and repair at the Saudi Pavilion; Yto Barrada’s elegant weaving together of myth, politics, and material histories in Comme Saturne at the French Pavilion; the Saudi Ministry of Culture’s A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World, which reorients worlds through southern cosmologies and speculative cartographies.

More than the exhibitions, what stayed with me were the moral encounters in a Biennale asking what is art for while the world burns. Palestine is in the rooms, in the pauses between sentences, in the trembling of voices, in the refusal to look away. Palestine is everywhere now: in our language, our thresholds, our griefs, our responsibilities to one another—a condition through which the world is being revealed.

Sam Thorne

Many of the disappointed responses to Koyo Kouoh’s unfinished final exhibition In Minor Keys noted its by now familiar tics and tropes. Peaceful gardens? Check. Ceramic creatures? Check. Figures with trees for heads? Check. At this point we’ve seen all the above in large-scale biennial-making for more than a decade, and there is a feeling of exhaustion with all this enchantment, not to mention with biennials in toto.

In 2018, Kouoh curated a section of the Carnegie International titled Dig Where You Stand. Informed by Édouard Glissant’s writing on rhizomes, and with a title borrowed from Sven Lindqvist’s manifesto on workers’ self-education, Kouoh’s presentation was preoccupied with roots and excavation. In Venice, too, the subterranean imaginary provided a potent if (appropriately?) overlooked aspect of the exhibition.

Some clues to Kouoh’s thinking: an intricate drawing by Pio Abad depicting a stack of books used as a stand for a potted plant. Halfway up, the catalogue for The Way of the Shovel, a 2013 exhibition at MCA Chicago on art and archeology, is pointedly placed above Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. Other crumbs to follow: playwright Werewere Liking’s wonderful paintings of strata beneath a wonky metropolis; Yo E-Ryou’s underwater maps, made while living among the haenyeo divers on Jeju Island, Korea; Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Unconformities, which displays what lies beneath our feet in an ongoing series of annotated core samples analyzed by geologists and archaeologists. Here we encounter traces of an ancient fire that once razed Beirut, so hot that it was said to have turned stone to ash, now mingling with the reconstructed bedrock of the city, engulfed and ungrounded. Venice’s richer moments, however fleeting, required going underground, getting lost in the dark.

Emily Jacir

In Minor Keys is a powerfully composed exhibition that embodies the personal and political, protest and urgency, alongside poetry and beauty. The events which occurred in and around Koyo Kouoh’s presentation was deeply intertwined and integral to it. I see this year’s Biennale as one of the biggest political developments and historical actions since 1974 when, in a major cultural protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the President of the Biennale, Carlo Ripa di Meana, dedicated the entire edition to Chile. The Biennale did not take place that year, and instead solidarity events were organized including conferences, performances, an exhibition of political posters, and much more. The 1974 Biennale was a massive act of refusal and solidarity. I see what transpired at this year’s edition, and in the months leading up to its opening week, in that lineage. However, instead of cultural institutions drawing clear lines, it was the people who did it. It was soul-stirring to see the solidarity and love between artists, curators, jury members, students, installers, and workers, together all organizing actions, readings, gatherings, protests, refusals, strikes, commemorations, and performances. Palestine was everywhere; in the artists’ works, across pavilions and in the streets, and on a personal level I was deeply moved to witness thirty years of work, allyship, and sacrifice unfold across Venice. For the 2013 Biennale, I hand-painted my large SOLIDARIDAD banner alone in a dark palazzo, imagining the collectivity and solidarity that went into making the murals in 1974. This year people gathered and built in all the ways I had imagined people did back then.

Another aspect that really struck me was the strong presence of work committed to performative practices. The Fortress by Dries Verhoeven for the Dutch Pavilion was a masterpiece and one of the strongest works in the national pavilions. A haunting and powerful architectural intervention, it shuts down its own pavilion and makes viewers inhabit the darkness alongside a fierce performance. With an economy of means, Verhoeven ruptured space and time, laying bare the horror and contradictions of the world we inhabit now.

Yasmine Seale

Up a spiral staircase in the Ospedaletto, a shelter built for victims of a sixteenth-century famine, in the music room where choirs of orphans once performed, a film by Lawrence Abu Hamdan plays on a loop. 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound—about the best thing you could do with nineteen minutes in Venice this summer—investigates an attack on a silent vigil against government corruption held in Belgrade in 2025, when the crowd was sent scattering in panic by a sound that bore down like a vehicle at speed. Abu Hamdan gathered thousands of accounts of this new acoustic weapon the state denies. Across a forest of screens, like banners raised in protest, mesmeric aerial footage of the phone-lit demonstration is laced with a chorus of testimonies, “earwitnesses” to the invisible violence. The piece continues the artist’s preoccupation with hearsay, whispers, pauses, drones, dropped syllables, single decibels, high frequencies—aural matter out of place, too watery to name. The craft of the private ear (his self-declared profession) is to tune in to this lagoon and find a language for its lack. Arabic names it best: tashweesh, the sound of a rumor spreading or of someone listening in.

Quinn Latimer

I saw the paintings and collages by Mohammed Joha from a distance, deep in the back of the central pavilion. The ragged architecture of his stacked lines and luminous forms, ripped from the world and its poor materials then restitched and returned to it, stunned me. I knew them and did not know them, all at once. I went quiet; the central pavilion of the Giardini, swimming with people, did too.

The Gaza-born artist’s lucidly delineated color-fields, delicate and seismic at once, seemed made for an eye like mine, trained (like so many of ours) in some coastal-colonial modernist aesthetic and matrix. His works, all shifting panes of color, are simultaneously intimate and international, mineral and liquid, economic and gorgeous and crushing. Material evidence of forms of life, they appear both of language’s and their lean, irradiating lines, and of the image and its liquid, memorial form. His works seem like devotional images strobed by memory and its colors, and by the methodologies of existence—reuse, repair, resistance—pushing against its systematic, pathological annihilation. His poetics are formed, as is the world, by supremacy, economy, exile, and a certain climate—or No Shelter, as the series title of his collages goes.

Joha’s watercolors offer horizontals that are floors and horizons both. They rise from the ground of their paper like those pale concrete apartment blocks, flush with rosy light and flashes of laundry shimmering in the sun off some sea, that rise across so many of the cities wrapped around coastlines. Likewise his geometric abstractions of interlocking colors and forms created via overlayed pieces of paper, cardboard, and textile on canvas. Here a sandy sky of glistening packing tape, there a Byzantine assemblage of architectonic forms building to a pool of blue. Mesmerizing and recognizable, his images are perfect technologies of modernist meaning-making even as they narrate the destruction that modernism and its hegemony has wrought. Contemporary color-fields for a world in which color—that is, life in all its pulsating hues—is actively being exterminated.

What is the modernist-colonial matrix, its set of visual languages, and why did it prepare me to love Joha’s work even as it annihilates his world? How to understand the way in which one’s own aesthetic sensibility has been hegemonically shaped so that those visual and conceptual languages that attract your attention and ardor, technologies of forms welling with meaning, seem almost genetic—borne to you, borne in you, part of your marrow and mouth, eyes and arms both—rather than placed there by education, empire, climate, class, violence? What kind of questions are these?

The Venice Biennale, with its colonial gardens of empire, its Arsenale holding not arms but the art supported by arms money—and from the extractive industries and surveillance technologies such arms make possible—raises such questions. Certain bodies of work, like Joha’s, are devastatingly expert in their ability to hold, reveal, and occlude all the visual regimes we unwittingly serve, and those we resist. I have long since left Venice, but my mind keeps returning to Joha’s built landscapes, his careful palimpsests, their strange and reparative poetics, their enigmatic elegance, at once magnetic and familiar and visionary, serving life, though, not death.

Alia Al-Senussi

Don’t Have Hope, Be Hope! is the title of the inaugural show at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Isola de San Giacomo, and in fact is, to me, the epitome of everything I saw and loved in Venice. There were various moments of poignant reflection and remembrance throughout Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, and throughout Venice in the Saudi Pavilion’s presentation of Dana Awartani’s May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, and the Uzbek Pavilion’s group presentation The Aural Sea. I took it all as a call to remember the horrors of man-made destruction and also as a call to action. How can we reject the truths that were put before us in those works of art, of monuments destroyed because of war or because of bad policy, and not think that change is required? The artists and curators provided us beauty so that we couldn’t look away, and so that we learn and work to rebuild. Let’s not lose hope.

Roisin Tapponi

I was extremely moved by Georg Baselitz’s exhibition Eroi d’Oro. It was his swan song; he died a few days before the show opened. Death is the people we leave behind. Every painting is of his wife, Elke, his muse since 1958. Each of the large-scale works depicts her lying vertically in a gold tomb, life leaving her body. The result is iconographic, befitting the exhibition’s religious setting in a former convent at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore. Baselitz represents life in the paintings with colorful, de Kooning-esque gestures that swirl outwards from Elke’s stomach. The show’s final work contains no life, no color at all.

Ken Okiishi

When a highly respected museum curator I’ve known for fifteen years congratulated me on “my” Japan Pavilion, I should have just said thank you.[i]

When the “other” is required to become a model minority—as a “positive” inversion of “fear of the other”—the paranoid projections of “replacement,” “destruction,” etc. are flipped into an expectation of magical superhuman abilities, including the ability to be the same person as another in a game of interchangeable categorical being—or, in this extremely bizarre year of 2026, to be able to curate the most difficult and visible exhibition in the world from beyond the grave. (It is indeed extremely odd to say an exhibition can be said to be “by” a curator who died well before an exhibition is realized [i.e. “curated”], such as the official title and introductory wall texts for “In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh” suggest. Hannah Black reflected on this precise problem in a beautiful essay about another important large-scale exhibition, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, which was originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor and “realized” after he also died relatively young from cancer.)[ii] That these impossible expectations are generated on all sides of the model minority imperative, including by the model humans who are self-idealized to project out perfectly calibrated smiley surfaces beyond any possibility of care of the self, is as tragic as it is deadly.

A flyer from the 2024 Biennale protests that was reused during the 2026 Biennale opening week protests acquires multiple levels of mourning, as the artists in the ghost-curated main exhibition protested the inclusion of “countries whose leaders were facing charges of crimes against humanity by the international criminal court” while carrying the weight (and stress) of mounting an exhibition without their beloved curator and the sudden resignation of their prize jury: No Death in Venice.

[i] In that split second of social and professional horror, I realized I was being addressed as the “first queer Japanese American artist to present a solo exhibition at the Japan Pavilion.” The curator was, of course, thinking of Ei Arakawa-Nash, and the bizarre (but shockingly common) confusion the curator experienced—thinking Ei and I are interchangeable persons—says something significant about how our brains have been trained to think against reality. Ei and I look and sound nothing alike: I am half-Japanese, much taller—and as a fourth generation (Yonsei) Japanese American, I have a completely different and historically alienated relationship to both Japan and the USA (and to Hiroshima, where my grandmother’s family went back-and-forth from for two generations until World War II made life a one-way street). I speak English like a monolingual American educated in New York, and am known for films, media artworks, paintings and writing. Ei, when speaking English, has incredibly charming Japanese-accented linguistic and bodily expressions, and is known for performance art, especially in the country in which they were born, and where their mother tongue will always be from: Japan. They recently became a US citizen and had to revoke their Japanese citizenship in order to do this. As Ei says in the PR material for the Japan Pavilion on being seen as a foreigner in multiple contexts, “I thought I would never have a chance to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale after I gave up my Japanese nationality a few years ago.” And in a recent interview in Art Review: “That legality of national identity actually isn’t what makes me Japanese—through the naturalization process, I became more aware that nationality is a construct. It relates to gay marriage as well, because Japan doesn’t recognise my same-sex married status; it turns out that my status in relation to that depends on which government I’m associated with.”

[ii] See: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/may/14/koyo-kouoh-obituary , https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/29/arts/design/koyo-kouoh-venice-biennale.html and https://4columns.org/black-hannah/grief-and-grievance

In 2000, in Paris, the artist Marjane Satrapi published the first installment of Persepolis, a memoir of her Iranian childhood before and after the 1979 Revolution, told in the form of a black-and-white comic book. With the wide release of an English-language translation four years later, Satrapi received rapturous praise for her simple yet elegant artwork and sharp yet self-deprecating humor, even while telling harrowing tales. A 2007 animated film of Persepolis cemented the book’s reputation.

When news spread earlier this month that Satrapi had passed away at the age of 56, tributes poured in from across the globe. There were critiques, too. When we asked the scholar Naghmeh Sohrabi, author-convenor of the invaluable newsletter These Are the True Things, for her thoughts, she described the conflicted mix of misgiving and admiration that Persepolis provoked when she first read it, decades ago — a “shock of recognition along with an uncomfortable feeling of being misrepresented.” (Like Satrapi, Sohrabi came of age in 1980s Iran, during the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war that followed.) This week at A Protest Against Spaghetti, we’re delighted to publish her reflections on Satrapi’s defining work and its complicated legacies.

Sometime in late 2003 or early 2004, I received a copy of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, a recently published graphic novel, signed by Marjane Satrapi, the author. It was a gift from someone I was dating at the time. He’d stood in line at one of her book signings and asked her to inscribe it to me in Persian. “She hoped she got your name right,” he said. I remember lingering on the bright red cover, unsure why he thought I would want to read a comic book besides the fact that both Satrapi and I were born in Iran. When I looked closer, my heart sank. Beneath the stylized white and blue title was a drawing of a girl wearing a black maqnaeh, the headcover required in the 1980s for schools and other official spaces in Iran, her arms folded, staring unsmilingly at me. I knew that face: It was me. Someone, I thought, before I even opened the book, had written my story.

For years my father had insisted that I write about growing up in Iran during the eight-year war with Iraq, and for years I had found other things to do. But here was Marjane Satrapi — two years older than me, cooler than me by any available measure, with her cigarette and her Paris and her cute mole on her nose — who had done exactly what my father had suggested. Oh well, I thought, I missed my window. Then I saw the title of the first chapter, “The Veil,” and groaned. Here we go again: Iran, women, veil. That tired trope.

Still, I didn’t stop reading. I couldn’t stop. By the time I got to the book’s devastating final panel — Marji’s father carrying her mother’s limp body out of the airport as young Marji, the precocious narrator of Persepolis, watches from the other side of the glass divider as she’s about to depart alone for Europe — I was all kinds of confused. I felt seen and at the same time betrayed. I couldn’t sort out why, exactly. I needed time to better understand my feelings. But time was not on my side. Soon after Persepolis exploded onto the American literary scene, another book by another Iranian woman arrived in bookstores, and for the next few years it was all anyone wanted to talk about.

That book was Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s memoir of a reading group that met in her home in 1990s Iran, where she and seven of her former female students read classics of English language literature. The cover featured a photograph of two girls in maqnaehs, their eyes looking down, ostensibly reading — which is to say, not staring back at you, grumpily. Four paragraphs in, I groaned again as the veil arrived, like catnip for the reader, establishing this text, like Persepolis, as the tale of a daring antagonist in a battle with a draconian state.

By the time I got to the scene of Nafisi taking a shower and narrating her thoughts as “the water caressed my neck, my back, my legs,” I had a headache. It wasn’t just that everything she was saying felt untrue. (As a bilingual kid in post-revolutionary Iran who read a ton of books in English in public, I was puzzled, to put it generously, as to where the danger and/or the bravery in discussing books in English lay.) It was also the writing. I felt like I was being hit on the head with a plastic mallet every time I turned the page. I did not finish the book.

For years afterward, I found myself frequently conscripted into the same conversation: “I loved Reading Lolita in Tehran/Persepolis. Did you?” This prompt arrived not just from colleagues and faculty of every nationality, discipline, expertise, and gender, but literally everywhere. Waiting in line with a friend outside a restaurant, a woman, realizing we were Iranian, interrupted our conversation to share that she’d just finished Reading Lolita in Tehran. “Iranian women are so brave,” she confided.

But although both books had been swallowed whole by a Western readership hungry for a particular Iran — veiled, oppressed, and easy to digest — and both had made that readership feel informed yet safely sorrowful, Persepolis was different. The most obvious difference lay in the fact that Marjane Satrapi was, undeniably, an artist. In creating Persepolis, she had unleashed something new into the world. I’d felt this before I could articulate it when I had first seen the cover: that shock of recognition along with an uncomfortable feeling of being misrepresented. For while Persepolis portrayed an incomplete, perhaps even twisted, reality of post-revolutionary and wartime Iran, it rarely rang untrue.

Even now, two decades later, I still find myself entangled in this conundrum. Try as I might to keep Persepolis out of the syllabi of my courses on the history of modern Iran, I always end up including it, with great trepidation. I hesitate precisely because of this complex relationship Satrapi created between truth and reality. Persepolis became a defining Western text about Iran because it transformed one woman’s partial, subjective experience into powerful artistic truth. The challenge is that this artistic truth can simultaneously illuminate reality and distort it, especially when it becomes the dominant — sometimes even only — lens through which outsiders understand a country.

The fact that so many of my students admit that they are taking my Iran course because they’d read Persepolis in high school only vexed me further. Can I say the veil didn’t matter? Can I say that there aren’t families in Iran whose loved ones were not arrested, imprisoned, or killed by the Islamic Republic for holding onto another vision for the revolution? Can I say that being a young girl in Iran in the 1980s was not bound up with attempts to control her body, her words, perhaps even her thoughts at school and on the streets? Can I say that to have a party with dancing and alcohol in those years, was not an intensely fraught prospect haunted by the fear that at any moment security forces might rush in to arrest people and haul them off? Can I say that Persepolis’ history of Iran’s twentieth century — from Reza Shah all the way to the Iran-Iraq war — is simply and entirely wrong?

I cannot. Yet I could not simply affirm all these things, either, as each affirmation would only confirm a singular narrative and singular story of Iran. My job as a teacher and scholar is to discern where the certainties of my audience lie and to work to destabilize those hard-held beliefs by presenting a multiplicity of narratives. Persepolis as a work of art both powerful and popular makes that task a challenge.

Consider one of the book’s most problematic chapters. In “The Key,” Satrapi centers the story of plastic keys that symbolized the key to paradise given to young boys from impoverished parts of the country who were then sent to the warfront as human waves to clear out mines by stepping on them. Marji is shown one of these keys by the family maid, whose fourteen-year-old son was being enticed at school to join the war. The boys, Marji tells us, were told that the key will open the door to a paradise of food, women, and homes made of gold and diamonds. At the end of the chapter, an affecting tableau of bodies thrown into the air, mid-explosion, their keys dangling from their necks, is contrasted with an image of Marji attending her first party, dancing.

Growing up in Iran at the same time as Satrapi, I am familiar with the plastic key to paradise. It was the kind of story that adults were wont to whisper to each other around kids, or that someone at a dinner party might loudly assert to emphasize the cruelty of the post-revolutionary state. To be honest, the first time I read Persepolis, “The Key” made me smile. It felt like an intimate family story, something that only those of us who had gone through the war together knew.

Every night on TV, we would see news reports or documentaries that portrayed these young men, boys really, preparing to face what was near certain death. My grandmother would slap her thighs when their faces appeared on the TV screen, saying: “May I die for you. May I die for your mother’s grief.” There was no doubt that thousands and thousands of young men were dying on the front. The story of the plastic key reflected the emotional devastation of being engulfed by what felt like an increasingly pointless yet bloody war.

So here was Satrapi not only remembering something so fleeting, she had given that memory the security and, the stability, of a story on paper, in literal black and white. Yet that stability is exactly the problem because, it turns out, the key was not real. It was a rumor that caught like wildfire and spread amongst those who were exhausted by a war with no end. I have no reason to doubt that Satrapi was shown a plastic key by her family maid. Maybe the principal of that school had purchased some plastic keys to give away to his pupils for precisely the reasons she gives in the book. But the boys who declared their willingness to die on TV never flashed their keys in front of the camera. Western journalists writing about this sometimes white, sometimes gold, sometimes imported from Taiwan, sometimes from Hong Kong plastic key never saw it themselves. The BBC journalist Baqer Moin speculated the rumor might have been started because for a while, a copy of a prayer book called “Keys to Paradise” was given to volunteer soldiers.[1] None of this has stopped the story from being treated as fact (even mentioned by Nikki Haley in a UN Security Council address in 2018),[2] with Persepolis often cited as one of the sources for its veracity.

The key was there and it was not there. It was true but it was not real.

The problem is not Satrapi herself. As an artist who had lived this life, in an upper middle class, secular, nationalist, leftist family with a maid and enough money to take family vacations abroad and to eventually send their daughter to Europe in the middle of the war, she owned her story and told it with verve, joy, and exuberant humor. The problem is the finite range of stories that are allowed by the publishing industry and Western readers to receive the stability of print that hers got. While the English-language literary world is replete with coming-of-age memoirs in America, some of which sparkle and others fizzle, there has always been a limit to the kinds of stories we get to tell about Iran. Imagine if JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father were all that anyone knew of American childhoods. Now imagine if most people treated them as records not of individual lives but of an entire country’s past.

While Persepolis is, as Satrapi made clear in her subtitle, “the story of a childhood,” there are precious few stories of other Iranian childhoods in English that could be swapped out for it. It’s not there are no other memoirs. For a while, in fact, memoirs by Iranian women were all the rage. But they are almost always written by women from the same milieu as Satrapi, representing the same type of defiance as her, though never so vividly and so fully from the perspective of a child.

Persepolis remains a crucial part of my teachings on Iran but in tandem with another text. In 1981, the French sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar conducted interviews with several teenage girls, including sixteen-year-old Moneer and fourteen-year-old Masume in the holy city of Qum. The sisters were true believers in Ayatollah Khomeini and the 1979 revolution, the kind of kids who are wholly absent from Satrapi’s memoir save as perhaps agents of her repression. Khosrokhavar draws the reader’s attention to how for Moneer and Masume, the revolution was also about defiance. These girls who were in every way different from Marji — poorer, more religious, and ideologically aligned with what they themselves insisted was an Islamic revolution — were also engaged in youthful rebellion against structures of authority at home and in the streets. As noted by Khosrokhavar, the teenagers he interviewed “each defines the boundaries of this liberty according to her own political ties. But on the desire to be free, there is no divergence.”[3]

In this sense, the stories of these girls, and so many others — including my own — are not a correction to Marji’s. They live inside the same revolution, waiting to be told, and maybe, to be heard.

[1] Baqer Moin, “Khomeini’s Search for Perfection: Theory and Reality” in Ali Rahnema ed. Pioneers of Islamic Revival, (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 2005), p. 68.

[2] https://2009-2017-usun.state.gov/remarks/8660.html

[3] Farhad Khosrokhavar, “Attitudes of Teenage Girls to the Iranian Revolution,” in Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, ed., Children in the Muslim Middle East (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 392-409.

The New York Post arrives in the morning like a brick through your window. It does not pretend to be above ideology. Its newsroom consists of eccentric conservatives, outer-borough uncles, Staten Island monarchists, Midtown libertarians, and the occasional tabloid surrealist who seems to have wandered in from the 80s. The Post is biased the way a cartoon is biased: the headline is the argument; the argument is the punchline; and the punchline is — occasionally, disconcertingly — perfect. Especially when its target is New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who celebrates his 100th day in office today.

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Since Mamdani’s election in November, which it marked with a headline that began “ON YOUR MARX, GET SET, ZO!” set against a cheekily dystopian evocation of “THE RED APPLE,” the Post has been doing its level best to lambaste the city’s first mayor from the Democratic Socialists of America. (“YOU’RE ZO VAIN,” “DO AS I CHE,” “FROSTY THE ZO MAM,” “SHOW MAM THE MONEY!”) They have depicted him, variously, as a Wild West gunslinger whose six-guns shoot Soviet flags, a colossal King Kong–sized man with a tiny head, and Chairman Mao. The gestalt is ostensibly contemptuous. And yet one can’t help but notice how much fun the paper’s writers are having these days, the delight they take in their work.

It is, you might say, a return to form. It’s been a lean couple of decades for the New York Post, which put the BLOID in tabloid back in the 1970s and 80s, when the titular city suffered through fiscal ruin, blackout looting, gang wars, crime waves, and serial killers, overseen by a Democratic political machine that was somehow equal parts exhausted and hammy. This was the golden age of Post headlines, telegraphic bursts that epitomized the crisis, rhetorically staged as a daily farce. It was an era of extremity that demanded extremity in return; catastrophe was the layout. (“HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” “GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS.”) This marriage of wit and whimsy, malice and aforethought, was one of the innovations of Rupert Murdoch, who jumpstarted his march to American media moguldom by purchasing the Post in January 1977. An entire chapter of Paper of Wreckage, the distressingly engaging oral history of the tabloid, is devoted to the headlines.

But somewhere along the way, the paper’s insouciant sensationalism got lost. (Twenty years of Republican governance didn’t help.) The election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor in 1993 was a watershed moment: Giuliani was the apotheosis of the Post’s worldview, its politics given corporeal form. There was nothing left to caricature. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, was too insulated by wealth to be entertaining, while Bill de Blasio, the first Democratic mayor of the 21st Century, evinced a diffident lameness unworthy of ridicule. It took Eric Adams — the ex-cop egomaniacal vegetarian dandy — to rekindle the paper’s dormant instincts. (“RAT-OBSESSED ERIC ADAMS CREATES NYC ‘OFFICE OF RODENT MITIGATION’,” “ERIC ADAMS CELEBRATES HIMSELF… WITH TIME CAPSULE”)

And now, with Zohran Mamdani, there is a sense of anticipation, even glee, at the return of a worthy antagonist. Mayor Mamdani is earnest and disciplined, fluent in a language of solidarity that feels imported from another, more optimistic era. (A vastly more literate era: in his Saint Patrick’s Day message, Mamdani cited Ireland’s history as England’s first colony, name-checked IRA hunger strikers, and eulogized the gay Irish nationalist and human rights campaigner Roger Casement (d. 1916), while thanking the Irish people for supporting the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s and Palestine liberation today.) The mayor has a gift for moral clarity, invoking housing justice, the public good, and all manner of collective flourishing. He does so without irony — he can be cheerily, unabashedly cringe — and the Post is both unmoored and invigorated by this.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the Post is itself having a renaissance — and that this renewed relevance comes at the expense of its debonaire cousin, the New York Times. The Times, which has become expert in recent years at both-sidesing the apocalypse, is put off by the Muslim mayor. Climate collapse is imminent, but so too are the concerns of hedge fund managers; police misconduct is troubling, but we must know where boat owners buy their watches. Thomas Friedman and David French bloviate unabated. The Times feigns disinterest. It contextualizes and historicizes him, frames his proposals as emblematic of a generational drift. It asks whether he can “build a coalition” and “thread the needle.” These are not hostile questions; they are quietly oppositional. They entertain the legitimacy of his worldview and then debate its feasibility with a prefigured answer (the answer being: “probably not” or “please God, an au pair does not a tax require”). The only thing they can manage to do, with any verve, is talk about the nicknames other publications give the mayor. Meanwhile, when the Post paints Zohran as the avatar of a socialist fever dream, it’s screaming what the Times not-so-secretly believes to be true. Through insane rhetoric, the Post demands he account for the anxiety he inspires. The paper’s readership feels that something has run amok; the old New York is dying. Why not express that feeling in a 144pt yawp? “SAY IT AIN’T ZO!”

To be clear: the Post is not noble. It is ugly, with a long and storied history of xenophobia and a fetish for law-and-order. Its “reporting” bends ineluctably toward capital, toward punitive policing, toward a nostalgia for a New York that never existed. Read it with suspicion. But read it. In the Post, one can encounter journalism in one of its rarified and useful forms: adversarial, unapologetic, caustic. The paper does not conceal its thumb on the scale: it is all thumbs. There’s something almost refreshing about that in an era when institutional objectivity has curdled into affectless equivocation. The Post is not neutral. It picks a side, blows the (apocalyptic) trumpet, and invites you to come hang out.

During the campaign, Zohran liked to quote an adage of his father’s about moral victories: “When the Right gains power, the Left writes a great book.” (In fact, his father, the African political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, has written a number of such books.) If the obverse is true, and Zohran’s mayoralty is symbolic of the Left gaining power, perhaps the New York Post, with its eccentric animus, is spitballing ideas for what may one day become the Right’s great book?

IN THE BIDOUNIVERSE, 2025 will be remembered as the year of Zohran Mamdani, whose victory united multiple ecologies—from community centers in Queens, to immigrants’ kitchens, to college campuses, and the city streets —into a viable municipal vision. If he is the apotheosis of the Bidouni—and he is—it’s because he wears his contradictions plainly: a socialist who knocks on front doors to fundraise, a friendly New Yorker who chats with strangers on the subway and smiles so much I have grown concerned about his jaw. He says nothing untoward, his politics are legible, his backstory exquisitely scrambled, and his left(ish) policies seem on their way to being semi-safely routed through the circuitry of governance.

The cynic in me, perhaps in every New Yorker, wonders if there’s something plastic about his promises, or if he’s perhaps too good to be true. Zohran may not be able to stop the firing squads, but I for one trust that he’ll at least make sure we’ve all received our fair share of blindfolds and cigarettes.

Zohran can’t abolish the system, but he can dissent inside of it—a fact that has this city feeling, at least temporarily, relieved, even hopeful.

For more on what we at Bidoun loved in 2025, see our contributing editors’ offerings below—and do subscribe to this Substack if you haven’t yet!

And coming in 2026, a conversation with filmmaker Mira Nair, now known as the Mayor’s Mom, as she looks at the year ahead with us.

—Zain Khalid, Contributing Editor

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Negar Azimi

Until his death last spring, Walid Daqqa (1961–2024) was the longest serving Palestinian political prisoner in Israel. Locked up for his role in the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier—a charge he denied—Daqqa turned his nearly four decades in prison into a sprawling intellectual project, pursuing two degrees and writing multiple books, mostly about the carceral system that had entrapped him. Writer Kaleem Hawa evokes Daqqa’s life and remarkable work, and the efforts to extinguish them, in “Like a Bag Trying to Empty,” a moving portrait published in Parapraxis magazine later made into a chapbook by the excellent, Brooklyn-based literary non-profit, Wendy’s Subway. Daqqa’s story is an epic, and Hawa traces it from his early life through his intellectual formation to his wedding to journalist Sana Salameh in 1999. When the Israeli authorities denied the couple’s desire to have a child, Daqqa’s sperm was smuggled out to produce a daughter, who would later refer to the prison that held her father as “a place without a door.” At a time when the systematic erasure of Palestinian life is upon us, Hawa’s ode to Daqqa, who remains in postmortem detention, is a vital protest against forgetting.

Sophia Al-Maria

My favorite thing that happened in 2025 was seeing Kneecap in Belfast in August. I chose a gravel pit over a beach for my birthday, which felt exactly right. It was the hip hop trio’s prodigal return after a year marked by British state scrutiny, legal battles, and the ongoing terrorism charges facing founding member Mo Chara, and being there felt like a small act of alignment as well as an opportunity to learn more about Northern Ireland, the Troubles, and the long history of criminalizing language and resistance. I wore a white, one-of-a-kind, charity shop resurrection (cost: £9.99) adorned with mismatched ribbons and pins and bearing a hand-painted lyric from their song, “Guilty Conscience:” I MEDITATE & HAVE PLENTY OF WANKS. (To go in deliberately virginal drag was a rare choice for me.) My look nodded to a Vivienne Westwood bodice, and was worn over a football kit I made from Sudan and Palestine jerseys as a love letter to linguistic insurrection and DIY glam. A curator later noticed my outfit and included it in the installation “Club to Couture” at the Barbican in November, where it appeared with a Leila Khalid pin—small representation, big satisfaction. Among Kneecap’s fans there was no merch save for a single poster, the proceeds of which went to medical aid for Palestine, which I respected deeply. I love Kneecap because the world needs more holy fools, like artists who hold joy and rage at once and refuse to dilute their politics no matter the cost. In the gravel pit of Boucher Fields, I was covered in mud and other people’s beer. I felt filthy but I also felt free—and was surprised to see so much pride in Palestinian solidarity in a heaving mass of folks who, after near-twenty years living in the grey unpleasant land of England, I would have reckoned and judged to be the type who’d be at a National Front rally. It was a real lesson to me, plus I got a bonus treat: an old flame laid a well-timed kiss on me high above the crowd on a Ferris wheel at exactly the moment the band ended and the field erupted in applause. May we all have more love and less shame, more revolutionary spirit and less power-pleasing, and more readiness to fight until we are all free. Palestine remains the key.

Zain Khalid

The Calf (Deep Vellum) by Norwegian writer Leif Høghaug has arrived in English much in the same way that its narrator, a garden gnome from Appalachia, wanders down a Norwegian mountain after decades of rural life in his adopted homeland: speaking three dialects yet getting none of them quite right. Translator David M. Smith—God bless him—has done more than merely render Høghaug’s words comprehensible; he’s staged a jailbreak, language coming out kicking, bleating, chewing through the fence. English, being so expansively simple, seems a last and perfect resort. Misfired idioms, wayward syntax. The Calf is what happens when Robert Frost’s tweaker cousins translate Marx while high on pine sap.

As for plot . . . there are cowboys and aliens. Christ comes again (along with a social worker). Pencils are sharpened. The gnome makes coffee. He’s solving a mystery. The calf is dead. Don’t get the gist? I don’t either. A screaming comes across the sky. This is why I dig it and why I can’t help but dig it. For every “social-climbing critique” novel, every “jet-setter ennui” novel, every “artistic-friendships-aren’t-what-they’re-cracked-up-to-be” novel, there should be one about a garden gnome with a bucket on his head talking in a language that only he understands. It’s the rare book that reminds you English is not a home but a temporary shelter, for writer and translator both, and can be built and rebuilt, in this case from warped driftwood that the North Sea has coughed up.

Yasmine Seale

This year I saw three of my musical heroes perform in New York: Jordi Savall, the Catalan viol player and scholar, who traces the entangled sounds of the Mediterranean; Simon Shaheen, a Palestinian virtuoso of both oud and violin, who embodies a lifetime of listening across worlds; and Cécile McLorin Salvant, a French-American vocalist of dazzling range, who treats the history of song as a living archive. Here she is at the Met Cloisters performing a lyric by the twelfth-century female troubadour, Almucs de Castelnau, first in Occitan, then in Haitian Creole.

Sukhdev Sandhu

When I was a boy, I used to scream and shout—to reggae and Rebetika, jazz and jangly pop. Some of those musics, for a long time neglected or even derided by airtime controllers, have since spawned publishing industries. Music by brown-faced Brits was always patronized, a cut below. No surprise then that it’s taken a West Coast label, Naya Beat, to explore some of the piquant Punjabi tunes that came out of the UK from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Teri Liye by Pinky Ann Rihal; Punjabi Disco by Mohinder Kaur Bhamra; almost anything by Bappi Lahiri. There’s bits of post-punk wobble here, avant-la-808 techno, Italo idiosyncrasies. Left field, ahoy!

Broadcast since 2006, Great Lives is a BBC Radio 4 series in which guests get the chance to salute someone important to them. This autumn, when stand-up comedian Stewart Lee came on to celebrate improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, presenter Matthew Parris expressed his dismay, likening Bailey’s style to that of a chimpanzee. What resulted was the best bit of radio in a long time. “Matthew, that’s such an idiotic thing to say. A chimpanzee doesn’t even have the fingernails to make that sound,” retorted an exasperated Lee. “You’re on the BBC, right? You’ve got to meet the challenge of a culture that is failing artists, and failing the public. . . .Also it’s such a cliched thing to say a chimpanzee. At least say an octopus. Or a wasp, for God’s sake.”

Lucky are those scribblesmiths in the United States and beyond who, these last ten years, found a berth at 4Columns. Founded by Margaret Sundell in 2016, it gave the much-concussed class of art writers a lushly designed platform to think aloud about work that puzzled, irritated, spirited them. What made it such a pleasure to contribute to were the editors: Sundell, Melissa Anderson, and Ania Szremski, who also happens to be a former curator at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery. The speed and elegance with which they alighted on my many grammatical infelicities, tarted up my bromides, proposed defter syntax—they were, are, all great writers themselves. Tireless, too. Ania, scenting a potentially slack metaphor, once spent hours researching the sounds that different types of dinosaurs made. 4Columns will shut up shop this coming summer. Alas, and thank you, Margaret, Melissa, and Ania.

Jennifer Krasinski

EXPtv.org isn’t new, but the incredible volume of rare media streaming nonstop on this channel—available on their website and on Twitch—makes you feel as though you’ll never step in the same river twice. Brought to you by archivists and editors Tom Fitzgerald, Marcus Herring, and Taylor Rowley, and their full-to-bursting hard drives, EXPtv offers up original programming with titles like “Plants are People Too,” “Kung Fu Wizards,” “Everybody is a Star,” and “Night Comfort,” deftly cut together from found films, videos, television shows, commercials, and all kinds of mesmerizing ephemera. No outlet for mere nostalgia, the channel in fact offers subterranean lessons in media history. Take “Nothing But Star Wars,” an hour-long collection of clips from rip-offs, run-offs, and remakes of Lucas’s landmark movie—including a genuinely baffling porno—that may just be the greatest essay on the dawn of global blockbuster culture. In the background as I wrote this, EXPtv featured a snippet from a Christian call-in talk show in which the host plays Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backward to prove that the words “my sweet Satan” are secretly embedded in the lyrics, followed by a scene from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in which Daniel Striped Tiger asks what “assassination” means. On EXPtv, as in life, there is no rewind button, no turning back the clock, only the recognitions and revelations that come with hindsight.

Sohrab Mohebbi

In a world littered with biennales and blockbuster shows making lofty claims, MONUMENTS is a true historical feat. Co-presented by the Brick and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles through May 3, 2026, this exhibition brings together a number of decommissioned American Civil War monuments, mostly Confederate, offering up a discursive engine that furthers debates around the role of art in the making of history. These objects are extraordinary examples of public art—civic, aesthetic interventions in public space, the most captivating of which bear the marks of social upheaval, predominantly in the form of graffiti. Others, seemingly untouched, are no less transformed by being removed from their pedestals through the sustained work of activists.

The monuments are installed alongside contemporary interventions that, for the most part, feel secondary to the exhibition’s otherwise groundbreaking proposition. The exception is Kara Walker’s Unmanned Drone, her forensic dissection of a monument to Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who she’s reassembled into a minotaur. This piece ranks up there with A Subtlety, her 2014 larger-than-life sugar sculpture of a Black female figure in the form of a Sphynx, as one of the most significant works of American art so far this century.

Yasmine El Rashidi

Lara Baladi’s Cosmovision at Tintera Gallery, on view through January 11, marks a rare presentation by the artist in Cairo after over a decade away. Structured as a concise, almost-mini-retrospective, the show compresses the long arc of her practice into a tightly curated sequence of works that defy the usual formalities of installation: some images are framed while others are simply pasted atop brightly colored walls or wallpaper; one of the rooms is designed to mimic a space from her past. The exhibition recalls Baladi’s emergence in the 1990s with large-scale photographic collages and kaleidoscopic constructions that challenged linear narratives and fixed points of view. Yet here she is repositioned not as a historical footnote within the now-contested history of Cairo’s downtown art scene, but as a figure pivotal to its early formation, one whose sustained interrogation of image, power, and memory remains unresolved, ongoing, and necessary.

Elizabeth Wiet

As a high school journalist, I had two main beats: Morrissey concert reviews and screeds against George W. Bush. Reading one of my old clips, a friend quipped, “This article is funny because you’re trying to sound like a hardened DC political commentator, but you’re actually a teen girl in rural Illinois.” That same self-aggrandizing sincerity permeates Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary Teenage Wasteland, which revisits a story of corruption in the Hudson Valley first reported by a group of Middletown High School students in the early 1990s. The students are Gen X archetypes: weekend goths, stoners, and would-be burnouts who find renewed academic energy in their delightfully named “Electronic English” class, where they learn the ropes of media production from teacher Fred Isseks, who is as ideologically radical as he is Hollywood handsome. After the students discover that corporations are conspiring with the mafia to illegally dump toxic waste in a nearby landfill, Isseks encourages them to document the story, despite resistance from local officials intent on covering it up. Having long since traded my reporter’s notebook for a classroom lectern of my own, I could not help but be moved by Isseks’s stalwart insistence that his students dare to dream. Think Dead Poets Society meets All the President’s Men, preserved on grainy VHS.

Read A Very Still Life: Jack Kevorkian and the Muse of Genocide, by Anna Della Subin published in Bidoun, Issue 27 Diaspora on Bidoun.org.

On Reddit, there is a forum where beachcombers and scavengers convene, a tribe you might glimpse with headphones and metal detectors, listening for a pulse in the sand. The latter-day diviners of “r/TreasureHunting” tout their finds: old Boy Scout medallions and rusted spear tips, bullet casings from World War II, an aardvark coin from Zambia. A few months ago, fellow Bidouni Alex Keefe alerted me to a recent post. A Chilean man living in the port city of Valparaíso had purchased a villa that had belonged to a local eccentric, “an obsessive collector of everything imaginable.” The house was sold as-is, and it turned out to be packed with the dead man’s belongings: a lifetime’s worth of oddities, acquired at auctions. Among its mysteries were the contents of a shipping container that once belonged to the late Jack Kevorkian, the Armenian-American pathologist, polymath, and pioneering advocate of the right to kill yourself.

In 2012, I wrote an essay for Bidoun that reflected on how a child of the Armenian genocide became “Dr. Death,” the patron saint of euthanasia. It was prompted by an exhibition at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, MA, of Kevorkian’s macabre paintings, usually well-hidden from public view. They are full of horrors: a man falls, screaming through a void, dragging his fingernails to the bone; another is feasting on himself. A greenish corpse ornamented with tinsel stands in agony, a human Christmas tree.

Kevorkian’s painterly eye was staring straight into hell. He was an autopsist, I wrote back then, from the Greek meaning literally “to see for oneself”—observing closely what happens at death, to people and peoples, both. Genocide haunted the premises; at the door of the museum, the receptionist handed me a chronological list, ending with a foreboding, “Who Is Next?”

Accompanying 1915 Genocide 1945, a painting of a severed head dripping with Kevorkian’s own blood, a plaque read: “To fail to take but token interest in the whole ugly affair, to avoid making it almost hereditary memory, would be abdicating decent human responsibility and thereby assuring recurrence is happening at this very moment.” Harrowed by an atrocity that pre-dated his birth, Kevorkian took on not its human perpetrators but Thanatos itself, driven by the conviction that all people should be able to die with self-determination, to slip off into the dreamless night with dignity and in peace.

By coincidence, I first visited the paintings at the ALMA museum the same weekend in February 2011 that Hosni Mubarak fell from power in Egypt. Soon, with the rest of the Bidoun team, I was on my way to Cairo; caught up in the afterglow of the uprisings, I set aside the darkness of Kevorkian. I wrote another essay for Bidoun about political figures unwittingly turned divine, which would become my book, Accidental Gods. By the time I returned to Dr. Death, I was well on my way to becoming an expert in apotheosis. Kevorkian became a sort of Bidounish god of the underworld—whimsical, charming, perverse. Revisiting his life and art in the shadow of the ongoing atrocities in Gaza reminds us of how genocides, even after the killing has ended, take on afterlives in ways we cannot predict.

Many of the sixteen paintings in the exhibition were Kevorkian’s own feverishly repainted copies of originals that were, I wrote, “lost by a moving company when Kevorkian moved to California in 1976” to direct a Hollywood film of Handel’s Messiah. The Reddit revelation offers a coda to that story, the Chilean trove being, effectively, the archive of Kevorkian’s life, from his birth in Michigan in 1928 to 1983. It includes his childhood report cards, school essays, and diplomas; sketches and comics; bank statements and cheques; journal entries composed in various shapes: a crucifix, a labyrinth, a soldier’s silhouette, and his initials, J K. There are photos of dead bodies, letters to art collectors, music scores, and the lost reels of his failed Messiah. It seems likely that, rather than being lost in transit, Kevorkian’s possessions were sold at auction when he fell behind on payments for his storage unit after going bankrupt making the film.

That the stuff of Kevorkian’s life should come to rest in Valparaíso makes a kind of historical sense: in the 1920s, Armenian survivors arrived in the nearby town of Llay-Llay seeking refuge. In 2015, the Chilean government officially recognized the genocide.

As for the paintings? The Valparaíso buyer, posting only as JJ, recounted that one night, he invited friends over for dinner:

One of my wife’s friends, who grew up in the same neighborhood as the collector’s family, froze when I said Kevorkian’s name. “Dr. Death?” she said. She then told us that when she was 14, a neighbor played a prank on her and her friends by leading them to the rooftop of his house, where they found a horrifying scene: 15–20 huge paintings depicting satanic imagery—blood, mutilation, cannibalism, Santa Claus assaulting Jesus—lit by candles. They ran off screaming.

It turned out the mischievous neighbor was the collector’s nephew. The paintings had been passed along to his mother who, convinced that they were evil, banished them to the attic. She got rid of them, eventually, but claims not to remember the particulars. Their fate remains unclear.

— Anna Della Subin

Read A Very Still Life: Jack Kevorkian and the Muse of Genocide, by Anna Della Subin published in Bidoun, Issue 27 Diaspora on Bidoun.org.

Sukhdev Sandhu is a British professor of English at New York University and a Contributing Editor at Bidoun. Since 2007, under the umbrella of a semi-secret society known as the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, he has hosted hundreds of events, predominantly screenings, with an emphasis on the “banned, censored, and forgotten.” The Colloquium is luxurious in spirit: admission is free, there’s usually booze, scholasticism is discouraged, and the slightly shambolic atmosphere of repurposed classrooms and dimly-lit discourse is oddly, almost absurdly, welcoming.

The Colloquium is, by my lights, one of the main reasons to be in New York. Many a time, I’ve set out for an event on the strength of a film’s impossibly weird name or one of Sukhdev’s perversely enticing epithets (“seceding, barely there, out-where…”) and gone home marveling at my good fortune. (A case in point: The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Black Oil.) The Colloquium is also one of the best ways to slip out of New York for an hour or two: a portal to startlingly intimate encounters with faraway places. In the last month alone, the Colloquium has assembled for:

• a rare screening of Zinda Laash aka The Living Corpse, the primal scene of Pakistani horror cinema;

• a womb-dark listening party for an LP whose German title translates to “Conversations with Larvae and Fossil Remains”;

• the American premiere, 65 years after the fact, of British critic Kenneth Tynan’s disappeared documentary on American non-conformists, We Dissent;

• a boozy Scottish wake for Keith McIvor aka DJ Twitch (Optimo); and

• a meditation on medieval Christian mysticism and liturgical straws.

Every so often, the Colloquium goes for broke. In 2011, Sukhdev flew k-punk blogger and Capitalist Realism author Mark Fisher to New York to deliver a pair of influential talks. (In 2017, the Colloquium marked Fisher’s death with a moving multimedia memorial service.) There have been whole weekends devoted to Glam Rock, to the cryptobibliographical publishing house Strange Attractor, to the films of theorist Laura Mulvey, and to the life and art of avant-garde composer Arthur Russell. (Russell’s parents attended.) But its most ambitious project to date is “After the Watershed: Late-Nite TV From Britain,” organized with writer-curators Matthew Harle and Colm McAuliffe.

A monthlong program of screenings, talks, and hangouts, “After the Watershed” provided revelatory glimpses of subcultures, public intellection, class struggle, ripe humor, and off-piste drama, “broadcast” each day to a single cathode-ray color TV in the magnificently appointed premises of Various Artists, the alluring year-old gallery on New York’s Lower East Side.

In our open-ended conversation, Sukhdev discussed the Colloquium’s origin story, the dreamworld of fanzines, “fissile abstraction,” and the glamor of atypicality.

Michael C. Vazquez: I was going to ask you to narrate your backstory with Bidoun for the benefit of our newsletter readers, only to realize that we had already asked you to do just that some years ago:

Bidoun was farouche, knowing, a bit of a flirt. All good magazines should be. They exude strange aromas. They may want you to like them, but they should never say. A great magazine shouldn’t care if you like them or not.

Which was itself a bit flirty? In any case, I realized that I don’t really know how the Colloquium came about…

Sukhdev Sandhu: What happened is that I was back in New York after spending a lot of time in London working on what would become my book Night Haunts, and the English department was encouraging all sorts of working groups and collaborations at the time. I went to a few meetings, but it quickly became clear that everything I was interested in was of absolutely no interest to my colleagues—and that I was not all that interested in modernism, at least the way it existed in the academy. I didn’t pedestalize literature. I mean, I like literature, but there’s other things. And then one day I was talking with a very peppy former student of mine, James Brooke-Smith, and we were discussing what we were bored by. [Laughs] And the takeaway was that we both wanted more… primary encounters.

MV: Yes.

SS: And I was still reviewing films for the Telegraph at the time, with all the access that implies. I remember flying back to New York with a suitcase full of all kinds of incredibly rare materials and wanting to find a way to put them to use. And I think there was a kind of ecological thing, too. NYU has a lot of real estate, you know. We gobble up so much land, and it’s empty half the time. So it was important from the beginning that the Colloquium be open to the public, to make that space available to people outside the university. Which was not always easy, even then, and has gotten increasingly difficult, with all the politics of policing now.

MV: So you settled on close encounters with film.

SS: We did a series, which was called ‘Unseen Albion,’ which was films that were out of circulation. And I think the very first thing we screened was John Boorman’s Leo the Last (1970), this incredible satire about… failed gentrification? In which the deposed heir of some European royal family moves to Notting Hill and falls in with his Caribbean immigrant neighbors. The Colloquium’s publishing wing, Text und Töne, actually published a book about Leo the Last by Edward Platt last year.

The series also included Godard’s British Sounds (1969), The Fall (1969) by Peter Whitehead, and Punishment Park (1971) by Peter Watkins. Who just died last week, at the age of 90!

MV: That’s a lot of bangers. (In the American sense.) What about the name? Did you intend a particular provocation by standing with the unpopular?

SS: Well, numbers are rubbish, aren’t they? Universities are always going on about scaling up, accelerators, their own version of the “like and subscribe” button. I’ve no illusions that there’s a ginormous audience for what the Colloquium puts on, but then, as Andy Weatherall used to say, “Music: it’s not for everyone.”

MV: It is funny how all the talk of scaling up ends up making the world seem smaller.

SS: The world should be getting bigger! But if you’re in the academy, it so often just sort of feels pinched and squeezed. So I think I settled on the name as a way to maybe flush out a certain kind of person—you know, the kind of poltroon who might be drawn for some reason to the idea of unpopularity.

MV: Poltroons like us.

SS: I mean, you could see it as a bit abject or frivolous—I’m not going to pretend it has any great metaphysical depth. But there’s a Rebecca Solnit line that I quite like, from Hope in the Dark: “What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated, and studied too, right now.”

MV: I mean, there are worse mission statements!

SS: Yeah. I remember an event, I think you were there, where somebody was showing a film of Viennese Actionists. We had people from the Whitney Independent Study Program, and their response seemed so cynical to me—basically, “Oh, it’s so easy to be doing that,” as if it were some kind of careerist master plan on the part of these young, sometimes morally defective, definitely over-passionate… whatever those guys were. And I thought, Wow, your education is doing active harm to you.

MV: Right. You are neither capable of being scandalized nor delighted by extremity.

SS: Or by anything. Neither scandalized nor delighted, because you run a risk by expressing an emotion, right? I don’t know. It’s always been about emotion for me, I think. Ideas and emotion. A couple of days ago, I was going through some old papers and I found some lectures that I wrote in my first job. And I thought to myself, I’ve been doing the same thing all my bloody life. Reading out thwarted love letters and raining down curses on a world of uber-scholasticism… But it did strike me, as I was tidying up those papers, that when I was about 15, all I ever wanted was a photocopying machine. I remember finding an ad for one in a local newspaper for 10 pounds. I was so excited! It was still a lot, but I persuaded my parents to give me the money. I don’t know where we would have put it? But then I rang the number and it turned out it was a misprint, and it was 1000 pounds.

MV: Of course.

SS: But my purpose was, obviously, to publish fanzines.

MV: [Laughs] Of course!

SS: I never liked the kind of reasonable fanzines that mimicked the style and the rhythms of the official press, whatever that is. I don’t want them to be inclusive, whatever that means. I like it when it’s just a mad, ranting person, who may be on a street corner or climbing atop a tower block roof with pirate radio equipment. When what it’s saying is: Here is a thing I’m really, really into, I think it’s great—don’t you?

MV: So should the Colloquium be understood as a sort of fanzine come to life?

SS: [Laughs] Well, I remember, around the time you introduced me to Shumon Basar, he was doing something with the idea of staging some sort of confluence of a magazine and live bodies in a room.

MV: Right. FORMAT, the living magazine.

SS: Yeah. I do think that’s interesting. I did an event for this really great jazz musician, Lol Coxhill, who died in 2012, and so much went into that. Most of the people who knew him are in their late seventies or older. And I was so nervous, terrified! His widow got in touch. I thought, you know, I just like his music. I wasn’t a friend. I didn’t know him. This is not my right to do this. But it was kind of wonderful. Maybe a bit like editing a magazine—you’re getting people to record things, getting people to find films that are not in public circulation, stitching together all these elements. Like laying out pages? Except the result only lasts, only really exists, for… 90 minutes? Two hours? For one afternoon.

MV: So wait, did you have a fanzine?

SS: Yeah, yeah. Well, just two. The first one was called Eheu! Caudex!

MV: Is that Romanian?

SS: Latin. It means “Alas! Blockhead!” And then the second one was called Ecce Caecilius, which basically means, “Behold Caecilius.”

MV: Was your fanzine about Ancient Rome?

SS: No, no. I mean, it was mostly about music. Interviews. I talked to Momus—

MV: You interviewed Momus in high school?

SS: Yeah! Well, you know, he likes to talk, so I think he decided he preferred to talk himself. [Laughs] I discovered the tape recently and he’s remarkably precocious and up himself in the best way—waxing lyrical about repressed sexuality, about other people’s opinions of his looks, the problem with English culture. It was good!

And he’d been on this compilation of él records, and I love love love love loved él records. I interviewed one of their main songwriters, a guy called Philippe Auclair, also known as Louis Philippe, who’d been trained as a philosopher and later become a chef in Belgium and then released records under various pseudonyms. And who just looked dashing. I found some of his letters to me recently—oh! his lovely script! And I think they were on some kind of vellum paper which I’d never seen at that time. [Sighs] But él gets written out of a lot of pop music history. They were often described as this very playful, sort of whimsical, entity. Their first single was Shock Headed Peters, “I, Bloodbrother Be.” Which is the most cavalier, the most Soviet, tyrannical paean to violent gay sex that you can imagine. It’s really good!

MV: Did you have friends who were making fanzines at that time? Was there any sort of scene or…

SS: No. I didn’t know anybody. But I really liked one called Trout Fishing in Leytonstone that had stuff about the Situationists. And another, which only ever had one issue, called It All Sounded the Same, which was incredibly twee. I later discovered it was the work of Rob Young, who went on to write about much more punitive, attritional, conventionally complex music as editor at The Wire.

MV: I like The Wire as much as the next reasonable person, but it can be a bit grey.

SS: Sometimes. But It All Sounded the Same was like a riot of color! A lot of those zines, they weren’t the kind of… ransom note aesthetic of the industrial 80s. [Laughter] They were more… emotional pencil case. Sad rainbows of polychromatic glee. You get a sense that the music is just a crutch for them in all their spasticated adolescent yearnings as they try to imagine themselves out of their small town or little suburb or drab college room. Trying to will something into being.

MV: Is it possible that there is a quintessential Colloquium event?

SS: Maybe the evening we did on Peter Singh, “The Rocking Sikh”—Britain’s leading Punjabi Elvis impersonator? [Laughter] Which we did with his friend Kosmo Vinyl, this brilliant guy, an artist who once upon a time helped manage The Clash. We showed this film, which is kind of lost in time—I think it was only shown regionally—about what it meant for him to see Jailhouse Rock as a kid and devote much of his life to becoming the Punjabi Elvis and the impact of all this on his slightly embarrassed daughter and wife. I’d got some people in Wales to do a bit of pre-record, and Kosmo brought out a painting that he’d done of Peter, and I brought in a 7-inch that he’d recorded, and we all sort of sat there together for an hour and a half. And I felt like, whatever my actual job is, nothing is ever going to give me more… pleasure or meaning or sense of purpose than being in a room of people, losing ourselves, thinking about Punjabi Welsh Elvis impersonators.

I mean, he’s probably nobody’s idea of Wales, of South Asians—of immigrants, even. Maybe people would think him wonky or absurd. But the Colloquium is happiest with the crooked. I love that Isaiah Berlin book, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. You know, bent is best. Or, as the title of our book on Penda’s Fen would have it: The edge is where the center is.

MV: It’s true! It makes me think of the Colloquium event celebrating Alex Keefe and his incredible essay in Bidoun’s Diaspora issue on Shridhar Bapat, an Indian expat in the early years of the New York video art scene.

SS: Gosh, yes. What on earth did we see that night? A goblin? A genie?

MV: I mean, we literally had a hologram of Shridhar. [Laughs] I forgot that part.

SS: It was so vivid. We were there to remember this pivotal and wholly forgotten figure, who spent his last years living in darkness beneath Manhattan, with all the chaos and collapse of that. But like, what was going on? We were all queuing up to meet him!

MV: I think I have a selfie with Shridhar, somewhere.

SS: It was like we’d held a séance, and he showed up!

MV: I guess you could say that one of the recurring themes of the Colloquium is the atypical Asian. The atypical yet exemplary Asian…

SS: [Laughs] That reminds me of another event a few years back, a triple bill of films about 2 Tone, the record label that launched the careers of The Specials, The Beat, and Madness. Which was based in Coventry, in the Midlands. So I wrote to Neil Kulkarni, this brilliant Asian writer, South Asian writer. He died just last year, horribly early. He used to write about hip-hop and metal for Melody Maker and Metal Hammer, really sweary, really vulgar, really funny. From Coventry. And I was like, Hey, I like your writing, would you consider doing some sort of introduction? And he said, Can I make a film? And I thought, Well, he’s going to sit in his bedroom and record a few things, sure, why not? And instead he went and bopped around town, shooting five different locations, and made this brilliant film about Coventry modernism. The city was one of the most bombed cities in the UK during World War II, so it became a bit of a tabula rasa for different waves of immigration. It’s sort of looked down on for having a very ugly accent. And this film was Neil saying, I fucking love this place, I love Cov, I’m never gonna leave. My politics, my music, my everything is here. He turned it around in about 24 hours! I was so blown away. I was so moved! The evening became a bit of a lock-in, with people dancing in the cinema aisles to “Do Nothing” and “Free Nelson Mandela.”

MV: Damn. I wish I’d been there.

SS: Yeah. But again, why was I so moved? I mean, it’s a big city, but in the scheme of things, you might think it’s not such a big deal. But the local and the small are really important to me. That sounds pompous, but it’s true. The small is really big! It’s like sitting in the front row of a cinema when that pixel in front of your face starts to look really weird. The screen is less about puncta of microscopic precision and more a kind of swarming, fissile abstraction. You start to lose yourself in it. The closer you go into anything, the more it sort of slips out of your ability to control it, to describe it. It becomes… well, I hope it becomes even more fascinating.

MV: Amen.

HOT TANGENTS

Guest curated by Sukhdev Sandhu

Music: A Selection of Music from Libyan Tapes

Habibi Funk is a brilliant Berlin-based record label that spotlights little-known or forgotten musical artists from the Arab world—particularly from the 1960s to the 1980s. Previous releases of note include a collection by Ibraham Hesnawi, The Father of Libyan Reggae; another by Sharhabil Ahmed, The King of Sudanese Jazz; and Oghneya, an astonishingly beautiful, Tropicalia-tinged LP from 1978 by the Lebanese band Ferkat Al Ard. A Selection of Music From Libyan Tapesshowcases tracks from the late 1980s to the early 2000s that are synthetic, spacey, and, in the case of Khaled Al Reigh’s “Zannik” (a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”), an authentic dance hall bubbler.

Film: Edward George, Black Atlas at the Warburg Institute, London

Eddie was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective. He was the Data Thief in the BAFC’s The Last Angel of History (1996), a foundational document for what came to be known as Afrofuturism. His ‘Strangeness of Dub’ radio series features two-hour programs in which black British history and cultural politics are dramatized through dialectical soundclashes between Jah Shaka and Dennis Bovell. Let loose among the collections at London’s augustly peculiar Warburg Institute, he has created Black Atlas, a looping essay film about art, blackness, and spectrality—a kindred spirit to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

Music: Arja Kastinen & Taito Hoffrén, Teppana Jänis

Death Is Not The End is a wonderful label whose ambit spans Iberian-Pakistani Sufi Flamenco, Jamaican Doo Wop, Brazilian country music, early 1930s Sacred Harp singers, Shidaiqu pop from late 1920s Shanghai, mushroom ceremonies of Mexico’s Mazatec Indians, Greek rebetiko, Japanese ryūkōka, pirate radio ads… Its founder, Luke Owen, who did a Colloquium event in 2023, says that what unites these disparate musics is “timeless emotion, fragility, nostalgia, a lot of despair, some humor here and there.” This recent release hearkens back to World War I, when Teppana Jänis, a blind kantele player, helped Finnish folk music researcher Armas Otto Väisänen record traditional shepherd melodies on wax cylinders. Wisps of those century-old recordings are commingled with modern-day renditions by researcher Arja Kastinen and singer–composer Taito Hoffrén; the results are heart-stopping, beyond words…

When Ismail Ibrahim set out to write about his experience as a fact-checker at an unnamed American magazine after October 7th, we suggested he look up Eliot Weinberger’s essay, “Where Was New York?” In his quietly devastating commentary on E. B. White’s “Here Is New York”—a beloved 1948 New Yorker article by the author of Charlotte’s Web and The Elements of Style—Weinberger skewered the self-sure provincialism of The New Yorker’s vision of New York. “For some eighty years the magazine has represented the Zeitgeist of the upwardly mobile educated white Manhattanite,” he wrote in 2002. “It is permanently fixed in an air of bemused detachment, which it expresses in a style whose sentences are pathologically rewritten by its editors, “polished” (as they call it) until every article, whether a report from Rwanda or a portrait of a professional dog-walker, sounds exactly alike.”

Weinberger is the legendary translator of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bei Dao, and the author of some 20 books on, well, whatever the fuck he finds worth writing about. He is also one of the great political essayists of our time, as evinced by his widely anthologized 2005 essay, “What I Heard About Iraq,” published in The London Review of Books during the locust years of George W. Bush.

Not coincidentally, Weinberger is one of Ibrahim’s literary idols. We brought them together to discuss “House Arab,” writing amidst disaster, and fact-checking as genre.

Eliot Weinberger: Hi Ismail… Many people go from fact-checker to editor at the New Yorker, but you are surely the first to go from fact-checker to Talk of the Town. “House Arab” may be Bidoun’s greatest hit. Any thoughts why? Obviously it goes beyond the liveliness of the writing.

Ismail Ibrahim: That’s a great question. I really believed “House Arab” would be a minor incident, only of interest to brown people working in media institutions who similarly felt at odds with their employers, though, as you mentioned, it sort of escaped containment… I think part of the spread is that the mea culpa I predict at the end of “House Arab” has begun. In July, the New York Times, a publication whose sympathies are no mystery, published an op-ed declaring the Gaza war to be a genocide, and, in Kamala Harris’s new book, she cynically writes that she privately disagreed with Biden’s position on Palestine. So, I think part of its appeal is that it names something the reader can see happening and that they are rightfully mistrustful of.

The other thing is that I would like to think that the piece works, in part, by de-emphasizing the importance of “reality” as a set of mutually agreed upon facts. The world “as it is” is as real to the narrator as the possibility of a more just world. To be a fact checker is, in many ways, to be totally obliterated by reality, a feeling I think many readers can “relate” to. (I have never understood reading to relate to something. I want to experience a consciousness profoundly unlike my own when I read. I get enough of myself just living). On top of the Gaza genocide, there are the mass shootings, the ICE raids, the Ukraine war, the rising cost of living, the climate crisis, and on and on and on and on. Reality feels like a brutal joke right now.

You say “obviously it goes beyond the liveliness of the writing,” and I agree, but it was important to me that the writing be bouncy, the tone ambivalent. I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the New Yorker’s plain style—the voice’s inability to be genuinely surprised by something, its projection of both distance from, and total knowledge about, the subject under discussion—and the magazine’s acquiescence to status quo politics. In your essay on Susan Sontag, you discuss her contribution to the New Yorker‘s post 9/11 issue, the only one that pointed out that the attack was a consequence of US foreign policy. Despite its “bad manners,” what she writes, in hindsight, seems self-evidently true. The hostility she was met with—not to mention the genteel essays from Franzen et al. it appeared among—seems of a piece with the nativist politics we are living with now. ICE, of course, being a creation of Bush II.

EW: The issue that immediately followed 9/11 has always struck me as the quintessence of the New Yorker. Rather than allude to it, I’ll do something I have never done, which is quote myself, since it is an accumulation of telling details. It opened my Sontag review in NYRB, but Bob Silvers refused to print these paragraphs. (It’s now in one of my books.):

After the nearly all-black portrait of the Twin Towers by Art Spiegelman; after the ads for Ralph Lauren Polo, Mercedes-Benz, and Laurent-Perrier champagne; after eighteen pages of the usual “Goings On About Town” (“Chef Rick Laakonen spent his woodsy youth among Massachusetts Finns”), and before the longish articles on the Boston Red Sox, new productions of Verdi, and the latest cookbooks, a group of writers were asked to comment on the devastation that had just struck.

John Updike, who “happened to be visiting some kin” in Brooklyn, raised his well-worn descriptive binoculars (“it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion”) and ambled to a cheerful conclusion: “The next morning… The fresh sun shone on the eastward façades, a few boats tentatively moved in the river, the ruins were still sending out smoke, but New York looked glorious.”

Jonathan Franzen recalled a personal “recurring nightmare,” invoked “a childish disappointment over the disruption of your day, or a selfish worry about the impact on your finances,” and lamented the “loss of daily life”: “your date for drinks downtown on Wednesday,… the hourly AOL updates on J. Lo’s doings.” Roger Angell reminisced about World War II and “a lifetime of bad news: your neighbor’s son’s car crash, your tennis partner’s blastoma, Chernobyl, or the Copacabana fire.” Rebecca Mead, comparing the National Guard barriers at 14th Street to the “velvet rope at the night-club door,” rather happily noted that “exclusivity” had been “restored” to a lost bohemian downtown Manhattan. And then there was Susan Sontag, blasting in her first sentences through the cluelessness and The New Yorker style-must-go-on prose.

Now I don’t think this is “nativist,” in the current iteration, but utterly provincial, and of course unable to imagine the political beyond the personal. It’s so New Yorker to reduce everything to its little world: Chernobyl is like your neighbor’s son’s car crash. I’ll never forget their reporting on the genocide in Rwanda, where they found it necessary to explain that Rwanda is the same size as Connecticut.

II: There is an element of “provincialism” to it, but if you are so insulated, as a provincial is, you think your land is the only land that matters. That is a form of exceptionalism. Comparing your neighbor’s son’s car crash to Chernobyl betrays a consciousness that can be undisturbed, for example, by civillian drone strikes in Yemen. Does that make sense?

EW: I think there is a huge difference between New York provincialism and nativism as currently practiced by the Trumpistas. Nativism is the overt hostility to everything that is not local. Provincialism reduces everything to the local and sees everything through the local. New York provincialism is occurring in the most international city in the world, so obviously it has a greater range of the “local” than a small town in Alabama. New Yorker-type “intellectuals” are not xenophobic, but they are apparently unable to think about the larger political contexts of events such as 9/11 or 10/7. What they understand is victims, which is why they supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, until they turned against it, and supported Israel until the genocide in Gaza became evident to them.

But let’s get back to “House Arab.” What about the fact-checking obsession in American magazines? In the old days, it was limited to potential libel. The New Yorker notoriously expanded it to legions of the recently graduated checking (in your example) at what exact minute in the Almodóvar film Penelope Cruz has sex, and this has now become standard practice in magazine publication. The result is endless hair-splitting between writers, who presumably know something about their subject, and fact-checkers, who only know what Google tells them—and, of course, the writers are presumed guilty until they can prove their innocence. Most of it is deeply pointless. And your case, in its way, takes it to an extreme: You were forced to ask Palestinian villagers to recount incidents of horror, which would then be retold in the New Yorker style of the arched middle-brow, running in faint type between the unchanging cartoons of cave men, princesses in castles, and suburban living rooms.

II: Part of me wants to say that obsession is a recent innovation with “the information age,” that accuracy is taken to be a good in itself, and no hair is small enough to be split, though I recently re-read part of Tropic of Cancer. Miller’s narrator (or Miller himself, I was never clear on this point and don’t wish to Google it!) becomes a copy editor at a newspaper. “The world is brought under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities” he writes. The newspapermen “live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it’s called.”

EW: Miller was indeed briefly a newspaper copy editor/proofreader. But punctuating the calamities is not at all the same as asking the victims of calamity to affirm (or prove) that they are victims. I just find that calling these villagers—and making you, as the “House Arab,” call them—is grotesque, and typical of the New Yorker’s insufferable self-regard.

II: In one way, yes. Punctuating calamities is different than running the victims of such calamities through the facts of it, making sure to specify that it was “sheep dung” they were forced to eat by their captors, rather than some other animal’s feces. What interests me about the Miller quote, though, is the posture toward the world’s calamities. That was what was being asked of me—to leave the events I was verifying under my nose, not to bring them to eye level while I prodded around to ensure they were “true.”

In the last year, since I left the job, I have paid close attention to my dreams and my imagination. I love films like Meshes of the Afternoon, Orphée, and Lost Highway, where the “hard facts of life” are violated to achieve a different kind of truth, a different kind of reality. The universe is not all that is the case, as Wittgenstein put it, though the universe of The New Yorker is. I think being a fact checker impoverished my ability to engage with “the other side.” I am trying to recover that sense.

Hot Tangents

Bidoun’s longtime Creative Director Babak Radboy, who serves as Creative Director of the black-owned fashion brand Telfar, will be staging a live television show in London during Frieze week. New Models is TELFAR TV’s first series: an eccentric experimental reality show in which open castings are held for ‘New Models.’ Typical of the brand’s bonkers and irreverent anti-industry politics, candidates are put through challenges, while organizers suggest they were never referring to fashion models in the first place, but new models of social and political organization and resistance.

Ibraaz is open today, October 15th: a new space in the heart of central London dedicated to “art, culture, and ideas from the Global Majority,” reimagined by architect Sumayya Vally. An initiative of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Ibraaz launches with an exhibition by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, a library-in-residence project by the Otolith Group, and loads of ambitious programming.

Les Chichas de la pensée, the itinerant discursive cultural project run by Mehdi Meklat, Badroudine Saïd Abdallah, and Asma Barchiche, is hosting a weekend of screenings, talks, and performances at Fauvette City Club, a new venue in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. The event (October 24–25) commemorates the 20th anniversary of the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré—two young men whose passing set off countrywide anti-police riots in 2005. Filmmaker Alice Diop, choreographer Tchomanga, and the rapper Prototype are among thirty artists taking part.

Our friends at the invaluable Palfest have launched a new podcast on and around the Palestinian literary scene. The first episode features young Gaza-based writer Batool Abu Akleen. Another Palfest event to look out for in London later this month: a conversation on Palestine and Kashmir with Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed at the Southbank Centre.

Artists Valentin Noujaïm, Meriem Bennani, and Orian “Yani” Barki have film debuts in New York City this week. Bennani and Barki’s first feature, a queer, animated coming-of-age story titled Bouchra, graces the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center from Saturday, September 27, through Monday the 29th. Earlier this week, Noujaïm’s trilogy of films set in the Parisian business district of La Défense screened at the Museum of Modern Art.

On Friday the 26th, Bidoun will be presenting Pacific Club (2022), the first film in Noujaïm’s trilogy, at 99 Canal. Set against the backdrop of racism, a heroin epidemic, and the emerging AIDS crisis, the short film evokes a nightclub that catered to a mostly young, mostly Arab clientele during the 1980s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with writers Perwana Nazif and Adam HajYehia and a launch party for Interzone, Noujaim’s first monograph, published by Kunsthalle Basel and Mousse.

For this inaugural edition of Bidoun’s newsletter, Barki and Bennani met up with Noujaim to talk about their latest work and mutual interest in speculative worldbuilding.

Valentin: You and I have many things in common, like how we like to mix the real and the unreal, documentary and animation. Why do you create this way? What do you want your worlds to do?

Meriem: Well, sometimes I establish a speculative space for the actors who are playing themselves in my films — for example, with Life on the Caps, I wanted them to believe they were in the future. As for the documentary aspect… I think it’s obvious that I’m not trying to pass it off as “real.” It may be strange, but I think of the staging of documentary footage as more like creating a narrative proxy—a way to put people in situations where they can express themselves while engaging in roleplay. It allows something else to come out in the work that’s not speculative, but very much about the present.

Valentin: That was absolutely the case in your Life on the Caps trilogy, which takes place on a fictional island in the middle of the Atlantic. The island is a futuristic detention camp for migrants. You don’t have to look at it very long to see that your image of the future looks very similar to… now.

Meriem: I think what the three of us have the most in common is that we work with reality. But what is your process like, Valentin? Do you shoot first and then construct the rest in post? Are your scenes fully scripted, or do you improvise with your performers, or…?

Valentin: It depends. It’s funny because I got my degree in screenwriting at La Fémis, in Paris, but I kind of hated it. [Laughs] I ended up wanting to escape writing—to do something that felt a bit more alive. Of course, I still write, but I leave room for other things to enter the script. For example, To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024), the second film in the Defense Trilogy, developed out of my interactions with the lead actress, Kayije Kagame.

Meriem: She was amazing in Saint Omer (2022), the Alice Diop film.

Valentin: She was! In my film, she plays a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper who slowly goes mad… I had just seen her perform a very long monologue from Jean Genet’s The Maids, so she was primed to inhabit a person who is entrapped by the system. I had a set, and I had some ideas, but Kayije brought a lot of her own gestures and ideas to the project.

On the other hand, Demons to Diamonds (2025), the third film in the trilogy, is very scripted, very heavy on dialogue and character. Oddly, it’s the film I made that feels closest to a cartoon, because the model for the city was very inspired by the look of Gotham in Batman, the animated series, which I loved when I was a kid. But even when I work with documentary footage, like in Pacific Club, where my main subject was free to say whatever he wanted—I remain in control of the narrative. So how “real” that film is is up for debate.

Meriem: I actually think there’s no such thing as pure documentary. You always have to tell people where to sit or stand, you’re deciding how you want to film them, you control the edit. Documentary is a construct — maybe especially with films that are trying to look the most like reality. I’m glad you mentioned cartoons! Yani and I were wondering if you’re a fan of anime, because the look of your films is so particular, so anime-like. We both thought about Ghost in the Shell, Perfect Blue…

Valentin: I am very influenced by anime, it’s true. But I’m also very influenced by theater — the way it’s always playing with reality, inside/outside. Audiences have to accept that there’s something behind the backdrop, behind the sets, you know? I see the same kind of theatricality in your work, too. I always have the strange feeling that there’s something or someone watching the characters, even watching us viewers, too.

Meriem: With Life on the CAPS, that feeling you describe of someone looking at you — I think it might just be me! [Laughs] I’m definitely always reminding viewers that I’m there through my little interventions — mostly animation — reminding them that this world is not real, that the story is constructed. Even when it’s my story.

Valentin: Bouchra really is your story, right? It’s very personal.

Meriem: Yeah. Initially, we wrote a script about a mother and a daughter and their complicated relationship. It was heavily inspired by my life, but I wasn’t ready to make the film autobiographical, at first.

Yani: We actually had a running joke at the studio: “This film is not about Meriem!” We wanted the story to seem very far from reality. We were scared, actually — fear shaped how we wrote it. But at some point, we got really stuck. And then came the phone calls between Meriem and her mom…

Meriem: I think there’s good fear and bad fear. Good fear is the kind that arises when you care about what you’re doing, so you feel nervous. But the fear that Yani mentions was a bad fear — it was our fear of falling into the classic “coming out” story trope. We were scared that it was going to be misunderstood. And I was scared because it’s my story and I didn’t want to pretend like I’m telling the story of every queer person, because I’m not. So we wrote a script that we were kind of happy with but maybe not excited about. We felt that it was missing something. That’s when I decided to ask my mom if I could record a conversation with her about my queerness.

Yani: When we listened to the recordings, we thought, Fuck, this is so much better than anything we’ll ever write. The dialogue was so specific — it had all this nuance. So then we went about creating a meta-narrative. We made Bouchra, the main character, a filmmaker who’s working on the script that we originally wrote. To help her finish her film, Bouchra calls her mom…

Valentin: I think you not only escaped all the traps of making a coming-of-age queer film, you managed to avoid exoticizing queer Arabness.

Meriem: Thank you! Can you speak about your relationship to Frenchness? I feel like you’re part of a group in France, let's say children of colonialism, who are increasingly making art about those legacies and realities. As a Moroccan with a French colonial education, I’m totally interested in this phenomenon.

Valentin: My first films were much more about Lebanon and Egypt, where my parents are from, but those places were a bit distant for me because I’m part of a diaspora. I realized that the reality I could talk about the most was France. I grew up in this country and feel very fearless about speaking to it. A portrait of La Défense, a business district in France, will inevitably be a portrait of those postcolonial legacies. To build it, they tore down a shanty town full of migrant workers who had been forcibly brought to France from the Arab world — Algeria and Morocco, mostly. And of course, the central figure in Pacific Club, Azedine Benabdelmounene, is of Arab origin. We know that France continues to have a complicated relationship to its Arab Others. This newfound visibility that you speak of, it’s a bit paradoxical. It exists, and yet it still takes years for us to get shows in major French museums… if it happens at all.

Meriem: For sure. [Laughter] Tell me, how are you feeling about screening these films at MoMA?

Valentin: I’m excited to be showing the three films as a trilogy, one after the other, and seeing how the responses in America might be different from what I’ve received in France. What about you? This is Bouchra’s first time in New York, yes?

Yani: It feels like pure fun to show it here. We’ve been working on it for so long — we’re ready for it to be out in the world.

Meriem: We want to be exorcised of it. [Laughs] I’m already dreaming about the next project.

Hot Tangents

Last week we published Bidoun’s most viral article in recent memory: House Arab, the story of a fact checker at one of America’s most prestigious magazines and his crisis of conscience in the aftermath of October 7th. Look out for a Q & A with its author, Ismail Ibrahim, in our next newsletter.

Bidoun contributor and friend Alaa Abd El Fattah is free. Alaa has spent much of the past fourteen years in prison or detention in Egypt. Read Lina Attalah’s recent piece on Alaa for Bidoun, & here’s a selection of his essays & interviews from our archive.

168 Hours of Resistance: a 24/7 live transmission of fragments and voices on the theme of resistance, running this week only, September 20-27. Organized by Ibrahem Hasan.

More from Meriem Bennani in Bidoun: a 2018 music mix (originally deejayed at MoMA PS1) and a conversation around Life on the CAPS with Fatima Al Qadiri.