All posts filed under: Recent

A selection of recent special features, essays, interviews and reviews

Interview // “Dance Anthem for Freedom and Play”: A Conversation with Elizabeth Hoover 

“o, yes, there are gaps in all archives, both private and public. The question is what is our responsibility toward those gaps? Sometimes we have an impulse to “fill them in,” but that can perform a double erasure—erasing the erasure, hiding the violence. So can those gaps become sites for the imagination, sites of possibility and play?”—Elizabeth Hoover

From Witness From Speech From Image: On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

Summer Farah | Critic at Large This essay is also available as a print zine through Open Books. All proceeds will be sent to Gaza Poets Society. The Arab Apocalypseby Etel AdnanLitmus Press, 2007 First Published by Post-Apollo Press, 1989 Dicteeby Theresa Hak Kyung ChaUniversity of California Press, 2022First Published by Tanam Press, 1982 In a Western Art History course, I learned to read images—to follow the eye, from the top left corner to the bottom right as if I was reading a page of words in English, but to let the artists’ lines guide and redirect my focus. To understand what the image is doing by identifying these moments of departure. I also learned art history as a comparative practice: to speak of an era is to put a collection of paintings next to each other and make conclusions about the time, to consider the world that presses into the frame. Before I am an editor, poet, critic, or any kind of writer, I am a reader; I want to follow the feeling. Reading …