Art Magazine
The unfinished B1 bridge in Karaj struck in two waves of US-Israeli attacks on 2 April 2026. Photo by Erfan Kouchari
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READI now think that in its waiting, the body experiences those post-poetic iterations that transcend its materiality, mortality, and alienation. It prepares for its future life in a post-poetic Palestine.
Tracing the Palestinian Post-Poetic, or, How to Concretize a Liberated Future?
In exile, the body waits to connect with its soul. Moving between tammadī, mística, Indigenous futurisms, and Palestinian folktales, Sanabel Abdel Rahman argues for the post-poetic: a knowledge constructed outside colonial experience and temporality, in which liberated Palestine ceases to be a rupture between reality and fantasy and instead becomes something lived and experienced in the present.
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READThere’s a disturbing trend in contemporary photography exhibitions, where everything feels correct but nothing feels thought-provoking. The projects are socially pertinent but their narrative, predictable. They are humanitarian. Let me explain.
Humanitarian Photography and NGO Curating: When Good Intentions Create Bad Art
When moral urgency eclipses aesthetics and critical inquiry, you get humanitarian photography. Jussi K. Suomalainen argues that museums and photo festivals increasingly resemble NGOs and that the result is not just bad art but boring art.
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READThe urumi is a physical medium of wood, metal, and skin, created by the hands of working men, metaphysicalised by the Tamil folk artists who, uprooted from political struggle by imperial counter-insurgency, endure the hell of neocolonialism through their mystification of art. Their soul – Tamil soul of Tamil soil – are a decreation of caste, colonialism and capital.
Post-Indenture Sonic Decreation: The Urumi Melam’s Materialist Ruptures
In post-indenture Malaysia, the urumi melam, a Tamil folk drum ensemble, is kept alive by caste-oppressed men who treat their instruments as deities. Celebrated in working-class temples yet policed in elite spaces and shaped by neocolonial power, the music carries devotion and political weight. Can this practice of sonic decreation ever move beyond religious liminalism to become an instrument of emancipation?
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READAt Red Clay, the people doing that work were not only sustaining the institution but also showing me what it means to have an absolute conviction that a place needs to exist and how to act accordingly, while holding and working through the many contradictions of the space.
Labor, Dependency, and Repair at Ghana’s Red Clay Studio
At Ghana’s Red Clay Studio, artist Ibrahim Mahama is building an alternative art infrastructure rooted in labor, repair, and community. During a month-long residency, Mawadah Nofal reflects on its possibilities, contradictions, and the precarious conditions required to sustain it.
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READMost of the non-profit spaces in Helsinki are run by artists or operate as a legal body of an artist association. The same applies to the country as a whole. The typical lifespan of an artist-run or non-profit space is short in Finland because the support systems for mediating art are negligible and lean on newness: it’s easy to argue for filling a gap in the system, but for sustaining a practice it seems almost impossible.
Art in the Age of Collapsed Images: A Review of Automatia at Pitted Dates
Automatia, a group exhibition at the non-profit ‘exhibition platform’ Pitted Dates, asks how information is distributed in looping and uncritical ways. Perhaps more importantly, the exhibition and its context present a good view of what the infrastructures of exhibiting art in Finland look like.
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READIt would be tempting to remain focused on the trauma that has led to her artistic practice. I am interested in that history. I admire her directness, and I am not a neutral observer: I carry my own experience of intergenerational trauma, and some of her work resonates with me. But I also want to look at the invitations she extends to the viewer, and at what happens when we accept them.
Are You Coming for Me?: An Interview with Juliana Irene Smith
Juliana Irene Smith’s collages and photographs hold rage and softness side by side, refusing to clean up. She talks about humour as armor, protecting herself and her viewers, and about making work in which survival means being the hero.
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READI’ve lived here, experienced what has happened and consider myself personally implicated in it. My priority is to show my people’s resistance, not their suffering. I believe that people are resisting an aggressor, a hollow superpower that imagines it has the right to rule the world, and that resistance needs to be seen.
My Priority Is to Show My People’s Resistance, Not Their Suffering: An Interview with Erfan Kouchari
In this interview, Iranian photojournalist Erfan Kouchari reflects on documenting a war from within, navigating the ethics of bearing witness, and preserving not only the destruction but also the resistance and everyday lives of those who endure it.
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READIn Tayen Tayen Fish, the absurd is neither escape nor decoration. Objects in the exhibition ask what happens when systems of caste, class, labour and power become so familiar that their violence appears ordinary.
“Explaining could be Exploiting”: Speaking on Humour, Caste & Machinery of Art with Yogesh Barve
Anupam Roy interviews Yogesh Barve about his solo exhibition Tayen Tayen Fish, the political possibilities of humour and the contradictions of artistic work. Saviya Lopes, visual artist and writer of the exhibition text, joins them.
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READCare is more than an informal aid. It is a set of practices, infrastructures, and commitments that can be intimate, informal, and political. It forces us to ask who is cared for, who does the caring, and which forms of care are recognized and resourced. And what happens when we treat the work of sustaining life as an unlimited resource?
Canopies of Care: Growing Spaces for Connection
Through Artists with Evidence (AwE) and my own curatorial practice, this paper explores how art–science encounters can help cultivate care as both an everyday practice and a political infrastructure, creating slower, more relational conditions for knowledge and mutual support.