Art Magazine
Nepali school children engage with Martyrs, Saints and Sell-outs at PhotoKTM6 in Patan. Curated by Siona O’Connell, the exhibition brings together photographs by Benny Gool, Zubeida Vallie, and Adil Bradlow documenting South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Photo: Phoebe Chen
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READPeople all around are wearing buttons pinned to their clothes: martyrs’ faces and Chya’s logo. There were a few rows of chairs surrounding the two graves, of which the majority were occupied by grieving women in black. The ceremony begins, speeches and songs are blasted, and we quickly realize that this gathering is a placeholder for remembrance, connectivity between locals, and a venue for awareness-spreading. There is an afterlife of ‘sacrifice’, in this case, for the forests.
Martyrs Don’t Die: An Embodied Dispatch from Zagros Wildfires
On the ground in Kurdistan in Iran, two visitors follow firefighters into the burning Zagros forests, where wildfire and grief converge, and the dead become martyrs who quietly refuse to disappear.
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READDespite the personal tragedies, Amma Zargul has become a symbol of resistance. She has joined numerous protests, rallies, and sit-ins for her son and other missing persons from Quetta to Islamabad to Mastung, sometimes jailed, sometimes dragged during demonstrations. “But my heart and will are not defeated. I am now part of the resistance,” she declares.
Amma Zargul, Balochistan, and the Weight of Disappearance
In Balochistan’s decades-long crisis of enforced disappearances, Amma Zargul has buried two sons and a daughter to state violence and impunity—yet for sixteen years, she has refused to stop demanding her third son’s return.
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READEuropean decision-makers enabled a genocide by failing to uphold international law. The groups involved in protest campaigns and petitions, and people who have found each other at demonstrations, are not under an illusion that joining a strike or protest would somehow save the United Nations. Organizing is driven by solidarity, and the felt effects of militarization, fear of facism and authoritarian politics. People are recognizing more clearly that the rules-based international order was not built to overcome inequality, but rather to provide a legal and institutional cover that sustains it. People want justice.
Black, White, Green and Red at Venice Biennale 2026
At Venice Biennial 2026, the jury tried to exclude Israel over its committing genocide in Gaza and was forced to resign under legal threat. Artists and workers refused complicity, exposing the art world’s crisis of legitimacy.
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READAs you approach the entrance of the town, a prominent metal sign spans across the roadway, clearly displaying the inscription: “Welcome to Bint Jbeil, the Capital of Resistance and Liberation.” This sign might read as a mere political slogan or an ideological marker. But this inscription is an organic statement of fact, authored by the very bodies of the South Lebanese people. This sign is a reflection of a population whose relationship to the soil is absolute, visceral, and non-negotiable.
Bint Jbeil: The Town Israel Tried to Erase, and Lebanon Turned into a Symbol of Resistance
Bint Jbeil appears in Western media only when Israel bombs it. But this town in Southern Lebanon has centuries of scholarship, resistance, and memory that no airstrike — or shorthand — can erase.
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READThe bad guest accepts the invitation. She comes, she eats, she is not above the honorarium or the grant. But she behaves incorrectly. She declines to separate the violence over there from the innocence in here. She does not bring her biography as proof. She mentions sanctions at the feminist panel and the war at the vernissage. She asks what the land acknowledgment is for, if the land is not given back.
The Bad Guest: On War, Eligibility and the Manners Expected of the Rescued
Mina Keykhaei traces how diaspora artists become “eligible dissidents”—rescued, programmed, applauded—until their grief implicates the rescuer, asking what it truly means now to become a less welcomed guest.
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READThe curatorial team brings together international perspectives and local voices, ensuring that global conversations stay rooted in Nepal’s social and cultural context. Each edition invites and celebrates stories from around the world alongside narratives from Nepal’s diverse population across terrains and ethnic identities, centring on that edition’s theme to emphasize that “Kathmandu is the center of the world.”
Amidst Chaos, Comfort and Solidarity: A Review of PhotoKTM, Post Nepal’s Gen-Z Revolution
Just two months after the Gen-Z protests that overthrew the government in Nepal, the Nepal Art Council opened the 6th edition of PhotoKTM. Discussing the history of resistance and solidarity in regions of the global majority, the review examines how these efforts shape the process of reclaiming sovereignty in areas marked by colonialism, exploitation, and violence.
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READThe city of Kochi itself has become a collaborator, its texture allowing multiple artistic voices and communities to coexist, interact, and resonate within the same space. But the city is also often indifferent to this performance: trees sway, humidity presses in, life moves at its own unhurried pace. For all its openness to change, Kochi imposes its own rhythms and constraints, complicating navigation of the Biennale and prompting the question: whose time is being used as the medium?
Temporal Claims vs. Institutional Realities: A Review of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26
This review examines how the Biennale’s claims about time, friendship, and collaboration unravel when measured against its organisational realities, labour practices, and structures of accountability. Does the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale deliver on the ambitions it sets for itself through this year’s theme For the time being?
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READAs we feel the icy breath of fascism looming over our shoulders we may find our strength in the labour of our partisan comrades, in the words of all of those who fought before us, proceeded in darkness with extreme rigor and clarity—peaking back from the archive it seems—with no hesitation.
What Could Be More Tragic for a Revolution Than to Become an Archive?
At Amsterdam’s IISH, Golrokh Nafisi and Ahmadali Kadivar’s After Storms turns a five-century archive into living witness, asking what solidarity still means when communication is cut and genocide is live-streamed.
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READSome of Elokapina’s actions have certainly been disruptive, but their overall effect is debatable. Even when they engage in disruptive civil disobedience, the main consequence is delay or inconvenience. Activists often go slack when being detained by the police, slowing things down by making it harder to move them—but the police eventually remove and detain them.
Protest, Perspective, and Pageantry: A Review of Saku Soukka’s ‘Rebellion for Future’
Saku Soukka’s documentary embeds viewers inside Finland’s climate movement — but the camera’s intimacy raises harder questions than it answers about what activism is actually for.
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READIn several works, it was highlighted how past decisions and political deals still affect the present, or how long ago a political conflict actually started. It presented figures whose legacies could be relevant today or who parallel other dark times, such as the first part of the 20th century. It speculated on the reasons for the rise of the far-right, then and now, but did not really offer any solutions to overcome it.
If Such Future Exists: A Review of ‘steirischer herbst 25’
Is emphasis on historical haunting productive, or does it sidestep confrontation with the present? The review examines how viewing history as a continuum rather than as separate events can provoke and shape anarcho-futuristic scenarios.
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READCaste is a practice of othering without announcing the “other”. It doesn’t create ‘othering’ in the same way as religion, race or gender; it uses different forms of distinction and differentiation. Hence, it cannot be footnoted as a structure without an elaborate explanation. The unique legacy of the caste system is that it is hardwired into society.
Speaking Between the Silences: An Interview with Suraj Milind Yengde
On the occasion of the launch of Suraj Milind Yengde’s latest book, Caste: A Global Story, in Helsinki in December 2025, Ali Akbar Mehta interviewed him, discussing questions of individual action, political failure, colonial legacy, and the responsibility of the diaspora in how the anti-caste struggle must be centred, named, and made the agenda for actual change.
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READJust Kidding? Improvisation, Free Speech and the Far Right
As the far right mobilises spontaneity in the name of free speech, radical politics, like radical comedy, must question the barren symbolic order of capital. The structure of improv offers us a lesson in staging the possibility of choosing the impossible. That choice must be elevated to a politics of the real.