Power

The twenty-third piece in our Polity of Literature series: In “fan fiction” the readers of popular stories, such as Star Trek and Harry Potter, write their own invented episodes, torquing the “original” to serve their concerns and preferred narratives. It’s not merely, as Michel de Certeau described, “reading as poaching,” but a...

Here is this week’s addendum to the Polity of Literature series: Because writers often compose their sentences in the relative calm and isolation of home or office, some people assume that writing is a solitary, apolitical activity. To give context to that assumption, here’s the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’s...

The twenty-second piece in our Polity of Literature series: “Reading as Poaching” is an essential text for the Polity of Literature, and a dense, word-by-word read; but flex your head, as the wise man* said, and this essay will reward you. The images are the stars! “Readers are travellers,” Michel de...

The twenty-first piece in our Polity of Literature series: The best libraries are often tiny, as small as a single book. A library’s value is in its use. Every book that a prisoner comes by, or that a refugee carries with her, opens onto other worlds and a realm of...

On March 3rd, 2018, the main pre-election rally for Vladimir Putin took place at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow. Tens of thousands of public sector workers were brought in from various regions of the country and were expected to listen to the President’s speech as well as those of actors...

Part 1, Prelude Introduction by Jonathan Brooks Platt Victoria Lomasko is one of the leading artists in Russia today. I recently invited her to mount an exhibition in Pittsburgh as part of her book tour for Other Russias (n+1 and Penguin, 2017), which collects her graphic reportages from the Russian...

The following essay was written in today’s Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, one of the Central Asian republics of the former USSR. It was translated by Giuliano Vivaldi, and was written by our colleagues Georgy Mamedov and Oksana Shatalova. Cultural activists and organizers, Mamedov and Shatalova initiated a hub for...

As an ideological reaction to the ongoing invasion of Russian troops, separatist attacks in Eastern Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and as a gesture towards establishing a new ideology to replace the Soviet one, the so-called Decommunization Laws were approved by the president and parliament of Ukraine...

I have been thinking about what it means to be a racialized person in the arts, and what kinds of tactics and strategies we’ve developed to move through these spaces. We wear politics on our skin; to be racialized is to live, every day, with a myriad of projected assumptions....

Two moving-image portraits of a woman—captured nearly fifty years apart—play alongside each other, the few inches between them charged with the weight of intimate and social histories. On the left, an elaborate re-enactment presented as documentary. On the right, a simple recording of a woman speaking. Between them, the struggle...

I have said this twice before, but I will say it again:[1] I am trying to figure out how to be in this world without wanting it, and perhaps this is what it is to be Indigenous. To be Indigenous is also to be hurt on the way out, if...

I woke up crying. It was a January morning, the 23rd, and I missed someone. Some family member, or some acquaintance, or some stranger — it matters not — died in the dream, disrupting my slumber. I woke up, tears in my eyes, the tears carrying the material weight and...

Introduction Sidd Joag On June 16th, 2017, ArtsEverywhere was set to publish Nissa Tzun’s piece, “Forced Trajectories: Creating Counter-Narratives to Police Violence.” That evening, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of the killing of Philando Castile in the outskirts of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Castile was sitting in the car with his...

The American Dream, a four-ton, 30-foot-long, ice sculpture by LigoranoReese, is the most recent of the artist duo’s Melted Away series and the molten heart of its American Dream Project. It is also a Trojan Horse: Its straightforward display of a familiar concept conceals a rare capacity to elicit complex...

Next month, Public Art Fund is installing Martin Creed’s “Understanding,” a 50-foot rotating neon sign, on Brooklyn’s Pier Six. That’s about a 20 minute walk through the Brooklyn Bridge Park Greenway from “OY/YO,” the popular public sculpture from Deborah Kass that’s on view until August. Which got us thinking: why...

Click here to download the PDF of Erica Hunt’s poem, “Melting: the American Dream.”