Category: In Focus
Collecting, Destroying,Accelerating
Collecting, Destroying, Accelerating1.
In a famous early work, the Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei had himself photographed dropping a Han [...]
On the Need for a Public Art Collection
A 2013 visit to the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi revealed an uncomfortable sight. At the central foyer of the Museum was an exhibi [...]
Is It Art?
“For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of [...]
Believing is Seeing
“Photography cannot record abstract ideas.” – Encyclopaedia Britannica
The use of a photograph determines its meaning. A news photograph with a capti [...]
Shafqat, Shama, Shahzad and Brandon
On 4th August, 2015, at 4:30 am, Shafqat Hussain was quietly led to the gallows after four last minute reprieves were each successively cancelled, des [...]
Broken Integrity – Khat-e Mahi, Khat-e Paikan, and Khat-e Munfarid: Design Experiments in Non-cursive Fonts for Urdu, Persian and Arabic Scripts
history of Nastaliq and its inventor, the fourteenth century calligrapher Mir Ali Tabrizi, I realized how, despite the long tradition of abstraction i [...]
Politics of Language, Colonisation, and Visuality
THE COMMAND OF LANGUAGE AND THE LANGUAGE OF COMMAND
Johannes Fabian, in Language and Colonial Power, begins by telling us a story about Catherine the [...]
Art and Text: A Cursory Overview
In contrast to the Enlightenment, during which ideas were coalescing and crystallizing into relative clarity fuelled in part by humanist self-belief a [...]
The Voice of the Artist
If someday you have a few months to spare, come to Barbary...you will feel the precious and exceptional influence of the sun, which gives everything a [...]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (of Letters)
There are many things that can prompt an artist to put aside the usual apparatus for some time and write: uncooperative weather, the horrors of a poor [...]