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I began to adopt the practice of concealing my chronic pain1 almost immediately after it began over 13 years ago. I have set rules for myself: not to vocalize my pain, not to let people see it on my face or in my body language. Though I am slowly growing more comfortable disclosing the fact of its existence, I continue to contain my sensations and the realities of my embodiment. I fear that expressing my pain will make people uncomfortable. I fear that it may invite expressions of pity, or admiration for my resilience. Even worse, I fear unsolicited advice and suspicions…

I. Every year on the first midnight of January, Ecuador celebrates La Quema del Año Viejo (the burning of the old year). My father used to build our family’s monigote — also referred to as the “old man” — using his old clothes. At the waist, he would stitch a shirt and a pair of pants together. Later, he would fill it with sawdust and old newspapers. He would then close the legs and arms with stitches. We would purchase a prefabricated paper mache head with a painted face of an “old man” as the finishing touch. We would bring our monigote to the middle of the street, where…

Come for the trash, stay for the culture – @fucknomtl There’s an ingenious profile of artist David Salle written by Janet Malcolm titled “Forty-one False Starts”, and composed of forty-one distinct ledes introducing the subject from a different angle. I’ve been thinking of this essay throughout my frustration with starting this piece, which has amassed a sizable pile of discarded introductions in an attempt to express the spirit of the past year. As it turns out, locking atmospheric social tides into language is a slippery business, and so after several false starts, I find myself distracted in my inbox. A Substack I…

Cosmos At last… The classical figure of Atlas—let’s take the Farnese Atlas as our oldest extant example—holds on his back the world in the shape of a celestial globe, a readable image of the heavens. If we were to circle this sculpture in three-dimensional space, we would count 41 constellations from ancient Greece: illustrations of star patterns whose forms have persevered to this day. Atlas’s spine is contorted and his muscles bulge; I witness his neck bowed and tug instinctually at my own shoulders, stiff in sympathetic reciprocity. It’s not that the sky is that heavy. Rather, Atlas only knows the sky as…

I “Bros, are you following this nonsense? I’m incensed, man! On days like this, I just wish I didn’t sign up to be a professor in the humanities or in the US. Our people sell us short.” So read the text message from my friend TJ. By “this nonsense” TJ was referring to an academic journal article—published by the African Studies Review—by two white women and the resulting social media furore about it and the responses of some African academic peers who were on social media defending the women’s right to free speech. “You take these things too seriously” was my…

The landscape of language in Shannon Ebner’s exhibition FRET SCAPES is weathered multiple times over. The show has two main parts: a floor-to-ceiling poem entitled FRET and a series of thirteen black-and-white photographs. The poem is composed using what Ebner calls a “wet letter alphabet”— photographs of paper letters pasted with water onto an anonymous white wall. In Ebner’s photographs, the dampened characters work against the natural forces of time, evaporation, and gravity which have caused the letters to slip and wrinkle. The photographs that make up Ebner’s wet-letter alphabet are sheathed in individual Photo-Tex sleeves and mounted on the wall of the gallery…

Working under the title ‘The Photography Workshop,’ the photographers, historians of working-class history, and educators Jo Spence (1934-1992) and Terry Dennett (1938-2018) collaborated and co-habited for a little under ten years. Rubber stamped on the backs of hand-printed postcards, included in the frontispieces of books, and marking files of photographic prints and negatives, The Photography Workshop was the banner under which Spence and Dennett conducted their photographic and pedagogical practice. While almost always produced or planned from their rented North London flat—which was also their studio and dark room— The Photography Workshop was not tied to a specific location or…

Guillaume Adjutor Provost is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator whose carefully considered material practice combines installation, sculpture, performance, video, drawing, and text. In his oeuvre, Adjutor Provost creates ethereal landscapes meant for thorough contemplation by his viewer. The artist envisions the space of the exhibition as a container of ideas and sees the act of exhibiting collections as a vehicle for issues such as class consciousness, counter-culture, vernacular imagery, and experiences of queerness. The figure of the wizard, a cross-cultural fictional practitioner of magic that has inspired young and old for centuries, is a wonderful character that Adjutor Provost has…

It was something like 3 a.m. on one of those nights nobody knows how to end the first time I saw Cléo Sjölander’s exhibition Exuvie at Espace Maurice. Heaven knows it’s got to be bedtime, goes the song looping in my head all summer and into the fall. I’m disappointed to discover that I have the lyrics wrong, and the song “Ceremony”—one of Joy Divison’s last, and released as New Order’s first—apparently goes: “heaven knows it’s got to be this time” (Ian Curtis never transcribed the lyrics and his vocals were muffled on the original recording, so I guess there’s a chance I’m still right). Besides, I think…

Guanyu Xu is an artist working with photography and cultural iconography to create compositions that deliberately disorient the viewer. His project Temporarily Censored Home has reached international acclaim, currently showing at the International Center of Photography in New York. In this work, he visits his family home in China and creates elaborate photo installations by mining images from his personal photographic archive, printing them out, and physically placing them within domestic settings. Many of these photos are from his life in Chicago and draw on aspects of his queerness – a part of his life that he does not share with his family…