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Tausif Noor
Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art history. His writing on art, literature, and visual culture appears in Artforum, frieze, The Nation, The New York Times and other venues, as well as in artist catalogues and various edited volumes.

Articles Available Online


Devil in the Detail: on Leesa Gazi’s ‘Hellfire’

Book Review

July 2021

Tausif Noor

Book Review

July 2021

British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax...

Art Review

May 2019

Simone Fattal, Works and Days

Tausif Noor

Art Review

May 2019

For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a...

Little can prepare you for the experience of reading Renee Gladman’s Ravickian quartet and encountering the oddity, humour, and singular intelligence of her mind Gladman began writing the series in 2003, drawing on a private language she had invented with a friend The linguistic game developed and eventually gave birth to Ravicka — a fictional city-state with an absurd, charming, and troubled local population   I want to state from the outset that these novels remind me of little else I have encountered in contemporary literature Ravicka has textual predecessors — Gladman overtly nods to Samuel Beckett, Anne Carson, and Julio Cortázar — but immersion in Ravicka feels, somehow, more like watching contemporary dance or experimental film than reading a novel Absurdity abounds, non-sequitur is employed liberally, and syntax seems more significant than setting or plot Nonetheless — and herein lies Gladman’s achievement — these novels are provocative and profound   To date, four of Gladman’s ten published works are set in Ravicka  The experimental collection of essays Calamities (2016) and a new monograph of Gladman’s drawings, Prose Architectures (2017),  complement the Ravicka project, but her first novel, Event Factory (2010), remains the best port of entry into this extraordinary city ‘From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka Yet, I arrived; I met many people The city was large, yellow, and tender,’ writes the unnamed protagonist, a linguist who arrives in Ravicka when her plane fails to depart after a layover The only novel in the series told from the perspective of a visitor from outside, Event Factory offers an introduction to Ravicka’s foreign culture and strange landscape, where Earth’s physical laws are either suspended or queered   Mostly, the novels offer the mere suggestion of a plot The Ravickians, the second in the series, ostensibly tells the story of a famous novelist trying to cross the city to attend her friend’s poetry reading But it is more a meditation on the impossibility of translation — a fugue-like discourse on community, longing, poetics and friendship taking place on moving trains and in fields, and closing with twelve fractious chapters of polyvocal conversations, taking

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art...

INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN

Art Review

July 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

July 2018

By the late 1990s a right wing government in the shape of a BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had come to power for the first time...
Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away

Art Review

April 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

April 2018

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). In...

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poetry

January 2015

Litanies of an Audacious Rosary

Enrique Vila-Matas

TR. Rosalind Harvey

poetry

January 2015

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation. This...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Mai-Thu Perret

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 1

Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s ongoing, fourteen year-old project The Crystal Frontier is a multi-disciplinary fiction chronicling the lives of...

fiction

April 2013

The Taxidermist

Olivia Heal

fiction

April 2013

I did not want to walk. The day was dull. But imperative or impulsion pushed me out, onto the...

 

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