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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze Artist Navine G Khan-Dossos painted the mural by hand, repeating a motif based on muqarnas – a kind of honeycomb vaulting used in Islamic architecture She moved across the wall on a scaffold, first with a cardboard template and later with paint, expanding the mural in careful variations of colour It shifts from red through to white, heating up at the centre and cooling at the edge, while kite-shaped inner pockets slide through shades of grey, complicating the relationship of flatness and depth   Echo Chamber is a portrait of a woman, although it would be impossible to tell without the accompanying text The woman in question, Samantha Lewthwaite (also known as Sherafiyah Lewthwaite), is a British Muslim who made headlines following her husband Germaine Lindsey’s involvement in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005 In the aftermath, Lewthwaite spoke out against his actions, but six years later she was charged by Kenyan police with possession of explosives She has since been dubbed ‘the White Widow’ by the press, a sensational moniker used for women radicalised at home in the west, who join the ranks of Islamic extremists   Born a year apart, both Khan-Dossos and Lewthwaite are white British women who became influenced by Islam as teenagers Navine G Khan-Dossos – an anagram for the artist’s birth name Vanessa Hodgkinson – moved to Kuwait in 2003, and later trained in traditional Islamic art in London Lewthwaite converted to Islam as a teenager, and married Lindsey in 2002, at the age of 19   Aside from an interview Lewthwaite sold to The Sun in 2005 denouncing her husband’s actions, she has not had much control over the dissemination of her story Journalists quote from her ‘diary’ – a set of papers seized in Kenya in 2011 – or cite tweets from a Muslim Youth Centre handle @MYC_Press that are rumoured to be hers, but neither are reliable sources Over the course of the years, Lewthwaite has been transfigured into a stock character in a cultural narrative, one that tells the tale

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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feature

Issue No. 7

The White Review No. 7 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 7

A few issues back we grandiosely stated ‘that it is more important now than ever to provide a forum...

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Tom McCarthy

Fred Fernandez Armesto

Interview

Issue No. 1

For those expecting him to be, as the New Statesman called him, ‘the most galling interviewee in Britain’, Tom...

feature

October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

 

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