Mailing List


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...

Suicide without a cause, or silent sacrifice for an apparent cause which, in our age, is usually political: a woman can carry off such things without tragedy, without even drama — Julia Kristeva   I   I return to a former self, ghost or shadow self emerging from a glimmering light;   Woolf’s ‘luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’   Life as circularity, inevitable return to a womb-like space, a space of the maternal?   Where do the dead go after they die? What nether region do they inhabit?   Where did the Hakka people come from? Peripatetic tribe from north-east China   She comes from people without a home, or fixed position She is condemned and doomed to wander looking for her place in history   I conjure up the past, delving into the recesses of unknown memory and time   I am returning to the source The original source The point of all our origin But these origins go further back beyond Western tradition, beyond the story of holy innocence fabricated in the myths of Adam and Eve, and the notion of a God the father And it does not reside in the maternal womb either, that place of warmth and nurturance, which begins with love   I invite mystery I return to our innate energy, excavating deeply layer upon layer of our consciousness   I breathe in the light; I inhale deeply and exhale   Where is the point of our origin?   I am digging deep I have to go further than the surface of things, back through space and time   I uncover hidden treasure buried for centuries, and carefully retrieve it for future purposes   Filtering through the coloured papers of memory, those delicate, fragile and carefully processed pieces of our past and history felt in my bones and body   In the beginning there was the Word And the Word is me My words become me, and I become the word, a flurry of mixed phrases, half-spoken sentences, articulate in their gibberish   I try to find the language that defines me, become a whirling dervish, caught up in a veil of spinning letters They fly around me, and I try to catch them   In the beginning there was

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...

READ NEXT

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

Enea Zaramella

Rodrigo Hasbún

TR. Sophie Hughes

Interview

March 2017

Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected...

feature

Issue No. 2

Three Poets and the World

Caleb Klaces

feature

Issue No. 2

In 1925, aged 20, the Hungarian poet Attila József was expelled from the University of Szeged for a radical...

Interview

Issue No. 15

Interview with Zadie Smith

Jennifer Hodgson

Interview

Issue No. 15

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success....

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required