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David Isaacs
David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end of a first novel and is at the early stages of a new project about the present tense.


Articles Available Online


Interview with Namwali Serpell

Interview

December 2020

David Isaacs

Interview

December 2020

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction. Since we first spoke, in September 2020,...

Book Review

June 2018

Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’

David Isaacs

Book Review

June 2018

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names. The...

Like the figures found in a spread of Tarot cards, an artist can assume a variety of viewpoints and characters – a soldier or a pilgrim, a journalist or a madman – each position allowing for a new way of looking at the world  Marine Hugonnier trained as an anthropologist, and deploys the vagaries of perspective as the material of her work, in films, photographs, and sculptures that often unravel their process – what happens on set, small failures, and the mechanisms of observing and making She has exhibited widely over the past 15 years, with recent solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Seoul, at the BALTIC Centre, Gateshead, and Galeria Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo   At the center of her practice is a set of films which approach the politics of looking: Ariana (2003), set in Afghanistan, concerned with the strategic, military point of view; The Last Tour (2004) with the tourist’s gaze; and Travelling Amazonia (2006) with the colonial map, and the cartographer’s attempts to subjugate space In the collage series, Art for Modern Architecture (2004-0ngoing), for which she is most widely known, Hugonnier performs surgery on the frontpages of newspapers marking the death of Kennedy or the fall of the Berlin Wall, transplanting the original pictures with coloured blocks The obliterated images still loom, as if scored into collective consciousness   When I request an interview, Hugonnier responds to my email almost immediately, and we meet in her modest studio just two days later The small, high-ceilinged room has the aura of a decorous living room A neat archive of her work covers one wall; an elegantly framed collage hangs opposite Aged 46, Hugonnier is lean and beautiful, with a thick ponytail, and dressed in supple leather trousers and black mohair She watches me carefully with ash-green eyes which are attentive, and a little cold   I question Hugonnier, in what never develops into a fluent conversation, but one punctured with pauses that my recorder breathes in Although French is her native language, she is highly eloquent in English, and able to explain her work in both theoretical and magical terms Composed at her desk, Hugonnier opens her catalogue raisonne and awaits my questions,

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Seasickness

Prize Entry

April 2016

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates. She says, ‘Maybe:...
How things are falling.

Prize Entry

April 2015

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015 they will have been replaced...
by Accident

fiction

April 2014

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic or anything like that (and...

READ NEXT

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...

feature

June 2016

Heteronormativity and the Single Mother

Jacinda Townsend

feature

June 2016

I.   This spring, in cities and towns all over the United States, schools, churches and other organisations will...

fiction

April 2012

They Told the Story from the Lighthouse

Chimene Suleyman

fiction

April 2012

I found Margate watching the sea. And I walked the streets thinking they had left it sometime in the...

 

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