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Kevin Brazil
Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Art Review, art-agenda, Studio International, and elsewhere. He is writing a book about queer happiness.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Sianne Ngai

Interview

October 2020

Kevin Brazil

Interview

October 2020

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements...

Essay

Issue No. 28

Fear of a Gay Planet

Kevin Brazil

Essay

Issue No. 28

In Robert Ferro’s 1988 novel Second Son, Mark Valerian suffers from an unnamed illness afflicting gay men, spread by...

I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream – shot at, tortured, scalped But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship   Charlotte Beradt, ‘Dreams under Dictatorship’, Free World (1943)   Born in Berlin in 1907 into a Jewish merchant family, Charlotte Beradt was working as a journalist when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 Around this time, she began collecting dreams, slowly compiling a record of the ramifications of Nazi ideology on the unconscious minds of her local community, from doctors and civil servants to students and homemakers Over the course of 6 years, Beradt collected accounts of around 300 individuals’ dreams, a project which ended in 1939 when she fled Germany for the USA   I was reminded of Beradt’s extraordinary project whilst exploring Daria Martin’s Tonight the World, a multi-media installation made in response to a dream diary kept by Martin’s grandmother Susi Stiassni, currently on view at the Barbican Curve Gallery The family, prominent Jewish textile manufacturers, fled their home in Brno in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was on the brink of Nazi occupation Aged only 16 when they left the country, Stiassni went on to keep a dream diary for around 35 years, accumulating some 20,000 pages of material Hers is an acutely personal project: almost too private to engage with as an outsider, and impossibly monumental to comprehend as a whole   Martin’s Tonight the World opens with a videogame that simulates the Stiassni family home in Brno, a modernist villa which still stands today Watching the prerecorded play-through, we are granted a first-person perspective on a faithfully recreated 3D model of the house and garden In the course of the game, the player discovers several artefacts from Martin’s grandmother’s childhood, among them a toy soldier, a locket and a model robot As the player interacts with these objects, specific pages from the

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Contributor

March 2018

Kevin Brazil is a writer and critic who lives in London. His writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, the London...

Interview with Terre Thaemlitz

Interview

March 2018

Kevin Brazil

Interview

March 2018

In the first room of Terre Thaemlitz’s 2017 exhibition ‘INTERSTICES’, at Auto Italia in London, columns of white text ran across one wall. Thaemlitz...

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fiction

June 2013

The Cherry Tree

Sheila Heti

fiction

June 2013

That winter, all the plums froze. All the peaches froze and all the cherries froze, and everything froze so...

fiction

March 2017

A Table is a Table

Peter Bichsel

TR. Lydia Davis

fiction

March 2017

I want to tell a story about an old man, a man who no longer says a word, has...

poetry

October 2014

Roman Nights

Martin Glaz Serup

TR. Christopher Sand-Iversen

poetry

October 2014

4.    It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m standing newly divorced on a roof in a town, we toast the...

 

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