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Skye Arundhati Thomas
Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Articles Available Online


Interview with Bani Abidi

Interview

Issue No. 33

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Interview

Issue No. 33

In the three-minute short Mangoes (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with...

Art Review

February 2019

Simryn Gill, Soft Tissue

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2019

I walked into Simryn Gill’s exhibition SOFT TISSUE at Jhaveri Contemporary on one of the worst days of an...

During his interview with Claudia Rankine in this issue, Kayo Chingonyi raises the subject of what role the arts might play in a period of ‘national emergency’ Discussing artists’ responses to recent tragedies, the two poets agree that ‘to think of [art] as something that happens in seclusion from lived experience feels wrongheaded in the world we live in’ As we put this issue together, this idea has been greatly on our minds, and it resonates throughout the magazine In her piece exploring the ethical implications of prisoners’ visual representations, Hatty Nestor asks ‘how empathy could materialise as visual art’; we hope that the pieces which follow share a spirit of enquiry, compassion and engagement with our complicated times   The past few months – since our fabled summer party on the rooftop of Bold Tendencies, when hundreds crowded onto hay bales to hear Claire-Louise Bennett’s mesmerising reading – have been a period of transition at The White Review This issue appears in a brand new design by Thomas Swann; it is the first under a new editorial team led by Željka Marošević and Francesca Wade We have launched an anthology, featuring highlights from the magazine’s first twenty issues, and a poet’s prize (the winning portfolio, by Lucy Mercer, will be published in Issue 22) In response to a growing concern at the shrinking number of outlets providing accessible and incisive arts coverage, we’ve begun publishing regular reviews of new books and exhibitions online, alongside poetry, fiction, interviews and essays We’ve hatched plans for events across the UK, established new collaborations, and designed some enviable tote bags, now for sale on our revamped website   In this issue, the personal and the political collide in bold and unexpected ways Speaking in advance of her major Tate Modern retrospective, Joan Jonas reflects on a growing sense of environmental consciousness in her performance and installation work Alev Scott reports from the Balkans on the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, while Megan Hunter explores the connections (physical and psychical) between writing and pregnancy We are delighted to present fiction and poetry from a range of new

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Contributor

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas is co-editor of The White Review.

Bani Abidi & Naeem Mohaiemen, I wish to let you fall out of my hands (Chapter 1)

Art Review

February 2018

Skye Arundhati Thomas

Art Review

February 2018

Loneliness is mostly narrative. It also has an aesthetic: an empty tableau in which the lonely act is performed. In Naeem Mohaiemen’s Tripoli Cancelled...
The characters in We That Are Young reside at ‘The Farm’ – a sprawling house in New Delhi complete with its own topiary of fat peacocks, bulbous pink flowers with English names, Fendi furniture, and a room in which it snows at the press of a button It’s not far removed from reality – Antilla, the world’s first billion-dollar residence for a single family of four, is a 40-storey building that towers over the suburbs of South Mumbai, replete with a staff of over 600 people, its own electrical power grid, ten-storey parking for a collection of unusable vintage cars, and a room, of course, where it snows on demand In dialogue with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Taneja’s debut novel explores the lives of a family that owns a multinational conglomerate, ‘The Company’, to which each character’s fate (and inheritance) is inextricably tied We have our patriarch, the Lear figure, Devraj; his three daughters Sita, Radha and Gargi; and his right-hand man Ranjit’s two sons, Jeet and Jivan The embarrassment of riches makes for an irresistible, if outlandish, setting; Taneja vividly indulges our intrigue in the way the rich conduct their daily lives, letting her words ooze out their luxury – filthy, yet so desirable After a particularly gruesome scene in which Radha administers the plucking out of a man’s eyes, she steps back into her suite and calls for a pot of first flush Assam, and rose macaroons   A reinterpretation of Shakespeare is the perfect postcolonial conquest: he remains the epitome of the Western canon, patriarchal, and repeatedly failing to include representations of the ‘other’ without recourse to parody Mainstream appropriations of Shakespeare in South Asia, such as Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj’s trilogy Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), and Haider (Hamlet), have generally taken us to rural settings, wherein tragedy is relegated to a matter of the lower castes Taneja, a Shakespearean academic and human rights activist, eschews such stereotypes, and goes straight for the jugular: the innate hypocrisy of the Indian class and caste system ‘It’s not about land, it’s about money,’ states the first line of the book, taking
Preti Taneja’s ‘We That Are Young’

Book Review

October 2017

Skye Arundhati Thomas


READ NEXT

feature

May 2014

How Imagination Remembers

Maria Fusco

feature

May 2014

How imagination remembers is twofold, an enfolded act of greed and ingenuity. I believe these impulses to be linked...

poetry

January 2015

Diana's Tree

Alejandra Pizarnik

TR. Yvette Siegert

poetry

January 2015

Diana’s Tree, Alejandra Pizarnik’s fourth collection, was published in 1962, when the poet was barely 26 years old. Named after...

fiction

November 2015

Three Days in Prague

Naja Marie Aidt

TR. Denise Newman

fiction

November 2015

A sparkling frost-clear landscape exists between them under a soft and smudged sky. Irises exist, blue and yellow, and...

 

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