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Tausif Noor
Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art history. His writing on art, literature, and visual culture appears in Artforum, frieze, The Nation, The New York Times and other venues, as well as in artist catalogues and various edited volumes.

Articles Available Online


Devil in the Detail: on Leesa Gazi’s ‘Hellfire’

Book Review

July 2021

Tausif Noor

Book Review

July 2021

British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax...

Art Review

May 2019

Simone Fattal, Works and Days

Tausif Noor

Art Review

May 2019

For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a...

WHISKY WITH MOTHER as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by My tongue gets distracted by eating grass Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, the teeth all dolled up, or imagining the death of your parents It’s all the same From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell Zealous hammering on my veins The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer Where am I I don’t recognise these big houses I’ve never rounded this bend in the road Degenerate desire Damaging desire Demented desire I don’t know how to get back My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her feet carved up by the blades The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night My hangover’s fierce and I collapse any old how to masturbate, my hair electrified, my skin hot, my eyelids stiff My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough Me and him in a convertible Me and him on a muddy road Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed Women should stop opening their sex, too I look for a word to replace the word I look for a word that shows my devotion The word that marks the spot, the distance, the exact centre of my delirium We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes like gutters I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood I walk round the house and open the windows The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art...

INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN

Art Review

July 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

July 2018

By the late 1990s a right wing government in the shape of a BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had come to power for the first time...
Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away

Art Review

April 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

April 2018

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). In...

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Art

March 2011

Gabriel Orozco: Cosmic Matter and Other Leftovers

Rye Dag Holmboe

Art

March 2011

‘To live,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘means to leave traces’. As one might expect, Benjamin’s observation is not without a...

poetry

October 2012

Bacon’s Friends

Stephen Devereux

poetry

October 2012

Always got caught out by their shadows: Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes, Cellophane fortune tellers curling...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Abu One-Eye

Rav Grewal-Kök

Prize Entry

April 2017

He left two photographs.   In the first, his eldest brother balances him on a knee. It must be...

 

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