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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...

The following text is the condensed result of over ninety hours of dialogue with Ricardo Melogno, recorded between November 2014 and December 2015 The conversations were much longer and more disparate, and the topics were covered with less continuity and greater chaos than in the current text My edits respect the words of the interviewee while compressing, grouping and organising them chronologically and thematically, with the goal of providing structure to his story I believe I have respected the concepts expounded by Ricardo, but I take full responsibility for any differences or mistakes arising from the editing process C B   TURNING TOWARDS THE DARKNESS   ‘I was told that someone saw you levitate’   [Melogno furrows his brow, smiles with amusement]   ‘Who?’   ‘Someone who knew you from Unit 20 and was convicted again They brought him here and when he saw you, he asked to be kept as far away from you as possible He said that you were evil, and that he had seen you levitate’   ‘Oh, I know who that is, ha ha Well, you see, that kid’s real impressionable Among other major issues he has   Here’s the thing with me Inside the prison, things pass from mouth to mouth and they start adding up Over the years it’s sort of snowballed Even now, when they send in the search parties (they’re not guards from here, but from the ‘regular’ prison, and they come every two or three months) they find the shrine in my cell with all the offerings and the candles, they say: ‘Old man, what are you into here? What’s all this strange stuff?’ But these guys are more modern these days, they ask more out of curiosity, not out of fear   [On his left arm he has a tattoo with three symbols on top of each other: at the top is a 666, in the middle an inverted crucifix and on the bottom a reversed swastika The line of symbols is flanked by two snakes writhing rampantly from left to right]   ‘Why the reversed swastika?’   ‘The regular swastika, the one used by the Nazis, represents turning towards the sun, towards the light So I got mine

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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poetry

August 2013

Poem from fortune: animal spiral

Sarah Lariviere

poetry

August 2013

xi. inside friend friend is not the landscape: to turn into the water wears and deposits rock, time friend,...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Bae Suah

Deborah Smith

Bae Suah

Interview

March 2017

The Essayist’s Desk, published in 2003 and written when its author Bae Suah had just returned from an 11-month...

Interview

October 2015

Interview with Valeria Luiselli

Stephen Sparks

Interview

October 2015

Valeria Luiselli’s second novel, The Story of My Teeth, was commissioned by two curators for an exhibition at Galeria...

 

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