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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...

A twilit bedroom Silence Ceiling view of the base of a hyper-extended bed—the length of a catwalk Slow pan of ruffled bedsheets in close-up—magnified sheets like an Arctic mountain range Shitty camera quality—that of CCTV or a sex tape, colours drained Zoom out Slow tracking shot reveals one by one, as in a Tarkovsky film, a series of sleeping faces—silent apparitions of celebrities—Taylor Swift—Kanye West—Kim Kardashian—eyelids shut, lips loose, mouths ajar—a slumbering parade of pop royalty—not in their usual livery but nude—trashily nude—classically nude Most of the body parts—arms and torsos and necks—are purpled with tattoos Most of the nipples—black or pink—are pierced A pink Caucasian cunt in extreme close-up Blackout   ‘At once both superficial and deep,’ a man’s voice intones—Kanye West’s We fade up on Kanye, wearing a silver jacket, sat in a swivel chair at a mixing desk being interviewed by journalist Zane Lowe ‘Both deep as a canyon and superficial as a razor blade,’ Kanye says, eyes wild, head dipped ‘So, you think you’re pushing the boat out?’ Lowe asks ‘I’ve reached a point in my life,’ Kanye answers loudly—as drums begin a 4/4 beat—’where my Truman Show boat has hit the painting’ Freeze-frame close-up of Kanye’s face, mouth agape—an oil painting filter is now applied to Kanye’s facial image—bass drum and hi-hat kicking—and now all at once a synthetic accordion and descant recorder come in doubling a jaunty melody—the freeze-frame of Kanye’s face cuts for a split-second to an image of Freddy Kruger—then black—and Kanye’s rap enters:   For all my Southside niggas that know me best I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex Why? I made that bitch famous   A glittering legend flashes up on the screen:   ☆ FAMOUS ☆ BY ♫ ‘KANYE WEST’ ♫   ♦   Shoulder to shoulder, half concealed by the sheets, half revealed by the sheets, in that enormous bed they lie, the celebrity bodies in Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ video And lie in more senses than one, all the bodies being at once hyper-real and hyper-fake, seemingly real yet actually prosthetic But, once become an image, isn’t everything real?

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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Interview

July 2012

Interview with David Harvey

Matt Mahon

Interview

July 2012

David Harvey is rare among Left academics: his work is as much appreciated by anarchists and the Occupy movement...

feature

Issue No. 9

Ordinary Voids

Ed Aves

Patrick Langley

feature

Issue No. 9

I am standing in a parallelogram of shrubbery outside London City Airport. Ed is twisting a dial on his Mamiya...

Interview

Issue No. 17

Interview with George Saunders

Aidan Ryan

Interview

Issue No. 17

The American short story writer George Saunders has the kind of reputation that makes one hesitate before typing his...

 

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