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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...

Long before the advent of ‘fake news’, Martha Rosler was teaching us how to think critically about documentary imagery and reporting Irrespective, the artist’s first survey show in 18 years, opens with the towering, floor-to-ceiling photomontage Cargo Cult (1966–72): an image of dock workers unloading stacks of shipping boxes, doctored so that each container is covered with a photograph of a generically beautiful white women applying makeup The work presents Western beauty standards as a traded material, and a load women are expected to carry It also highlights the modus operandi of Rosler’s practice, treating media as material: an approach as relevant today as it ever was   Irrespective contains work from across Rosler’s five-decade career, including the now-famous photomontage series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967–72), in which images of domestic interiors from glossy magazines are spliced together with brutal photographs of the Vietnam War Originally, Rosler handed out photocopies of the collages at anti-war protests First Lady (Pat Nixon) appropriates a photograph of the First Lady standing in the White House taken for the popular lifestyle magazine, House Beautiful She smiles serenely at the camera, wearing a yellow dress and jacket that match the colour of the walls Rosler has replaced a painting in a gilded frame, hung above the fireplace, with a photograph of a woman’s disfigured body In another work from the series, Cleaning the Drapes, a thin, smartly dressed woman photographed for an advertisement demonstrates the ease of use of a vacuum cleaner She pulls open a curtain as she cleans to reveal soldiers in trenches Due to technological advancements in photography, the Vietnam War was the first to have images from the front-lines circulating in real time, entering American homes on television screens, as well as in newspapers and magazines Rosler’s collages are a reminder of how desensitised Western audiences have become to pictures of violence Today our screens, billboards and news publications are littered with violent imagery, and it’s hard to imagine how shocking the introduction of Vietnam War visuals were to the register of everyday life   Rosler revisited House Beautiful following the US invasion

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

Issue No. 1

Interview with Will Self

Jacques Testard

Interview

Issue No. 1

Standing on the doorstep of Will Self’s London home ahead of this interview, last August, I was quite terrified....

fiction

March 2017

The Urban Cyclist

Daniel Galera

TR. Alison Entrekin

fiction

March 2017

No terrain is impossible for the Urban Cyclist. His powerful legs drive the pedals down in alternation, right, left,...

feature

June 2013

Jean Genet in Spain

Juan Goytisolo

TR. Peter Bush

feature

June 2013

‘1932. Spain at the time was over-run with vermin, its beggars. They went from village to village, in Andalusia...

 

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