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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...

Proposition: The limits of our social imaginaries mean the limits of our worlds   1 Perhaps new forms of being require new forms of relationship   11 What is being anyway but gesturing towards an indefinite assembly of unknowable qualities & quantities   12 Categories of being are obstructive & injurious both to those who touch the social imaginary & those who don’t   13 Categories of literature are obstructive & injurious both to those who read it & those who write it   14 Concepts like ‘genre’ & ‘style’ are made-up words   15 Concepts like ‘female’ & ‘male’ are made-up words   16 New forms of being require new forms of thought, such as “that the distinctions between the beautiful and ugly, if made at all, [be] made arbitrarily”[1]   17 I have finally been turned on in the sense that “[i]f one of my works were to be turned on it would destroy itself”[2]   18 Perhaps the attempt to acquire reality through anti-illustrational action is the only meaningful endeavour   19 Francis Bacon says of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait (c1659):   If you analyse it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks[3]   110 Perhaps belief in the necessity of sacrifice is the utmost achievement for all people at all times    111 Gabrielle Civil says:   Art of all kinds is not just the practice of making, it’s the practice of being in the world a certain way It’s a certain susceptibility, and it’s also sacrifice – the offering up of everything with only a few strings attached[4]   112 Perhaps being arrives through a sustained engagement with the act of thinking as embodied practice   113 If being requires a theatre of the social imaginary do we, the audience, bear responsibility for being’s staging   114 If gender is a “variable cultural interpretation of sex” perhaps our facility to intervene in gender’s [being’s] context(s) is likewise mutable & indefinite[5]   115 What is the difference between you & the thing that eats you – is it the fact

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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fiction

Issue No. 2

The Surrealist Section of the Harry Ransom Center

Diego Trelles Paz

TR. Janet Hendrickson

fiction

Issue No. 2

To Enrique Fierro and Ida Vitale—   Just like you, muchachos, I didn’t believe in ghosts, and if I’d...

feature

Issue No. 11

Climate Science

McKenzie Wark

feature

Issue No. 11

Welcome to the Anthropocene, that planetary tempo in which all the metabolic rhythms of the world start dancing to...

Interview

Issue No. 8

Interview with Deborah Levy

Jacques Testard

Interview

Issue No. 8

‘TO BECOME A WRITER, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and...

 

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