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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...

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt Watt was an alchemist An alchemist is a? Dad wanted me to have the definition by heart Someone who, through belief, hard work and persistence, turns the ordinary into the extraordinary I knew the rhythm of it I don’t think I quite knew what belief, hard work or persistence were; extraordinary I probably had some sense of Allegory was still a long way off   Watt was a good man, there was no doubt about that But he didn’t always seem it Often he would be so absorbed in his work that he could go days, even weeks, without seeing his family His mother was sick and bedridden His wife was stooped and bent from scrubbing the floor, washing the clothes, milking the cows And his son, his only son, clothed in rags, missed him terribly But Watt knew, Dad would say, that when his son grew up, he would come to understand how important his work was, the true wealth it had brought them, and would forgive him   It happened without warning One night, after a long day’s work, when Watt was tidying up his laboratory, he went to pick up a certain block of lead which he’d been experimenting on, when a terrific pain shot up his arm His body was thrown across the dark room in a spray of sparks, as though an anvil had been struck   When he came to, he found himself lying flat on his back on the cold stone floor The block of lead, which sat on the big oak table, glowed a strange orange colour and the air around it flowed like water Watt, brave man, stood up and reached again for the lead and again the pain shot through his arm and again a splash and flurry of sparks and his body again shuddered with the force   When he came to once again he once again stood up and one again touched the block of metal Once again the same sharp pain, the same shaking, as

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...

READ NEXT

poetry

January 2015

dear angélica

Angélica Freitas

TR. Hilary Kaplan

poetry

January 2015

dear angélica   dear angélica I can’t make it I got stuck in the elevator between the ninth and...

poetry

Issue No. 3

Cousin Alice

Medbh McGuckian

poetry

Issue No. 3

Your mountain is robed in sombre rifle green And one of its greener fields is suddenly Black with rooks....

poetry

January 2016

Three Honey Protocols

Monika Rinck

TR. Nicholas Grindell

poetry

January 2016

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths,...

 

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