Author: DoppelHouse Press

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Hunting for Art on the Ring Road

BY AHMED NAJI -أحمد ناجى
The shop walls were covered with wooden planks, on those planks, drawings of people in a state of motion. They were crossing the street or leaving a building, but here they were stuck in a void.

That was the first exhibition by “Amr El Kafrawy” for me to attend. We met for a short interview. He told me about his work approach: sitting in some “internet café” overlooking Talaat Harb square in the Downtown area, getting out a small camera while watching people, and secretly taking photographs of them. Afterward, he drew on those photographs to put them back in a state of motion. He turned them into black shadows crossing the empty wooden planks covering the “Artellewa” gallery walls.

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Language, Lunacy, and the Literary Provocateur: Life Writing and Schizophrenia

By Claire Phillips

The night before picking up a copy of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esmé Weijun Wang’s essays on the subject of “the full psychotic spectrum” or what are called “the schizophrenias,” I anticipated its themes in a threatening dream related to my mother’s struggle with an illness that went undiagnosed for far too long.

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COVID-19, MY COMRADE: Central-European Graffiti and Street-Art Responses to Pandemic

Written and photographed by Mitja Velikonja, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

In the beginning is the scream. … And lots of screaming can be heard lately, in difficult times of global COVID-19 pandemic. As a researcher of urban cultures and radical politics I’m particularly interested in “sprayed screams,” … reacting to the disease and even more to governmental medical, social and economic measures against it.

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Pandemic BLM Politics: Graffiti from New York, Long Beach, and Los Angeles

By Carrie Paterson
Photos by Seph Rodney, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Carrie Paterson

It was lucky for me that early in the (first?) summer of the pandemic, I encountered the writings of Slovenian “graffitologist” Mitja Velikonja, just as my home street corner started filling up with warring pandemic wheatpaste posters and stickers. Like many shops and businesses around the country, the tenants decided to board up the windows in a (hyperbolic, on my quiet street) show of fear about property damage that might ensue from the Black Lives Matter protests