By Zarina Zabrisky
Scene 1. The camera slowly goes over my grandmother’s wall calendar open on the caption, in Russian: LENINGRAD. November 7, 1988. 71st anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.
Scene 2. The military factory entrance looks like Moloch’s jaws.
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.
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
A selection of poems by Nina Pick. Grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and an integrative spiritual counselor, Pick works to revive Judaism through the gifts of female spiritual leaders and heal intergenerational trauma. She’s a Reiki Master, a Waldorf educator, and a fellow at the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project.
By Glenn Harcourt
Harris’s Carmilla is much more than just a well-told and engaging story with an affirmative if transgressive LBGTQ plot. It engages us also in the way it transforms its original source material, and about how that transgression can also be a liberation, as long as one is willing to be the price.
By Antoinette LaFarge
“Two summers on the island of Spitzbergen,” wrote Louise Brigham in 1909, “taught me, more than all previous experiments, the latent possibilities of a box.” The book she published that year, Box Furniture, is indeed a testament to the possibilities of a box—and not just any box, but specifically the packing crates then used to ship all kinds of ordinary consumer goods. Brigham found in those humble, cheaply made boxes inspiration for a unique system of furniture design based entirely on recycled packing crates.
By Susan Power
Our experience of time and space has been radically disrupted by the threat of the pandemic; its scope and sobering impact both intimate and distant. Yet this existential crisis can promote a new way of being in the world. With so many aspects of our lives on hold, the current moment offers a rare opportunity to reflect upon the “state of things.” Like the eponymous 1982 film by Wim Wenders, which revolves around a science fiction film cast and crew stranded together on location when the production is stalled due to sudden lack of funds, Liat Yossifor’s latest body of work was on its way to Sydney, Australia for a solo show at Fox Jensen Gallery scheduled to open on March 28 when it became stranded in shipping crates, postponed in the voyage to its destination, and ultimately consigned to a screen…
Hsuan Hsu explores how director Bong Joon-ho uses sense of smell to elucidate socioeconomic divides in his Oscar-winning film, Parasite. Hsu also places the movie into the context of the very real wealth divide in contemporary South Korea.
Austrian artist Deborah Sengl, who published her art book “The Last Days of Mankind” with DoppelHouse this past December, discusses her recent exhibit, “Broken Soldiers.” In the following interview with Alois Kölbl, she explores her […]
By Monica Strauss
Around the turn of the century in Olmütz, a small town in the Czech Republic, (known as Olomouc in present day) a Jewish community flourished. With its impeccable examples of Gothic and Baroque architecture and connection to the Hapsburg Empire, it was known as the “Moravian Rome”. However, its young people were increasingly turning to cosmopolitan Vienna for intellectual stimulation. When the onset of World War I sent many of them home to Olmütz, they tried to maintain that high level of cultural exchange they had experienced in the Kaiserstadt.
