Today, from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you Joobin Bekhrad’s interview with artist Taravat Talepasand, aka TVAT. They discuss Talepasand’s recent show at San Francisco’s Guerrero Gallery, Made in Iran, Born in America, the use of drugs in her work, and her love of Iran. The artist says, “Take your definition of ‘Orientalism’, which I find offensive, and see if you can create art that is as conceptually profound and technically[…..]

In an age when internet presence grants visibility, the sparsity of digital images and articles of Dennis Jeffy’s work makes his solo exhibition, From Antelope Springs, at MOCA Tucson a significant and rare occurrence to be experienced. Born in Antelope Springs (Navajo for Jeddito, Arizona) in 1952, Jeffy has developed a fertile artistic practice that has journeyed through a wide range of experimentation in style, material,[…..]

As university presidents, corporate CEOs, and political leaders on the left and right toss the terms “multiculturalism” and “postcolonial” around in speeches and promotional materials, I am reminded that these buzzwords of the new transnational order have resisted domestication and dilution through the sharp, thoughtful, uncomplacent writing of Homi K. Bhabha.[1] Bhabha’s recognition that cultures must be understood as complex intersections of multiple places, historical[…..]

For the Chilean-born visual artist, poet, and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña, the textual and the visual exist and function together in a familial relation, as if the making of objects and the shaping of words into images are knotted together like threads, binding and weaving themselves to form reified constellations that speak of the individual and collective simultaneously.[1] Vicuña’s work has a rich engagement with the[…..]

Today from our friends at Big Red & Shiny, we bring you a conversation between artist Chanel Thervil and artist and curator Silví Naçí. They discuss artist Juan Roberto Diago’s first retrospective, curated by Alejandro de la Fuente at the Cooper Gallery. Naci parallels the exploration of diasporic Africans in colonized Cuba in Diago’s work with the current political state of the U.S., saying, “…during a crucial moment in U.S.[…..]

In his 1978 text Orientalism, Edward Said states that the “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab–Islamic peoples and their cultures” is not just bound by historical clashes, sociocultural differences, or geography, but a constellation of a “whole series of interests” predicated on the desire to control, manipulate, and incorporate “what is manifestly different.”[1] Under Western hegemonic power, the struggle for dominance in the Middle[…..]

Among obsidian stones, an upturned police barricade, a beat-up refrigerator, and cow vertebrae, the detail that lingers longest in Jimmie Durham’s retrospective, on view at the Hammer Museum, is Durham’s absence. Born in Arkansas in 1940, Durham left the United States thirty years ago for Europe and has largely refrained from exhibiting in the U.S. since, giving a provocative tone to the retrospective’s title, At[…..]