On the fourth track of Solange Knowles’ new album When I Get Home, there are gunshots. You could almost miss it; the clocking of the gun, interspersed with its firing, is so effortlessly melded into the melody…
Tag: review
The Witching Hour: Watching “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”
The enduring myth of witchcraft has long been one of female power. By becoming a servant of the devil rather than one of god, a woman could hope to take control and agency…
Frida Kahlo, Making Herself an Exhibit
I am younger than I am now and wearing a green velvet dress. My face is painted and I have violet flowers tucked within my dark hair. My earrings drip to my shoulders and I feel dazzlingly happy as I sit in the passenger’s seat beside the man I love …
Who is Madeline’s Madeline?
Madeline’s Madeline is an exercise in tension. It explores the interplays of tension and release in personal reality, which exude beyond the film, becoming, very much, a movie on anxieties. Watching it, I felt my own fingers tighten …
The Question of the Authentic Indian
In a striking short story titled Out on Main Street, the writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo deconstructs the idea of the authentic Indian identity, countering it with the notion of hybridity…
Japanese Connections at the Louvre Abu Dhabi
The time is somewhere between jaunty April and the gloved-hands of November in 1867. You are a wide-eyed visitor at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, the most elaborate fair the world has ever seen, in a city where both human and physical geography is growing and diversifying seemingly overnight…
Thinking Bout Frank Ocean’s Blonde
Considering that Frank Ocean’s Blonde album has been out for a couple of years now, there are plenty of articles dissecting its meaning and form. This review will instead detail the ways in which Blonde taps into the uncertain and poignant emotions of youth. I believe that what makes the album so special is that […]
Dismantling Detroit: Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You
I’ll admit that I was at first dazzled by the strange combination of ethereal bangles and beads and the NeonEjaculate artistic flair of curb-stomping stubbornness that is the lead, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), in the film Sorry to Bother You…
The Eyes of Those in The Bear Clan: A Review of the Short Story Fleur
The natures of various characters in this short story are embodied by the creatures they master; by using animals to explore human nature, the story comments on the parallel between people controlling animals, and men controlling women in two societies …
Notes on Kendrick Lamar, Moby-Dick, and the Margins
Compared to the heavy-handed, anger-driven lyrics of these singles, DAMN. in its entirety, also features pieces by Lamar in which he reflects, mellow and quiet, on his black experience. As opposed to the “creation of a new site where the violence of internalized racism and fear sublimated into rage can be transformed to target institutionalized racism” in To Pimp A Butterfly, as Siebe Blujis writes in “From Compton to Congress,” DAMN. wants to create a new space for Lamar in which ‘rage’, both against internalized and institutionalized racism, is synthesized into something else, a reflection, a “me versus me” rather than a “me versus the world”.
Five Roses Thorns: A Review of Sheila Hicks’ Lignes de vie
Lignes de vie (Life Lines), an exhibition of Sheila Hicks’ textile-based artworks currently on display at the Centre Pompidou, is truly retrospective of the 83-year-old artist’s work, dating back 60 years. Curated by Michel Gauthier, the exhibition features artwork from as early as 1956, and as recent as 2018. During my visit, the artist herself […]
