This conversation was recorded with Hoda Katebi, the self-defined “sarcastic (& angry) Muslim-Iranian writer, photographer, and activist living in Chicago” behind the political fashion blog JooJoo Azad (“free bird” in Farsi) to be featured in The Funambulist 15 (Jan-Feb. 2018) Clothing Politics #2. In January 2017, a few days after the inauguration of the current U.S. President and the subsequent massive feminist protest, she wrote an article entitled “Please Keep Your American Flags Off My Hijab” about which we discuss in this interview, along with many other facets of her work with regards to clothing in relation to imperialism, capitalism ...

To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required ...

Hana Tajima and I recently sat down to talk about one aspect of her work as a fashion designer. Some of the clothing she designs have the particularity to incorporate the hijab (Islamic veil) that currently suffers from an absolute lack of discursive complexity and contextualization. Our conversation is organized in such a way that we first describe the hijab only in its physical characteristics, as “a piece of cloth.” Once we have a grasp at its object properties, we then proceed to intensify it with the symbolic and political position it carries voluntarily and involuntarily within a given context. ...

The second season of Overmorrow’s Library is dedicated to world-building, world-ending, and travel across worlds. Federico Campagna presents a new selection of books that might help us to appreciate the fragility of ‘worlds,’ and the art of creating new ones through a particular use of our imagination.

Historically, more than any single institution, art publications have been primary sites for discourse surrounding the artistic field. And yet most recently, the discourse has seemingly moved elsewhere—away from the formal vocabulary used to explain art production, away from traditional art capitals, and away from the printed page. At times, new discursive practices even replace traditional forms of art production. Given the current climate of disciplinary reconfiguration and geographic dispersal, it has become apparent that the urgent task has now become to engage the new intellectual territories in a way that can revitalize the critical vocabulary of contemporary art. We ...

Mecca is the holiest city in the Islamic religion and the birthplace of the prophet Mohamed. Located just off Saudi Arabia’s western coast, all Muslims are required to visit at least once in their life if they are physically able to. With air travel becoming easier, the number of pilgrims has been rising rapidly over the last few decades, with a record number of 3 million people visiting Mecca simultaneously during the 2012 Hajj. More recently, visa regulations have been made more strict to keep the situation under control. In this episode, we discuss with various experts how this rising number ...

The seventh episode of the Feminism Under Corona series follows a conversation with Mariam Khan, writer and editor of the book It’s not about the Burqa (2019). This first-person anthology of essays of seventeen Muslim women’s stories gives rise to a collective voice where differences are as important as similarities in creating a community of their own within the spectrum of feminism and world-making. Reading this book is like being anonymously invited to meet another community of feminists. But not in order to talk to or discuss with them, but mainly to listen and to unlearn. One way of presenting ...

Jalal Toufic is a thinker whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense—notwithstanding that, as he put it, many, if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, “continue to be forthcoming even after their publication.” In relation to one of these books, he wondered: “Does not a book titled Forthcoming suggest, ostensibly paradoxically, a second edition?” Here’s the revised edition of Forthcoming, a book first published nearly a decade and a half ago by Atelos press. —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Conversation with artist, writer and curator Hamja Ahsan on the support campaign he organized for his brother Syed Talha Ahsan, his groundbreaking book Shy Radicals, his project at documenta fifteen and the hate campaign that he is receiving from some of the German media. Hamja talks openly about mental heath issues, islamophobia and the crucial support that he got from Anne Tallentire while he was studying at Central Saint Martins.

An organic notebook is as good a way as any to commit events and objects to memory. Fallen leaves, bark, twigs, and decaying branches are records of the past. Glistening water moves through grass-lined channels, emerging in bubbling rivulets that slow and subside over terraces, briefly creating a mirror of the sky that soon tarnishes as the earth drinks. The flow, measured by the shadows, is directed by the gardeners’ long-handled shovels. Imagine it as ink, while fallen leaves and twigs form words, and the earth provides pages around which enclosing mud walls form a robust binding. Like the worn cover ...

This first conversation with Alex Shams (the second will occur in Palestine this coming February) takes for site the Iranian city and the politics of gender exercised in it, both under the regime of the Shah and during these last thirty-five years in the context of the Islamic Republic. We start by establishing the framework of our critique and the traps to avoid—the example of Mehran Tamadon’s recent film Iranian (2014) being illustrative for this matter. Alex takes us then in his research articulating both the ideological/imaginary and the physical/urban context of gender politics in Iran. This includes a ‘chapter’ about the ...

Federico Campagna presents Henry Corbin’s 1964 History of Islamic Philosophy and his esoteric interpretation of philosophy and of religion.