The Arts Archives - Page 5 of 38

Interviews

Animated by Not Knowing

A conversation with Wendy Xu on thinking through poetry in Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 16, 2025 • by Gabriel Chavez and Wendy Xu

Poet and educator Wendy Xu’s new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (University of Michigan Press, 2025), traverses multiple genres of poetry, poetry criticism, essay, and memoir, presenting close readings and “thinking-throughs” of works by poets such as Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean ...

Literature

Sisyphus, From Memory

An excerpt from Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

October 14, 2025 • by Wendy Xu

He was a god, or he wasn’t. He was a king, at least. He had some relation to both the gods on high, their glamour and power, and the lowly world of mortals. Of course you must imagine him with the stone, and it was a stone I’m sure, and ...

Film & Performing Arts

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Blame it on Mommy and Daddy

October 10, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor

It’s almost as if the selection committee for the recently ended sixty-third New York Film Festival (NYFF) was acknowledging that giants no longer walk the cinematic earth when it chose to screen Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague and Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly. Both directors are among the most important of American ...

Revelations and Reservations at the 2025 New York Film Festival

Art & Design

Imperfect Images

Sohrab Hura on slowing down time in a survey show at MoMA PS1

October 2, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves and Sohrab Hura

Sohrab Hura began his career in film and photography documenting social issues across India and has been a full-time member of Magnum Photos since 2020. Over the years, his practice has expanded to include publishing, drawing, and writing in an ongoing investigation into the relationship between the personal and the ...

Activism

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Liberation movements like the Zapatistas and the Black Panther Party teach us to unite political, artistic, and cultural ideas in how we dress

October 1, 2025 • by Mike Harrington

The so-called “first postmodern revolution,” the Zapatista uprising of 1994, came at a time when the internet was becoming a worldwide phenomenon. And with this Pandora’s box of widely accessible imagery and information newly opened, people were able to witness the uprising in more-or-less real time. Based in Chiapas, the southernmost ...

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Film & Performing Arts

The Art of Change: A Libretto

Opera 0.2: A Prelude

September 18, 2025 • by Jean-Baptiste Barrière, Chiara Bottici and Matteo Procuranti

Synopsis: A community decides to pursue its revolutionary dream by adopting the principle of accelerated change, and applies it to every aspect of social life. The result is a utopian (or dystopian) world that may (or may not) turn out to be ours. Event 1. Prologue Flutist in dialogue with video projections ...

Art & Design

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

An excerpt from Bruno Schulz and Galician Jewish Modernity

September 1, 2025 • by Karen Underhill

The small body of prose by Galician Jewish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz that was published between 1934 and 1938 has entered into, transformed, and enriched Polish, Jewish, and Central European modernisms, stretching the boundaries of how each of these bodies of modern literature is understood. It has also ...

A Creation Born Out of the Longing of Golus

History

Bruno Schulz’s Poetics of Golus

On the Polish language as a medium for diasporic modernism

September 1, 2025 • by Alex Rossen and Karen Underhill

For many readers, Bruno Schulz‘s interwar short story collections evoke the memory of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust. To Karen Underhill, Schulz’s stylistically innovative writing is also a movement through transient forms—the Polish language and childhood experiences in interwar Poland—into the exegetical “margins” of Jewish tradition." Recently, Underhill ...

Gender

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Elections have empowered a strongman government—and police and military are back to banning music

June 25, 2025 • by Rachmi Diyah Larasati

Sukatani, a punk band from Central Java, are known for critiquing the interconnected violence of police, military, and religious institutions. I like to play their music in my Minneapolis house—and share it on my Instagram—to protest the return of fascism in Indonesia and globally. So early this year, I was ...

The Politics of Music and Motorcycles in Indonesia

Film & Performing Arts

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

A conversation with German novelist Daniel Kehlmann

June 17, 2025 • by Mitchell Abidor and Daniel Kehlmann

Mitchell Abidor interviews Daniel Kehlmann about examining the curious saga of Austrian filmmaker G. W. Pabst in his new novel, THE DIRECTOR....

The Fate of the Artist Under Totalitarianism

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Artificial Intelligence

Writing Was Always Magical

On Literary Theory for Robots and divining the text of the future

June 12, 2025 • by Tsering Dolka Gurung and Dennis Yi Tenen

Rather than focus on techno-utopian fantasies or doomsday predictions in which technology replaces humans, scholar Dennis Yi Tenen inspects writing itself as a human technology. In his new book, Literary Theory for Robots (W. W. Norton, 2024), the English professor and former Microsoft engineer asks: How will AI change the ...