Mailing List


Amber Husain

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall, Central Saint Martins. Her essays and criticism appear or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Believer, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, Radical Philosophy and elsewhere. She is the author of Replace Me, to be published by Peninsula Press in November 2021.



Articles Available Online


Slouching Towards Death

Book Review

July 2021

Amber Husain

Book Review

July 2021

In January, a preview excerpt in The New Yorker of Rachel Kushner’s essay collection The Hard Crowd (2021) warned us that this might turn...

Book Review

August 2020

Natasha Stagg’s ‘Sleeveless’

Amber Husain

Book Review

August 2020

‘The thong is centimetres closer to areas of arousal,’ writes Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York,...

I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream – shot at, tortured, scalped But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship   Charlotte Beradt, ‘Dreams under Dictatorship’, Free World (1943)   Born in Berlin in 1907 into a Jewish merchant family, Charlotte Beradt was working as a journalist when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 Around this time, she began collecting dreams, slowly compiling a record of the ramifications of Nazi ideology on the unconscious minds of her local community, from doctors and civil servants to students and homemakers Over the course of 6 years, Beradt collected accounts of around 300 individuals’ dreams, a project which ended in 1939 when she fled Germany for the USA   I was reminded of Beradt’s extraordinary project whilst exploring Daria Martin’s Tonight the World, a multi-media installation made in response to a dream diary kept by Martin’s grandmother Susi Stiassni, currently on view at the Barbican Curve Gallery The family, prominent Jewish textile manufacturers, fled their home in Brno in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was on the brink of Nazi occupation Aged only 16 when they left the country, Stiassni went on to keep a dream diary for around 35 years, accumulating some 20,000 pages of material Hers is an acutely personal project: almost too private to engage with as an outsider, and impossibly monumental to comprehend as a whole   Martin’s Tonight the World opens with a videogame that simulates the Stiassni family home in Brno, a modernist villa which still stands today Watching the prerecorded play-through, we are granted a first-person perspective on a faithfully recreated 3D model of the house and garden In the course of the game, the player discovers several artefacts from Martin’s grandmother’s childhood, among them a toy soldier, a locket and a model robot As the player interacts with these objects, specific pages from the

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain

Contributor

November 2018

Amber Husain is a writer, academic and publisher. She is currently a managing editor and research fellow at Afterall,...

On Having No Skin: Nan Goldin’s Sirens

Art Review

January 2020

Amber Husain

Art Review

January 2020

The feeling of drug-induced euphoria could be strips of gauze between beautiful fingers. Or a silver slinky sent down a torso by its own...
In Defence of Dead Women

Essay

November 2018

Amber Husain

Essay

November 2018

The memorial for the artist was as inconclusive as her work, or anybody’s life. Organised haphazardly on Facebook by one of her old friends,...

READ NEXT

Interview

November 2013

Interview with Javier Marías

Oli Hazzard

Interview

November 2013

Javier Marías is one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. He began writing fiction at an early age –...

feature

March 2013

Heroines

Kate Zambreno

feature

March 2013

I am beginning to realise that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking...

Interview

July 2014

Interview with Geoff Dyer

Tom Overton

Interview

July 2014

‘I’ve always believed that an artist is someone who turns everything that happens to him to his advantage’, Geoff...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required