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Robert Assaye
Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

Articles Available Online


Issy Wood, When You I Feel

Art Review

December 2017

Robert Assaye

Art Review

December 2017

At the centre of Issy Wood’s solo exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa is a room-within-a room. The division of the gallery into two viewing spaces –...

Art

April 2017

'Learning from Athens'

Robert Assaye

Art

April 2017

The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is...

The Gulf War made my first year at Towneley High School uncomfortable White lads taunted us Pakistanis with pictures of RAF Tornadoes in the newspapers, saying they were bombing us The divide was clear: if you were brown you were on the other side Not all the brown kids were the same; there were Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and they didn’t get on, but the whites came after us all There was one black boy at the school He was on the side of the white lads So we cheered when RAF pilots were shot down and paraded, beaten and bloodied Thirteen years later I was in Iraq   I was nothing before I went to Iraq I was a lad from Burnley who’d joined the army after messing up his A-Levels, a screw-up I wasn’t the clean Muslim boy who was going to get married and have kids I had tried to be, but I failed The grammar school got me to university but by that time I’d fallen for the military I would read manuals I’d borrowed from the army when I was meant to be getting on with Chemistry I learned how to storm trenches, how to build bridges and how to blow them up, how to clean myself in a chemical war, how to soldier I’d spend my nights at the gym and planning long running routes on Ordnance Survey maps, dreaming about running for miles Thirteen miles a night would see me right I had been a problem, but then I took responsibility for myself and joined up I’d look at others with anger, ‘Why can’t you sort your own life out instead of whingeing? Why don’t you grow a set of balls and get yourself in uniform?’ I’d look at the men in beards and think, ‘Screw you’ I was a statistic but the army made me more The lads made me more than I ever could have been on my own, sat there trying to think my way out of the room They opened the door, showed me the light, how to live, and they

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye

Contributor

August 2014

Robert Assaye is a writer and critic living in London.

New Communities

Art

January 2017

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty million members contribute to a...
The Land Art of Julie Brook

Art

Issue No. 4

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession of inhospitable locations, creating sculptures...

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feature

Issue No. 6

The White Review No. 6 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 6

By the looks of it, not much has changed for The White Review. This new edition, like its predecessors,...

feature

Issue No. 10

Vern Blosum, Phantom

William E. Jones

feature

Issue No. 10

Chatsworth, established in 1888 in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, took its name from the family...

poetry

September 2011

Sleepwalking through the Mekong

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

I have my hands out in front of me. I’m lightly patting down everything I come across. I somehow...

 

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