Mailing List


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...

Dor Guez, artist, scholar, photographer, archivist, wants to avoid being classified, but it’s difficult not to fall into the trap As an artist from Israel of mixed Christian Palestinian and Tunisian Jewish origin, whose work disentangles the complex identities which exist within Israel and Palestine, delineation is something he both rejects and encourages   His work uses photographs, archives and films to ask critical questions of the position of Israel’s Christian Palestinian community, who today make up less than 2 per cent of the population Much of his art focuses on his family, particularly his grandparents Ya’qoub and Samira, through whom he tracks the experiences of the generation who lived through the Arab-Israeli War, which began in 1948: the year marked Israel’s declaration of independence, which led to the large scale displacement of Palestinians from their homes Guez uses archival photograph collections to record the steady movement of time passing, and video installations to document banal everyday exchanges, capturing fragments of memory and reflections on identity In the video Subaru-Mercedes (2009), three members of the same family discuss the complexities of self-identifying between Arab, Christian, Israeli, and Palestinian, while in (Sa)Mira (2009) a young Christian Palestinian discusses the subtle racism she’s encountered in Jerusalem Alongside his art work, Guez founded the Christian-Palestinian Archive (CPA) in 2009, the first archive devoted to the Christian-Palestinian minority of the Middle East   With the past month witnessing an increasing number of stabbings, shootings, protests and clashes across Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, Guez’s work takes on added relevance Many of his projects are highly intimate, displaying portraits of the generations who have been witnessing this cycle of violence and dispossession since 1948 Guez seeks to unfold every recent layer of identity within the Christian Palestinian community, contrasting these complexities – and the extraordinary circumstances which come with living in either Israel or Palestine – with people’s often banal everyday routines In Bypass (2014), we see the dirt track, which runs parallel to the concrete wall separating Israel and the West Bank, worn away by the ‘living footsteps of menial existence’ It is a physical

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...

READ NEXT

Art

December 2011

James Richards: Not Blacking Out...

Chris Newlove Horton

Art

December 2011

Artist James Richards appropriates audio-visual material gathered from a range of sources, which he then edits into elaborate, fragmented...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

fiction

January 2013

Car Wash

Patrick Langley

fiction

January 2013

He is sitting on the back seat of a car, somewhere in France. It’s a bright blue day, absurdly...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required