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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...

1   A mural with a soldier and a worker at its centre Broken tiles on the floor A red star, peeling Angles from the ground, from up high Angles that require crouching and climbing, dirt under fingernails     2   He loves nothing more than a derelict GDR factory, an abandoned asylum An amusement park left to the elements   The weekend comes around and he sets off with his bag of provisions Snacks, a pre-rolled zoot His DSLR with a wide-angle lens, a macro for close-ups     3   I called it ruin porn   That was a mistake   We were sat in a café in Schillerkiez when I said it    First time we’d met    I was flicking through his photos of something abandoned Military hospital? Cement factory?   He grabbed the camera from my hands   Told me, Don’t call it that    I said, What should I call it then?   It’s the thing I love most about this place, about Berlin, he said, eyes fixed on the camera’s LCD screen    The waiter came by, and we watched in silence as he set down our order Two Americanos and a thick slice of mohnkuchen We exchanged dankes and bittes, waited for him to retreat   Aren’t you scared? I asked   Scared of what?   Glass, debris… needles The polizei picking you up?   You go running in Görlitzer park, no?    He paused Looked down at his camera, then back at me, asked: Come with me some time?     4   We got chatting on the app   A late summer evening, Hasenheide park   A sarong for a picnic blanket, a portable speaker on top There was a spliff going round, a bottle of Sekt warmed by the sun   I thought I’d meet him in the bushes once I was tipsy enough But he wanted to chat, exchange pics – not nudes Not just yet   He said he was from Holon, Israel And from the pics that he sent I could tell he was of Yemeni descent   How’d you guess?   Those cheekbones, I typed in response My dad is from Aden Jewish   He’s from Yemen?   From Aden    Haha I thought that was a stereotype    What is?   That the Adenim think that they’re separate    Aden was a country   Was, he replied, with the eye-roll emoji     5   Rollies Negronis Weserstrasse   We met at the bar

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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fiction

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

poetry

July 2012

Fig-tree

John Clegg

poetry

July 2012

He trepans with the blunt screwdriver on his penknife: unripe figs require the touch of air on flesh to...

feature

October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

 

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