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Tausif Noor
Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art history. His writing on art, literature, and visual culture appears in Artforum, frieze, The Nation, The New York Times and other venues, as well as in artist catalogues and various edited volumes.

Articles Available Online


Devil in the Detail: on Leesa Gazi’s ‘Hellfire’

Book Review

July 2021

Tausif Noor

Book Review

July 2021

British-Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam’s debut A Golden Age (2007) tracks the early stirrings of revolution in East Bengal from the 1950s to the climax...

Art Review

May 2019

Simone Fattal, Works and Days

Tausif Noor

Art Review

May 2019

For the last five decades, Simone Fattal has produced works that refract the particularities of the present vis-à-vis a...

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919[1] In this older work, the reader is introduced to a man of ‘mid-life’ assuming the pseudonym, ‘Vincent,’ a sufferer of agoraphobia who has decided after ‘some time’ to ‘commit to writing’ some observations of his condition Over the next five pages, Vincent rewards the reader with a detailed and evocative account of the strange maladies he undergoes in his daily life as a victim of this spatial anxiety To begin with, we are told of the likely ‘cause’ of his condition, being the murder of a childhood friend, whose throat was cut ‘from ear to ear’ and then dragged at night to the ‘bank of [a] river’ Thereafter, Vincent suffers from a morbid fear of being alone In addition, he was also ‘afraid to go to the barn in the day time, and suffered when put to bed in the dark’ This childhood trauma sets in place a troubled relationship with the world, exacerbated by an already nervous and sickly temperament Soon after, the agoraphobia begins His first encounter comes at the top of a hill One evening, he tells us, he experiences the incipient symptoms that will mark his adult life more generally   In time, this rupture of his security increases to the world around him, to the extent that even ‘[u]gly architecture greatly intensifies the fear’ Certain props afford him comfort Darkness, snow, stormy days and any other means to veil the horror of the world from his eyes allow Vincent to find his way in the world, as he tells us rather glibly: ‘On such days I make it a point to be out and about the town’   But this anxious relationship to places is not limited to a localised event For Vincent, the agoraphobia is always present even when at home In one especially incisive passage, he remarks: ‘I enter a home and sit in an arm-chair chatting with my friend; I soon find myself gripping the arm of the chair with each hand My toes curl in my shoes, and there

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor

Contributor

March 2018

Tausif Noor is a critic and doctoral student at the University of California Berkeley, where he studies modern and contemporary art...

INTERVIEW WITH ANAND PATWARDHAN

Art Review

July 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

July 2018

By the late 1990s a right wing government in the shape of a BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had come to power for the first time...
Danh Vo, Take My Breath Away

Art Review

April 2018

Tausif Noor

Art Review

April 2018

‘When you love, you are nailed to the cross,’ says a character in Rainer Fassbinder’s film In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). In...

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Interview

May 2011

Interview with Desmond Hogan

Ben Eastham

Jacques Testard

Interview

May 2011

Desmond Hogan is probably the most famous Irish writer you’ve never heard of. In the early 1980s, with numerous...

Art

May 2013

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson

David Trotter

Art

May 2013

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little...

poetry

Issue No. 20

Two Poems

Nisha Ramayya

poetry

Issue No. 20

JOY OF THE EYES   The future is not the beginning, but the forerunner, of a new intense-formation.  ...

 

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