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Alexander Christie-Miller
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been published in Newsweek, the Times, the Atlantic, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The White Review.


Articles Available Online


Ada Kaleh

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Issue No. 17

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among...

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October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

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October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

Some things are meant to be lost You can’t collect emotions As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this, I imagine an elaborate array of emotions, all bottled up, lining a shelf: anger, love, confusion, happiness, hatred   Nkanga’s practice is expansive and multifaceted, encompassing performance, painting, drawing, sculpture and installation It is characterised by the artist’s will to explore and understand stories, narratives and histories—of landscape, nature and place—as mediated by the body A complex web of information, action and conversation inspires diverse accounts and memories in the audience    On my first experience of her work I entered Diaspore (2014) to encounter two women, plainly clothed, standing poised with a plant, Queen of the Night, tentatively balanced upon their heads Navigating a drawing underfoot that resembled a map, the women’s movements were slow and considered, the rhythms of their bodies effected in the swaying of the plants above Viewers mingled, sat, stood around the space, marking out their territory I felt like an observer, absorbing the scene, but a friend described holding eye contact with one of the women for over half an hour: a battle of wills, a silent understanding?   Another earlier work, Face Me, I Face You (2013) sees three people standing closely together, physically connected by six pointed black wooden sticks These crisscross between them, a layered zigzag suspended in space and held in place only by the tension between two bodies – audience participants then begin to expand this network of connectivity Contained Measures of Shifting States (2012), conceived and commissioned by The Tanks, Tate Modern, also sought audience participation Four separate round tables were placed in a darkened, spotlit room, each displaying four elements: liquid, ice, smoke and heat in a state of movement and shift On a hollowed out table, 100 printed images showed ‘inspiration’ from the Tate’s own collection as well as pictures of landscapes, maps and scientific diagrams – in the table’s central orifice, the artist remained for nine hours without a break, engaging in discussions with the participants   Born in Nigeria and now working in Antwerp, the artist, who studied at the Rijksakademie in

Contributor

August 2014

Alexander Christie-Miller

Contributor

August 2014

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been...

Forgotten Sea

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Issue No. 11

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the...
Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

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July 2013

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus routes, a destination and a...

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fiction

November 2016

The Miserablist

Anne Boyer

fiction

November 2016

This vision was strongly nebulous, an indeterminate but bold reaction only because it was so much like one of...

poetry

September 2012

Interview

Cutter Streeby

poetry

September 2012

The first time I think I saw Robinson? I’d have to have been leaving Yucaipa. He was on an...

Interview

September 2016

Interview with Garth Greenwell

Michael Amherst

Interview

September 2016

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You has won praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Edmund White...

 

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