Mailing List


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...

‘Grandma Why are we brown?’   The grandmother puts down the rifle she’s been cleaning Another rifle and a box of ammunition are sitting on the kitchen table in front of her   ‘What?’   ‘Why are we brown?’   ‘We’re not brown, we’re morochas Where did you hear that?’   ‘We were in gym class and Tati shouted, “Ewww!!! She has brown nipples!”’   The kettle comes to a boil and the grandmother stands up to turn off the stovetop She wraps a dishcloth around the iron handle before picking up the kettle Then she puts two bags of coffee in one mug and a teabag in the other and pours in the hot water before bringing both mugs to the table The sugar and spoons are already laid out on the cloth She unwraps the bread, which has been bundled up in cloth to keep warm It came out of the clay oven less than an hour ago   ‘How did she see your nipples?’ she asks, sitting down   ‘We were finishing gym class and had to get changed back into dry clothes So I was sweaty and took off my t-shirt and she saw my boobies Why are we brown?’   ‘We’re not brown’ The grandmother sips from her mug, which she holds in two hands Her gold wedding ring is shoved right up to the top of her finger, where it meets the palm ‘Brown is the wrong word, it’s a filthy color We’re morochas, which is different’ She sips from her mug but the coffee is burning hot and scalds her throat The grandmother grimaces in pain and tears come into her eyes Her granddaughter laughs ‘We’re not brown, we’re morochas, OK?’   ‘But that’s not an answer’ The girl puts two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her tea, adds milk, cuts two slices of bread and dips them in too The bread swells with milky tea and she starts to scoop it up with the spoon like soup   ‘We’re morochas because the paint ran out while we were being made’   ‘What paint?’   ‘At the place where people are made they didn’t have enough paint to make us really dark We were going to be black, but they

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...

READ NEXT

Interview

Issue No. 2

Interview with Richard Wentworth

Ben Eastham

Interview

Issue No. 2

Richard Wentworth is among the most influential artists alive in Britain. He emerged in the 1970s as part of...

feature

March 2014

Burroughs in London

Heathcote Williams

feature

March 2014

I first met William Burroughs in 1963. I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review...

Art

October 2012

Mitra Tabrizian's Another Country

Matt Mahon

Mitra Tabrizian

Art

October 2012

Mitra Tabrizian’s Another Country (2010), a collection of nine large-scale photographs taken between 2009-2010, present to the viewer an...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required