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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...

Breath-Manifester   Each bared morning is a swell time to die, Leaving the town’s ornate maze for the level Expanse of those lit and meat-eating fields, the Clouds that turn like ghost machines, the antic Tremendous woods where Pan’s breath on your heart Recharms a flame from its grey-furred ember I’ll wear my belt blazoned with Alpha Centauri, For luck, whilst you’ll surely sport that Oxfam scarf In whose puce stitch some crone has worked GI   E (Glory To The Most High) Time to die, to be Disturbed by the one re-re-repeated Word Fanfared by each time-warping bird, each fierce leaf Or pimped bud that is but love’s newest halloo Over the heads of the dead and alive, alive-O Laughing, you’ll lurch and say or missay, “only kenning what’s real Saves us from terror Wilhelm Reich” Wise words     Drones   You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s nervous system the way we use a drone or hidden camera Given what I now knew, it almost seemed possible When green tea was announced I slid outside for a smoke,   paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth Back in the conference centre, the tea- fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl that stilled her car on that night when she knew she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone   terrible to recall, a rising drone which turned her body into pixel-smoke swarming upwards and assembled anew (“like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth”) on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl When she arrived home, hours late for tea,   her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone momentarily quickened the cased owl on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke, and shivered through the symmetrical teeth of God’s lost children (tell us something new!)   who’d come here to share what little they knew I thought of the onset of DMT – that sense of deliverance into the teeth of a buzzing wind or luminous drone, mere seconds after releasing the smoke – and then of that line from Twin Peaks, “the owls   are not what they seem” I dozed, dreamt of owls sane and inviolate in all they knew, and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke And Mirrors, Carl Jung And The

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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Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

fiction

October 2015

The Bird Thing

Julianne Pachico

fiction

October 2015

You are worried about the bird thing but that’s the last thing you want to think about right now,...

feature

December 2016

Wildness of the Day

Orlando Reade

feature

December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier...

 

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