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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...

I’m a woman who’s been through terrible trauma I’m a woman whose first husband committed suicide, and whose second husband woke up out of a dead sleep, murdered her son, then killed himself   Kamal woke up, killed Mahmoud, and threw himself off the balcony   Kamal woke up, killed Mahmoud, and threw himself off the balcony Right from the start, from the beginning of the beginning, I never blamed Kamal for killing Mahmoud Kamal is forgiven: he had a whore for a mother and a bastard for a son, and it’s at those two, bastard and whore, that the fingers of blame should be pointed Not at Kamal, who was a victim the same way that I was a victim, and more so The whore mother I’d already killed, but the bastard son, who’d played the lead in Mahmoud’s death, what were we going to do about him?   Justice is that the killer dies, right? That’s what I know That’s what everybody knows, though they might deny it   Hours I spent on Facebook, hunting for Haytham Kamal, trying every play on the name I could think of, until I found him, and sent him a Friend request Then nights, scrolling down his wall I wanted to know what he was doing, where he went Where I could find him, so I could kill him, so I could make the world more beautiful, if only for a while Okay, I was telling myself, I’ll kill him, and I’ll turn myself in to the police, and I’ll go to prison   But as I was hunting Haytham on Facebook, I was also searching on Google, looking up Qanater Prison I wanted to be fully prepared I packed a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush Wasn’t leaving anything to chance   When they took me to prison – when I took myself to prison – I wanted to be ready   I’m a woman who’s taken what people aren’t made to take So what do I do? Die? Can you do that? Suffer all that trauma and just make up your mind to lie down and die? Well, yes, of course you can, but what I’m saying is: that’s not

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

feature

Issue No. 1

(Un)timely considerations on old and current issues

Donatien Grau

feature

Issue No. 1

Criticism has not been doing well lately. The London Review of Books, Europe’s biggest-selling literary publication, would no longer...

fiction

Issue No. 20

Track

Nicole Flattery

fiction

Issue No. 20

My boyfriend, the comedian, took pleasure in telling me about rejection – how it came about, how to cope...

feature

September 2013

9/11 Emerging

Joseph McElroy

feature

September 2013

Others have it worse, have had, will always. ‘We,’ though, own the record now for largest building collapse.  ...

 

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