Blurring the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, design and painting, the innovative practice of Rana Begum RA (b.1977) is the subject of this comprehensive monograph, which takes her processes as its focus.
Begum Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan was the wife of Pakistan's first prime minister. She was born Irene Margaret Pant in Kumaon in the early twentieth century. A generation earlier, her family had converted to Christianity, and Irene grew up in the shadow of the Brahmin community's still active outrage. Always intelligent, outgoing and independent, she was teaching economics in a Delhi college when she met the dashing Nawazada Liaquat Ali Khan, a rising politician in the Muslim League and an ardent champion for the cause of Pakistan. She was immediately inspired by both the man and the idea; they married in 1933 and Irene Pant became Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan. In August 1947 they left for Pakistan-led by Liaquat's mentor and friend, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Ra'ana threw herself into the work of nation building, but in 1952 Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated-the reasons for his murder are still shrouded in mystery. Ra'ana continued to be active in public life-and her contribution to women's empowerment in Pakistan is felt to this day. Ra'ana's life story embodies all the major tropes of the Indian subcontinent's recent history. Three religions-Hinduism, Christianity and Islam-had an immense impact on her life, and she participated actively in all the major movements of her time-the freedom struggle, the Pakistan movement, and the fight for women's empowerment. She could see clearly what went wrong after 1947 and wasn't afraid to say so. She spoke out openly against the rise of religious conservatism in Pakistan and the growing role of the army. She was occasionally derided or ignored, but she never gave up. It is this spirit that The Begum captures.
For a major new presentation in 2019, Whitechapel Gallery is taking as a model its groundbreaking 1956 exhibition 'This is Tomorrow', an event which is indelibly linked to the institution's history. Organised and developed by architect, writer and sculptor Theo Crosby, 'This is Tomorrow' featured 37 artists, architects, designers and writers who worked together in 12 small groups. In the catalogue, Lawrence Alloway introduced the exhibition as "devoted to the possibilities of collaboration", the results of which "appear to be setting up a programme for the future." 'Is This Tomorrow?' will also feature 12 groups of contemporary architects, artists and other cultural practitioners to highlight the potential of collaboration, to address key issues we face today and to offer a vision of the future. Both UK and international participants will explore subjects from conflict and warfare, economic inequality, migration and resource scarcity, to education, labour, trade and technology, comparing and contrasting the ideas of the original 'This is Tomorrow' artists and architects whose concerns with communication theory, mass culture and the vernacular reflected their associations with British Constructivism and the Independent Group.00Exhibition: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (14.02.-12.05.2019).
The first contemporary survey of postwar British women sculptors from modernism to the YBA's This publication focuses on postwar British women sculptors, including Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Barbara Hepworth, Kim Lim, Sarah Lucas, Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread.
Library of Light brings together established and emerging practitioners who work with light, as material or subject, from theatre, music, performance, fine art, photography, film, public art, holography, digital media, architecture, and the built environment, together with curators, producers and other experts. Structured around twenty-five interviews and four thematic essays - Political Light, Mediating Light, Performance Light and Absent Light - the book aims to broaden our understanding of light as a creative medium and examines its impact on our cultural history and the role it plays in the new frontiers of art, design and technology. Illustrated with colour photographs and images of installations, sculptures, architectural projects, interventions in public space and works in virtual reality, the book includes interviews and contributions by: David Batchelor, Rana Begum, Robin Bell, Jason Bruges (Jason Bruges Studio), Anne Bean and Richard Wilson (The Bow Gamelan), Laura Buckley, Mário Caeiro, Paule Constable, Ernest Edmonds, Angus Farquhar (NVA), Rick Fisher, Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon, Jon Hendricks, ISO Studio, Susan Hiller, Michael Hulls and Russell Maliphant, Cliff Lauson, Chris Levine, Michael Light, Joshua Lightshow, Liliane Lijn, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Manu Luksch, Mark Major (Speirs + Major), Helen Marriage (Artichoke), Anthony McCall, Gustav Metzger, Haroon Mirza, Yoko Ono, Katie Paterson, Andrew Pepper, Mark Titchner, Andi Watson.
In contrast to buildings divided by walls, monospace buildings are determined far less by its shell than by a reciprocal relationship between space and practices, objects, materials, and human bodies. Using the example of such one-room-architectures, this book explores the potential of an actor-network-theory (ANT) approach to space in the field of architecture. Sabine Hansmann focuses on the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, England by Foster Associates (1978) to investigate the mutual entanglement of people, objects and building. She traces the work that is necessary in »doing« space and thus suggests a re-conceptualisation of space in architectural theory.
Sansaringa did not have a buffalo like the other boys in the village. So he carved himself a toy buffalo. It was beautiful but it was only a toy. What could it do? A lovely story of how the buffalo helped Sansarinaga make friends. Magical illustrations by Jainal Amambing complete the story. Jainal Amambing used gouache on paper for the illustrations in this book. The illustrations show the magical and fantasy world of Sansarinaga and also the world Jainal comes from - Sabah, on the island of Borneo. This book won an Encouragement Prize in the Noma Concours for Picture Book Illustrations organised by the Asia-Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO in Tokyo.
A leading cancer specialist tells the powerful stories of 3 adult leukemia patients—shining new light on the hidden history of the disease and the drugs developed to treat it. “A look at leukemia patients’ fear, survival and grace while fighting the disease . . . a quiet chronicle of life with and beyond leukemia, and sometimes life’s end.” —The Washington Post When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can’t function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes readers on the journey that patient and doctor travel together. Sekeres, who writes regularly for the “Well” section of The New York Times, tells the compelling stories of three people who receive diagnoses of adult leukemia within hours of each other: Joan, a 48-year-old surgical nurse, a caregiver who becomes a patient; David, a 68-year-old former factory worker who bows to his family’s wishes and pursues the most aggressive treatment; and Sarah, a 36-year-old pregnant woman who must decide whether to undergo chemotherapy and put her fetus at risk. We join the intimate conversations between Sekeres and his patients, and we watch as he teaches trainees. Along the way, Sekeres also explores leukemia in its different forms and the development of drugs to treat it—describing, among many other fascinating details, the invention of the bone marrow transplant (first performed experimentally on beagles) and a treatment that targets the genetics of leukemia. The lessons to be learned from leukemia, Sekeres shows, are not merely medical; they teach us about courage and grace and defying the odds.
In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.