Category Archives: Contemporary Art

Iran Exhibition in London

There is a new exhibit on Iran at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through 12 September. If you cannot make it to the exhibition, there is a brief trailer. You can also learn about the exhibition here and there is a slide show of 15 objects over 5,000 years here.

One of the rather silly parts of the coverage of the event on the website is having images with a woman or two women (perhaps to encourage masks…) observing the items, as in the following.

Coloring Persia

In 1928 my mother, who was 6 years old at the time, received a coloring book from a neighbour. It was called “Big Circus Painting and Crayoning Book” and published in Cleveland, Ohio. On most of the pages there was a color image with the same image below it meant to be colored or crayoned in. The image above seems rather distant from the idea of a circus, but other non-circus images are of the military, a grizzly bear and Scotland.

Everyday Islam

by Kathryn Zyskowski, Cultural Anthropology

Click here to read the five articles and interviews with the authors.

This collection gathers together five articles previously published in Cultural Anthropology, by Naveeda Khan, Hayder Al-Mohammad, Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins, Kenneth George, and Arzoo Osanloo. The collection also includes interviews with the authors, who reflect on their work, as well a commentary on the whole collection from Charles Hirschkind. The articles engage with everyday aspects of living, negotiating, and constructing the world among contemporary Muslims. Moving beyond a focus on the aesthetics of dress, gender relations, or the text in Islam, the collection crosses national boundaries and thematic areas, touching on the immense diversity of nations, peoples, languages, and ideas that fall under the category of Islam. A broad array of ethnographic material is included in the collection: gathering to eat soul food in Los Angeles, navigating a kidnapping in post-invasion Iraq, a child’s relationship to a jinn (spirit/ghost) during sectarian violence in Karachi, discourses around justice in media and conversation surrounding a young man’s death sentence in Iran, and debates about the production of Islamic art in Indonesia.
Continue reading Everyday Islam

Letter to the Americans


Image by Naji al-Ali. Painted on the Palestinian side of the separation barrier close to Bethlehem.

by Ammiel Alcalay, Warscapes,
August 11, 2014,

You know as well as I do that a people under occupation will

be unhappy, that parents will fear for the lives of their precious children,

especially when there is NOWHERE TO HIDE.

You know as well as I do that a husband’s memory of his wife forced to

deliver their child at a checkpoint will not be a happy one. You know as

well as I do that the form of her unborn child beaten to death in the womb

will never leave a mother’s mind. And you know as well as I do that a girl will

have cause to wonder at the loss of her grandfather, made to wait on his

way to the hospital, and she’ll have cause to cry at the bullet lodged

in her brother’s head — You know as well as I do that watching

someone who stole the land you used to till water their garden

while you hope some rain might collect to parch your weary throat

Continue reading Letter to the Americans