Collage by Buntu Fihla
I have an essay out in Chimurenga's excellent magazine, Chronic. I've liked the work Chimurenga has done for a long time, so it was an honour to be asked to contribute.
I wrote an essay about the UN mission in South Sudan, wilful forgetting, and the fantasies of international observers. You can read it here, or below the fold.
Read MoreI have a new piece out with Small Arms Survey, looking at the conflict in Unity state, South Sudan, in the wake of Kiir's decree, dividing the country's 10 states into 28. You can read it here.
Back in January, a new issue of Asymptote came out. In the nonfiction section, which I edit, I was happy to publish pieces including:
I have an essay out in the catalogue of Jenny Holzer's exhibition, War Paintings, which is running at the Museo Correr in Venice, from 7 May to 22 November. The exhibition was curated by Thomas Kellein, and the catalogue is published in cooperation with the Written Art Foundation.
You can purchase the catalogue here, or you can read my essay here. An earlier version of the essay was published by Media-N, and could be read here.
The essay begins:
Behind the canvas, the water looks cold and unforgiving. It is as if the words were written onto ice crystals, black on blue, and where the canvas is still dark and liquid, I have to step closer in order to read them. Only when I lean in can I see the file number at the top of the page, (0062-04-C | D 369-69278), which indicates that the painting is based on a government document. It is difficult to read the words.
Fig I. in (JIHAD) time, 2014, oil on linen, 57 x 44 in. / 147.3 x 111.8 cm. Text: U.S. government document. © 2014 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Slowly, I make out the handwritten lines that begin page 99 of the U.S. military’s report on the actions of the Special Forces personnel that beat and burnt eight prisoners in Gardez, Afghanistan, before dousing them with cold water and sending them out into the snow and ice. It begins: “I that my Renown is mentioned in (JIHAD) time I was a childe.”
I have an essay out with Small Arms Survey on the situation in Abyei, which you can read here. As a taster:
The current situation is eminently productive for the GoS. The deferral of a political resolution to Abyei’s future allows it continue to reap the benefits of the oil revenue from Difra, which it is supposed to share with the Abyei area, while also placating the Missiriya, who graze unopposed in northern Abyei, without the consent of the Ngok Dinka. The United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) plays a role in GoS’ current strategy. In order to minimize tensions between the two communities, the peacekeepers have created a security cordon around the centre of Abyei, in order to protect the area in which the majority of the Ngok Dinka live, and allow the Missiriya pastoralists, who annually migrate to the north of Abyei during the dry season, to graze their herds without encroaching on Ngok Dinka agricultural land. The creation of this cordon has had several unintended consequences. Whereas previously the Missiriya would negotiate with the Ngok Dinka over the routes they took through Abyei, the northern pastoralists now graze freely in the north of the territory. This undermines relations between the two communities; annual grazing meetings used to be the time when debts for the thefts and killings of the previous year were addressed, and migratory routes agreed as part of a complex calculus of alliances, kinship, and shifting ecological conditions. For many Ngok Dinka, the Missiriya now graze at will, with UNISFA effectively functioning as their bodyguards.
I have a new piece out on Unity state, South Sudan, which looks at the SPLA's late-dry season offensive. You can read it here.
Fig. 1. in (JIHAD) time, 2014, oil on linen, 57 x 44 in. / 147.3 x 111.8 cm. Text: U.S. government document. © 2015 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used with permission.
I have a new piece out in Media-N, on Jenny Holzer's redaction paintings. A version of this essay is also forthcoming in the catalogue of Jenny Holzer's 'War Paintings' exhibition, currently on display in the Museo Correr in Venice. The catalogue is edited by Thomas Kellein, and is being produced in collaboration with Frankfurt's Written Art Foundation. You can read the piece at it appeared in Media-N here.
This is the beginning of the piece:
Behind the canvas, the water looks cold and unforgiving. It is as if the words were written onto ice crystals, black on blue, and where the canvas is still dark and liquid, I have to step closer in order to read them. Only when I lean in can I see the file number at the top of the page, (0062-04-C | D 369-69278), which indicates that the painting is based on a government document. It is difficult to read the words.
Slowly, I make out the handwritten lines that begin page 99 of the U.S. military’s report on the actions of the Special Forces personnel that beat and burnt eight prisoners in Gardez, Afghanistan, before dousing them with cold water and sending them out into the snow and ice. It begins: “I that my Renown is mentioned in (JIHAD) time I was a childe.”
I have yet another essay out with Small Arms Survey, this time on the situation in Abyei, on the Sudan-South Sudan border. Read it here.
I have a new essay out on the conflict in Unity state, South Sudan, with Small Arms Survey's HSBA project. You can read it here.
I will be talking about redaction, fiction, and falseness at the New School on April 25th, from 2:10 - 3:40pm, as part of Art in General's, 'What Now? 2015: The Politics of Listening'.
A version of my Grammar of Redaction, which was exhibited at the New Museum's Temporary Center for Translation in Summer 2014, was published in Archival Dissonance: Knowledge Production and Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris/Ibraaz, May 2015). You can read the entire grammar here.
Over at the excellent Creative Time Reports, I have an essay out about the conflict in South Sudan, the United Nations, and the weather, with photographs by the wonderful Jérôme Tubiana.
You can read it here. This is how the essay begins:
February 28, 2015. Chicago, U.S.A.
For months the park below my apartment was a white sheet, the trees pencil drawings on a blank canvas. Winter coats Chicago, and the cold contours everything. Whatever may separate me from the millions who live here, for the long months of winter, we are together, struggling against a wind that makes me feel like I am wading through water. Now though, the snow is beginning to melt, awaking angry patches of red earth. Spring has arrived, and no one is helping anyone else get a car out of the snow. Life is no longer a question of how to bear conditions beyond our control. People’s postures have changed. They walk upright; they can plan again. The city opens up, and with it comes the promise that we can move in space and not simply sit at home, stuck in time.
Sitting in front of this prelude to spring, my morning takes me to South Sudan, where I spend much of my life. The Sudan Tribune is running a story on the United Nations (UN), which is setting up a sanctions program to target the leaders of the groups involved in the civil war. The conflict, which began in December 2013, sets the government of Salva Kiir, the sitting president, against his former vice president, Riek Machar, and his rebel force. A leaked report on the conflict—of dubious authenticity—recommends excluding both men from a future transitional government, which the report proposes should be overseen by the AU and UN. Only four years after the international community congratulated itself on South Sudan’s secession from Sudan, it is having second thoughts. My inbox contains a litany of NGO reports demanding transitional courts and accountability for war crimes. Historians may no longer agree with Thomas Carlyle that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” but they certainly didn’t tell the journalists and politicians. Reading the news from afar, one would be forgiven for thinking that the fate of South Sudan depended on the actions of just a few men—21st-century Napoleons—and that life was simply a matter of their intentions, unconstrained by the world around them.
Skype sounds. It is a friend in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, saying hello. I have only one question: How is the weather?
I am the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, and we have a new issue out. I am particularly proud of the nonfiction section, which includes Grégoire Chamayou on drones, an epistolary exchange between the wonderful Semezdin Mehmedinović and Miljenko Jergović on Susan Sontag and other matters, prose poetry from Syria, the Soviet literary icon Ilya Ilf, and the memories of the Martinican writer Raphaël Confiant.
The production site at Tor, Unity state, South Sudan--abandoned since an SPLA-IO attack last December, the empty offices are littered with the carbonized remnants of vacation requests and invoices for fuel.
I have a new piece out with Small Arms Survey, based on field research over the last two months, on the conflict in Unity state, South Sudan. You can read it here.
I also have another new piece, also out with Small Arms Survey, on the situation in Abyei, Sudan/South Sudan.
I have a new essay out in Onsite 32: Weak Systems. It is about Beaumaris, Wales, the British class system, and Brecht, amongst many other things. Read it here. This is the beginning:
The excavator made short work of the sheds. Its power shovel easily broke through their corrugated iron walls, rusted by a century of sea spray, to reveal piles of old fishing tackle and the remnants of half-built boats. Amid the destruction, debris from the sheds fell onto the smooth stones of the beach. The sky had the same green-grey hue as the pebbles, as if God had run out of colours in Anglesey and painted this Welsh island with the murky remnants of his palette.
Further along the beach, a woman is walking her dogs. They sniff at the water’s edge, eagerly searching for a gift offered up by the sea: a small crab perhaps, or else Mr Jones’ unwanted office lunch, tossed out of his car window as he drove along the winding seaside road and now returned to dry land by the tide. The woman is searching, too. Her head is bowed down, as if in prayer, and her eyes scan the water’s wake. She bends down, picks something up, and cradles it in her hand. It’s a shard of porcelain, with fine black ink work depicting a castle, hidden under a hazy glaze of blue, yellow and red. It could be a page from a children’s colouring book, hardened by the sea. ‘Children,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘learn from bright colours, because the fantastic play of colour is the home of memory without yearning, and it can be free of yearning because it is unalloyed.’
She looks towards the sheds.
I have a new working paper out with Small Arms Survey, Contested Borders: Continuing Tensions over the Sudan-South Sudan Border, which surveys the border zone since 2013, in the midst of the two countries civil wars.
As part of the New Museum's Temporary Center for Translation exhibition, which housed excerpts from my Grammar of Redaction, Six Degrees, the New Museum's blog, is publishing a series of texts around the themes of the exhibition. First up is an excerpt from the novel I am working on, Redacted Mind, introduced by the wonderful Omar Berrada.
I have a new piece out with Small Arms Survey on the situation in the 14-Mile Area on the Sudan-South Sudan border.