Noah Simblist: Noah Simblist: Writing

March Journal, 2022

Protests are one of the basic building blocks of the political grammar of the oppressed. Protests erupt and die down, they are noisy rivers of people chanting, yelling, demanding. Following the confluence of protests in Palestine and Colombia in spring 2021, we were struck by the images that circulated about them. We asked ourselves: is there something similar about these protests? or at least their representation? One year later, what can we make of this confluence? . .

Alia Farid: Water Holds a Poetics of Relation

Burnaway, 2022

In his seminal 1997 text, Martinican writer, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant called the waters that carry ships the “blue savannas of memory and imagination.”[1] The space between shores is an abyss marked by uprooting and re-rooting, but if we stay in between these states, a poetics of relation starts to emerge. The passage of migration can be defined by the pining for a place of origin that slowly dissolves into memory, or a future harbor that soon becomes familiar, crystallizing new patterns of the everyday. But the poetics of relation found in the place in between allows for a measurement of one’s self through difference.[2] . .

Tania Bruguera: The Francis Effect

Deep Vellum Books, 2022

Stemming from a performance that originated at the Guggenheim Museum, The Francis Effect explores Tania Bruguera’s work as an artist, activist, and Cuban immigrant to the US, engaging the tension between art’s pragmatic, activist, and aesthetic possibilities. . .

Commonwealth

Publication Studio, 2022

What do we share in common? Who is the “we” in “We the people”? How can we reimagine wealth and come together for common good? . .

Artist In Residence

Publication Studio, 2021

Artist in Residence is a collection of 50 contributions from artists from around the world who were asked to answer a simple question: what would be a piece of art or performance that we could all do in our homes during lockdown? Contributions range from crafts to cooking to conversations to meditations, giving us a glimpse into some of the forms creative thinking can take during quarantine. This project was conceived in March 2020 during one of the first periods of lockdown and social distancing implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Proceeds from the sale of this book were donated in full to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. . .

Collective Listening and the Nation State

Liquid Architecture, 2021

The Beirut-based artist Haig Aivazian works in a range of media, including performance, video, sculpture, and installation; to unpack the machinations of power and the hidden ideological flows within histories such as music, sports, street lighting, and predictive policing. Based on extensive research, the artist’s practice is at once exactingly precise and, at the same time, is an avalanche of sensory information. He often links popular culture with obscure histories, illuminating their complex social and political networks. While Aivazian studied in North America and his work has been shown internationally, he is a central figure in the Beirut art scene. In addition to his art practice, he is the Artistic Co-Director of the Beirut Art Center. While Aivazian is not a musician or a sound artist per se, sound, music, performance, and collective listening have played an important role in a number of his projects. In this interview writer Noah Simblist begins a discussion about the artist’s work with a series that revolves around music and its relationship to nationalism and colonialism. . .

Dread Scott's Struggle to Reclaim Collective Memory

Art in America, 2020

One day this past fall, the usual hubbub of the New Orleans French Quarter was interrupted by the cries of hundreds of people of color, dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, who marched through the city streets like a fired up militia. They banged drums and shouted “Freedom or death!” and “We’re going to end slavery!” It was a potent intervention that asked onlookers to remember the horrors of slavery and to see its contemporary forms in structural racism. . .

Palestine, TX: A Parafiction

Art Journal Open, 2019

This is a parafictional story about a small American town and the frontier culture of manifest destiny. [1] Palestine, TX is an intersection of colonial histories, of holy lands, of conjunctions and disjunctions, where the utopian location of Zion can always be found on the horizon and catastrophe is always underfoot. This project asks: . .

Igniting The Archive

Art in America, 2017

The projects of Mexico City–based Minerva Cuevas look at the ways in which seemingly banal items like fruit, chocolate, or water can be laden with ideologies associated with global capitalism. Her conceptual gestures employ a wide range of forms, such as rebranding campaigns that subvert a corporation’s logo to reveal power dynamics and histories of colonialism, and artist-run organizations that emulate various real-world entities. . .

A Match Made in Heaven

Tali Keren: The Great Seal, 2017

In 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop was standing on the deck of the Arbella, a ship that sailed from England to the New World. He preached about the new colony that was about to be created and how it would be “a city upon a hill” – a shining example of community and charity to the world. This ship was carrying a group of refugees who were fleeing the religious persecution of King Charles I. These Puritans identified with the ancient Israelites’ suffering they had read about in the Old Testament and compared their tyrannical king to the Egyptian Pharaoh who pursued Moses in Exodus.¹ As every American schoolchild knows, the Puritans who settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, are the protagonists of the origin story of the United States of America. But this identification between Christian Americans and Jews in search of a promised land was much more than a metaphor and has proven to have major geopolitical consequences that continue to this day. . .

Double Binds: The Biennial as National and Transnational Context

Aissa Deebi: Exile is Hard Work (Haifa: Fatoush Gallery, 2018) and (Birzeit: Birzeit University Museum, 2017)

This exhibition includes two works by Aissa Deebi, The Trial (2013) and Motherland (2016). These two projects were conceived for biennials: The Trial for the 2013 Venice Biennale and Motherland for the 2016 Çanakkale Biennale. By bringing together these two works, this exhibition creates a dialogue between their themes but it also raises a number of issues related to their original contexts. . .

Two Point Perspective

Tohu Magazine

In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town of Saida that acquired mythological flourishes: One of the Israeli fighter jets that were sent to the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Ain El-Helweh, aborted its mission to bomb a school building, its pilot dropping the bombs into the sea instead. In a text for Tohu Magazine, published in 3 parts, Noah Simblist dives into Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, instigated by this true story. . .

Taming the Dancing Table: Post-humanist ethics in the age of hyper-capitalist spectacle

Terremoto, 2016

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties…The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. . .

Places of a Present Past

Publication Studio Hudson, 2015

Places of a Present Past brings together three exhibitions presented at the Pollock Gallery at SMU, Meadows School of the Arts in 2014. These exhibitions addressed the traces trauma left on particular sites; with specific focus on the colonial relationship between Japan and Korea in the first half of the twentieth century, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany and beyond. The artworks in this book are bound together by a historiographical impulse. The artists included here are less interested in the truth than the way that we feel through the legacies of past traumas. They reveal the oblique ways that we repress historical trauma, burying it in the very sites of their origin. Places of a Present Past is filled with an archaeological ethic, metaphorically digging down, both spatially and psychologically into the depths of transnational grief. . .

Campus in Camps: The Politics of Imagining a Public Sphere

MAP, 2014

The refugee camp is a lived space that functions in a state of exception. As the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, this status is both extraterritorial and extra-juridical.[1] But the camp is by definition provisional, created to respond to a disaster. It is meant to provide temporary shelter, food and other basic services to a group of people that have been displaced by a radical rupture in the fabric of everyday life. In recent memory, we can recall refugees from natural and military disasters in places such as the Congo, Syria or Sudan. . .

Dor Guez: Memoir of the Dispossessed

Art Pulse, 2013

It’s a common practice, especially in today’s globalized art world, to define artists in terms of their nationality. Trying to avoid such descriptions can be like omitting gendered pronouns. In this sense, a post-national reading of an artist is like a queer reading of an artist. This essay will look at the ways in which Dor Guez queers the borders between normative nationalist and religious positions.[1] This might seem like a biographically reductive gesture but Guez’s work is emphatically about a family’s political history that is a rich layered story, blurring the boundaries between identity positions such as Jewish, Arab, Christian, Israeli and Palestinian. . .

How do you pronounce the politics of aesthetics?

Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic edited by James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, Penn State University Press, 2013

Like Gregory Sholette, I was interested in the statement by the Stéphanie Benzaquen in section 9, towards the end of the seminars. This section was about addressing any lack or exclusion of subjects that the participants noticed. She claimed that the group had “not touched on the social and economic conditions of theories of art.” Instead, she says, “We have been living in the abstract.” She references Edward Said’s text in The Anti-Aesthetic[1] because he explicitly talks about the patterns of exclusion that exist within both writing and its interpretation. . .

Failed States

Semigloss, 2013

As I write this, another American president is flying to Israel-Palestine to address a failed state of affairs. The Zionist project has failed to produce a Jewish democratic state and the Palestinian national project has also failed to produce anything more than a state in limbo – an archipelago of partial sovereignty. The first intifada failed, the second intifada failed, the Oslo Accords failed and when it comes to the United Nations, there is a long list of failed resolutions. In 1947 UN resolution 181 recommended a partition plan, dividing Palestine into Arab and Jewish States – this resulted in a war that Israel calls a war of independence and Palestinians call the nakba, the catastrophe. After another war in 1967, UN Security Council resolution 242 condemned the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. Israel still occupies the West Bank and Golan Heights and while unoccupied, Gaza exists in a state of siege, governed by Hamas, an international pariah. Most recently, in 2012, the Palestinian Authority failed in their bid for statehood recognition by the UN. To some degree these failures also point to the failure of the United Nations itself. They also have produced another failure - that of the nation state as a site for egalitarian freedoms. . .

Trouble in Paradise: The Erasure of Memory at Canada Park

Pidgin Magazine (Princeton University School of Architecture), 2011

Canada Park, a national park and recreational area in Israel, is a site where landscape and politics intersect. Like all parks, it is a constructed environment meant to balance an experience of nature with the safe confines of culture. It has signage combining maps with textual history; clearly articulated paths; and a staff that mediates the untamed wilds of nature for the urban and suburban visitors that visit looking for a brief period of pastoral calm. This essay will tell the story of this park and the ways in which a seemingly benign green space is actually a highly contentious site of religious and nationalist reckoning. Secondly, I will look at the way that text has acted as a framework to reveal the competing nationalisms that otherwise might remain hidden in Canada Park. . .

The Art of Forgetfulness, The Trauma of Memory: Yael Bartana and Artur Zmijewski

Transmission Annual, 2011

Now an icon for the worst of humanity, the Holocaust is a reminder that any discussion of religious, ethnic, or racial essentialism has a logical endgame to which we can point in the past. Ironically, this iconic status has also allowed many to use the Holocaust to serve multiple and often contradictory ideological projects. Some religious Zionist Jews likened the late Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to a Nazi when he proposed a two-state solution, while there are Palestinian protesters in the West Bank who liken Israeli soldiers to Nazis for their participation in the occupation. These particular cycles of accusation have much to do with the State of Israel, and the consequent occupation of Palestinian land in in the wake of World War II. The history of Jewish victimhood, with the Holocaust as its ultimate example, haunts any consideration of security and safety in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . .

Heterotopia on the High Seas: Battles of Representation Around the Gaza Flotilla

Art Papers, 2011

In May of 2010, six ships called the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” sailed from Cyprus toward the Gaza Strip. Their aim was to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza[1] by delivering humanitarian aid, medical supplies and construction materials. These ships, lead by the Turkish flagged Mavi Marmara also included US, Greek, Swedish, and Irish activists. This flotilla garnered widespread international attention after an Israeli military operation against the Mavi Marmara ended with the deaths of nine activists. . .

The Nazi Fetish: Ritual Violence and the Power of Cinema in Inglourious Basterds

Art Papers, 2010

Hollywood has had a long, tortuous and often contradictory relationship with Nazi imagery in feature films. In the lead up to WW II, before the US got involved, Hollywood treated the rise of the Third Reich with kid gloves. But after WWII and especially in the last 15 years, America has increasingly used the Nazi, and in particular, their role as perpetrators of the holocaust, as a signifier of absolute evil. One aspect of these representations of Nazis focuses on Jewish victimhood and weakness. But increasingly Jews are seen in film as participants in active and aggressive resistance. . .

Revolutionary Tourism: Land, Labor, and Loss in Yael Bartana’s Summer Camp

Art Papers, 2008

This is a story about a place—a home, to be precise—built out of exile, destroyed by refugees, and built once again by outsiders. It is a Palestinian home, rebuilt in a town just outside of Jerusalem. This home is an abstract place, barely real in any functional sense, and erected on land whose relationship to real time is tenuous at best. Here, as the poet Yehudah Amichai has remarked, the air is so heavy with history that it is difficult to breathe. As a result, this story crisscrosses various wars, religions, politics, and ideologies. Even though it is the story of a house, plain and simple, Yael Bartana’s video installation Summer Camp is also a layered allegory. . .

Noah Simblist

Insurgent Political Theater: Subjects-in-revolt In Colombia and Palestine