Ronen Jafari likes to cook with and for friendsJuliette Berkeley doesn’t really do anything.

On 11 December 2023, a group of artists and activists took another step in their ongoing protest at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. The group, called Te Waka Hourua, used power tools and spray paint to alter the text of an English display panel in the museum’s Te […]

Hasib Hourani and Jeanine Hourani in conversation across April – June 2024 HH: What is archive to you? What is something you’ve been doing lately that feels like a process of archiving? JH: I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of archiving recently actually. I’ve been thinking about it within a broader framework of […]

In my childhood home, we had a living room that we used only for when guests visited. It was the untouched section of the house and featured a Persian-style carpet, cream leather couches, a coffee table covered with a small crochet doily, a dining table with a plastic table protector and four mahogany wall units. […]

The women have always danced until their skin gives out. Barefoot, my aunties lay their heels down for the final song. Their shoes rest under the table with the unclaimed tights someone has taken off. Its flesh belongs to another body of overtax and overburden and oversweat. My cousin will pick it up at the […]

When reflecting on institutional archives, I found myself simultaneously hopeful and anticipatorily disappointed.  Growing up between Kerala and Kuwait during the Gulf Wars as a displaced third-culture child, I must have internalised a stock image of an animated cast of ‘working professionals’, individuals unrestrained by gender, ethnicities, mobility, ability and means, who balanced personal needs […]

September 2024 This issue takes its title from the sabaar, a cactus that once grew along the borders of now-flattened Palestinian villages. Almost impossible to eradicate, the sabaar continues to reappear and grow along those same lines, demarcating where those villages once stood.[1]  Nothing is less clear than the word ‘archive’.[2] In its most basic […]

This letter was originally penned for members of Broom and Brine’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Broom and Brine operates a small organic market garden in lutruwita/Tasmania and CSA is an experimental farming methodology, pioneered by Booker T. Whatley in Alabama during the 1970s. Whatley, a horticulturist, professor and civil rights activist, encouraged farmers to […]

It was a warm summer’s day; the overly ‘fresh’ smell from the fishing boats mingled with the aroma of thousands of herded, bundled, tightly penned sheep waiting to board the next freighter. My cousins and their friends and I were sitting on, in, and around my grandfather’s boat, in the various gaps between our family […]

One squally, middling afternoon, I take a train from my home in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington up the Kāpiti coast in an attempt to recreate the conditions in which a viewer might have originally encountered the Palestinian artist Inas Halabi’s sound work Hopscotch (the Centre of the Sun’s Radiance). But ‘viewer’ is something of a misnomer. Commissioned […]

We are sitting on a bench in Ivan Franko Park in Lviv. The leaves on the trees shimmer like sequins, reflecting the midsummer sun, the shade provides relief from the heat, as do the iced drinks we are sipping. We have spoken about family, about politics, about the war, about the future. We talk about […]