The rune singer: an ancient art revived
On the rim of the Arctic Circle, in a timber house half-buried by snow, Jussi Huovinen sits before a small fire, an arthritic finger poised to pluck a wooden kantele. Dust dances off its steel strings as snowflakes fall against the windowpane. The smell of boiling lamb warms the room. Three hundred
Statements following Oswald Mosley’s meeting in Oxford (May 27, 1936)
It is very difficult for the outsider who has not been to a Mosley meeting to realise the menace to democracy and free speech represented by his movement. It is not that the Fascists themselves go about directly causing violence and breaking up meetings: their technique is much more subtle and dange
China’s Empty Metropolis
“It doesn’t if it’s a white cat or a black cat, it’s a good cat if it catches mice.” With these words, in 1962 Deng Xiaoping proclaimed China’s new approach to revamping its feeble economy. Forty years on, this dictum which strikes at the heart of the Chinese property bubble in an econom
Invisible Wounds: The ISIS Undergoes Torture to Investigate ‘Enhanced Interrogation’
Content note: graphic description of torture The noise is unbearable – a red ragged pulse which smothers the skin at every breath, the condensation soaking into the hood until it congeals over my nose and mouth and moulds itself into an oppressive black pall. My inner thighs are burning from the s
Tea with a Stranger (Ep 1)
The ISIS interviews Oxford’s strangers over a cup of tea.
Love is Enough: Jeremy Deller in Oxford
An interview with Jeremy Deller and a review of his Modern Art Oxford show ‘Love is Enough’ Since Jeremy Deller generates his own work through what can and has been called a curatorial process, I approached the Modern Art Oxford show with the impression that it was, in its entirety, one
How to Read a ‘Freak’: A Psychobiography of Diane Arbus
“What I do in the Arbus book is what a lot of biographers do, a lot less explicitly: I try making sense of the reasons why Arbus took the kinds of pictures she did. So, I examine the subjective—emotional, psychological—origins of her art,” William Todd Schultz, author of a new book on th
Screening the Unscreenable: Atrocity on Film
Tracking shots, noted the French director Jean-Luc Godard, are a matter of morality. Jacques Rivette, one of Godard’s contemporaries, used this ruling to dismiss Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1960 film, Kapo. The story of a young girl attempting to escape the concentration camp, it was one of the earliest