Complete Love
TAKE on art|July - December 2017

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.

Ingo Niermann
Complete Love

It had grown dark. The only light came from the lamps in the park and from the street. A bald guy had gotten onto the stage and announced, “Next is Public Movement from Tel Aviv.” He read from his phone, straight from the Internet: “Public Movement is a performative research body that investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement’s actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronised procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity.”

The audience stood up and moved toward the statue of Marx and Engels. It seemed they already knew that the performance would be held there, and stood along the perimeter of the plaza that surrounded the statues. Karl followed.

The monument was located at the opposite end of the plaza and wasn’t illuminated. It seemed the city wanted to lend the already modestly proportioned figures (only two times larger than life, with a seated Marx) as little aura as possible. But at least they hadn’t dismantled Marx and Engels the way they did with Lenin.

It was a crude, ungainly sculpture that actually looked best in the dark. With their diagrammatic beards and cylinder legs, Marx and Engels recalled characters from Japanese animation. A typical friendship motif from the 19th century depicted one figure sitting and the other standing, maybe with a hand on the other’s shoulder. But Engels had been set back here a bit, to emphasise Marx’s greater significance.

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Complete Love
TAKE on art

Complete Love

It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.

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10 mins  |
July - December 2017
Delicate Animals
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Delicate Animals

The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.

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5 mins  |
July - December 2017
Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
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Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story

India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.

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4 mins  |
July - December 2017
Technologies Of Elegance
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Technologies Of Elegance

As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.

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6 mins  |
July - December 2017
why do artists write on art?
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why do artists write on art?

once, there were newspaper reviews. they connected art writing to the artist and to an audience, with immediacy.

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2 mins  |
july - december 2016
A Writer's Discourse
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A Writer's Discourse

There are two moments in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus that I come back to often. The first is an epitaph that Socrates uses to explain bad writing, which he recites (and I will now quote) in full:

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4 mins  |
July - December 2017
The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain
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The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain

The story goes that Sadequain (1930 – 1987), living in Karachi, was exhausted and in poor health. He was offered a stay at a government rest house at Gadani in 1958, so that he could recover. Gadani is located in the province of Balochistan on the Arabian Sea, a few kilometers west of Karachi. It must have felt quite remote from the city back then. The western coastline of Pakistan has long been infamous for underdevelopment and for unregulated trade activities with West Asia.

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4 mins  |
July - December 2017
Ghosts Of Ghan-Town
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Ghosts Of Ghan-Town

Landing gracefully on a rock, the camel tucked in its wings And wondered if this was perhaps Miryam Springs? This parched and desolate landscape was not what he hoped to find What of the flourishing settlement he had once left behind? 

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1 min  |
July - December 2017
Kerala Boy
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Kerala Boy

The Kerala boy stands alone, facing the sea or what looks like the sea. Water is never far from his feet. His eyes are dark and his hair is blacker than the best Tellicherry pepper. He is an inch taller than most and a little long in the tooth. He likes the language of protest. He likes the flavour of a season called ‘Left’.

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4 mins  |
July - December 2017
Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse
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Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. –Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”

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6 mins  |
July - December 2017