The Fifth Element: A personal history

In Genesis glorie attends to the crosser of borders, the exile. It belongs to the immigrant, with his neatly tended warehouse of wheat.

Gary Dauphin

Mingering Mike Superstar: Imagined credulities

While black musicians from Count Basie to Duke Ellington to Prince Paul have brashly adopted self-aggrandizing new names, Mingering Mike gave himself a moniker that sounds like a schoolyard insult.

Sukhdev Sandhu

1+1=3: The Trine Towers

It is almost impossible to imagine it otherwise, to conceive of what New York would look like if United Airlines Flight 175 had missed its target. If the monument to the WTC were a single tower, forever mourning its absent twin.

Michael C. Vazquez, Babak Radboy

Tarek Zaki’s Monument X

You’ve seen monuments like this before.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Rosalind Nashashibi: Perfect Mute Forever

Jung once said that mythologizing “gives existence a glamour we wouldn’t want to be without.” Nashashibi seems to agree.

Will Bradley

The Headlace of Xerxes

Xerxes has a certain joyfully swishy quality, taking languorous sniffs of Leonidas’s scalp when they meet to parley, wearing clear lip gloss, and dressing like the sartorial stepchild of Liberace and Dhalsim from Street Fighter II.

Tom Morton

Sign of Allah

Allah’s mighty tag can be found in the froth of the sea and the pulp of the tomato, in the wool of the lamb and the rubber of the Nike.

Sophia Al-Maria

Naguib Mahfouz’s White Linen Suit

It turns out that meeting a Nobel laureate is far easier than meeting a washed-up and possibly castrated pop star. The difficult part is figuring out what to wear.

Anand Balakrishnan

Children of War: Kuwait

Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid Al Gharaballi were kids when Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. In January 1991 an American-led coalition initiated Operation Desert Storm with airstrikes on Iraqi army positions in both countries.

Fatima Al Qadiri, Khalid Al Gharaballi

His Dark Materials

In Wael Shawky’s Telematch series, the Egyptian-born artist revisits a German game show originally broadcast and widely syndicated during the 1970s.

Gary Dauphin

The Education of Lee Boyd Malvo

The plan was to create an army of black “super children”: seventy boys and seventy girls who would flood into the United States from a secret compound in Canada to combat racial injustice and build a more perfect society from the bottom up.

Alexander Provan

Strike the Empire Back: Episode IV: The Lord, The Homeland, The Leader

Michael Rakowitz

Some Things Can Not Be Made in China

On June 29th, 1986, our neighbors gathered in our home-war-shelter. The electricity had gone out, and our shelter had the only battery-operated color TV in the neighborhood.

Vartan Avakian

Vegan Jihad: A Conversation with Sean Muttaqi

In 1981, A Washington, DC, Punk band named Minor Threat released a song called “Straight Edge.

Kelefa Sanneh

Sherif El-Azma

Sherif El-Azma’s career up to this point, as an artist and experimental filmmaker, is bookended by two works that are formally very different but, thematically, seamlessly connected.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Jasmine on the Muzzle

In April 2001, Mei Shigenobu set foot in Japan for the first time. The daughter of an unnamed Palestinian militant and one of the most wanted terrorists in Japanese history, Mei cut an iconic figure.

Yutaka Sho

The Girl in the Red Beret

I still remember the first time I saw her. I was on my way to school in Ammo Mohammad’s carpool.

Lina Mounzer

Crossdressing

Crossdressing is a project by Simona Schneider on merchandise and border crossing.

Simona Schneider

Am I Pink?

Vartan the Brave is a warrior’s name. His name is red and he is a saint.

Vartan Avakian

Daniyal Mueenuddin: Stranded gentry

But listening to him talk about the farm and the workers and the soap opera shenanigans that go on, and how they’re connected to the political ruling class, I kept thinking of Levin, the philosopher farmer of Anna Karenina, who was something of a self-portrait of Tolstoy.

Elizabeth Rubin