Randhir Singh’s photograph Sector 5 Saket captures a ubiquitous scene in South Asia: the neighborhood cricket match. A stack of bricks stand in for wickets, field boundaries are demarcated by random objects, and the players’ attire is a mismatched cacophony of color. However, the protagonist of Singh’s photograph is one of the match’s onlookers: the … Read More
At 10 pm my mom got the call her eldest brother died. At 4 am she FaceTimed his face. At 6 am his smoke swirled clockwise into the smoke of strangers. 10 pm here is 7:30 am the next day there. 10 pm there is half past noon the same day here. At 10 pm … Read More
Sunando Sen was an Indian immigrant living in America. In 2012, at 46, he fulfilled his dream of opening a print shop in Manhattan. Six months later, a woman pushed him off a subway platform and into the path of an oncoming train. In her own words, she “hated Hindus and Muslims” and had been … Read More
The world is rose-colored, sweet, and sour in Norwegian pop duo FLTY BRGR GRL’s new music video “Sweet Boy,” premiering today on Kajal. The single comes off the band’s debut album Love You Forever, due for a late September release. Blending cool bubblegum punk riffs with garage pop, “Sweet Boy” is about unrequited love and crushes that hit … Read More
A Poet’s Quarrel, by Denver based Indo-Caribbean artist Suchitra Mattai, is an artwork made out of another artwork. Like many of Mattai’s recent pieces it is a textile intervention on a found artwork – embroidery on a landscape painting. Using bright yellow and red thread Mattai has embroidered large lightning bolts onto an otherwise idyllic … Read More
A wall of soft words. Bangla script as sculpture, with pillow-like volume and skin of shimmering sari fabric. The formal beauty of written Bangla catches the eye of the uninitiated. The title, The Spell Song, heightens the mystery of the text. For Bangla speakers the softness will transcend the physical to the linguistic. The phrases … Read More
Born in Lahore, Pakistan, hybrid-artist Ayesha Raees spent her childhood moving frequently. As displacement became a facet of her identity, it also started showing up as a common theme in her creative work. In many poems, such as in “SI Unit,” she describes her impartial existence being displaced from childhood to womanhood: “I spent much … Read More
When I sit at my desk most days, I try to convince myself that it’s not winter – that the sunlight I see scattered across my view would make me sweat if I went outside. I know that if I snuggled up to my window, my nose to the cold pane, and looked down, I’d … Read More
NYC-based singer, songwriter, and producer, Melika, dropped the new video for her track 1010 last week. The video, directed by Kateryna Czartorysky, begins with her walking into a bedroom colored in indigo and magenta fabrics. Before her head falls onto a pillow, her body transcends into the ethereal. “Respect we moving slow // Breathing through … Read More
Hangama Amiri is memorializing the everyday lives of contemporary Afghan urbanites. Combining a fashion designer’s toolkit with the history and language of painting, Amiri is creating rich images that place Afghan women at the center. We see a colorful bazaar, banners for Khatool Mohammadzai, the first and most senior female general in the Afghan National … Read More
