Contemporary artist Golnar Adili is playing with language. Specifically the shape of Persian. For the past 15 years she has been making art that revels in the physicality of her mother tongue. She has extracted individual letters from her father’s writing and recreated them in print and sculpture, designed her own Persian pixel typography, created … Read More
Released last month, Montreal-based singer Edwin Raphael’s single “Sights Like These” brings on a trance-state almost immediately. Hypnotic, circling vocals combine with guitarist Dhruv Visvanath’s instrumentals to create a sound bath for meditation. Reflecting on moving on from hurt, lyrics like “I’m fainting & you won’t turn around” and “I’m faking but you won’t figure … Read More
If you had to assign New York-based Pakistani artist Aiza Ahmed one color from the vast spectrum that exists, it would have to be rose pink. That’s not to say that Ahmed does not experiment with green washes or blue backgrounds or reds or oranges, but of all her work and multiple series spanning the … Read More
With my broken Urdu, I read Faiz/ Bloodstreams of Persian & Urdu ghazals run through your streets/ But Ghalib’s metaphors appear on my wounds/ And Iqbal’s verses purify my sins/ Mir’s wahshat is how I make sense of God/ I decipher each and every script/ I read blood/ I wear it like skin.
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
