Post Your Map :: We will regularly present a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
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In the first person - In your own words
We trawl the news media so you don’t have to
Media you make - stories you tell
True insight into the real direction of our collective purposes
Musings from the Worldtown cast.
Post Your Map :: We will regularly present a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
Artist: Joseph Shahadi
Title: TV Eros
Artist’s Description:
I have always been fascinated with in-between states. I think that is partly my personality and partly because I’m Arab American: in the culture but not of it. My grandparents immigrated to the US from Lebanon at the beginning of the 20th century and I grew up watching cartoons, reading comic books and drawing in my sketchpad, dreaming. When I was a kid my father called me into his workshop in the garage and showed me an old National Geographic pictorial of Beirut from before it was broken into a million pieces. We stood there flipping through it and he said, “This is what it looked like…it was beautiful” A few years later my dad was dead and like Beirut he was only alive for me in pictures. In the world of pictures, nothing ever goes all the way away. But it does. And we are between the two, staying and going, always. We are lousy with ghosts.
I grew up to be an artist to try and make sense of this.
The tension between austere formality and the vulgar energy of American pop idioms characterizes the work I make in different media. Whether that is a result of the hybrid element of my identity I could not say, which I suppose is the unique condition of second generation Americans. But in my work I tend to explore related themes of particular significance to Arabs in post 9/11 America: shame and exposure, surveillance, authority, and voyeurism.
When I made these images I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia turns the familiar world strange, surreal. Night after night I sat up watching television, not asleep or entirely awake. Eventually I picked up my camera and began to photograph the flickering TV screen, one image-making machine facing another. The resulting pictures are hyper-real flashes of data and noise. I love the pixelated texture and painterly quality of them, some saturated with color and some dreamy and pale. I shot them at random and when I was compiling them afterwards they all seemed to be about frustrated desire. And, like my thoughts when I made them, feverish.
Garrote (Sex Doll)
Untitled (Anna Nicole)
Beneath the Darkness of His Outspread Hair (Ducky)
Synth
I Killed My Husband (Mary Winkler)
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JOSEPH SHAHADI is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. He makes performances, video/installations and photographs and his work has been produced and exhibited in New York, regionally throughout the United States, and internationally, in Europe. His most recent work, Self-Portrait with DNA (Sand Nigger), can be seen at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) as part of their show GUTTED. He writes about the relationship of culture to politics at VsThePomegranate. For more information about his work see his website.
Lumped together, Autumn/Winter 2010 is readily told by the cast of London Fashion Week: who to wear, what to wear, and how to wear it - but who’s doing the telling? Adjacent to the utra-high fashion set in West-Central London’s setting of LFW headquarters at Sommerset House is an opening for amateur and Do-It-Yourself status budding designers. The “Untold” is a collective for designers and creatives that have limited access to entering the competitive world of high-fashion. This is a story that’s universal for any aspring fashion designer, but the Untold collaboration focuses on designers with backgrounds that classify them as “underprivileged.” It may lean the story in one direction, but it also makes it more interesting.
Contribute your story to a forthcoming volume: “Mama Says Good Girls Marry Doctors.” This book focuses on the pressures on South and East Asian women who have grown up in North America to be “good girls.” It seeks to collect the stories of such women, and their traumas, victories, and defeats as they face the control that their immigrant parents try to exercise over them in relation to the choice of a partner, or a career, or their freedom. We want to know how negotiating these pressures affects young Asian diasporic women, their relationship to feminism, to their parents and to their partners or siblings.
“The street artist known as Princess Hijab is, as she puts it, hijabizing ads in Paris. She’s drawing the Islamic head cover onto immodestly dressed models in public advertisements and billboards. Why? It’s unclear. She has a manifesto, written in the third person, on her website, but it’s oddly-punctuated and generally baffling.”
London Fashion Week wraps up today.
Don’t cry in to your 5 inch pumps…
Catch up on our coverage!
Know the true meaning of Malcolm X, and you cannot help but be moved. You cannot help but stand up taller and aim to live with greater courage, committed to the upliftment of oneself and of all people. The life and death, struggle and change he underwent from 1925 to 1965 still stands as a powerful source of learning and inspiration. The burden now falls upon those of us who know to ensure that new generations aren’t deprived of also truly knowing Malcolm, and living better because of it.
The following resources and selected quotes have been gathered as a brief, introductory primer for those unfamiliar with Malcolm X.
:: Dispatches from London Fashion Week ::
This Is Worldtown joins the street style bandwagon, and is it ever fun!
We spotted these stylish and pulled together men and women in and around London Fashion Week venues.
This Is Worldtown had the opportunity to backstage at the Belle Sauvage show for their Autumn/Winter 2010 collection. Check out the slideshow for all the action, from start to finish.
Spotted via Africa is a Country: Die Antwoord - a trio from South Africa that happens to be the hipster obsession du jour, has previously been referred to as a “wild and savage rap group from the deep, dark, …
While the runway shows get the glitz & glam, Fashion Week is essentially a trade event.
The designer exhibitions are where to find some of the most interesting, innovative and stylish creations looking to express an idea and be available in a shop near you.
This Is Worldtown shares some notes on exhibitors that intrigued us.
:: Dispatches from London Fashion Week ::
To see the Autumn/Winter 2010 collection from Jena.Theo come down the runway at London Fashion Week, it is difficult to believe that just half a year ago the duo behind the line, Jenny Holmes and Dimitris Theocharidis, were participating in their very first catwalk show as part of Fashion Fringe at Covent Garden.
Post Your Map :: We will regularly present a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
“The street artist known as Princess Hijab is, as she puts it, hijabizing ads in Paris. She’s drawing the Islamic head cover onto immodestly dressed models in public advertisements and billboards. Why? It’s unclear. She has a manifesto, written in the third person, on her website, but it’s oddly-punctuated and generally baffling.”
Post Your Map :: We will regularly present a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
Post Your Map :: We will regularly present a featured artist, writer or performer who is exploring questions of identity and personal narrative through their medium of expression.
The map is your representation. No rigid lines, no defined routes. You direct it on your own account.
Lumped together, Autumn/Winter 2010 is readily told by the cast of London Fashion Week: who to wear, what to wear, and how to wear it - but who’s doing the telling? Adjacent to the utra-high fashion set in West-Central London’s setting of LFW headquarters at Sommerset House is an opening for amateur and Do-It-Yourself status budding designers. The “Untold” is a collective for designers and creatives that have limited access to entering the competitive world of high-fashion. This is a story that’s universal for any aspring fashion designer, but the Untold collaboration focuses on designers with backgrounds that classify them as “underprivileged.” It may lean the story in one direction, but it also makes it more interesting.
