Kaleem Hawa

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  print October 2022

  Abbas Zahedi

  In Abbas Zahedi’s exhibition “Metatopia 10013,” a hanging loculus posed architectonic questions. This centerpiece, Waterphone & Automatic Sprinkler Prototype (10013) (all works cited, 2022), was a distillation instrument composed of brass and stainless steel. Above it dangled its counterpart: a quasi dehumidifier with a polystyrene base, which filtered the room’s moisture through calcium chloride. Later, in a performance, the instrument would be played like a viola, a makeshift bow on the metallic sternum generating an echoing screech.

  On the gallery floor, Zahedi had placed two sets of hand-cut

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  film August 17, 2021

  Space Oddity

  AN ANDROID NAMED FRIENDSHIP is sent to Earth on a peace mission from the faraway galaxy of Procyon, but something goes wrong upon atmospheric entry: Instead of landing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she finds herself in Jordan during Black September, the 1970 military conflict between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that followed in the wake of Israel’s mass Palestinian depopulations of 1967. Stranded in Amman, the android, designed by computers to arrive with a “fully axiomatized system of ethics” and a penchant for Charlie Parker, is captured

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  books October 05, 2020

  Open City

  Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties by Zeina Maasri. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 342 pages.

  TWO WHITE WOMEN IN BIKINIS, feet planted in the froth of the Mediterranean, backdropped by Beirut’s iconic Raouché rocks. Bannered across the top left corner of the photograph, in yellow, an unlikely milestone—THE DAY THEY ABOLISHED WINTER—accompanied by looks of self-satisfaction, as if the pair had done it themselves. This image appeared in a December 1969 issue of The Economist, in an ad placed by the National Council for Tourism in Lebanon (NCTL). Backed by