

BOMB 151 Spring 2020

Editor’s Choice
Bouchra Khalili’s The Radical Ally
Édouard Glissant’s Sun of Consciousness
Jasmine Guffond’s Microphone Permission
Thalia Field and Abigail Lang’s Leave to Remain
Interviews
Art: Amani Al-Thuwaini and Andrea Hasler
Art: Chitra Ganesh
by Tausif Noor
Fiction
Poetry
Portfolio
Comic
Essay
Bouchra Khalili’s The Radical Ally by Sophie Kovel
In February 1970, the Black Panther Party (BPP) sought political support from the French dissident writer Jean Genet, after his play The Blacks, which had recently traveled to New York, suggested he might be an ally.

Last spring, inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theory of mondialité, I created an experimental performance salon at The Kitchen, featuring sound stories with an attitude of globality and an improvised/ambient/chanting vibe.

This spring, Vienna’s experimental label for “new punk computer music,” Editions Mego, releases an anxiety-inducing record by Australian-born, Berlin-based sound artist Jasmine Guffond.

Two friends flee from a band of vengeful hunters in the 1820s Northwest and dream of striking it rich.
Charles Atlas by Erica Getto
Since the ’70s, the filmmaker, video artist, and pioneer of “media dance” has recorded exceptional bodies in motion—dancers, drag queens, and punk musicians.

Two artists recast the iconography of consumerism—one into tradition-bending Kuwaiti dowry chests and the other into sculptures evoking raw flesh.

From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.

Paramodernities juxtaposes scholarly texts with movement, deconstructing iconic dances by Ailey, Balanchine, Cunningham, Fosse, Graham, and Nijinsky.

In her paintings, videos, and installations, Ganesh plays with the distinction between art object and artifact, myth and history, to posit alternative, emancipatory futures.

Bruce Boone Dismembered selects from four decades of unflinching, intimate prose and poetry on gay life by the cofounder of San Francisco’s New Narrative movement.
Telegram by Verónica Gerber Bicecci
Alphabets are limited; it’s the arrangement of letters that produces meaning.
David Berman committed suicide, and I’m like a blackbird that has flown into a bay window and awoken in a flower box, dizzy in gardenia shade, trying to get un-stunned and back on the wing before the neighborhood cats come round.

I am a woman who wakes up hungry. Tom touched only coffee till noon. You do what you’re capable of at some point, so Tom and I left each other.

First I was Ren’s guest, a role that indicated only the short length of our acquaintance, rather than what it would become later: the strategic adherence to a balance of formality and intimacy designed to showcase only my most appealing qualities.
A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me

‘Now here’s one I like!’
Or—‘Stop me if you’ve heard this,’ but
this story’s the exception. It’s
vouched for by Science and actually
happened. You judge.
under the sun by abrownrecluse
And in that dream I felt a warm bright light.
The Lost Art of Raw Recording by Ian Brennan
Re-embracing the full sonic spectrum in the era of binary digital sound.
