Magazine

Nicolás Jaar is a Chilean electronic music producer, composer, and recording artist who has gained critical acclaim for his innovative tracks. Jaar’s work is characterized by its unique blend of minimal techno, ambient sounds, and experimental electronic elements, often incorporating field recordings, piano compositions, and unconventional rhythms to create atmospheric and deeply textured sonic landscapes. He has established himself as a pioneer in electronic music since 2011 with the release of his debut album “Space Is Only Noise.”

In Solidarity is a series of conversations with artists and cultural workers who are reshaping creative practice and social engagement through their commitment to justice and community. These interviews explore how creative vision intersects with activism, examining the ways art becomes a vehicle for meaningful change and collective action. Through these dialogues, we celebrate voices that challenge systems, build bridges, and demonstrate that artistic practice and social responsibility are inseparable forces for transformation.

In Solidarity is a series of conversations with artists and cultural workers who are reshaping creative practice and social engagement through their commitment to justice and community. These interviews explore how creative vision intersects with activism, examining the ways art becomes a vehicle for meaningful change and collective action. Through these dialogues, we celebrate voices that challenge systems, build bridges, and demonstrate that artistic practice and social responsibility are inseparable forces for transformation.

Hiroyuki Hamada is an acclaimed sculptor whose work has been exhibited widely in prominent galleries, and whose practice has secured him notable grants including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. Hamada’s success has not managed to subdue his art’s disruptive intentions. Starting as a painter, Hamada progressively escaped the canvas’ flat surface, creating generally black and white, rounded structures suggestive of nature—whose seeming fluidity resist discursive interpretations of the dominant art world.

In this series, we speak with artists who may be overlooked by the market or art history, but who are highly respected by other artists. Catherine Czacki is one of them. Her work moves quietly across forms and disciplines, shaped by lived history, personal memory, and a refusal to separate art from the world around it. In this conversation, she speaks about her father’s silenced past, teaching through political collapse, and how art can hold space for what’s missing, lost, or deliberately erased. Catherine Czacki is an artist, musician, and educator based in New Mexico. Her work includes ceramic, wood, painting, paper mache, metal, fabric and found objects in movable parts that come together as installations. Their forms relay a past or the remnants of history re-thrown into contemporary vitality. Visual codes, symbols, and historic traces gather onto hand-sewn patchwork and its present re-invention.

Laura Peh is a novelist and founder of Cinnamon Art Publishing, an independent publishing house and roving bookshop specialising in children’s picture books, with a focus on underrepresented topics and Arabic literature. In 2024, Cinnamon Art Publishing released a new title by Palestinian writer Hooda al Shawa titled The Donkey Who Carried the War on Her Back. The title is available via Cinnamon’s website.

The Mosaic Shattered: Exile & Resistance (1949-1986)

The film follows foraged goods in their journey from wild grasses to the kitchen table. In the field, knife-bearing hands pick and dethorn the ‘akkoub, gathering it in plastic baskets that are later emptied on the street floor for neighbors to buy and prepare. Two women sit side by side at the kitchen table, ridding the ‘akkoub of the remaining thorns. But not all is well.

Irish-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi works across painting and filmmaking, merging these disciplines to explore themes of time, ritual, and human relationships that combine the urgency of the contemporary with art historical notions of composition. She gained international recognition in the early 2000s for her observational films that blur the line between documentary and artistic expression. Her paintings often feature abstracted figures and forms rendered in vivid colors, while her films are known for their meditative quality and careful attention to everyday moments and social dynamics.

Akram Al-Ashqar’s film First Picture (2006) follows a young boy, Nour, who was born in an Israeli prison. Nour, meaning “light” in Arabic, was aptly named for the hope and comfort he brought to the girl prisoners in their dark cells, illuminating their spirits in the midst of despair. The camera films Nour’s first steps as he exits the detention center after spending his first years confined within its opaque walls. Nour’s mother, Manal, was detained while pregnant for participating in the resistance against the occupation in the Tulkarm Camp for Palestinian Refugees - what was meant to be a temporary site for displaced Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba that eventually edified into a long-lasting camp built on shoddy infrastructure and condemned to the poverty of those stripped of their land and possessions and forced to flee.

Excerpts from Dr. Layal Ftouni’s “They Make Death, and I’m the Labor of Life: Palestinian Prisoners’ Sperm Smuggling as an Affirmation of Life” published in Critical Times, Duke University Press, 2024.

After 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist interests involved populating the expropriated Palestinian lands with a Jewish population. Zionist aspirations had always been conceived with European Jews in mind, but Israel’s immediate need for people and labor meant that the focus shifted to Jewish populations in Arab countries—who Ben-Guiron chillingly compared to Africans brought to America through the transatlantic slave trade. The mass-migration that occurred following the events of the Nakba were not as natural as one may be persuaded to believe, leading Israeli authorities to launch a variety of strategies in an effort to promote said expatriation. The result was a number of operations, listed in this article, that managed to secure significant waves of immigration through an emphasis on the Arab world’s allegedly widespread antisemitism, and a resulting urgency to flee the territory. This narrative, once put into motion, would continue to shape conversations surrounding Arab Jews—or Mizrahi Jews, as they are referred to in Israel—and would simultaneously set a precedent for the current weaponization of Antisemitism claims by Israel and its supporters.