In Depth
Bani Abidi
By Murtaza Vali

Under the soft orange glow of a street lamp, a middle-aged woman in a royal-blue sari, its hue repeated in the deepening dusk sky behind her, sits at her dressing table nonchalantly plaiting her hair. A caption at the foot of the photograph introduces her to us: Chandra Acharya. [more]

Interview
Vasif Kortun
By Devika Singh

Vasif Kortun is the director of Istanbul’s nonprofit Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, which holds exhibitions, releases publications, and offers artist residencies. Currently closed for renovation, the center will consolidate two institutions and reopen in two buildings in 2011. [more]

John Pule
Odes of a Restless Spirit
By Jacqui Durrant

One night at a poetry reading in the early 1980s, John Pule—then a poet in his early 20s—stunned Auckland’s literary and bohemian crowd with a reading. “To that group of poets,” he says, “I would have been the last person—and a brown one at that—who after months of just listening, would suddenly burst out with the entire Ode.” The ode in question, in which John Keats relates his intoxication by the nightingale’s eternal song, which in turn throws his own mortality into bittersweet relief, was Ode to a Nightingale. [more]