Светлана Сараева

When a bomb falls on a building or a town, it exposes all its guts,” said Mohamad Hafez. His elaborate models of annihilated streetscapes and ruined buildings replicate the devastation of the war in Syria, where Hafez was born. In October 2016, I entered his studio in the Westville neighborhood of New Haven during the annual City-Wide Open Studios event. The walls were covered with his sculptural structures, intricate pieces depicting exposed rebar and protruding electrical wiring. Hafez—by day...

Meriem Bennani’s new artwork, Your Year by Fardaous Funjab, features the most recent hijab in the artist’s fictional line of high fashion headscarves. This thirty-second video, part of the Public Art Fund’s Commercial Break series, features an ever-evolving hijab that can be worn throughout the year. One headcovering commemorates various Islamic holidays as well as secular events. As the seasons change, the hijab morphs on the Barclays Center’s “Oculus” screen into eight distinct versions, ranging from generic autumnal attire to a headscarf for Ramadan...

Nick Cave created his first Soundsuit after the Rodney King beating in 1992. Cave was sitting in a park, feeling vulnerable and cast aside, when he saw a discarded twig on the ground. Later he fabricated a symbolic suit of armor, using hundreds of collected twigs. The Soundsuits became integral parts of Cave’s practice, and this original experience also awakened a sense of civic responsibility in the artist. The buoyant appearance of the Soundsuits, composed of kitschy materials such as beads and plastic tchotchkes, belies their serious connotations...

The artist and writer Dushko Petrovich was walking home in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, when he thought of a title for a new publication: The Daily Gentrifier. Petrovich had been on the road, doing interviews for Adjunct Commuter Weekly, a magazine he edited and published that catered to the interests of higher education’s growing population of adjunct professors. With The Daily Gentrifier, Petrovich—who is now a tenure-track professor at School of the Art Institute of...

The Brooklyn-based artist Jesse Chun was living with her family in Hong Kong as an expatriate when the handover took place, in 1997: one flag was lowered and another one was raised, a symbolic event marking the end of British rule over the country and the transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China. When I met Chun to talk about her work in September 2016, the artist said, “I didn’t move, but the country changed over night.” This shift in power and feeling of displacement without...