Siraj Izhar

Siraj Izhar is a London based artist, activist, and organiser working in autonomous spaces and informal networks. His projects are to be found at xyzlondon.com and his writings at amplife.org. He began his art career at a squatted public lavatory in London's East End converting it into Public Life (publiclife.org) once an active hub for London's art and music scene.
COVID-19 and Our Purgatory of Consumerism
Culture/Economics/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Love in the Time of Coronavirus/SAVE/ IGNORE: popular

COVID-19 and Our Purgatory of Consumerism

By
 / 14 January 2021

Our pandemic quarantine has become the sublime enactment of Baudrillard's theory of consumption – that modern consumption, with its myth of individual liberty and choice, is in fact 'de-socialising'.

Futureshock: Herbie Hancock and the Body Politics of Pop
Culture/Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Music/SAVE/ IGNORE: popular

Futureshock: Herbie Hancock and the Body Politics of Pop

By
 / 10 November 2020

A classically trained jazz pianist who spent five years with the Miles Davis Quintet, Herbie Hancock is also a practising Buddhist whose ideas about transcending the body are realized in his funky cyborg "Rockit" video.

Plattetopia: The Prefabrication of Utopia in East Berlin
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Plattetopia: The Prefabrication of Utopia in East Berlin

By
 / 30 September 2020

With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the licence to take a wrecking ball to its nightmare of repression. But there began the unwritten violence of Die Wende, the peaceful revolution that hides the Oedipal violence of one order killing another.