A new film by Nan Goldin: WATCH THE VIDEO: Gaza →
For over five decades, the photographer Nan Goldin has been creating unforgettable images that traffic in the poetics of the personal. Friends, lovers and ambiguous others star in her intimate and yet operatic diaries of love, loss and longing. More than any other artist of her stature, Goldin has leveraged her success to call out the greed and inhumanity of the powerful, from the US government’s slow-motion response to the AIDS crisis that killed so many of her friends in the 1980s to the profiteering of Big Pharma and the overdose epidemic it unleashed.
The grandchild of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, Goldin has spent the past two years consumed by the obliteration of Gaza and its people. She has protested while many of her peers have remained conspicuously mute; her exemplary words and actions feature heavily in her friend David Velasco’s recent Equator essay, “How Gaza Broke the Art World”.
Earlier this year, she and her editor David Sherman began stitching together videos from Palestine – scenes of normalcy and atrocity, both – to produce Gaza, a tapestry of pain and beauty. She has generously shared the result with us. The images presented here make any number of demands on the viewer. But perhaps above all, they insist: do not look away.
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I have no more words. This is my way of speaking out.
This piece is a work in progress that stands as a record of what has consumed me for the last two years: the need to bear witness.
This is the first genocide unfolding in real time on our phones and it is unbearable. The footage in this film is from friends who visited Palestine, the brave journalists on the ground, most of whom have been targeted, and the people living it. It remains silent because music is too directive and without sound people are forced to look more intently. The film loops because what it is showing is constantly repeating. It remains unfinished because it is not over.
It’s not the time for denial and amnesia. – Nan Goldin
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End-of-year recommendation lists traditionally plump for the new or the newly relevant, vouched for in their solitary splendour. This January, Equator tries to do it differently, drawing connections between the old and the new, the east and the west, the popular and the less well-known, the mainstream and the idiosyncratic, the material and the experiential. Read on for books about eating in Mumbai, films about stardom, a Japanese war epic, and a band with a square parenthesis around its name.
If you’re a fan of Satyajit Ray, you must immediately watch Jia Zhangke’s Caught By The Tides (2024), a deeply moving, narratively radical film about China’s transformation from Deng to Xi – easily the best film I saw last year. And for extra credit, I would also recommend Shyam Benegal’s 1985 documentary Satyajit Ray, which I stumbled upon on the Criterion Channel, and was filled with a quiet rage (at myself, and the world) for having let me go so long without seeing it. — Aatish Taseer
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Peter Beinart: ‘What Israel Is Doing in the Name of the Jewish People Is a Desecration’
Nation-states as national homes; and Sir Edwin Montagu’s views on Zionism (1917)
The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten
Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies
In video from Gaza, former CEO of Pegasus spyware announces millions for new venture
After the truth-shower 