YASMEEN M. SIDDIQUI

Yasmeen M. Siddiqui is an independent curator and art critic. She holds a master’s degree in Medieval Islamic art history from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in curatorial studies from Bard College. She has curated exhibitions by Pia Lindman, Linda Ganjian, Kim Holleman, Hassan Khan, Moataz Nasr, Consuelo Castañeda and Do Ho Suh, among other artists. She received The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship. Siddiqui’s essays and interviews have appeared on hyperallergic.com, as well as in Flash Art, Modern Painters, Nka, The Brooklyn Rail, Cairo Times and Medina Magazine.

Lebbeus Woods. Pamphlet Architecture 15: War and Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press, Inc., 1993.

Lebbeus Woods changed my worldview with War and Architecture. He dedicated this book to Sarajevo and its populations who at publication time had been under siege for 14 months. Woods related the conditions of contemporary city life in the context of an iconic war-scape through, for example, photographs of Sarajevo on fire and drawings of buildings rising like shards from the earth. Woods attended to questions about the symbolic value of images of war and pleaded with readers to remember the pillars that build modernity, as well as its promises of pluralism, tolerance, progress. He amplified the crisis with a description of gunners shooting at steel skyscrapers and mosque minarets. This booklet opened the floodgates, leading me to other writings and theoretical projects; for instance, his earlier work “Berlin Free Zone 3-2.” He introduced me to the architect who first conceived the vertical city, the Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia.

Salman Rushdie. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999.

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet is built upon an intricate armature of allusions to mythology, with emphasis on the ancient tale of Orpheus struggling to win back Eurydice with music. The primary, contemporary story is about the lovers Ormus Cama, son of a Parsi father obsessed with relating East and West through comparative mythology, and Vina Aspara, who is half Greek American, half Indian. The book’s narrator, photographer Rai, also loves Vina. The world-scape Rushdie constructs is a labyrinth of stories that intersect, fragment and reconstitute. When Vina is tragically devoured, consumed by an earthquake, Ormus leaves to go on tour with “Into The Underworld,” only to hear songs he insists he wrote being performed by others across the Atlantic. This tale of rock and roll, love and the rootless is an argument for constructing a malleable yet coherent system for arranging imagery in the service of storytelling, as in exhibition making.

Giuliana Bruno. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso, 2002.

Giuliana Bruno challenged assumptions generally made about the relationship between geography, architecture and film. She shifted our attention away from the optic and reoriented our understanding of film and architecture towards the haptic—the sense of touch. Each section of this book builds Bruno’s argument for analyzing film and architecture through this lens that privileges spatial qualities and the sensory/sensual possibilities of the moving image or forms that configure architectural spaces. To animate her premise, she looks at the history of cinema, the place of travel in the context of film history, painting, maps and map making. In this interdisciplinary, non-chronological book, Bruno excavates geographic, domestic and familial landscapes spanning the last five centuries to suggest we put a different interpretive emphasis on the work of, for instance, architects, filmmakers, fashion designers and artists, pointing more directly to their intentions, which Bruno asserts have to do with erecting tactile, emotional, spatial formations.