The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon

Anchored in artistic practice, this vibrant collection of essays and writings spans a period from 1992-2017 and the work of leading artists such as Adel Abdessemed, Richard Avedon, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling, Omer Fast, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Alfredo Jaar, Glenn Ligon and Shen Yuan. A key figure in British and international art, Gilane Tawadros draws difference to the surface, recuperating it as a potentially radical frame through which to understand contemporary art and the everyday world. Playing with forms of writing, from critical analyses to fictional narratives, the book functions as a practice-based meditation on how to write about contemporary art.

Gilane Tawadros is a writer and curator. She was the founding Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) in London which, over a decade, achieved an international reputation as a ground-breaking cultural agency at the leading edge of artistic and cultural debates nationally and internationally. She has written extensively on contemporary art and curated a number of important exhibitions in the UK and internationally. In 2012, she was the first art historian to be appointed to the prestigious Blanche, Edith and Irving Laurie Chair in Women's Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The Leftovers of Translation
1. But What is the Question? Art, Research and the Production of Knowledge
2. Extra-Extra: Interview with Raul Ortega Ayala
3. Dissonant Chorus
4. Shen Yuan: The Leftovers of Translation
5. Voices Off: Interview with Susan Hiller
Part II: The Banality of Difference
6. 'We are the Martians...'
7. Van Leo: Self-Portraits
8. Shirani Shahbazi: The Banality of Difference
9. A Case of Mistaken Identity: Notes from the Scene of the Crime
10. Electrifying Eve
Part III: Re-siting the City
11. The Real Me
12. Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting
13. Alfred's Favourite Tree
14. The Leopard
15. Maps of Desire
Part IV: Studies in a Post-colonial body
16. The Revolution Stripped Bare
17. Studies in a Post-colonial Body
18. Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art
Part V: Relocating the Remains: History and Representation
19. Strangers and Barbarians: Representing Ourselves and Others
20. Telling Tales: Keith Piper's Relocating the Remains
21. Sweet Oblivion
22. Godville: Interview with Omer Fast
Part VI: Going Global
23. Going Global: 4th International Istanbul Biennial
24. Detonations: Jonathan Hernández and the Rongwrong series
25. Modern Europeans
26. Slipping Away (or Uncompliant Cartographies)
Part VII: Transmission Interrupted
27. Interruption in Four Acts, or Disappearing Irises, Broken-down Buses and Ceramic Citroens
28. Egypt at the Venice Biennale: 1967 and The Year That Changed
Everything
29. From Zero to Infinity: The Work of Adel Abdessemed
30. Reading (and Curating) from Right to Left
31. Dissonant Divas: Sonia Boyce, Sound and Collaboration
32. A Thousand and One
Index