We are pleased to share the publication of our third issue!

“For Many Returns” is written as a correspondence between Nasrin Himada and Ruanne Abu-Rahme and Basel Abbas’s The Incidental Insurgents. Engaging with writing as a process, this piece takes up the task of writing alongside, and with the artwork. In this first iteration of “For Many Returns,” Himada grapples with the limitations of grief as it is felt in relation to the poetic images of a desolate, post-apocalyptic Palestinian landscape.

“The Beloved” is the transcript for a video piece with the same title by Candice Lin. Lin takes the reader through our colonial past. Witnesses morph from “the peasant” to “glass,” “porcelain” to “the king,” to arrive at “the beloved,” the only present tense.

In “Like Piss in Motion: Race, Gender, and Filtration Systems in the work of Candice Lin” Dan Bustillo takes a closer look at Candice Lin’s use of piss to situate how histories of race and gender do not become sterile over time. This essay was commissioned by contemptorary as part of Field Perspectives2017, a co-publishing initiative organized and supported by Common Field as a part of their Los Angeles 2017 Convening.

Lastly, Gelare Khoshgozaran’s “A Cartography of Crisis through the Obvious and the Intimate” ponders the intricacies of visibility, mobility, and surveillance in relation to the refugee crisis and within the current neocolonial order, through the 2017 exhibition, It Is Obvious from the Map.