This zine represents the culmination of an art writing workshop held between September to November 2023 with15 enthusiastic, committed and erudite participants from universities across the UAE. The workshop sought to nurture critical reflections on select artworks from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection by a new generation of writers, artists, poets and thinkers against the backdrop of the exhibition In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, which ran from 15 July to 24 September 2023 at the Foundation. We were deeply aware that the artists featured in the exhibition—with many of whom we have nursed longstanding relationships—spoke to an embodied experience of the concept of diaspora. What we didn’t anticipate was just how much the students— selected through an open call—would connect with these narratives and histories and make them their own through the lens of their personal histories of migration.

The workshop’s three modules involved questioning the role and relevance of criticism, pitching reviews to editors and an exploration of various traditional and unconventional art writing formats. We subsequently commissioned the participants to review one artwork each of their choosing from a list of key works from the exhibition.
 

As we steered the process of editorial feedback, the world around us began to implode. Many of our participants remain directly impacted by the consequences of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The texts they evolved thus reflect the collision of our acute moment with long-term strategies for living with injustice, war and exile. Manifesting either as free-floating poems, unsent letters, lyrical reflections or probing reviews, the texts in this zine consider how we can speak to art at challenging times like these and how it may even speak back in the form of latent ideas, radical politics and solidarities.

— Rosalyn D’Mello & Jyoti Dhar