Tausif Noor will write a series of articles examining eclecticism as a mode of contemporary visual practice and contextualizing historical and contemporary attitudes toward eclecticism—skeptical, ambivalent, laudatory—to situate these practices in the longer history of global modern art. Noor’s writing will generate connections between historical modernists and contemporary practitioners in the Euro-American tradition and artists working well outside the Western domain whose practices take up eclecticism as an aesthetic and political ideal to resist co-optation. He will read the causes and effects of eclecticism, both as a cosmopolitan phenomenon that reaches horizontally across disciplinary lines and as a tool that allows for critical interrogations of race, ethnicity, class, and nationalism.
Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His criticism, interviews, and profiles of artists can be found in ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, frieze, Jewish Currents, The Nation, the New Yorker online, the New York Review of Books online, the New York Times, and the Poetry Project Newsletter. His essays have appeared in collected volumes published by Paper Monument and the India Habitat Center and in catalogs of the work of artists including Alex Da Corte and Ficre Ghebreyesus. Noor has organized exhibitions, lecture series, and events in Philadelphia and Berkeley, including solo exhibitions of Shwarga Bhattacharjee at Twelve Gates Arts (2022) and Asif Mian at FJORD (2018). From 2014–15 he was a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow in India, where he worked at the Kochi Biennale and the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). He has also worked at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow from 2017–20.