Word: cloth
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...making headless mannequins like the ones in his How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies). They come outfitted in 18th or 19th century dress, but in a wild-style fabric that's from another time and place altogether. It looks at first like "traditional" African patterned cloth--and it is--but the tradition turns out to be complicated. As Shonibare discovered years ago, those "African" wax-print textiles are actually produced by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then started selling them in Africa, where they were adopted as, ahem, native...
...symbol of the unstable elements that go into racial and national identities, the cloth was perfect--and it was also gorgeous. Shonibare set to work using it for his signature mannequins. Dummies in more ways than one, his headless figures are oblique meditations on the complexities of cultural identity, coming at the question from the indirect angles provided by wit, ambiguity and beauty. In his ensemble piece Scramble for Africa, the 14 life-size figures arranged around a table represent the colonial powers that carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where they helped themselves to what...
...French secularism note that the Scientology trial is based on fraud accusations, not religious practice. Meanwhile, the burqa offensive is aimed at protecting the rights of women forced to efface themselves by covering their bodies entirely. "The rights of women isn't an issue of a few centimeters of cloth, but the burqa is the symbol of the oppression women suffer, so this debate should be encouraged," says Siham Habchi, president of the Neither Whores Nor Submissive women's movement, referring to the parliamentary initiative. (Check out a story about Europe's "veil wars...
...British student Meredith Kercher's murder flickers on a laptop screen as Bremner points out what she deems critical flaws in the collection of evidence. After placing rulers on the sides of a bloody shoeprint, for example, a blue-rubber-gloved hand reaches down with a piece of white cloth and scrubs the bloody mark off the tile floor before putting the cloth into an evidence tube. This happens three times for three separate footprints. In film footage taken at least a day later, another team of investigators attempts, using photographs, to place where the footprints had been. "They should...
...followed, however. Many priests' spirits proved weak and their flesh willing--notably the sybaritic Pope Alexander VI, who installed his teenage son as an Archbishop in 1493. Fernando Lugo, the current President of Paraguay and a former bishop, is accused of fathering three children as a man of the cloth. And while abstinence does not inevitably lead to child molestation, critics are quick to draw a link between priestly celibacy and recent pedophilia scandals...