What is NOW?

Text Sarra Alayyan

There is perhaps no word more pervasive than Now, now.

In Arabic, Now, al-aan, rings more melodic and more urgent than its English counterpart. Translating to “the time is now,” al-aan is a demand and a provocation. For some, the hasty and end oriented, it denotes a presence. And for others, it’s circular, meandering and of its own time, like steeping sage in water of no particular temperature.

When we posed the question to our community, Palestine, death, and artificial intelligence loomed large, but so too did a sense of bewilderment. The late Mark Fisher forewarned this moment wherein the driver of history was no longer “homesickness for the past … now, it is the impossibility of the present”. A sense of imminent and constant loss permeates a Now that is at once empty and overflowing with everything it is and isn’t.

For editors as much as our contributors, it seems that Now is not arriving. It is out of time. The genocide that must end now is not. The occupation isn’t, either. The environment must heal now, but it is only getting worse. The future we need desperately NOW is not coming, while something entirely more dark is taking its place. How, then, can we even begin to grasp a present moment that’s mutated in inexorable change-but-not-change?

In search of an answer, we reached out to our community with a simple (or pointedly difficult) question: What is Now? Their answers range from intimate and personal, at times only comprehensible to themselves, to more political and socially tuned, piercing the current zeitgeist. Nonetheless, they all capture moments in which Now means everything or nothing at once—perhaps, that is the only constant.

Hannah Elsisi – Historian and curator

Now, like perfect love, is unsynced. For Mahmoud Khaled as for Félix González-Torres and Hazem Harb, too, whose Now is a haunting beach, disjointed yet fundamentally contiguous from Deira in Gaza to Alexandria in the west and Tripoli in the east. We feel Now, if following James Baldwin, we “like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others … do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world”.

Marcelina – Singer

Forever and ever

@onewiththeinternet – Meme account

Fig. 1: Escape

Sharon Rose – Artist

So much on my mind now. Now, it feels eternal. And blasphemy all around me. Rage, rage and grief and shock, mingled with faith and hope, and a purpose that ignites an old, dormant flame from an ancestral memory. I pray to God—how do I transmute this painful reality that my skin absorbs into an armour and sword? That pours out from my spirit, like a wave, crashing down the walls my skin built to sense a lonely separation. To be a drop in the ocean, that roars instead. How do we get out of our shell, where we hide and pretend we aren’t astray, but there’s a real world out there… for us to be in, together, and that’s very exciting. Praise God.

Noura Tafeche – Artist

In June 2025, the YouTube page of ‘Israel’s’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs promoted ads claiming “record levels of humanitarian aid, delivering millions of meals daily” to Gaza. Self-anointed as “one of the largest humanitarian operations in the world right now”, these videos erase the facts of ‘Israel’s’ ongoing blockade on aid and deliberate mass starvation—one among countless calculated, weaponised extensions of a decades-documented genocidal machine. Thinking of the notion of now, I carve into this word the image revealed by such videos: flagrant, prolonged impunity, supremacist colonial savagery carried out with nonchalance, and the corruption of every linguistic and visual device bent in genuflection to serve absolute betrayal, denial, and ravishment of truth—yet also the desperate attempts of the ZioAmerican imperial edifice as a harbinger of its long-awaited fall.

Becoming Press – Publishing house

In Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo’s new book, Exocapitalism, capitalism produces different “worlds” with different “nows”, and exploits the latency between worlds—a world that is 20 seconds ahead, can exploit the time-gap, buying something for 1 in the future and selling it for 2 to the past. We should be careful of this “now”, and we should be especially cautious of “trying to live in it” because whose now are we talking about exactly?

Zein Majali -Artist

Hypergambling, nature, return migration.

Abdulhamid Kircher – Artist

Boy.Brother.Friend – Fashion magazine

At Boy.Brother.Friend, when we think about ‘now’, we can’t not think about the rise of AI and its impact on subjectivity. This image from photographer Sohrab Hura reminds us of thinking through technology and its advancements with historian Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics:

“The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”

The crucial question is not whether AI will eventually become human, but rather what fundamental challenges arise for our subjectivity and sovereignty precisely because AI will never be human.

Ayham Hassan – Fashion designer

For me, it’s the MUSE of IMMORTAL MAGENTA—the colour that doesn’t exist!

Sharon Rose is a profound source of inspiration. She embodies true resilience and captures the spirit of immortality in a way that resonates deeply. Her ability to rise above challenges and remain steadfast serves as a powerful reminder of the strength in Palestinian Haifa. The breathtaking photoshoot by Nicola Delorme showcases Sharon’s unique beauty and character, capturing her essence in a way that leaves a lasting impression. This moment is not just a personal highlight; it represents my unwavering fascination and passion for her artistry. To me, she is truly the embodiment of NOW!

My MAGENTA! Love you forever, Ayham Hassan

Therese Raffoul – Fashion designer

In my fashion practice, many of my core references are rooted in animalism and instinct. This time, I was fixated on images of snakes shedding their skin, identifying heavily with this cyclical ritual. Funnily enough, it’s the Year of the Snake, marking one of the most significant sheds—whether organic or by chemical burn. Now feels like peeling back the layers that no longer serve us and reflecting on those stripped away by the atrocities around us. Nothing can ever be the same, and I explore this personal and collective timestamp in my upcoming collection, May We Shed Fear.

Zayn Qahtani – Artist

On an earth that has intertwined its roots with internet cables, and where robotic neural pathways fuse with our own, it truly feels like an evolutionary time. We are no longer creatures of isolated tribes, but rather operate as a hyperglobal, hyperconnected collective and it is impossible, in this mycelial form, to be silent when a part of the network is actively under attack.

Mourning the Me I Used To Be II (2024) is a sculpture-drawing I made that speaks to this—a shedding and grieving of the past self, of naïveté and innocence, of obsolete notions of what it means to be human. We may all be a touch cyborg, but in tandem, possibly more human than we have ever been.

Sumayya Valli – Architect

“Hopelessness is only economical and convenient in the short term.

The hard work of hope produces liberation.” A note to a book by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Wish You Were Here).

Hollywood Superstar Review – Anonymous arts and culture criticism site

Now is caught in an ailing, malaise-wrought hypostasis. Now could be mayo bottles chained up in a South East London Morley’s or artist Gili Tal’s Leporello (2025), a work of modern gothic inception displayed on a billboard by a motorway.

South Asia Archive – Archivist

Duality > dichotomy. All the things that feel imminent, urgent, and necessary in this moment: mostly sedition. Freedom, joy, courage. Literacy. Belonging. Materiality. Legacy. Conviction. Discipline. Transformation. Symbiosis. Continuance. The world is just beginning.

Amad Ansari – Archivist

A few things that are now: Gaza, Y2K retrofuturism, archives, the internet. Though this graphic, a logo of Al-Azhar University in Gaza, is at least 25 years old, it exists in perpetuity on the Internet Archive’s servers—even as the IOF targeted and destroyed much of the actual university in November 2023. The logo’s low-res 3D rendering looks dated today, but still evokes the optimism around technological futures at the time. Accessible in the now, the 463×770 pixels GIF becomes a portal into both the past and future of Gaza, and yet another symbol for the consistently relentless spirit and resilience of Palestinians.

Nicholas Korody and Victoria Camblin – Collaborators and researchers, editors and curators

Saad Khan – Archivist and founder of Khajistan

My favourite cover this year is the February issue of Urdu Digest. Its stripped-down, end-times imagery rips open the present, cutting through deceptive globalised propaganda with razor-sharp precision—Elon Musk portrayed as the devil. Inside, three essays pose poignant questions: “On one side the banner of peace, on the other side deceit?” (p. 3); “Elon Musk: human or devil?” (p. 35); and “Manufactured poverty and hunger: the terrifying truth” (p. 46).

In the wake of the western human-rights discourse’s shameless collapse, this issue speaks directly to the end-times anxieties of many (echoing the Last Hour omens that we in the Islamicate world know all too well) while unmasking the vacuous morality and unrelenting duplicity of the west. I think of this issue when I think of our now.

DJ Gawad – Producer

Hi, please put this picture of my cat. This is from now.

Rahel Stephanie – Chef and entrepreneur

In a time like NOW, the past is constantly being repackaged. Nostalgia flattens. Practices once born of constraint – of making do, making last – are lifted from their contexts and reframed as aesthetic. You see it in design choices, in eras and atmospheres referenced without recognition or respect. It isn’t always malicious. But it is rarely neutral.

The present is shaped by fatigue. By burnout, instability, and the pressure to keep going. So the past becomes something to hold onto—not to reckon with, just to aestheticise. Nostalgia fills the void left by exhaustion and disconnection. What gets remembered is shaped by what flatters. And that tension – between what’s easy to look at and what’s harder to hold – is what now seems made of.