Dilek Sayedahmed, PhD

“Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even as their wealth has been drawn from global structures that decimate the cultures those objects are from? If only we could all be buffered from exploitatively neoliberal regimes by family money and luxuriously austere domestic settings.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“What is the line between being vulnerable and prostrating yourself for a system that won't recognise you? The onus is never on the system to adjust its hardness, it's on you to shape-shift and acquiesce. Do I don vulnerability as a weapon against this culture? - If you require me to be hard and harder to fight you, I will rebel by being soft like a jelly-beaned being, but like anything, you need to be softer and softer to have the same impact. Do I weaponise my own pain and cause harm to myself by revelling in that pain, nurturing it, putting myself in danger to encourage it and then working it over by verbalising it for display, to show society, I am a human being and I feel pain just like you.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“The truth was they were both inept, but it is always easier to blame others for what we cannot tolerate in ourselves, what we cannot forgive ourselves for.”
― Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born