‘What fresh hell is this? There’s an inferred question in the title of this issue. But it’s a rhetorical one. Because we know exactly what fresh hell this is. Fossil Fuel – that paralytic drug – has leeched into our collective bloodstream. It’s difficult to recognize the beasts that are eating us in this very moment.’ – Sophia Al-Maria, from the Editor’s note, The Happy Hypocrite 8

The Happy Hypocrite – Fresh Hell treats in different ways the subject of oil. Adopting an exploded methodology for intake, image and text contributions, this issue takes a hoarding, brutally accelerative approach and considers reading, too, as an unsustainable activity. Guest editor Sophia Al-Maria’s archive acts a sort of proto-Tumblr composed of school notebooks, war games and oil industry pamphlets scattered as a series of identifying clues. All windows are open, all browsers are burning: The Happy Hypocrite asks what happens when reblogged information is translated into paper-based print.

With contributions and new work by Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Monira Al Qadiri, Stephanie Bailey, Alex Borkowski, Judy Darragh, William Gibson, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Malak Helmy, Raja’a Khalid, Omar Kholeif, McKenzie Wark, Simon Sellars, Francesco Pedraglio and Lena Tutanjian.

Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist and writer based in London, UK. Her memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Collins, 2012), was published in Arabic by Bloomsbury Qatar in Summer 2015. In 2014, she had her first solo show, ‘Virgin with a Memory’, at Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK. She is the recipient of a 2015 Sundance Institute Fellowship and her work was included in the New Museum Triennial, New York, USA, 2015. In 2016, she will receive her first solo museum show in the USA with the premiere of a new series of videos at the Whitney.