Books

In 2021, Hend Elbalouty started researching the relation between art and social class in Egypt and created a performance inspired by the local street dance and music in Egypt (Mahraganat). In her artistic work, Hend strives to produce and participate in socially aware dance pieces, constantly exploring the role of Art as a tool to empower the individual and bring out those neglected modes of expression. With her recent publication "Mahraganat Dance in Egypt: Between Acceptance & Rejection", she now continues this exploration within the form of an artist's book.

Hend Elbalouty (EGP/DE) is a choreographer, performer and author, based in Cologne. She holds a MA in Performing Arts from Academy of Media Arts Cologne, a BA in production design from institute of cinema studies in Egypt and 3 years degree in contemporary dance from Cairo Contemporary Dance Center. In recent years, Hend was interested in the challenge of using Arabic language – in Germany – as an artistic tool. This approach often challenged the perception of Arabic language in the western art world, and was the core of many projects in the last three years such as for the video exhibition “FrauenGold'in Hamburg, the dance performance “The Kitchen” in Cologne, or “Absence”, a group exhibition at Coculture Art space, Berlin, as well as the video installation “hell vol.1” in Cologne.

In 2022 Hend was awarded the “Kunstpreis der FREUNDE der KHM 2021”, which honors outstanding artistic achievements by KHM diploma students and graduates.

When conventional language does not equip us with the tools to speak about ourselves, we create our own. Slang expresses words and feelings that break down boundaries. It is a form of protest and fills in the gaps.

The Queer Arab Glossary is the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang. This bold guide captures the lexicon of the queer Arab community in all its differences, quirks and felicities. Featuring fascinating facts and anecdotes, it contains more than 300 terms in both English and Arabic, ranging from the humorous to the harrowing, serious to tongue-in-cheek, pejorative to endearing. Here, leading queer Arab artists, academics, activists and writers offer insightful essays situating this groundbreaking glossary in a modern social and political context.

With beautiful, witty illustrations, The Queer Arab Glossary is a powerful response to pervasive myths and stereotypes around sexuality and an invitation to take a journey into queerness throughout the Arab world.

Contributors include Saqer Almarri, Nisrine Chaer, Sophie Chamas, Rana Issa, Adam HajYahia, Suneela Mubayi, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Hamed Sinno and Abdellah Taïa.

The Queer Arab Glossary was made possible with the generous support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC, Mophradat, Bashar Assaf and Mohammed Fakhro.

Foreword by Rabih Alameddine

I Will Always Be Looking For You – A Queer Anthology on Arab Art brings together the works of 31 artists from 13 Arabic-speaking countries, with literary contributions by 24 writers from across the region and its diaspora. The individual texts span a wide variety of genres – poetry, essays, fiction, experimental writing – and enter into dialogue with the visual artworks that accompany them. In this interplay, the definition of queerness in the Arab world is both documented and expanded – not as a fixed identity, but as a generative force, a method, a rupture and a refusal. The book represents the first purposeful collection of intergenerational artistic voices in one and the same volume, creating an important archive of queer voices in Arab art that is at once intimate and collective.

The book was commissioned by the Lebanese feminist collective Haven for Artists, translated by Rayyan Abdel Khalek, and designed by Marwan Kaabour. For its launch, editors Yasmine Rifaii and Nadim Choufi enter into a conversation with Dayna Ash from Haven for Artists.

Building on the foundations of the first two issues, Synthetic Agencies invites a rethinking [and unthinking] of the assumptions, polarities, and discontents surrounding the notion of agency. Traditionally defined in Western thought as the capacity to act and effect change, agency is inseparable from questions of power and the often invisible structures through which power operates. The various contributions interrogate how agency is produced, constrained, or distributed through the systems of knowledge, design, and governance that shape our built environments, technologies, media, and cultures. They were are invited to right (as much as write on) agency, reflecting on how it operates across different scales and contexts, and imagining alternative worlds or configurations. Ultimately, Synthetic Agencies understands agency not as a fixed attribute but as a contested lens through which we might read, reshape, or resist the conditions of the present.

With contributions by Amine Houari, Driss Ksikes, Fehras Publishing Practices, Hamed Sinno, Helga Tawil-Souri, Lada Hršak, Mayada Madbouly, Myriam Ababsa, Nzinga Biegueng Mboup, Ola Hassanain, Omer Shah, OPPA, Salma Barmani, Samia Henni, Tarek El-Ariss, Zaidoun Hajjar.

In its second issue, Manufacturing Narratives, Makan focuses on how interrogating narrativity can provoke fundamental questions about how societies define or choose to accept societal or historical truths in today’s world. Spanning across [and beyond] the Mashreq and Maghreb, the various contributions reflect a shared space of inquiry that bridges geographies and fosters emergent dialogues across shifting territorialities. This issue invited contributors to right (as much as write) narratives: to question authorship and its social collectivities, to retell alternative public histories, to explore gender roles, and to unsettle the exoticism, folklorization, and political textures of fiction as a practice of indiscipline. Together, these contributions re-articulate the genealogies of our present through the pluralities of the past, offering tools to imagine and manufacture alternative futures, and realities otherwise.

With contributions by Ala Younis, Bari Abbassi, George Bajalia, Karim Kattan, Karima Kadaoui, Tamkeen, Kenza Sefrioui, Lahbib El Moumi, Laila Hida, Maureen Mougin, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Monica Basbous, Nadia Tazi, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Salma Barmani, Sonia Terrab, Soufiane Hennani, Yto Barrada.

One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people. 

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing. 
— Max Porter

A debut collection from the Palestinian poet—Modern Poetry in Translation’s ‘Poet in Residence,’ 2024—a bilingual assembly of forty-eight poems in which each work accounts for a single kilogram; a body’s mass; a testament to a sieged city; a vivid and visceral voicing of the personal and the public in the midsts of unspeakable violence.

Translated from the Arabic by the poet with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher

I am not deep, although my eyes are, like a black sea that has been forgotten, as many have told me.

Noura Alsouma’s zine “Nawar’s Sketchbook” is a liquid lament by the Berlin-based Syrian visual artist and printmaker, riveted to eyes that see and therefore shed tears, channeling the heartfelt exposure of the sketchbooks Noura fills to the bleed.

With a moving text by the artist in the original Arabic, reproduced in her handwriting, as well as in English translation by Suja Sawafta.

In the face of utter devastation, Palestinian poets offer their words as mournful testimonies of grief and war, but also of unwavering hope and resistance despite all. In collaboration with Espace Magh, we are proud to present “GAZA, Is there life before death?”: an trilingual anthology of poems written by Fatena Al Ghorra, Hend Jouda, Nour Baaloucha and Wadah Abu Jamie, as well as Charles Ducal.

Edited by Mohamed Ikoubaân and Taha Adnan, the book consists of three parts: the Arabic poems, their French rendering, and newly translated Dutch versions. Across these languages, poetry figures as a bulwark against the degradation of humanity. The book forms a tribute to those who continue to carry out the voice of their people in spite of their occupation and annihilation.

Poëzie is een daad van verzet op een plek waar de hoop lijkt te zijn weggevaagd. Het is een blijvend bastion tegen menselijke degradatie. De Palestijnse dichters Hend Jouda, Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha en Wadah Abu Jami getuigen in hun poëzie over de oorlog op Gaza en de veerkracht van hun volk. Samen met Charles Ducal maken ze deel uit van GAZA, Is er een leven vóór de dood? Deze drietalige bloemlezing, samengesteld door Taha Adnan en Mohamed Ikoubaân, brengt hun gedichten in het Arabisch samen met vertaalde versies in het Nederlands en in het Frans.

En collaboration avec Espace Magh, Moussem présente une anthologie trilingue de poèmes écrits par les poèt·ess·es palestinien·ne·s Hend Jouda, Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha et Wadah Abu Jami, accompagné·e·s de Charles Ducal. Dans GAZA, Y a-t-il une vie avant la mort ?, iels témoignent de la guerre à Gaza et de la résilience du peuple palestinien : des poèmes devenus acte de résistance là où tout espoir semble avoir été écrasé.

De dichtbundel is gepubliceerd ter gelegenheid van het gelijknamige programma dat op 24 juni 2025 plaatsvond in Espace Magh: een avond waar poëzie werd voorgedragen als hulde, als echo van waardigheid en solidariteit. Zoals Taha Adnan aangeeft in het voorwoord: wij hebben niet de rol van spreekbuis willen spelen. Hier is het woord aan Gaza.

De gedichten in het Arabisch (Palestina) en het Frans van Fatena Al Ghorra, Nour Baaloucha en Hend Jouda zijn afkomstig uit het gelijknamige boek, Anthologie de la poésie Gazaoui d'Aujourd'hui, vertaald door Abdellatif Laâbi en samengesteld door Yassin Adnan (Éditions Points, 2025). De Nederlandse vertalingen uit het Arabisch zijn tot stand gekomen in samenwerking met de Onderzoeksgroep Arabistiek en Islamkunde van de KU Leuven.

Doorheen deze drie talen brengt het boek een eerbetoon aan zij die de stem van hun volk blijven uitdragen, ondanks hun bezetting en annihilatie.

Teksten:
Fatena Al Ghorra
Hend Jouda
Nour Baaloucha
Wadah Abu Jamie 
Charles Ducal
Taha Adnan

Vertalingen:
Abdellatif Laâbi
Taha Adnan
Jean-Marie Gerard
Danielle Losman et le Collectif des Traducteurs de Passa Porta
Nisrine Mbarki 
Heleen Mercelis 
Roumaisa Boulbahaim
Hanna Jacobs 
Dilara Karataş
Freya Moonen en Jade Gevers

A multilingual, feminist and original publication edited by Kulte Éditions in Morocco, TAMO, a journal where art, history and contemporary issues intertwine, unashamedly thinks, discusses, criticizes, promotes and denounces.

Contributions by Hassan Hajjaj, Leila Kutub, Abdellah Taïa, Dalila Ennadre, Lilya Ennadre, Rim Battal, Junko Toriyama, Younes Benmoumen, Ali Essafi, Mririda n'Aït Attik, Apolonia Sokol, Azzedine Saleck, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Younes Rahmoun.

The fast-growing stinking escaped waste-loving wall-breaching self-cloning other-than-natural no-man’s tree is a 4000-word bilingual English-Arabic photo essay examining the ecological, political and historical significance of ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven) in occupied Palestine. Introduced by the Jewish National Fund during its Jerusalem Forest afforestation projects from the 1960s to 1980s, this tree flourished across various urban fringes, roadside areas and seemingly abandoned land. Known for its pungent odour, which earned it the nicknames ‘tree of hell’ and the ‘stinking tree’, it is now classified by the Israeli Ministry for the Protection of the Environment as an invasive species. 

Drawing on her formative experiences in Palestine and an interest in trees as political agents, Palestinian architect, artist and researcher Areej Ashhab provides a first-hand account of the invasiveness embodied by this unregulated, fast-growing weed-tree. The text is enriched by annotations by Catalan-British trans writer, researcher and community organiser Ailo Ribas, who unpacks the concepts of 'weediness' and explores issues of belonging and resistance within Palestine’s settler colonial context. Accompanied by recent photographs of the tree across Palestine, the publication lays bare the intricate root system and complex ecologies that underlie our geopolitical narratives.

This publication was realised through the support of Sharjah Art Foundation’s annual publishing grant (2023). 

A compilation of recipes from the Arab world that were presented by artists for Mophradat's online cooking show Lentil Space.

Adapted from its namesake online program produced by Mophradat, co-curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Reem Shilleh, from 2021 to 2023, this book is a celebration of the varied cuisine of the Arab world and its relationship with inherited food practices and the cultures of cooking and talking about food.

With contributions by Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad, Deena Abdelwahed, Laila Hida with Amine Lahrach, Mohamed Abdelkarim with Abla elBahrawy, Nadah El Shazly, amongst many others, this cookbook includes recipes chosen and prepared by the artists in an intimate setting coupled with stories both personal and about their art practice. 

This anthology presents a selection of over 100 texts by some sixty contemporary Lebanese women poets, reflecting the plurality of voices that tell, each in their own way, to the many facets of the same country. The trilingual book (in English, French and Arabic), edited by Nada Ghosn et Paulina Spiechowicz, published after four years of research, is accompanied by artworks from Etel Adnan, Laure Ghorayeb, Huguette Caland, Afaf Zurayk, Manar Ali Hassan, and Jana Eid.

During these troubled times that Lebanon is going through, the anthology of contemporary Lebanese women poets aims to give a voice to those underrepresented in literary studies and the art world alike.

This poetry book aims at carving a path made of a plurality of voices: around sixty poets and over one hundred texts that tell, each in its own way, the many facets of a single country, like a kinetic atlas, a lyrical fresco carried by reading, traveling, translating, and contemporary art in the broadest sense.

Contributions by Violette Abou Jalad, Etel Adnan, Sana Al-Bana, Hoda Al-Naamani, Susanne Alaywan, Manar Ali Hassan, Thérèse Aouad Basbous, Romy Lynn Attieh, Ritta Baddoura, Rita Bassil, Valérie Cachard, Huguette Caland, Elmira Chackal, Andrée Chedid, Majida Dagher, Ranim Daher, Frida Debbané, Amanda Dufour, Mireille Eid, Leila Eid, Jana Eid, Nada El Hage, May Elian, Tamirace Fakhoury, Claire Gebeyli, Rim Ghandour, Laure Ghorayeb, Hala Ghosn, Joumana Haddad, Katia-Sofia Hakim, Darine Houmani, Inaya Jaber, Mariam Janjelo, Edvick Jureidini Shayboub, Hana Khatoun, Vénus Khoury Ghata, Michèle Gharios, Nadine Makarem, Noha Moussawi, May Murr, Linda Nassar, Amal Nawwar, Myra Prince, Violaine Prince, Rouba Saba, Nohad Salameh, Christiane Saleh, Roula Saliba, Mo Maria Sarkis, Nada Sattouf, Maha Sultan, Yvonne Sursock, Samia Toutounji, Nadia Tuéni, Hyam Yared, Sabah Zouein, Afaf Zurayk.

Trilingual edition: Eng, Fr, Ar.

Dolce Stil Criollo’s fifth issue, "Extraordinarily Apotropaic," aims to rethink reality in its current ordinary form by discovering and creating charms and rituals for changing it into one where there is less harm. The issue features poems in multiple languages; a map of dreams; a video game-turned-manga; a section that functions as a kineograph; a collaboration with the Huni Kuin people; and more. We also curated a collective project, “Cinema of Hope,” which brings together 11 moving image artists in search of the apotropaic moment, caught on film. 

The cover of our fifth issue features one of five “santinho” inserts. Designed like prayer cards, they contain a collaged portrait of a musical artist (Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Iya, Swatch, Devil Gremory) on the recto and the rap lyrics they wrote in response to our theme on the verso.

Contributors include Andrés-Monzón Aguirre, Aykan Safoğlu, Azul Caballero Adams, Belinda Zhawi, Daniel Machado, Daniel Moura, Devil Gremory, Enorê, Esvin Alarcón Lam, Gabriel Massan, Hick Duarte, Itamar Alves, Iya, Jennifer Pérez, Jesse Cohen, Johan Mijail, Juan Pablo Villegas, Kasra Jallilipour, Kent Chan, Keratuma (Mileidy Domicó), Laura Huertas Millán, Lucía Melií, Lucía Reissig & Bernardo Zabalaga, Maria Thereza Alves, Masha Godovannaya, Mayada Ibrahim, Najlaa Eltom, NIna Djekić, Ophelia S. Chan, Pivaratu, Pivete Nobre, Ricardo Pinheiro (Ganso), Roberto Tejada, Sofía Córdova, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Swatch, Thales Pessoa, and Thiago Martins de Melo.

Languages: Spanish, 
Portuguese, English, Japanese and Arabic

Published on the occasion of Mudun Short Story Prize, an international competition that pays tribute to cities around the Arab world which was launched by the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah (UAE), in 2021, Mudun: Stories from Arab Cities brings together the 19 stories—10 in Arabic and nine in English—that were shortlisted for the prize, including the winning submissions.

Texts by Neetha Kurup, Soraya Morayef, Ashton Eleazer, Noora Alhashimi, Lynn Cheikh Moussa, Ramzi Maqdisi, Fatemah Raed Al Awadh, Barrak Alzaid, Bhoomika Ghaghada, Sami Raghad, Naima Abdul Wahab Abdullah, Diar Murshid, Wajdi Al Ahdal, Ben Addi, Nawaf Al Mazmi, Maryam Mirza, Laila Kubba, Ahmed Fouadeldin.

An exploration of the performativity of the law within Egypt's spectral legal reality.

The publication dissects material collected for Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk's film On Trials, a work-in-progress that uses modes of documentary and fiction making. In it, they reflect on sites where legal proceedings take place. And listen to all manner of actors from within the realm of the law including, lawyers, a TV camera operator who frequents courtrooms, a former inmate, on whose body the legal specter has left unutterable marks, and tailors who specialize in uniforms.

Born to an Egyptian father and a Polish mother, Jasmina Metwaly is a Cairo-based artist and filmmaker, and member of the Mosireen collective. She likes to work with people and their histories, texts, archives, images, scripts and drawings. She is interested in how stories create stories, and how they leave the space of one reality and enter another, intertwining the boundaries of both. Rooted in performance and theatre, her works focus on process-based practices that have a social function that generates tension between participants and audiences.

Filmmaker, writer and freelance journalist Philip Rizk was born in Germany, raised in Egypt and is based in Cairo. His practice has moved beyond the documentary mode that directly engages with realities of historical moments, allowing the documented image to be infiltrated by imaginary worlds. Rizk is part of the video collective Mosireen.

Abu Jildeh and Al-Armeet looks at anti-colonial insurgency in Palestine through the story of the Abu Jildeh bandit gang, a group of farmers from the greater Nablus region who rose up against the British colonization of Palestine. From roughly 1931 to 1934, the band resisted both the British occupation and Palestinian feudal landlords, before they were eventually caught and executed by the British army. Their rebellion, amongst others, paved the way for the 1936 Revolt, a mass uprising against the British colonization of Palestine and the planned Zionist colonization outlined by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Although the 1936 Revolt was ultimately crushed, it presented a formidable challenge to the British Empire. Its echoes still reverberate today. 

A historical narrative unfolding through text, drawings, and archival documents, this book, first published in 2017, is now reprinted in a new edition augmented by an English-language translation.

Bilna’es (in the negative) is an a-disciplinary platform that seeks to find new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work. Functioning as an interdisciplinary publishing space with releases ranging from music to video games, exhibitions, publications, and yet-to-be-imagined forms. Bilna’es was initiated by Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas, Muqata’a, and other anonymous figures as a way to support artistic communities in Palestine and beyond.

The story of a meeting between a woman and a man linked by music for one night, in a nuptial dance of bodies and words doomed to failure: an ode to desire by the Franco-Moroccan poetess.

Rim Battal (born 1987 in Casablanca, lives and works between Paris and Rabat since 2012) is a French artist and poet.

Edited by Yasmina Naji.
Translated into Arabic by Abdelilah Khattabi.

“With this collection of texts, reflections, questions, documents, we invite our readers, colleagues, and peer organizations to engage in difficult, often fraught, discussions about sexual abuse in art spaces. We do not want these conversations to always start at zero, as if a lot of work around sexual abuse hasn’t been done already. There is copious activism, scholarship, and creativity on this topic, if one wants to find it. What this publication would like to do is contribute to the work that has already been done and to be a waypost toward what remains to be done.”

Commissioned and edited by: Karim Kattan and Mai Abu ElDahab
Contributors are Adam HajYahia, Habiba Effat, Karim Kattan, Mai Abu ElDahab, Marnie Slater, Naira Antoun, and Salma El Tarzi

Notes compiled and written by Ahmed Medhat, Marina Samir, Nana Abuelsoud, and Salma El Tarzi, with edits and comments by Sahar Mandour
Translation from Egyptian Arabic of “Notes on Justice” by Yasmine Haj
Copyedited and proofread by Jenifer Evans
Designed by Loraine Furter and Naïma Ben Ayed

What role will self-publishing play in the 21st century? Will the new kind of book printing develop to become an alternative to electronic communication? How is it possible to distinguish subversive gestures and New Biedermeier?

NO-ISBN – On Self-publishing investigates extraordinary books that withdraw from the international book trade. A register contains 1,800 items that have three features in common: they are recent, printed on paper, and circulate without an ISBN. This is the first Arabic edition produced within the context of the exhibition How to maneuver: Shape-shifting texts and other publishing tactics, with the support of Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi.

NO-ISBN – On Self-publishing provides an outline of media history from 15th century book printing to the present time, a schedule of micro- and fanzine fairs from four continents and manifestos of historical and current avant-gardes. They are interspersed with texts about the international boom of artists´ books, written by protagonists of self-publishing. This first, richly illustrated reader offers an apparatus to discover a new, yet uncharted terrain.

Arabic edition.

This publication comprises four essays and one conversation with contemporary artists and curators discussing their experience of becoming mothers as professionals in the arts, its reality and effects. While their reflections represent a similar strata of art worker in terms of background, class, and career trajectory, the impact of instruments of patriarchy on rendering maternity invisible that they describe is recognizable and insidious.

Contributions by Mai Abu ElDahab, Basma Alsharif, Lara Khaldi, Mary Jirmanus Saba, and Mirene Arsanios with Nikki Columbus.

Edited by Mai Abu ElDahab
Published by Mophradat and Archive Books
Text design layout by Valerie Arif
Arabic and English