Decolonising the book
A bilingual online exhibition and digital archive of Arabic book arts, commissioned by Dr Zeina Maasri (University of Bristol) in partnership with the British Library, Al-Furat Bookshop (Beirut) and the Azzawi Archives (London). We developed the site and co-designed the UX and UI as part of a close collaboration with Sophie Demay (In the Shade of a Tree) and Jana Traboulsi.
With/for: University of Bristol (2024–26)
The books live in four "exhibition rooms," laid out with care, where clicking an image surfaces its record in the underlying Library. This blurring of the border between 'exhibition' and 'archive' makes the link between between them direct rather than hidden. The whole platform is bilingual by design, built so that Arabic is the primary language without alienating English readers.
Much of the structure grew out of our mutual discussions and research into how archives and exhibitions translate to the screen, guided by workshops into understanding the history and contemporary context of Arabic typography led by Jana. The project was completed, despite the outbreak of war in Lebanon where key partners and materials were based, through an extraordinary collective effort.
The archive recovers a largely overlooked golden age of Arabic book arts, from the 1950s to the 1980s. This was a period when publishing across Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Syria became a site of both aesthetic experimentation and anticolonial struggle. Artists, poets and intellectuals worked together to transform the book in its content, form and very conception. The platform's Library credits that creative labour: cover design, illustration, calligraphy are all cross referenced and searchable across the archive, surfacing work often missing from existing bibliographic records.