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 In the Shade of a Tree – who was responsible for the art direction – and the project co-lead Jana Traboulsi.
With/for: University of Bristol (2024–26)
The books live in four 'exhibition rooms', designed to be explored in a linear fasion, much like a museum experience. Contextualising texts are available alongside each room, and clicking the image of a book 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, ever present, whilst English translataions are consistently available to non-Arabic speakers.
Much of the structure grew out of the project team's 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 against a backdrop of Israel's illegal war on Lebanon, where key partners, friends and materials are 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.