Dr Zeina Maasri, (History of Art), has launched Decolonizing the Page: A Forgotten Golden Age of Arabic Book Arts (1950s–80s), a first-of-its-kind bilingual online exhibition and digital archive that sheds light on a remarkable era when Arabic book arts flourished, mirroring the artistic, political, and intellectual fervour of a heady period of decolonization in the Arab world.
Featuring around 250 books, the exhibition reveals how the aesthetic and political concerns of a generation of Arab artists from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan and Syria transformed the Arabic book in its content, form and very conception.
Created collaboratively with an international team of designers, the resource is fully bilingual (Arabic–English).
Decolonizing the Page was developed with support from an AHRC Fellowship and in partnership with The British Library, Al-Furat Bookshop (Beirut), and the Azzawi Archives (London).
You can access the resource here: www.decolonisingthepage.com.
Read more about this project on the Arts Matter Blog.