Books

“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