جماليّات التحرّر

Decolonizing the Page

A Forgotten Golden Age of Arabic Book Arts
(1950s–1980s)

This online exhibition sheds light on a remarkable era when Arabic book arts flourished, capturing the artistic, political, and intellectual fervour of decolonization. During this period, books played a vital role in reshaping knowledge, imagination, and aesthetic sensibilities, reaching an expanding Arabic readership and global networks of solidarity.

Decolonizing the Page uncovers the creative labour of designing, illustrating and making these books. It reveals how the aesthetic concerns and political commitments of a generation of Arab artists and graphic designers transformed the Arabic book in its content, form, and very conception.

Featuring around 250 books, organized across four rooms, the displays invite you to see modern Arabic books anew—not merely as containers of text, but as aesthetically rich, designed objects.

Through this visual lens, the exhibition allows us to recover histories of decolonization. Its unfinished legacies resonate with ongoing struggles and solidarity movements today.

Books, as media technologies, are products of modernity’s standardizing effects on print cultures—through paper formats, binding methods, typographic conventions, and image-text compositions. Yet, they are also artefacts shaped by linguistic conventions, aesthetic traditions,  and distinct cultures of reading and writing. Arabic books, for instance, are read from right to left, resulting in books bound on the right, unlike Latin-script books. Rooted in a rich Islamic heritage of bookmaking and calligraphy, Arabic books have inspired artists to decolonize the page, in and through modern interpretations of Arabo-Islamic artistic traditions of the book.

The books in this exhibition reveal an aesthetic richness and visual freshness that mirrored the cultural effervescence of the Arab world at the time, combining modern experimentation with an anti-colonial impulse. While many Arab artists were trained in European academic traditions, this training increasingly came under scrutiny, as artists sought to counter Western artistic formations that they believed had alienated their work from local societies and artistic traditions. Concerns for place-based—often nationally or regionally bounded—modernism, triggered tense debates around questions of modernity, heritage and cultural identity in art and design. Decolonizing the Page highlights how modernism, as a transcultural aesthetic movement, was not only translated within an Arab context, but also how it was often radically and creatively reconfigured to serve postcolonial futures.

The exhibition showcases the work of a generation of Arab artists from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, who explored Arabic books as an aesthetic form, expanding the horizon of their art to the reproducible realm of everyday print culture. While artists were credited for their illustration (rasim) or calligraphy (khatt), they only gradually came to be credited for their design (tasmim) of books, combining previously separate book art practices into one unified creative activity. This shift marks a transitional moment in the professionalization of graphic design in the Arab world, coinciding with the rise of the publishing industry.