Manar Moursi Website
Blue Black Liver
Self-published, Berlin, Germany, 2025
In Blue-Black Liver I put the scalpel to two pillars of settler-colonial literature—A.B. Yehoshua’s "Facing the Forests" and Camus’s The Stranger. I lift their sentences apart, reorder them, and stitch them back together to recenter the ghosted Arab voice. From those sutured texts the publication I let a wider anatomy unfold: livers that bruise indigo with anger, oasis pumps that siphon futures dry, Berlin art institutions that art-wash occupation. Wetness—tears, sweat, river water, desire—irrigate the text.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
Storm Over Cairo
Forthcoming, Edition Fink, Zurich, Switzerland, 2025
In my forthcoming book Storm Over Cairo I guide the reader on a journey on Cairo’s ring road and roads following the Nile North and South of Cairo to the unloved outskirts of the city. Along the way, new housing projects in the desert, mosques built illegally on agricultural land, and the soundscapes of the city, as well as ghosts from my past are brought to life.
I spent three years recording interviews with the people who live and work in mosques on the outskirts of Cairo – imams, caretakers, muezzins, contractors, lighting technicians, brick-makers. In this extended essay, I slightly fictionalize their accounts and set them beside two parallel threads: a running commentary on Cairo’s shifting urban fabric and a more private meditation on loss, distance, and belonging—an elliptical narrative that mirrors my circular voyage on the ring road. This extended essay is paired with my 120 mm and 35 mm photography—portraits of these improvised mosques and their hybrid typologies.
Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
Rivering Together
Rivering Together, Self-published, Berlin, Germany, 2025
Rivering Together collects the traces of a ten-day workshop I led at Dar Bellarj (Marrakesh) where artists, researchers, ethnobotanists, and local residents walked the dried bed of the Ourika–Issyl watershed and asked what it means to live with dwindling water. Essays, poems, recipes, songs, and photographs record how we listened to the parched valley—and to each other—to imagine fairer, more intimate ways of sharing water in a time of drought and accelerating change.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
"They Put in Their Stomach a Summer Watermelon"
Watermelon, Fabrikzeitung Nr. 369, eds. Noha Mokhtar and Gregor Huber, Zurich, Switzerland, 2021
In this short piece, I use watermelons to trace a life stretched between Cairo, Kuwait, and Montreal. I start on my parents’ new Nasr City balcony, where returnees from the Gulf debate rind-color and sweetness while wondering whether to resettle. From there I follow the fruit’s Egyptian slang—miramila for the perfect, araa’ for the disappointing—into a dermatologist’s warning that my thinning hair is turning my scalp into desert, a dating-app promise of “seedless” love, and my grandmother’s lifelong crusade for vitamins after losing her daughter. Each slice exposes another edited-out seed: the unkept promises of emigration, post-2011 politics, Rogaine, even nutrition itself.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
"An Attempt at Exhausting Mother’s Hospital Room"; "Future Womb"
Our Bodies Breathe Underwater, eds. Nour Kamel and Mariam Boctor, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt, 2021
"An Attempt at Exhausting Mother’s Hospital Room" is my own Perec-style log of bedside days and nights. Over a handful of pages I try to register everything that keeps slipping past the big medical narrative: the shade of orange creeping into a urine bag, the rhythm of suction tubes, the way baby-lotion vapour hangs in stale air, the exact sequence for turning a body without bruising it. I let these fragments repeat, drift and collide; monitors speak, letters and shampoos gain voices, grief hides inside inventory lists. The aim is the same one Georges Perec had in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris: to see whether the smallest, most easily ignored details can carry the weight of a whole place—in my case, the room where my mother’s life was slowly fading.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
Platanos y Momias
Self-published, SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico, 2021
In Platanos y Momias I string together sixteen postcard-length stories. I follow elephant-shaped objects—an elephant hat from Mexico City, real elephants in a South African park, elephant-ear pastries and plants in Veracruz, Ganesh statues in India.Each elephant object triggers a ricochet: a vanished friend, my mother’s hospital room, a job that collapsed before a revolution, an anarchist printing press, soap-slick streets, blue moon-washed houses, a joke between a banana and a minaret. These fragments pile up like souvenirs in a carry-on testing what sticks and what slips when lives are packed, shipped, and unpacked again.
Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
"Transmissions"
XO, eds. Manar Moursi, Margarita Sanchez Urdaneta , Kirsten Gill, and Catalina Antonio, Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote, Mexico City, Mexico, 2019
A jet-lagged arrival in Mexico City uncovers unexpected parallels with Cairo. Serpent gods, pyramids, engine noise and WhatsApp ghosts weave through this brief travelogue on circular time, failed revolutions and a daughter’s unresolved grief—an ouroboros of cities, myths and unfinished messages.
Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
"No Work, If You Can Fix"
Pink and Green No. 2, ed. Merve Unsal, Toronto Art Bookfair, Toronto, Canada, 2018
A piece of found-language détournement, this poem is built only from the shop signs, book titles, and flyer snippets I gathered while wandering the Chinatown mall that hosted the 2017 Toronto Art Book Fair. The building’s own stray phrases—“Magic Hair,” “Immigration Tax,” “We can’t make you younger”—tumble into a single, jittery monologue on commerce, borders, and small acts of hope.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines
Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo
Onomatopee and Kotob Khan, Eindhoven and Cairo, The Netherlands and Egypt, 2015
Sidewalk Salon—co-authored with David Puig—follows Cairo’s pavement chairs: patched-up armchairs, brick-propped sofas, and battered office seats that line the streets like unofficial hosts. Polaroid photographs pair with our introductory essay, tracing how these makeshift perches register resourcefulness, surveillance, rest, and talk. Short interviews let the chair-owners tell their own stories, while commissioned fiction and poetry (Arabic and English) invite writers to imagine the daily life of a single neighbourhood seat. The result is a portrait of Cairo’s sidewalks as places where repair, encounter, and quiet assertion happen one chair at a time.
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Artist Book, Creative Writing & Zines