Blue-Black Liver project content

Designed by Engy Aly and translated into Arabic by Yasser Abdellatif. Photographs by Gearbox, Cairo. Thanks to Leon Conrad, Haytham el Wardany and Elizabeth Fox. Supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Email to order copies.

Blue-Black Liver Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Tintera, Agit, Berlin and Cairo, 2025

Blue-Black Liver takes the form of a mock newspaper, its ragged poetry columns and shifting type scales mirroring the fractured flow of water, history, and memory. By adopting the familiar grammar of the newspaper, it exposes the form’s limitations—revealing instead submerged currents of colonial and ecological violence. In the opening spread I splice A.B. Yehoshua’s “Facing the Forests” into a settler-colonial greenwashing “forest of solitudes,” only to watch it ignite in an act of resistance. From these foundational reworkings the paper pours into fevered reflections— “Drought I” and “Drought II” pulse with arid heat, “Deluge” surges in elemental grief—before “Gaslit Histories / Rewriting Wounds” excavates lived and colonial violence. Lyrical interludes in “Soft,” “Ode to the Rose,” and “Everything and Nothing” meditate on embodied rupture and memory; “Future Biology / Beyond Womb” reimagines anatomy as agency; the recipe in “St. John’s Wort” roots us in herbal alchemy; “Conjunctions” probes the words that bind and fracture; “You Can’t Get Blood from a Stone” upends mythic prophecy; and “A Practical Guide to Caring for Your Dust” closes with mordant wit and a reminder that even the lightest detritus carries heavy testimony. Black-and-white archival photographs of the Jordan River (c. 1900–1920)—sourced from the American Colony Photo Department and the Palestine Museum Digital Archives—punctuate every spread, reclaiming landscapes erased by the colonial narrative.

Blue-Black Liver was first shown in my exhibition Blue-Black at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (April–June 2025). In launch events in Tintera, Cairo and Agit/Hopscotch, Berlin, I staged a two-voice, stereographic lecture performance: one reader voiced the poems of Blue-Black Liver while a second delivered passages from my essay “Roll, Jordan, Roll: Stereographic River, Colonial Hydropolitics,” unfolding parallel streams of poetry and critique that converge like twin images in a stereoscope.