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All | Criticism & Academic Writing | Artist Book, Creative Writing and Zines
"Roll, River, Roll — Stereographic River, Colonial Hydropolitics"
Forthcoming, 2025

  From devotional stereographs that offered turn-of-the-century pilgrims a 3-D glimpse of holiness to colonial aerial surveys that mapped the valley from above, this essay traces how photographic images both mirrored and abetted the Jordan River’s passage from sacred threshold to militarized, monopolized resource. Twin optics—illusionary depth at eye level and extractive vision from above—conspired to naturalize a hydropolitics that controlled the river and rerouted its flow. Counter-images in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive restore ground-level pleasure, land-rooted care, and insurgent memory. Originally written for the lecture-performance that accompanies Blue-Black (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2025) in Cairo and Berlin, this essay converses with the images gathered in Blue-Black Liver and will later appear as a standalone publication. Criticism & Academic Writing
"Workers Resting: Reclaiming Rest and Idleness as Resistance in Modern Egyptian Art and Politics"
MIT Thresholds 53, eds. Mingjia Chen and Joshua Tan, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2025 Anchored in Hamed Owais’s 1975 canvas Workers Resting, this essay tracks how Egyptian art moved from Orientalist caricatures of Arab idleness to nationalist images that yoked leisure to state-led productivity, and finally to Owais’s quiet counter-gesture of collective sleep. By placing the painting beside colonial bathhouse fantasies, Nasser-era youth-camp photographs, and a century of strike histories, it shows how rest itself became a contested arena of anti-colonial and class politics. Owais’s intertwined labourers recast exhaustion as solidarity and subtle defiance, exposing the unfinished struggle for dignity that still shapes Egypt’s contemporary working conditions.

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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.  Download excerpt ↓
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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. Download excerpt ↓
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"Concrete Shores: Illusions and Desires of Total Control on the Littoral Edge of Egypt"
Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism, Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt, eds. Sibel Bozdoğan, Panayiota Pyla and Petros Phokaides, Routledge, London, UK, 2022 Post-independence Egypt's refashioned its Mediterranean beaches into open-air studios for a new social script, using architecture, infrastructure, and state-backed films to choreograph “modern” romances. Reading reels like the 1967 feature The Women’s Camp, this essay shows how the shoreline doubled as both literal edge and ideological media for molding ideal conjugal matches. Sun-splashed frames, however, expose the very repressions and desires that quietly unravel the State’s coastal agenda.
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"Regional Exchange and Knowledge Transfer through Building Practices: The Work of PACE in Yemen, 1968-2016"
Pan-Arab Modernism 1968-2018,  eds. Dalal Al Sayer and Ricardo Camacho, Actar Publishers, London, UK, 2021 Kuwait-based Pan Arab Consulting Engineers (PACE) arrived in war-scarred Yemen in 1968, carrying the Gulf’s oil-funded modernist know-how into clinics, universities, and mass housing that stretched from Hodeida to Sana’a. The essay shows how regional aid transformed architecture into soft power: concrete frames and recessed arches broadcast Arab solidarity yet often clashed with Yemen’s stone vernacular and climatic logics. By following five decades of PACE’s work, it unpacks a two-way exchange in which Kuwaiti geopolitics, Iraqi design ideas, and Yemeni landscapes forged a hybrid “Arab modernity” whose tensions still echo across the Red Sea and Gulf today. Download PDF ↓
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"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.  Download PDF ↓
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"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. Download PDF ↓
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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
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