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Now in its fourth year, Tasmeem has steadily established itself as one of the region’s most vital platforms for graphic design. Held annually at ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, the poster-focused exhibition returns this summer with Graphic Dissent. This powerful new theme explores design as a space for protest, memory, and imagination. From environmental grief to political critique, twelve artists were selected by a jury of regional design experts to exhibit works that speak across geographies and generations.
Curated by Malak Abu-Qaoud and developed by Lebanese graphic designer and printmaker Farah Fayyad, Tasmeem: Graphic Dissent opened on July 8 and runs until the end of August. Each of the featured works interrogates the role of design in society, reminding us that a poster is (and has been) a living call to attention, and sometimes, action.
“Tasmeem is my favourite project of the year,” says curator Malak Abu-Qaoud. “And this edition feels especially powerful because of the strong, meaningful message behind it. Historically, posters have been a tool for protest, liberation, and equality—and seeing that spirit come through in the selected works is incredible. What makes it even more special is the community we’ve built through Tasmeem. It feels like so much more than just a show.”
Echoing that sentiment, Farah Fayyad adds: “The work Tasmeem and its team are doing ensures that design holds space beyond aesthetics as an active and resonant force in society. These works remind us that visual language carries power and responsibility, paving the way for future generations to continue to speak through design.”
We posed a single, unifying question to all twelve participating artists: Did you want your poster to provoke, comfort, resist, or question?
These were the answers.
Lama Kadri (@lamak.designs)
Threads of Liberty was created in response to the 2021 Sheikh Jarrah evictions. A visual reaction to a moment marked by injustice and displacement. In the face of occupation’s violence, this poster became a way to process, resist, and speak. It was never just a piece of design. It was a statement, an attempt to draw attention, to make the issue visible, immediate, and hard to ignore. A reminder that what happens on the ground cannot be allowed to fade into the background.
This work challenges silence. It pushes the conversation on Palestine into public space, unapologetically, without fear, and without the weight of taboo. Its presence is a call to engage, to remember, and to refuse indifference.
Mohamed Abdelbasit (@muhamed.jpg)
I want my poster to raise awareness among non-African audiences about the long history of colonization and oppression that African people have faced for generations. These events have left deep marks on our societies, cultures, and identities, and they still affect us today in many ways. I hope the poster helps people from outside the continent understand these struggles and look at Africa with more respect and understanding. At the same time, I want this poster to serve as a call for unity and resistance among Africans. It is meant to inspire pride in African identity and heritage, and to encourage collective strength in the face of ongoing neocolonialism and authoritarian control. By reflecting on our shared past and present, I hope to ignite a movement of self-empowerment, resilience, and the rejection of any force that seeks to suppress African voices and sovereignty.
Nisrene Sarkis (@nsrnsrks)
This poster is a personal reflection on the sense of helplessness that arises when contemplating resistance, and the role design might play within it. It stems from a desire to fight back, to refuse surrender. The work questions the power and the limitations of language in the face of political and cultural paralysis. Arabic, one of the richest languages in tools of negation, offers an expansive vocabulary for saying no; la, ma, lam, lan, laysa, ghayr, and more. Was this abundance a premonition, as if the language itself knew its people would need so many ways to resist? Or is it an irony: that even with all these tools, all the nos in the world are still not enough? The work becomes a quiet protest, not only against external forces, but against the limits of our own utterances.
Ranim Halaky (@ranimhalaky)
The poster was conceived as an act of resistance through remembrance, positioning memory as a political gesture in the face of erasure. It draws from both human and non-human narratives, particularly the silent resilience of trees, as living witnesses to historical and ongoing struggles. Through typographic forms that echo natural growth and fragmentation, the work attempts to give voice to landscapes that carry memory. It does not seek to comfort or provoke in a conventional sense; rather, it offers a quiet, visual insistence, that to remember is to resist, and that both bodies and ecologies hold knowledge that must be acknowledged. In this way, the poster becomes a site of layered resistance: to forgetting, to environmental degradation, and to the silencing of collective and more-than-human histories.
Rami Hoballah (@rami_hoballah)
My poster is meant to resist and provoke. Through repetition and symbolism, I aimed to express a sense of collective defiance and highlight the role of visual language in confronting injustice. The use of Arabic typography, specifically the word “لا” (no), is repeated to form a pattern inspired by the Palestinian kufifyeh. This repetition is not just aesthetic, it represents a unified voice against occupation and oppression.
I wanted the piece to speak both politically and culturally, using familiar visual elements in a new context to evoke reflection, emotion, and solidarity. Design, for me, is not only about aesthetics, it’s a powerful tool for expression, resistance, and reclaiming identity. In this work, the visual becomes a form of protest, transforming typography into a medium for dissent.
Milad Safa Naji (@meelads1)
This experimental poster draws inspiration from the fractured landscapes of Iraq’s southern marshes—once thriving wetlands now devastated by drought and environmental degradation. As the water recedes, the land reveals deep, organic cracks—silent testimonies to the region’s biological collapse. These textures became the foundation for a visual language constructed entirely from the earth’s own ruptures.
Through careful research and observation, the phrase “جفاف الأرض الرطبة” was visually shaped by arranging these cracked patterns into forms resembling Arabic letters. The typographic composition was further enhanced with thermal map colors to evoke the searing heat and desiccation that define the current climate crisis in the region.
Beyond environmental commentary, the work explores the emotional and psychological impact of this transformation. The drying of the land has altered not only the physical identity of the marshes but also the behavior and spirit of the people who inhabit them. What was once a lush and life-giving landscape now reflects a sense of withdrawal and resilience in the face of loss.
Hussein Khalifa (@huss.khalifa)
Through my poster Your Closeness is a Blessing to the Soul, I wanted to offer a quiet form of comfort, one that gently resists the fast pace and emotional detachment of the present moment. I turned to the emotional richness of Arabic music and the intimacy of hand-drawn script to create a space for reflection, stillness, and memory. The work draws from collective cultural references, Um Kulthum’s voice, familiar lyrics, and traditional visual symbols, not to escape the now, but to reconnect with something lasting and meaningful. Rather than provoke or confront, I wanted the poster to invite pause. To remind us that tenderness and beauty are not separate from struggle, they are part of what sustains us. In centering love, longing, and cultural memory, the work asks: what happens when we allow ourselves to feel deeply? I hope the viewer finds in it a moment of connection, between self and heritage, between past and present, between image and emotion.
Naz Naddaf (@naznaddaf)
Salam Falastin is a call to action to assemble, collaborate, and to carry the message of Palestine through movement, forming a new symbol of remembrance and resistance. The step-by-step guide invites two people to participate in a simple yet deliberate gesture that traces the map of Palestine, offering a moment of solidarity that must be enacted and not just observed.
Rather than imposing an image to consume, the poster imagines solidarity as something that lives in the space between people and provides a way to carry the memory forward, physically and collectively. I am with hope that it provokes viewers to move beyond witnessing into doing in whatever ways they are able, because even the smallest actions, when multiplied, can turn into power.
Abdulrahman Hashlamon (@abd26_)
I wanted the poster to provoke and question. Not loudly but sharply. It’s a satirical echo of an injustice that keeps repeating. “بقرة حاحا” is not just a memory, it’s a mirror. The piece pushes back against forgetting and insists on being felt.
Gamila Elkordy (@gamilaelkordy)
I wanted my poster to resist. It draws from Tarweedat al-Shamali, a coded folk song sung by Palestinian women outside prisons during the British Mandate and after, particularly during the 1936–39 Revolt. These women altered the language—adding the letter “ل” (lam), repeating syllables, and fragmenting words—to transmit hidden messages to imprisoned fighters. The songs were disguised as lullabies, but they carried news, instructions, and emotional support, slipping past guards who could not decode them. This was resistance through language, through orality, through collective memory.
The poster renders the lyrics of Tarweedat al-Shamali in hand-lettered Arabic, arranged in the structure of a cross-stitch pattern. The visual form references tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, which—like the songs—has historically functioned as a medium of cultural transmission and coded resistance. Together, these two forms, lyric and stitch, document strategies of survival and communication used by Palestinian women under occupation.
Farah Teima (@teima9)
The heavy, hardened nature of concrete in the texture of my lettering is to question the permanent, solid effect of visual ideas once they’re out there. between input, the process of design, and the output, where does the idea get solidified? How does the interpretation of the design change its nature?
The pedestrian bridge is to let the viewer pass from unknowing to understanding. Like visual infographics as a most famous example, design in its nature breaks things down then assemble them again in a more coherent, solid fashion.
Daoud TABIBZADA (@da.o.ud)
I wanted my poster to question and resist. It questions how inherited symbols of violence like the Afghan war rug can be transformed. Instead of mapping tanks and rifles into homes as normalized memory, NATIONAL PEACE reimagines that same visual language to resist cycles of conflict.
By wrapping an AK-47 in flowers and turning bombs into pomegranates, symbols of life, the work rejects the old pattern of glorifying war as heritage. It asks: What if a war rug could be a peace rug?
This piece invites the viewer to see cultural memory not as static trauma but as a vessel for renewal.
The show runs until the end of August, which means you’ve got just a few weeks left to witness these visual declarations up close. Don’t wait.
