SOFT POWER: Hawazin Alotaibi’s Pink Rebellion

Through a playful palette of pinks and pastels, the Saudi artist reimagines Khaleeji masculinity, challenging the conventions of gender, power and self-image with an unexpected softness

HinDidi: When Bollywood Invited Algeria to Dance 

In the aftermath of independence, Bollywood offered Algeria something revolution could not: the freedom to dream, to love, and to imagine a life beyond struggle. Decades later, one Indian film, Janitou, remains a tender relic of a future that never quite arrived

What It Takes to Be Mister Lebanon

As opportunities shrink in Lebanon, contestants are pouring increasing amounts of time, money and effort into the country’s most famous male beauty pageant, and the possibilities it might unlock

Salam, El Mehdi!

Pop star, filmmaker and now leading man, El Mehdi talks gatekeeping, going home and the peace that comes with choosing yourself

Eurovision, Samira Said, and Morocco’s Unreceived Love Letter

Revisiting Morocco’s choice to perform at Eurovision in 1980, the first and last Arab country to do so, reveals a complex web of forces at play in our history, and a legacy that stands in evidence of a confused national identity, much less healed from colonial violation than it purports to be

Aestheticised Violence and The Spectacle of Political Slop

How a war became content, and why the exhaustion is the point

Worlds of Their Own Making

The emerging cohort of designers transforming raw material into a living temperament

Ugliness Looks Back

From a 1960s Iranian leper colony to Kim Kardashian's surgeon, tracing how "ugly" became a diagnosis to be cured rather than a way of being seen