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

Notes on Lebanese Frenchies and the In Vitro Diaspora

Francophilia has long been a part of Lebanon’s complex sociopolitical fabric. The Frenchies of the country detach themselves from their environment and enjoy a bourgeois French-centric mode of existence. In the wake of ongoing national crises, members of the francophone middle class are becoming increasingly critical of their upbringing and aim to re-appropriate a certain sense of Lebaneseness

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

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

At SeeDjerba, the Tunisian Island Becomes the Gallery

At its 2026 edition, See Djerba turned a Tunisian island's fortresses, shrines and craft villages into a gallery that asks you to look at the place as closely as the art

A Language Of Image: From Manuscripts To Meta-Algorithms

From Islamic manuscripts to Blender renders, the image of the Arabic language has always been built from overlapping histories and references. The designers pushing it forward today are proving that visual history is most useful when it becomes a tool for invention rather than nostalgia, and that the archive is not a repository of finished answers