Kayfa ta: On Shapeshifting Texts and Other Publishing Tactics
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-05-07

Start – 06:10 // Introduction by Hala Auji
06:10 – 34:35 // Ala Younis and Maha Maamoun 
34:35 – End // Discussion and Q&A

In 2012, Ala Younis and Maha Maamoun founded Kayfa ta as an independent publishing initiative that emerged from a need to break out of the limited readership and distribution of alternative books: books that cross genres, engage a mixed range of writers and readers, and are not driven by restrictive market values that control who and what is publishable. 

Their project is also interested in identifying the mechanisms of “gate-keeping”, be they in art or publishing, that shape and limit the voices and practices that have access to a wider public. In 2019, Kayfa ta expanded its interest into understanding the wider field of self and independent publishing and distribution, as well as the new challenges facing access of the private to shared public platforms, and the space left to maneuver the mounting obstacles therein. 

Their talk explores the expanded fields of contemporary publishing and distribution – modes of making-public and of public–making, as developed through quotidian as well as artistic strategies – as a revealing entry point to understanding contemporary efforts to limit and expand the space of the commons.

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Speaker biographies:

Ala Younis is a research-based artist. Collaboration forms a big part of her practice, as do curating and publishing projects. Using objects, film and printed matter, Younis often seeks instances where historical and political events collapse into personal ones, and where archives play on predilections and how lacunas and mishaps manipulate the imagination. She is member of the advisory board of the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, and the Academy of the Arts of the World (Cologne), and co-founder of the independent publishing project Kayfa ta.

Maha Maamoun is an artist, curator and independent publisher. Her work examines the form, function and currency of common visual and literary images as an entry point to investigating the cultural fabric that we weave and are woven into. In addition to her practice as an artist, Maamoun works collaboratively on independent publishing and curatorial projects. She is a founding board member of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC), and co-founder of the independent publishing project Kayfa ta.

Hala Auji directs the art history program at the American University of Beirut where she is assistant professor of Islamic art history. Informed by her background in graphic design, criticism and theory, and art history, her interdisciplinary research on Arabic book and print culture, modernity, global art, museum practices, and portraiture, evidences an intersection between book history, manuscript studies, art history, design history, and Middle Eastern studies. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016) and has published numerous essays and articles on her research, most recently in Platform, Review of Middle East Studies, Visible Language, and The Journal of Middle East Culture and Communication. Auji serves as Islamic Art Field Editor for caa.reviews, Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, International Representative with the Historians of Islamic Art Association, and Lebanon Liaison for the Syrian Studies Association.

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This event took place on Zoom on Tuesday 27 April 2021 as part of the series Histories and Archives of Arabic Publishing, co-curated and convened by Hana Sleiman (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge) and Daniel Lowe (British Library). You can read more about this series here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2021/04/haap.html