In Palestine, living a living history does not mean that you know what the next day will bring. Yasmeen of Nöl Collective writes about the rituals of the earth, memory and resistance in Palestine.
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Following her group exhibition in Dubai, the Lebanese artist tells Digital Editor Dalia Al-Dujaili how she utilises the comic book style to relay political messages and how resettling in America has given her a different approach to her usual work.
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The Palestinian-Irish actress tells AZEEMA about her new BBC documentary "The Holy Land and Us," and how founding the Arab Film Club has allowed her to challenge Arab stereotypes on screen.
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Palestinian artist manager Christina Hazboun and musician Haya Zaatry share personal recollections and pensive reflections on touring Haya's debut album "Rahawan" in Palestine during a year full of colonial violence in an effort to tell the stories of music, women and borderless geographies.
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Ahlamd, the anonymous playwright of You Bury Me, sits down with Shams Hanieh to explore what it means to grow up as an adolescent, to find love and lust for the first time, amidst the rubble of a politically turbulent city like Cairo during its protests.
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From resistance to ruptured identities, we speak to Dina Amer on her debut film ‘You Resemble Me’; a beautiful, tragic and cathartic re-telling of a true story about Hasnaa Aït Boulahcen, the French-Moroccan woman who was implicated in the Paris Attacks of 2015.
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Writer Rand Al-Hadethi digs into Lara Chahine’s latest mixed-media project scrutinising women’s body politics within her home country, Lebanon, and the wider SWANA region, through personal archival imagery and street photography.
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Living a life straddling many worlds and resisting multiple expectations, Anoushka Shankar tells AZEEMA how she has led a musical life pushing against exoticisation and how she remains committed the global fight against gendered violence.
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Digital Editor Dalia Al-Dujaili sits down with playwright Jasmine Naziha Jones to discuss why she wrote an absurd tragic-comedic play for the Iraqi diaspora; at once a deeply personal experience, and a publicly political act of resistance to the narrative around the country’s history of conflict and colonialism.
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Ana Maria Monjardino explores intersectional approaches to abortion rights through the experiences of Black and Brown women and non-binary people in Northern Ireland and Ireland. Moving chronologically from the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012, through the referendums of 2018 and 2019, to the present day, Monjardino considers how much has changed for women and non-binary people of colour seeking abortions since then and what still needs to be done.
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Digital Editor Dalia Al-Dujaili was lucky enough to sit down with renowned Algerian-American dancer Esraa Warda in her Brooklyn apartment. She tells AZEEMA about the origins of her subversive rai dancing, her long-standing musical partnership with icon Cheikha Rabia, and her excitement about a rare and special upcoming performance during this year’s Le Guess Who? Festival.
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Multidisciplinary artist, Furmaan Ahmed, discusses their experience as a queer creator on Instagram with writer Olivia Griffith, and their role in the new Instagram spotlight series, This Is Me: Gen Queer, which celebrates lesser-heard, intersectional voices within the LGBTQIA+ community in the UK.
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As this year’s Safar Film Festival gets underway, we speak to the award-winning Jordanian director on how she tried to epitomise Palestinian joy coupled with imposing social restrictions in her debut feature Farha, which tells the story of a little girl in 1948 Palestine who survives the Nakba and is concealed in a cupboard by her father to protect her from pending danger.
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Nour Regaya shares her first experiences with the word 9a7ba (whore) as a young woman and meditates on its usage in the Middle East to suppress female sexuality throughout her upbringing. Through is inversion, Nour has learnt to empower herself by redefining what the word means to her.
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With her “geek hat on”, the hilarious standup comedian and founder of Weapons of Mass Hilarity, took to an experiment whereby she tried to see if she’d have more luck reaching out to gig promoters with an English name.
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Maya Campbell visits first-time curator Destinie Paige at the launch of her new exhibition, Black Bxy Joy, which exercises a second-look at the Black experience and asks us to soak in the joy and tenderness of everyday Black life.
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Documentary filmmaker Sonita Gale talks us through her reasons behind making her recent BAFTA-shortlisted film ‘Hostile’ and how her family’s migration from India to working-class white neighbourhoods in the North of England has inspired her wider creative and political work.
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“Let’s start this with an apology to my mother.” In this tender exploration of the transition between girlhood and womanhood, Cairo-born photographer Alia Dessouki dictates the uniquely feminine evolution from the subject of innocence to the subject of the sexualised gaze through her childhood underwear.
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Ravista talks us through her project Broken Englizh and how it started off as a personal enquiry into what it meant to ‘decolonise’ in one’s own life, which then grew into a collection of 26 first-person narratives.
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Farihah Chowdhury takes us through the Bengali history of Brick Lane as developers seek to efface its legacy to accomodate a rising gentrified sensibility.
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