Fehras Publishing Practices (Kenan Darwich, Omar Nicolas, Sami Rustom) is an artist collective and a publishing house established in Berlin in 2015. It was founded as a response to mounting questions concerning the history and the presence of art and publishing in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the diaspora. The mission of Fehras is to research the issue of publishing as a subject by observing and experimenting with its forms, attempting in this way to create a new, more extensive culture of critical engagement. The research focus of Fehras is based on the interrelation between cultures and publishing, which includes different fields of languages, archives, and arts. The projects, publications, and activities of Fehras Publishing Practices focus on archival materials (such as journalistic, radio, television, cinema, and digital archives), books, and magazines, libraries and readings, sound materials, publishing practices within the field of performance and visual arts and the transformation of cultural language in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.

www.fehraspublishingpractices.org

 

Borrowed Faces

Photography, objects, lecture-performances

ongoing

Borrowed Faces has been presented to date in a series of lecture-performances, archival boxes, large-scale drawing tableaux, and finally the first edition of a photo novel.
Fehras Publishing Practices focuses on individual cultural actors in Arab publishing in the late 1950s and 1960s, revealing a network of local and international institutions and conferences that courted them. The political interests of the great powers also entangle Arabic writing culture in a bipolar international context.

Borrowed Faces: Stories of Publishers during the Cold War

by Fehras Publishing Practices

 

Series of Disappearences

Essays, texts and images

2017

The Series of Disappearances deals with the relocations of knowledge and libraries at different levels by following the traces of private libraries of intellectuals, writers, publishers and individuals and the traces of the book archives of collectors and institutions. It also observes the phenomena of public and street-libraries in the East Mediterranean and North Africa. The term disappearance is understood, not only in the sense of vanishing of books or libraries, but also of disappearance as a process of transformation and therefore as a mode or strategy for a new appearance. Hence, the disappearance became an act that motivates us to research its reasons, forms and the new relations that came out of it. In other words, how a publication appears in new forms and contexts and what significance does this process have in the present.

Fehras Publishing Practices

Arab Publishing in Troubled Times

Libraries on Quicksand

by Amer Bader Hassoun

Disappearances Appearances Publishing