Decolonizing the Page: A Forgotten Golden Age of Arabic Book Arts (1950s-80s)

This online exhibition sheds light on a remarkable era when Arabic book arts flourished, capturing the artistic, political, and intellectual fervour of decolonization. During this period, books played a vital role in reshaping knowledge, imagination, and aesthetic sensibilities, reaching an expanding Arabic readership and global networks of solidarity.
Decolonizing the Page uncovers the creative labour of designing, illustrating and making these books. It reveals how the aesthetic concerns and political commitments of a generation of Arab artists and graphic designers transformed the Arabic book in its content, form, and very conception.
Featuring around 250 books, organized across four rooms, the displays invite you to see modern Arabic books anew—not merely as containers of text, but as aesthetically rich, designed objects.
Through this visual lens, the exhibition allows us to recover histories of decolonization. Its unfinished legacies resonate with ongoing struggles and solidarity movements today.