Mohamed G.

The 2021 publication of Building Sharjah marks the completion of an intensive five-year research project to collect and reconstruct Sharjah’s modern landscape, including the parts once imagined and those no longer to be found. Co-edited by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi and Todd Reisz and published by Birkhäuser, Building Sharjah is one of the most engaging and thorough examinations of the history of modernization in the United Arab Emirates. Nearly 600 images from dozens of sources, mostly unpublished until now, in addition to more than 60 featured projects and newly commissioned contributions from 17 writers chart how modernist ambitions came together to engineer a global city.

I was invited by DARKMATTER collective to create three artworks as part of a guerrilla poster project for the interdisciplinary event SAPODILLA to explore house and techno music’s fundamental relationship to black and black queer identity and activism while celebrating. The invitation came at an exciting time as I am diving into the sorcery power of the Arabic letterforms in Islamic mythology. So for these artworks, I interweaved inspiration from the work of the artist musicians performing for the event and the story of Anaq Bint Adam, allegedly the first witch in Islamic history.