Zamân Books

A limited edition artist’s book, mneme presents Nidhal Chamekh’s series “The Beat of the Wings” and “What Martyrs Dream About ?”, as 34 independent drawings presented in a portfolio. A series recently exhibited, on several occasions, in London, Tunis and also at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).

The publication underscores the simultaneous self-evidence and complexity of these drawings, inviting two authors-interpreters, including Omar Berrada who proposes to see them as “rebuses that represent the visual unconscious of Tunisian modernity, with its dreamed revolutions and its repressed revenants (…) a theater without decor where the dream stage can be performed.

Bert Flint, AFRO-BERBER PLANET, the trans-saharan arts at the tiskiwin museum, from Marrakech to Timbuktu AFRO-BERBER PLANET is an augmented reissue of the guide to the Tiskiwin museum in Marrakech, created in 1996 by collector and anthropologist Bert Flint following his various Trans-Saharan travels: from the Eastern High-Atlas to the Niger River, he explores the emergence of a visual culture both millennium and contemporary, extending from the Maghreb to Sahel countries.

Settled in Morocco since the 1950s, Bert Flint is an expert in “Afro-Berber” arts, a category which he patiently forged, showing the fundamental role of the Saharan populations in the multicultural heritage of Morocco (Mali, Niger , Chad, Mauritania, Tunisia, Algeria...). Flint eventually traces deep cultural transfers, on both sides of a “sub-Saharan” border which tends to collapse, since these exchanges go far beyond the frame of national or colonial borders.

Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985) is a key figure in Egyptian modernism and global art history. His plastic and poetic inventions not only reflect over forty years of political and philosophical debate in the Arab world and the Mediterranean but also gave birth to an exiled modernity: to the cities where he lived and worked (Cairo, Copenhagen, Paris) and aesthetic movements he interacted with (CoBrA, lettrism, Islamic arts…) Organised as an ABCDarium this book is not a traditional catalogue but an inquiry through the artist’s personal archive and library; documenting his erudite wanderings between different cultural universes, beyond West and East, where one defines himself as a Trans-Arab and cosmopolitan visual thinker.

With the support of the Farjam Foundation, Zamân Books is publishing the English version of the catalog «Arab Presences – Modern Art and Decolonization – Paris 1908-1988», originally released during the eponymous exhibition recently held at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (April 3 – August 25, 2024).

The book explores Paris’s role in the rise of modern Arab art through 130 artists between 1908 and 1988, in the context of decolonisation. Featuring rare archives and essays by leading scholars, it maps the artistic exchanges between Paris and Arab modernities.

A tricontinental exhibition and publication project that takes the form of a multiauthor monograph to showecase an artist whose work creates space to connect with the self; to be in the here and now. The publication is structured in 3 movements between the active polarities in Younes Rahmoun‘s work: Migration/Rootedness, Single/Multiple and Here/Elsewhere, thus highlighting the major themes of his work, which aims for the universal.