IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

The Arab world is slowly waking up to the urgency of preserving the local disappearing and systematically marginalized design legacies of the Arab visual culture. These significant contributions by pioneering designers, illustrators and typographers among other creatives have been poorly documented due to the recurring political and economic turmoil in this part of the world. Their bodies of work rarely make it to the global design history discourse, giving the illusion that no valuable creative outputs were present at a time when the Global North was flourishing. With emerging calls for decolonization and puncturing the Western design canon, the importance of archiving and the necessity of preserving artefacts that demonstrate the richness and the innovation of the Arab visual culture is gaining traction. Many are now actively creating personal libraries of rare printed matter. Salvaged from second-hand bookstores and old book markets in big Arab capitals; Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and others, magazines, posters and rare books are documented and later published on social platforms such as Instagram for a wider audience to access. Over the past few years, Instagram archives have exponentially grown in number, ranging from collections of posters, book covers to vinyl record and cassette tape covers. While social media archives are exposing the wealth of the Arabic cultural and visual heritage, the question remains of whether the mere collection and publication of those ephemeral prints on Instagram is sufficient for the ambition of infiltrating the design history canon. At this critical moment in time, when ‘decolonization’ is the new buzzword, reducing the pursuit of inclusion to a simple display of eye candy on a platform with increasing noise and clutter is counterproductive. It is imperative for those genuinely invested in acts of de-westernizing design to move beyond the archiving rush into a more critical and analytical engagement with found visual archives.