SHUBBAK: A Window On Contemporary Arab Culture Starts Friday 28th June

The fifth edition of the biennial Shubbak Festival starts on the 28th June bringing exciting, bold, poignant and urgent work by over 150 Arab artists to London. This year's programme champions artists who embrace questioning the norm, commenting powerfully on the world we live in.

The opening weekend includes a number of installations at different locations across London. At the Museum of London and the British Library Aicha El Beloui, the Casablanca-based illustrator and graphic designer, who works with communities to discover a neighbourhood and to filter her observations into maps and illustrations, has gathered material on the history and psychogeography of Moroccan immigration in London. El Beloui will create one of her distinctive maps, which will be available in paper formats, digitally and as an installation, travelling to different sites across the city. In partnership with the Bagri Foundation.

At Art on the Lake, Milton Keynes and the British Library Jeddah based Bricklab, the designers of the first Saudi pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale create a new pop-up sculpture especially for Shubbak. 22 brightly coloured units equalling in number the 22 states of the Arab League are arranged in different constellations to offer new viewpoints of geographies, nations and the power to imagine other realities. No unit can stand on its own, but has to be grafted onto others. Geographical Child's Play conjures up poignant and surprising alignments and dependencies.

Becoming by Tunisian artist Hela Ammar, is a new site-specific photographic installation in Shepherds Bush Market. Ammar has spent time with women who have recently arrived and are carefully balancing the normality of London living with a period of personally unsettled existence. Memory, identity and marginal communities are recurrent themes in Ammar's work. Ammar has exhibited in major international biennales and her works are in the collection of the British Museum and the Institut du Monde Arabe.

North Kensington has long been at the centre of Moroccan identity in London. Casablanca-based street artist and key member of Morocco's thriving art scene Mehdi Annassi, aka Machima, is working with residents and community groups on St Mark's Road, Ladbroke Grove to create a mural that reflects its history and scenes of everyday life. Presented in partnership with Bagri Foundation.

At the Bush Theatre Iraqi photographer Hassan Al-Mousaoy is working with recently arrived young people in West London, charting their daily lives in sequences of personal photographs. Participants will select, edit and install their work in the intimate setting of the Bush Theatre Attic. Presented with additional support from Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with the British Red Cross, Young Roots, and Barnet Refugee Service.

At Rich Mix Belonging, Sideways curated by Toufik Douib sees five Algerian contemporary artists explore identity and location. Mounir Gouri's stitched plates refer to the trade of illegal migrants in his coastal home town; artist Illustrator Sarah Ouadah re-interprets the classic poem of the tragic Bedouin love story Hyzia as a digital fantasy for a new generation; Rima Djahnine's cartography-inspired installation weaves fragments of maps, film, GPS data and documents into personal narratives of homecoming and memories; with his iphone the photographer Fethi Sahraoui captures a series of cars as scenes of ordinary life in the Saharawi camps in the South West of Algeria and Abdo Shanan displays material from his award-winning book 'Diary: Exile' which reflects on his experiences as an artist of Algerian and Sudanese origin who has lived in Libya for many years.

Also at Rich Mix Kahareb,a groundbreaking electronic showcase presented by MARSM, brings together the finest selection of artists from the Middle East and North Africa to celebrate the vibrant underground scenes of techno, folktronic, global bass, house, trance and more. Featuring Sama' (aka. Skywalker), a DJ and electronic music producer from Palestine; Shkoon, who mixes Arabic scales, melodies and traditional folk songs with classical harmonic and Nuri, one of the upcoming promising musicians of African futurism mixing deep bass, organic percussion with poly rhythmic grooves.

At the Southbank Centre Tunisian dancer Mohamed Toukabri's autobiographical solo The Upside Down Man (the son of the road) delves into the experience of a young man finding himself in dance and in Europe. The piece follows him from discovering street dance as a 12-year old in front of the railway station in Tunis to his ten years of performing with renowned companies like Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Jan Lauwers.

On Sunday 30 June Shubbak@ The British Library is presented in partnership with the British Library and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, curated and produced by award-winning Arabic literary translator and editor Alice Guthrie

Following on from Shubbak's first ever queer literary panel in 2017, Bold Voices: New Queer Writing brings together a new range of writers and artists working at the cutting edge of LGBT+ creative expression. Two artists from this exciting and defiant scene present their multidisciplinary approach, ranging from comics to storytelling, memoir and activism. Lebanese poet, playwright and actress Dima Mikhayel Matta, the founder of Beirut's storytelling platform Cliffhangers and Joseph Kai, whose comics centre around the unspoken, marginalization and gender.

Telling the past: Contemporary Arabic Historical Novels features a range of writers who approach the recasting of fraught histories through the creative lens, discussing the motivations, methods and challenges of this special genre. Reading from their work in Arabic and in English are Iraqi multidisciplinary writer Inaam Kachachi, shortlisted for the IPAF 2019; Iraqi-Welsh journalist and writer Ruqaya Izzidien, whose debut novel features Iraqi, Welsh and English characters in WWI Baghdad; acclaimed Sudanese novelist Hammour Ziada's newest work examines cycles of patriarchal and political oppression through twentieth-century Sudan; and London-based Palestinian novelist Rabai al-Madhoun, whose epic Destinies, Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba on the Palestinian exodus and right to return won the IPAF 2016.

Three feminist artists from very different contexts, working in diverse artforms, discuss and perform their work and what it means to be an Arab feminist in 2019. French-Moroccan journalist, commentator and Prix Goncourt-winning novelist Leïla Slimani joins the Saudi journalist, chatshow host and novelist known for tackling women's issues for over twenty years Badriah al Beshr, and the Egyptian creator of the veiled female superhero Qahera, multi-award-winning graphic novelist and web comic artist Deena Mohamed for The Endless Wave: Feminist Writing Now.

Three special 'Spotlight' sessions focus on new or forthcoming books: Arabic writing from London with Malu Halasa, new Syrian fiction with Dima Wannous and groundbreaking new translations of Kurdish fiction with Bakhtiyar Ali and Kareem Abdulrahman.

Friday 28th June

• Becoming, Shepherd's Bush Market (9am-6pm)
• 10 to 10, Bush Theatre (10am-6pm)
• Belonging Sideways, Rich Mix (PV at 6pm)
• Kahareb, Rich Mix (8pm-4am)
• Mehdi Annassi, St Mark's Road, Ladbroke Grove

Saturday 29th June

• Aicha el Beloui, Museum of London (10am-6pm)
• Geographical Child's Play, Milton Keynes (1pm-8pm)
• Belonging Sideways, Rich Mix (10am-11pm)
• The Upside Down Man (The Son of the Road), Purcell Room, (7.45pm)
• Becoming, Shepherds Bush Market (9am-6pm)
• 10 to 10, Bush Theatre (10am-6pm)
• Mehdi Annassi, St Mark's Road, Ladbroke Grove

Sunday 30th June

• Aicha El Beloui, British Library (12pm-7pm)

• Geographical Child's Play, British Library (12pm-7pm)
• Shubbak@The British Library (12pm-6.45pm)
• 10 to 10, Bush Theatre, (10am-6pm)
• Belonging Sideways, Rich Mix (10am-11pm)

Website: www.shubbak.co.uk

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