Art Commissions

Leil Zahra Mortada:

There is a Baba in Our House

& Text by Nubian Geographic

Parting from a personal narrative, and using references from both popular culture and key political events, artist Leil Zahra Mortada uses the performative aspect of nationalism and its propaganda, to contribute to a much-needed debate around Pan-Arabism & its consequences, history and present.

About

Biographies

Leil Zahra Mortada is a transfeminist queer activist, researcher and artist/filmmaker, born in Beirut. Their film work includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; and the awarded experimental short “Breakup in 9 Scenes”. Leil is also behind the collaborative project Sound Frontier, a music research project focusing on marginalized music and sound art from a decolonial and feminist perspectives. Leil is also a researcher and trainer on digital security, online privacy and open-source investigations. Recently they concluded a fellowship at Mozilla Foundation on the impacts of content policing on social media platforms. Their work has a major focus on queer and feminist politics, archiving, migration, anti-racism and decolonialism.

Nubian Geographic was founded in 2015 to document Nubia and its geography, history, language, wildlife and more. As a Nubian initiative, we work to counter the systemic erosion of the Nubian culture through research, documentation, producing resources and raising awareness. We aim to become the organization of a Nubian Scientific Society that would help to preserve and revive our rich culture and history.