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

In this political coming-of-age, the video highlights the blurred lines between the father figure as both the patriarch of the family and the leader of the nation. The author holds their father’s bias accountable despite the latter’s unquestionable commitment to social justice.

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.