6 /
Nazik Al-Malaika
    / The Arrival

“And we have arrived. Here beauty lives,
along with warmth, the gentle sun, stillness,
vastness and a world that spans the centuries.
A sea of colors created by imagination,
and above its reach, thousands of shadows ripple.”*

Nazik al-Malaika is an Iraqi poet and a pioneering female voice in free verse, which revolutionised Arabic poetry in the mid-20th century. Al-Malaika’s poem “al-Wusuul,” translated as “The Arrival,” forms the central focus of this experimental publication. It explores the innermost self and recounts a dialogue with one’s own soul. The poem unfolds as a process of self-discovery and self-acceptance.

This artistic exploration engages with the poem’s words through lingering, repetition and meditation in the form of writing — an inner search, and an arrival, so to speak. The resulting texts are therefore not complete sentences, but fragments, sounds, individual words, or even single letters. Over the course of five months, a collection of different formats emerged, using the 7th-century Arabic Abbasid calligraphy, also known as Kufi. The pages were then scanned and compiled into a publication. An orange linen folder was designed to collect the booklet alongside the typeset poem in Arabic and its German translation. The quiet and subtle front cover bears the title "al-Wusuul," while the back carries the name of Nazik al-Malaika, inviting the viewer slowly into the poem’s inner world.

Exhibited at: SPCE Gallery, Kiel, Germany
Master Project. Muthesius University | 2025

* The English translation above aims to make a short excerpt of the poem accessible to English-speaking readers.