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Nazik Al-Malaika
    / The Arrival

سأحبُّ نفسي في ارتعاش ظلالها تحيا عصُورْ ملأى بألوان الخيالْ

Nazik Al-Malaika is an Iraqi poetess and considered a pioneer of free verse poetry, which revolutionised Arabic poetry in the mid-20th century. She broke away from rigid structures without neglecting tradition; rather, she built on it. In a similar way, this artistic work seeks to transfer the historical 7th century Kufi script into a modern context.

Al-Malaika’s poem – The Arrival – forms the central focus of this artist book. It deals with the innermost self and recounts a dialogue with one’s own soul. The poem forms a process or a kind of self-discovery and self-acceptance. This artistic exploration engages with these thoughts, an inner arrival so to speak, through repetition and meditation in the form of writing. Thus, they are not whole sentences but fragments, sounds, individual words, or even fractions of a sentence. Over the course of five months, a collection of different formats unfolded. The pages were scanned, compiled into an artist’s book, and exhibited at the SPCE Gallery in Kiel, Germany in March 2025.

Master Project. Muthesius University | 2025