Khalid Abdel-Hadi: Looking in While the Rest Look Away

When regional media hesitates, rewrites, or strategically looks elsewhere, My Kali stares straight into reality. What began in 2007 as a small digital experiment from Amman has grown into one of the Arab world’s most quietly influential cultural platforms. “My Kali was born out of necessity,” says founder Khalid Abdel-Hadi. “Growing up in Amman, I felt the absence of spaces that genuinely reflected the experiences and voices of a younger generation questioning identity, culture, and belonging.”

This absence became an origin story. My Kali borrowed the glossy visual language of print magazines but lived online, slipping past borders and gatekeepers. “What started as a personal experiment in self-expression soon evolved into a collective platform for dialogue,” he says. “Over time, it has become a living archive of voices that insist on being seen and heard.”

And seen they were, even when it caused tremors. Publishing the magazine publicly in Arabic for the first time in 2016 was, as Abdel-Hadi describes it, “transformative”. It positioned My Kali not simply as a niche magazine, but a cultural intervention. And, as with every intervention, it also elicited public reactions, causing the website to be briefly taken offline. True to the spirit of resistance, though, it came back with its ethos intact, unshakable and rightfully so.

Still, the publication has never been about the shock factor; it’s rooted accurately representing a spectrum of lived realities that regional media too often edits down to something easier, flatter, more palatable. “The work we do is about expanding the space for expression, where complexity, contradiction, and individuality can coexist without fear or erasure,” explains Abdel-Hadi. “Beyond visibility, we seek to document and celebrate the evolving realities of a generation navigating identity, belonging, and creative resistance. We are not a reactionary publication driven by virality. Our work is grounded in long-term storytelling and the nuanced realities of the communities we represent.” 

The decision to work slowly and thoughtfully is precisely what has made My Kali endure as pertinent. “I’ve always been drawn to paradoxes,” he adds. “That coexistence of bold expression and quiet restraint, of glamour and piety, continues to fascinate me.” This duality has become the magazine’s trademark aesthetic: a collage of the Arab world’s contradictions, held without judgment but celebration.

In the end, the publication’s pursuit is nothing short of indispensable: refusing erasure. “I hope it continues to grow beyond labels or firsts,” he says. “And instead stands as a lasting archive of a generation, one that resists cultural amnesia and preserves moments of creativity, defiance, and tenderness for the future.”

As the magazine approaches its 20th anniversary, it is preparing its first-ever print retrospective in the form of a book that traces censorship, design identity, and two decades of cultural record. Alongside, Cabaret My Kali: Ya Leil Ya Eyein will tour as a live, bilingual performance series, transforming nostalgia and experimentation into shared experience.

My Kali began as a silence. It turned into a platform. Now, it’s becoming an archive of everything the region feels but rarely names. It looks where others won’t, allowing a new generation to finally see itself clearly.