Forever and Always: Ruba Katrib’s favourite selection of Dazed MENA features

The artists who have lined the pages of Dazed MENA traverse various mediums and practices: archiving, painting, video, photography, animation and more. When put together, they coalesce at an exhibit’s sweet spot: biting subversion and brisk confrontational postures that bring a viewer to their knees, provoke possibility and comfort with complexity, massage imagination and unshroud new ways of thinking and being. That said, while systems of art can often be inane and, at their worst, violent, art always resists asphyxiation and will forever be hot. 

Ruba Katrib knows hot art. Currently serving as Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at MoMA PS1, she’s one of the practitioners carving out a decisive space for intellectually rigorous, transformative, and experimental contemporary art forged by a fervent emphasis on global perspectives and emerging voices. Naturally, we asked Katrib to curate her favourite pieces from the artists we’ve featured in our own play on an exhibition, albeit concretised in print, in a ‘show’ that’s sublime, critical, satirical, tender, and always hot. 

“It’s almost impossible to single out a work by Farah Al Qasimi, whose photographs, videos, and installations form an ever-expanding network of relations—a crescendo of meaning that grows with each new project. Still, her Dearborn series, shot in the Michigan city where nearly half the population is Arab, stands out. In Marathon Oil Refinery (2022), we see the back of a woman in hijab, her tan abaya gleaming under the camera flash, mirroring the reflective surface of a toppled traffic cone nearby. Facing the refinery’s train tracks, her unseen gaze meets the name ‘Michigan’ boldly painted on a distant train car. Fast-food cups rest on the ledge. It is the contemporary sublime; it is Amreeka.”

“Martine Syms’s DED (2021) lingers powerfully in my mind. The video features an avatar of the artist in a stark and empty digital world, repeatedly attempting suicide. The gamified repetition mirrors how video games render death and rebirth as routine acts. Creating the work by 3D-scanning her body, the artist has produced an endlessly reanimated double who rehearses her own end again and again. Her limbs reattach; she rises; she begins anew. A work of the COVID-19 era and BLM movement, the avatar wears a T-shirt reading ‘to hell with my suffering’. It is dark, yes, but in its unflinching repetition, Syms captures the fraught coexistence of care and disposability in a world where life itself is contingent on power.”

“Encountering Akram Zaatari’s The End of Time (2012) in an old building during Documenta 13 remains etched in my memory. The silent, black-and-white 16mm film was projected directly onto a wall, depicting two men in an empty space. Their intimate gestures and tensions unfolded with a simplicity that revealed profound humanity. Each flicker of the film, each hum of the projector, amplified the sense of longing embedded in their movements.”

Meriem Bennani’s new feature-length film, Bouchra (2025), directed alongside Orian Barki, is a tour de force. Expanding on her series of animated shorts, the artist constructs a deeply personal narrative about negotiating the real and symbolic distances between her life in New York and her family in Morocco. The film proposes a new way of existing between two cultures in a way that feels truer for its humour and vulnerability. As always, Bennani’s impeccable comedic timing and attention to life’s smallest details will make you laugh and cry.”

“Monira Al Qadiri’s Gastromancer (2023), presented at the Sharjah Biennial, was a highlight of the year. Embedded within a curved architectural setting, entering the work felt like a journey into another sensorial world – one shaped by colour, sound, and gleaming surfaces – perfectly poised between the synthetic and the organic. Suspended, large-scale shells bathed in red light drew viewers into an alternate, organic future shaped by our petro-present.”

“Tanseem Sarkez’s Golden Gun (2025), a pair of glimmering gold high heels concealing a pistol in the stiletto, is glitz and glam with an edge. At once a symbol of status and ambition, the shoe-weapon hybrid cleverly exposes the implicit threat that shadows Arabs in contemporary western societies. Often cast as dangerous themselves, Arabs face pervasive discrimination, surveillance, and violence. Sarkez embraces what she calls ‘Arab kitsch’, a playful and critical approach to a complex, heterogeneous identity too often misunderstood.”