Fehras Publishing Practices (Kenan Darwich, Omar Nicolas, Sami Rustom) is an artist collective and publishing house established in Berlin in 2015. It was founded as a response to mounting questions concerning the history and presence of art and publishing in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and the Arabic diaspora. The research of Fehras focuses on the interrelation between cultures and publishing, which includes different fields of languages, archives and arts.
At the Lecture – Performance, two members of the collective, Kenan Darwich and Omar Nicolas, will focus on the installation DISAPPEARANCES, APPEARANCES, PUBLISHING, presented in the exhibition Unpacking my Library. The project examines the private library of Abd Al-Rahman Munif, one of the most well-known modern writers in the Arab world. Munif spent most of his life in exile, moving to a large number of Arab and European cities. He constantly collected books and publications during his travels and founded libraries in different cities, destined to disappear, shrink or move. Munif's library could therefore be considered a reference to the history of Arab cultural expulsion and the transfer of knowledge, and at the same time it is an area in which the disappearance and re-emergence of publications take place.