This is Part II of our coverage of Suni’a Bisihrika – Made with Your Magic. This piece expands the review to examine Suni’a Bisihrika as an infrastructure of relations, building cultural networks across cities, borders, and generations. The piece traces how Baghdad emerges as a shared horizon— in a trans-Arab circuit, shaping how memory, care, and resistance circulate across the exhibition’s unfolding journey.

Dream City was never just a festival. Born from the radical gesture of dancers Selma and Sofiane Ounissi, who co-founded L’Art Rue (“Art Street”) in 2006, years before the Tunisian revolution, it has always operated as an infrastructure of relation. 

Now, with Suni’a Bisihrika, it begins to mutate into something else: a trans-Arab circuit that remembers and moves at once, a dispersed archive, reviving forgotten links and crafting new ones. 

Abou El Fetouh is not an external curator but a central node carrying the itinerant sensibility of Meeting Points — his earlier project that crossed borders, built ephemeral institutions of trust, and was central to the creation of Dream City over fifteen years ago. This new exhibition extends those lineages. The five movements of Suni’a Bisihrika (2025–2027) will carry fragments of works, traces and echoes of each city, and encounters with different publics. 

What begins in Tunis will be altered and expanded — in and by Beirut, Damascus, Jeddah, and Baghdad. The exhibition will become a living archive of these transformations: each chapter another movement, each city another mode. By the time Suni’a Bisihrika returns to Tunis in 2027 — accompanied by a book co-edited with curator Rasha Salti — it will have gathered the memories of multiple publics, artists, and places. It will have become an archive of listening. 

The larger Dream City 2025 editorial names the festival’s frame: “Fragments of an Unfinished World: Thinking Amid the Slow Apocalypse”. It positions art not as celebration but as evidence, as resistance to erasure, one where “persistence is not survival, it is a strategy of time.” Against what it calls slow violence, the exhibition insists on presence — to create, gather, and listen even amid contraction. 
 
The maqām as curatorial partition and method affirms the politics of the plural and the aesthetics of the unfinished. It suggests that polyphony itself can be a form of survival in times that feel apocalyptic. Abou El Fetouh insists that the movement from Tunis to Beirut to Baghdad is not a tour, as each city will transform the shape and tone of the exhibition. Each encounter will add another set of vibrations and frequencies to its body. 
 
The maqām becomes both form and politics: a tradition of improvisation, migration, and adaptation that mirrors the exhibition’s geographic unfolding. And alongside the works of the Iraqi artists (see: part I), those of Etel Adnan, Ala Younis, Iman Mersal and Alia Farid compose a polyphony in which distance does not weaken intensity but alters its frequency, allowing Iraq to appear not as a single image but as a set of reverberations. 

Etel Adnan — Lantern in the Apocalypse 

At the heart of this relational infrastructure lies a voice that moves between poetry, politics, and prophecy, an artist that we lost in 2021 but whose aura was deeply felt: Etel Adnan. Her world-building work acts as a poetic and political compass, a way of naming light in the midst of destruction.  

And perhaps Suni’a Bisihrika is that spell extended — a maqām unfolding across time, carrying the echo of Iraq, the cry of and for Palestine, the voice of Etel Adnan, and the quiet insistence that being together need not mean agreement — that to remain beside one another, through our dissonances, is itself a form of collective practice, a way of persisting. 

Her book-length poem The Arab Apocalypse (1980), written after the Tal al-Zaatar massacre in Beirut in 1976, hums beneath these works like a persisting rhythm — dissonant, luminous, incantatory. In that vast solar poem, Adnan wove the destinies of Palestine and Iraq into a shared cosmology of struggle — lands bound by fire and mourning, but also by endurance, imagination, and the stubborn will to name what survives the destruction. 

Soon to be published in Arabic by the Tunisian art publishing house Bao Books, it returns as both text and testimony, a re-circulation at a moment of deep, engineered fragmentation and political defeat, resounding with the same urgency it carried decades ago. Adnan’s work in the exhibition appears not as historical artifact but as living presence — a voice threaded through the parcours, shaping how the surrounding works reverberate. 

Adnan was profoundly of the Arab world and embodied another kind of belonging: one built through faith in the connective tissue between our lives and struggles. This sense of cross-border belonging and affinity also appears in the first stop of the exhibition in the film ISMYRNA (2016) by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, in which Adnan reflects on a city she never visited but originated from — Smyrna/Izmir — and on the forced exiles, erasures, imaginaries, and lingering traumas that bind people beyond state categories. 
 
For Adnan, Baghdad was not a footnote in her biography but a field of relations — through a decade-long friendship with the poet Buland Haydari and through the repeated invitations that rooted her in the city’s literary and artistic world as she recounts  in The Master of the Eclipse (2009). In The Arab Apocalypse, these bonds surface not as memoir but as incantation: Baghdad as pulse, as witness, as a name spoken to keep relations alive, weaved in what she referred to as “constellation of sorrow”.  

In this exhibition, Adnan’s voice resonates not only as poetic echo but as an ethical and political horizon. At a time when Arab regimes once again betray Palestine and sectarian divisions are weaponised to deepen fracture across the region — from the river to the sea, from Beirut to Baghdad, from the Euphrates to the Nile — Adnan’s presence feels like a lantern. She reminds us that The Arab Apocalypse was never a single event but a condition we inhabit — not a fate, but an order built to endure — and that even within it, beauty, resistance, care, and embodied solidarity remain possible. 

If Adnan’s poetics of light traced the emotional landscape of the Arab world, Ala Younis continues that conversation through architecture, archives, and the material memory of Baghdad. 

Ala Younis — Battles in a Future Estate – Haifa Street (2025) 

Venue: École Préparatoire – Rue des Glacières 
Maqām Hijaz – Music from this maqām played all day at Café De Jo  

Ala Younis, the Kuwait born artist and curator, continues to trace Baghdad’s architectural and political imagination, a terrain where modernity, desire, and authoritarianism have long converged. This work on Haifa Street is the later fold in this long-term archival inquiry, after Plan for a Greater Baghdad (2015) and Plan (fem.) for a Greater Baghdad (2018). 

Battles in a Future Estate – Haifa Street marks the first time Younis and Tarek Abou El Fetouh collaborate in the roles of artist and curator after years of shared involvement in various curatorial initiatives. Their encounter here opens a new dialogue about how art and research might together trace the sediments of a city that remains over-imagined and over-represented through violence while its other layers are obscured or forgotten. 

This work focuses on a single thoroughfare in Baghdad. One that has borne multiple layers of history: from its modernist planning in the mid-20th century as part of a new national imagination of the newly established Republic, to its later transformation into one of the most militarized zones of the post-2003 U.S.-led occupation. In recent memory, Haifa Street has been captured mainly through images of sectarian violence and the joint U.S.–Iraqi military operations that claimed to render the neighborhood safe. Younis revisits this street not only as a site of war, but as tracing the strata of aspirations and ruins — a place where ideology, architecture, and lived experience are inseparable. 

Though she has yet to set foot in Baghdad, Younis’s research-based practice, informed by her training in architecture, allows her to weave together micro and macro-histories over several decades. She reconstructs the story of the myriad men (2015) and women (2018) who contributed to the design and construction of modern Baghdad, revealing how architecture functions as both a vessel for collective imagination and a stage upon which power struggles were inscribed. Deployed in the courtyard as an open-air reconstruction of Haifa Street, Younis draws together archival fragments, drawings, and imagined reconstructions; she summons the ghosts of a generation of planners, artists, and citizens who once sought to build a city of abundance — only to see it transformed by deprivation, siege, and sectarian violence. 

One figure is foregrounded in the installation: Nuha El Radi, the Iraqi artist whose visions of urban renewal — and whose recurring “bread-palm tree dream” first recorded in her 1990–91 wartime diaries — have threaded through earlier segments of Younis’s long-term project. In Haifa Street, El Radi is staged twice: as an enlarged digital collage with a palm tree sprouting flatbreads obscuring her face, printed life-size on one wall; and as a smaller 3D-printed figure of El Radi standing before it, contemplating the image. This dream conjures an aspiration of protection, nourishment, dignity and self-sufficiency. The tableau makes material the impossible distance between aspiration and aftermath — an intimate and allegorical dream that persisted even through the manufactured scarcity of the embargo years. 

In the context of Suni’a Bisihrika, Haifa Street becomes a meditation on distance and imagination: how to inhabit a place one has never visited, how to reconstruct a landscape through collective memory, traumatic history and inherited dreams. 

Just walking distance from Younis’s architectural reconstructions and archival re-membering, Iman Mersal turns to the intimate architecture of loss: the archive itself. 

Iman Mersal & Kayfa Ta — Archive and Crimes (Howdunit 1) (2022 – 2025 Bao Books reprint) 

Venue: Safahat – Bab Lakouas 
Maqām Nahawand – Music from this maqām at Café Layelli Zamen 

Iman Mersal, the Egyptian poet, essayist, and translator, appears in Suni’a Bisihrika through her project Archives and Crimes (Howdunit 1), a work that exposes the tension between evidence and absence, between the official grammar of history and quest of the researcher through an archive that is at once obsessive, intimate and persistent. 

Mersal’s investigation resists the authority of historical and official archives. In tracing these remnants, she reveals how power is enacted not only through historical violence but through the silence that follows it — the missing records, the bureaucratic euphemisms, the quiet disappearance of lives deemed inconvenient to remember. 

Her research focuses on case studies, some of which delve into the fates of Iraqi artists and intellectuals persecuted during Saddam Hussein’s regime. Yet her approach transcends biography: she writes with and through these absences, treating the archive not as a repository of facts but as a living organism that trembles with desire, loss, and partial recovery. Each act of research and reading becomes a gesture of care, a form of repair toward those whose traces remain scattered and unacknowledged. 

In reading Mersal, an echo from earlier in the exhibition returns through the image of Aziz Ali in Mounir Salah’s film — that first encounter with an Iraqi voice persecuted into near-erasure. Mersal’s text becomes an invitation to think about how alternate histories are built when political violence has mutilated them. This concern lies at the core of Ali Eyal’s practice, crystallised in the tension of Tonight’s Programme (2017), where he “merg(es) Duke Ellington’s 1963 performance at Khuld Hall in Baghdad with Saddam’s bloody coup in the same theater 16 years later.” In Safahat, the community center that houses the works of Eyal, Adnan and Mersal, the maqām does its work: different frequencies of archival work pulse side by side, and show that memory needs more than one method to stay alive.  

Mersal’s book also resonates profoundly within the larger frame of Suni’a Bisihrika, which itself is built around the politics of memory, the ethics of witnessing, and the need to listen to what has been suppressed. Mersal’s presence anchors the exhibition’s exploration of disappearance and reappearance, situating the researcher as both mourner and witness. 

Her collaboration with Kayfa Ta, the independent publishing initiative co-founded by Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis, extends this dialogue. The press — whose name means “How to” — operates as a porous space between art and writing, between speculative methods and social documentation. Younis and Maamoun conceived Kayfa Ta as a publishing practice that resists institutional rigidity, offering a space for inquiry that is at once artistic and intellectual, personal and political. 

Both Younis’s Haifa Street and Mersal’s Archives and Crimes are acts of reconstruction — gestures of reassembly that seek to piece together what hegemonic history has tried to erase all the while imagining continuities where only fragments remain. In their works, Baghdad’s architecture and archives, imagination and evidence, the spatial and the literary, meet and mirror one another — rebuilding memory from what survives its disappearance. 

In the last stop in the exhibition walk, the audience is invited to linger with the echoes between intimate and ecological grief, with Alia Farid’s film extending these resonances into the marshes of southern Iraq, where extraction and endurance coexist. 

Alia Farid — Chibayish (2022) 

Venue: Dribet Dar Hussein 
Maqām Saba – Music from this maqām played at Café Mrabet 

Alia Farid, a Kuwaiti–Puerto Rican artist, brings her camera to the southern wetlands of Iraq, filming what political power drained in the 1990s and the communities and ecosystems that continue to resist disappearance. Her film Chibayish (2022) unfolds where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, a landscape simultaneously sustained and suffocated by the infrastructures of oil and waste. It follows three young residents, Riad Samir, Jassim, and Qassim Mohammed as they care for a water buffalo, traverse the flooded terrain, and name their kin and neighbors. Their gestures, both ordinary and ceremonial, mark a living continuity within a geography engulfed by extraction. 

Farid intercuts these scenes with computer-generated images of used plastic bottles drifting in the air of the reconstituted Ziggurat of Ur. The juxtaposition folds the traces of toxic modernity into the landscape: turning pollution itself into the archive of a future we have already set in motion. 

The film is part of a larger body of work that traces the social, historical, and ecological consequences of oil economies on the intertwined destinies of southern Iraq and Kuwait. In a 2023 ArtNews interview, Farid reflected on her lineage (her paternal grandmother from southern Iraq) and described crossing that border for the first time as a reminder that “we are not our governments, that these borders are not real, and that insisting on community and connectivity is essential.” 

In Suni’a Bisihrika, Farid’s work is in dialogue with the Iraqi artists’ meditations on memory and loss: her camera listens for what refuses erasure, tracing the rhythms of life that persist even inside the ruins of authoritarian rule and enduring empire. The result is a portrait of a landscape shaped as much by collective endurance as by violence where resource extraction and ecological devastation coexist everyday forms of persistence and care. 

Toward Baghdad 2027 — Return and Listening Back 

When Suni’a Bisihrika reaches Baghdad, the resonances first felt in Tunis will without a doubt take on new tones. And to imagine the exhibition there is to honour a city that has never ceased to create, even amid invasion, sanctions, isolation, and the long duration of abandonment. Its artists have continued to invent forms of relation and resistance in the absence of infrastructure, insisting that creation and relation themselves are a way of remaining present. 

This persistence links Baghdad to many of the threads moving through the exhibition. Writer Iman Mersal and artist Ala Younis, for instance, both trace long-standing connections to Iraq — geographic, affective, and political. In an interview during Dream City, Younis shared that during the Gulf War, she met Mersal in Amman while she was on her way to Baghdad on a solidarity trip, and took with her letters and material support that Younis and others were sending. Through their work their gestures of witness and proximity—across time, borders, war, and loss— mark an enduring commitment to Iraq as both collective wound and horizon, as a space of relation that refuses erasure. 

In these interlaced trajectories — from Adnan’s solar poetics, to Mersal’s and Younis’s archival inquiries, to Abbas and Eyal’s collective grounding, and to Farid’s and Salah’s meditations on legacy and transmission — we begin to glimpse an expanded geography of relation ignited by and through Iraq. It gestures toward a constellation of artists and thinkers who, across decades and borders, have turned toward the country not only as a site of grief and loss but as a living archive of endurance, imagination, and shared becoming. 

In Baghdad, the exhibition will not simply conclude before the Tunis homecoming; it will listen back — to the place from which so many of its echoes emerged, where imagination has persisted despite everything. And importantly, its arrival will not lean simply on existing infrastructures — whether fragile or resilient — but add new layers to them, thickening the terrain on which artists, cultural workers and thinkers can gather, think, and act. This is where the presence of Rasha Salti becomes particularly resonant. Her decade-long research in Past Disquiet with Kristin Khoury made clear not only Baghdad’s importance as a regional node of artistic and political organizing, at the time around solidarity with Palestine, but also the margins where that imagination was forged — the informal networks, self-organised initiatives, and artistic solidarities that sustained Arab and transnational cultural infrastructures beyond state sponsorship. 

In Tunis, similar questions surfaced insistently in many of the informal discussions amongst artists and cultural workers about the tension between: the scarcity of opportunities, hegemonic funding sources, the future of art in public spaces, the shrinking of civic freedoms, and the role of the artist in a time when fascism appears less as an aberration than as a global horizon. These conversations have taken another intensity after October 7 — sharper, more urgent, yet still largely unheld collectively, suspended between fatigue, fear, and the absence of alternative structures through which to imagine artistic and cultural work otherwise. 

The prospect of this itinerant and incremental exhibition that will gather many in Baghdad in 2027 therefore carries more than symbolic weight. It suggests a space where the echoes first heard in Tunis -and carried through Beirut, Damascus, and Jeddah— can be tested, stretched, and transformed: not by closure, but by the demand to face one another, to listen, and to take responsibility for the worlds we are making. 

This is Part II of our coverage of Suni’a Bisihrika – Made with Your Magic. Part I, which introduces the exhibition’s opening movement in Tunis, exploring the work of artists from within Iraq, can be found here.