THE ANATOMIST

Co-produced with Lara Baladi

The Anatomist is a Cairo-based publication launched on the occasion of Lara Baladi’s first solo exhibition at Gypsum, Z for Zarafa. Its inaugural issue is dedicated to migration, broached through the journey of a 19th-century diplomatic gift from Egypt to France: a giraffe known as Zarafa. Forced from her home in Sudan and sent to France, Baladi takes Zarafa’s story as a lens through which to consider forced displacement and the absurdity of diplomatic exchanges. 

Bodies, images, ideas, memories—and perhaps giraffes—in transit shape the course of human history. The commissioned texts in this issue reflect on displacement, borders, exile, and return. Across these themes, readers encounter stories of diplomacy, the plight of a migrant mother, and the scent of the medlar fruit.

This publication accompanies the launch of Anatomy of Revolution, the online ABC and archival platform Lara Baladi created to explore the iconography and language of social movements, revolts, and revolutions. Borrowing the form of an ABC, it weaves stories and histories of resistance and quests for freedom through the Arabic alphabet.

With contributions by Khaïri Abaza, Jamila Abdel-Razek, Lara Baladi, Rafaëlle Berthault, Hana Elhaddad, Mai Elwakil, Ganzeer, Jonathan Hearn, Mahmoud Salem, Amr Shalakany, Farida Youssef, and testimonies from Sudanese refugees in Egypt.

Co-edited by Lara Baladi and Farida Youssef
Designed by Farida Ezzat
Copy-edited by Jenifer Evans and Zacharia Fahmi
Printed in Cairo, Egypt, at Metropole

SOFTWARE UPGRADE

Edited by Malak Helmy

Software Upgrade (edited by Malak Helmy and designed by Engy Aly) includes conversations with Zeina Aly, Castell Lanko, nasa4nasa, Omar El Sadek, Hend Samir, and Yazan El Zubi. It proposes that the nature of the image shifted over the last decade in Egypt. It offers a speculative framework that in 2014 to 2019 we fell out of a shared global temporality as a foundation for a study of those images.

Software Upgrade was presented as an exhibition in September 2023 curated by Malak Helmy. This book publishes early conversations with the six artists in the exhibition about images, this time, community, listening, and the body as a starting point for this ongoing proposition.

Featured on https://www.grillitype.com/blog/in-use/software-upgrade

A NEW COMMISSION FOR AN OLD STATE

Mahmoud Khaled

Gypsum is pleased to launch a digitized copy of A New Commission for an Old State, a publication that was produced on the occasion of Mahmoud Khaled’s solo exhibition with the same title at Gypsum in 2018. The conversation between Mahmoud Khaled and Amro Ali was originally commissioned and published in English by Ibraaz in June 2017. This publication offers an Arabic translation of the interview and includes images taken by Khaled as part of this project.

A New Commission for an Old State was first shown at Edith-Russ-Haus, Oldenburg and produced by the Grant for Media Art of the Foundation of Lower Saxony in 2016. In this site-specific show, the artist explores associations between aesthetic and political cues that accompany recurring waves of rebranding nationhood. Khaled’s research-based approach embeds archival sources in an artistic narrative. He attempts to critically engage with the burden of a nostalgia to a fabled golden age and state-sanctioned processes of constructing collective memory.

Reenacting formal and conceptual aspects of memorials, Khaled focuses on iconic artifacts within the Egyptian context, specifically, a gated summer resort in Alexandria called Maamoura built by the state shortly after Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power to accommodate the new elite of the “rebranded” (post-1952) Egypt, a significant yet painfully understudied monument of modernist architecture in Egypt.

Download the publication here.

AHMED MORSI: THE PRINTMAKING YEARS

Ahmed Morsi

Ahmed Morsi: The Printmaking Years is Gypsum Books’ inaugural publication. Bringing together works from an expansive practice of 550 prints executed in New York City in the 70s, 80s and 90s, this book aims to document and give context to this nuanced collection of works in Morsi’s oeuvre, particularly at a moment in cultural history in which the medium was at the forefront of art production and thought. The book includes contributions by Sarah Rifky and Amina Diab with a foreword by Duro Olowu and is designed by Valerie Arif. We are grateful for the intimate relationship with and the enthusiasm and support of the artist’s estate in imagining and producing this long overdue book, which has been made possible through the generous patronage of collectors Alaadin Afifi and Yasmina Makram, Farida Hamza and Mounir Awad, HE Zaki Nusseibeh, Karim Wissa, Nora Alkholi and Rasheed Kamel.