“Hammams are places of erotic pleasures and illicit queer adventures, but also of vicious crackdowns, of bodies confined and controlled. They are sites where histories of empire and histories of sex converge and congeal. They reveal as much as they conceal. They resist a western obsession to unveil and (re)present the physical world through ocular regimes of knowledge. They are saturated with dense layers of steam that obstruct vision, musty smells that intoxicate the mind and echoey sounds that resonate.”

Read the full of the essay in the Forum section of Visible Evidence (July 2023).

“The spring sun casts warm light on a makeshift soccer field overlooked by blocks of rundown buildings. Nearby, a man in his early fifties with a slim, athletic build is leaning against a pine tree. He follows the movement of a soccer ball as it bounces between a group of young men. Every now and then, he jots down some words or sketches some images in a small notebook.”

Read the rest of the essay in the April 2022 issue of e-flux Journal. Launched in 2008, e-flux journal is a monthly art publication featuring writings by some of the most engaged artists and thinkers working today.

When words fail to articulate the meaning of "queerness," silence is the answer to an impossible coming out. This essay film ponders the place of queer utopia in a world of difference and privilege. The wandering eye of a Lebanese queer filmmaker oscillates between the clamor of gay rights slogans at the Stonewall monument in New York, and the warm ordinariness of a public garden in his hometown, Tripoli, Lebanon, where homosexuality remains illegal and taboo.

This essay video and text were published in December 2021 by Kohl, a journal for body and gender research.

You can watch the trailer of the video essay here.

I participated in a virtual, imaginary conversation between documentary filmmakers, film scholars, and philosophers from different contexts concerned with the philosophical, aesthetical, and political dimensions of documentary film. This experimental roundtable was published by the 12th issue of Cinema (Journal of philosophy and the moving image), IMAGES OF THE REAL, edited by Stefanie Baumann and Susana Nascimento Duarte.

"In the living room of my parents' home in Tripoli, Lebanon, an elaborate family tree is displayed in a golden frame. It is a constant reminder of a fatalistic vision of life's ultimate purpose: reproduction. Males are depicted as branches; females as leaves. The thriving of the tree relies on branches like mine. A single man who bears no new branches or leaves could condemn an entire lineage to an end."

Read the rest of this personal essay published by the literary magazine, The Common, on September 15, 2020, here.

This chapter challenges the anti-homosexuality law in Lebanon with a poetic, historical and sociological approach. It was published in a book called, Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices (Sternberg Press, 2015).

The book builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of "queer abstraction," a term coined by Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire. It is particularly concerned with where form and politics crossover, citing the various combinations, juxtapositions, and the play between artistic strategies.

Find out more here. Read a related text from April 2014 called Untitled Dialogue #1 in Makhzin magazine.

Between 2014 and 2019, I reported on the Christians of Iraq, a community that has been deeply affected by political and security-related instabilities in the country and the region. I wrote and produced multimedia stories about displaced refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan and Lebanon, as well as stories of people returning to towns and villages in the Nineveh plains after several years of occupation by the Islamic State. There were stories of people struggling to rebuild their homes and communities and maintain, in the face of daily adversities, a strong foothold in a land that belonged to their ancestors for many generations.

These multimedia stories were published by One magazine, the publishing arm of CNEWA, an international organization.

Read some of the stories I wrote and see the photos I took here: Health on Wheels, Hard Choices and Resolve.

Watch some of the videos I produced here: In Limbo in Lebanon: Iraqi Refugees Starting Over, When Iraqis Come Home, and A Day on Zahko's Mobile Clinic for Iraqi Refugees.