Arabicity reflects on four decades of the aesthetic, conceptual, and socio-political concerns of contemporary Arab artists. Beautifully produced, it features over 200 artworks by more than 35 Arab artists including Bahia Shehab, Ayman Baalbaki, Hassan Hajjaj, and Raeda Saadeh, who explore their cultural heritage, and themes such as memory, destruction, and conflict, with great warmth, humour and visual poetry. Whether through video art, painting, photography or installation, these artists challenge the confines of their identity, resist stereotyping, and reshape the parameters of their cultural traditions. In their diverse media and subject matter, their works reflect the pulse of the region. In chaos they discover what endures.

'Being a woman in Iran is hard, and working as a woman photographer is even harder' - Shadi Ghadirian. Shadi Ghadirian is one of Iran's leading contemporary photographers. Born in Tehran in 1974, she has exhibited widely in Europe and the US, and her work has been collected by museums worldwide. She came to the limelight in the late 90s with her Qajar series, in which she examines the paradoxical position of women in Iran. Women in traditional clothing pose with items such as a mountain bike - permitted a hundred years ago, and now forbidden to women. Ghadirian's oeuvre is a spirited wink at authority. With witty parodies of domesticity, she neatly sidesteps both restrictions and expectations.

Susan Hefuna's Egyptian-German heritage has led her to explore the respective cultures' characteristics and oppositions. In her multifaceted photographs, drawings, installations and videos, the artist works with cultural codes and offers new insights in each of them. Navigating between different cultures and various media, Hefuna moreover questions identity as such. To her, digitally altered images of so-called Mashrabiyas (distinctive type of wood carving particular to the Arab East, mainly used for windows behind which women would not be seen from the outside), can serve as means to define gender specific spaces and spiritual concepts hidden behind the visible reality. Comprised of recent and selected works, this publication accompanies a travelling exhibition. (Bluecoat Arts Centre Liverpool 2004, UK, Curator: Bryan Biggs, Townhouse Gallery Cairo 2004, Egypt, Curator: William Wells, among other locations).