Installation shots, A Photobook World, B7L9 Art Centre, Tunis, 2025. Curated by Roï Saade and Tamara Abdul Hadi. Courtesy of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation.
Organiser Souheila Ghorbel tells us how the roving project has expanded to include workshops, book signings, talks, and concerts in Tunis
When I spoke to publisher and designer Roï Saade about his roving photo book library, Bound Narratives, in 2024, he expressed to me his frustrations about photo book publishing in the Middle East and North Africa: “Our bookstores, libraries, and homes are filled with Western photo books [on the region]. Yet it’s rare to find photo books from the region itself in these collections,” he said. “We have no shortage of artists or storytellers from the MENA region.” Just shy of a year later, his ambitions to present photo books from the region through a decolonial lens has scaled outwards dramatically.
After travelling to Beirut, Florence, Montreal, and Sarajevo since its creation in 2022,this Autumn Bound Narratives travelled to Tunis. It marks, for the first time, the project as a festival, offering an exhibition, an open-access library, workshops, book signings, talks, and concerts.
Organised by Saade, Tamara Abdul Hadi and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Bound Narratives unfolds into a festival across the city, activating B7L9, the home of the foundation, and also 32 Bis and Mouhit Space, running from 19 September to 14 November. The programme is focused around an exhibition, A Photobook World curated by Saade and Abdul Hadi which took place at B7L9 from September 19 to November 2. There were also book launches, panel discussions, concerts, and workshops – all with the intention of scrutinising methods of publishing, encouraging public engagement with emerging arts in Tunis, and blurring the lines between borders. Souheila Ghorbel, Program Manager at B7L9, describes it as a “very full programme,” one that “activated the exhibition from the first day with guided tours, talks, and workshops.”
“It’s important for us as Tunisian photographers, and not only for the Tunisian scene, to approach photo books from our own perspective”
Conceived as a bridge to Jaou Tunis, the biennale of image and moving image, Bound Narratives, co-curated with Iraqi photographer Abdul Hadi, aims to strengthen the Tunisian cultural scene through innovative curatorial formats that centre the photo book and the image. The festival’s ambition, according to Ghorbel, was not only to showcase work but also to re-anchor the project in Tunisia – bringing the photo book medium closer to local audiences and practitioners.
“This was the main idea behind bringing Bound Narratives to Tunis – it’s a project from artists from the MENA region but it was mostly showcased in Western countries. It made a lot of sense for us to bring this project to North Africa and create a one-of-kind event in the region,” says Ghorbel. “We have a lot of projects in the region about photography, about books and the arts, but not about photo books specifically.”
Initially envisioned as a small reading room, the project expanded into a large-scale exhibition featuring over 30 artists from across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond – including Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and Lebanon. The show was organised around three curatorial threads: Longing and Belonging, Upheaval, and Reimagining Histories, exploring how artists use the photo book as a medium for counter-narratives, memory, and reclamation.
One of the festival’s most powerful undertones is its decolonial spirit – rethinking how visual narratives from the MENA region are produced, circulated, and historicised. As Ghorbel explains, for many Tunisian artists, exposure to photobooks has long been mediated through Western references and institutions. Bound Narratives challenged that by offering a platform built from within the region, featuring creators whose perspectives are often underrepresented in global publishing circuits.
“It’s important for us as Tunisian photographers, and not only for the Tunisian scene, to approach photo books from our own perspective. Here, we have mostly Western references and we don’t know what’s happening in the region. With this project, we discover the richness of projects that are happening that we didn’t have access to,” Ghorbel continues.
Panels such as “Independent Publishing in the Region,” moderated by Mohamed Somji of Gulf Photo Plus, created space for reflection on the infrastructures of artistic production. Participants included Tunisian voices such as Zied Ben Romdhane, Souheila Ghorbel, and Moez Akkari, founder of Bao Books, a new independent bookstore in Tunis.
These discussions culminated in the creation of a regional database of creators and publishing resources – an initiative toward sustainable collaboration and knowledge exchange.
Parallel to the exhibition, the festival hosted numerous workshops, concerts, and community programs. Egyptian photographer Heba Khalifa presented her work virtually, while Maen Hammad led a skate zine-making session with Tunis’s skating community – part of his ongoing Landing project linking youth collectives from Palestine to Colombia and the US. Landing is the inaugural publication of Saade’s publishing house, Huwawa, launched this year which expands his efforts to practice disruptive publishing focused on artists and local economies in the region.
A key component of the ongoing festival is the Photobook-Making Lab, led by Tamara Abdul Hadi, Roï Saade, and Zied Ben Romdhane, in which ten Tunisian photographers are developing photobook dummies under mentorship. This lab reflects the festival’s commitment to capacity-building and to cultivating a self-sustaining photobook culture in Tunisia.
For Ghorbel, Bound Narratives represents a turning point: “Just by having only photobooks from the region is an achievement itself.” The exhibition revealed the multiplicity of approaches to bookmaking emerging from the Arab world – works that blend intimacy and politics, history and materiality.
Bound Narratives will continue its journey through a forthcoming presentation at Ibraaz, the newly relaunched London-based initiative by Lina Lazaar and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. The aim is to engage with the London art scene and its diasporic communities, and to create new synergies between the foundation’s regional and international platforms.
Bound Narratives runs until 15 November at B7L9, Tunis. The exhibition A Photobook World closed its doors at B7L9 Art Centre on November 2. However, the Bound Narratives festival is still ongoing at Le 32bis through the Photobook-Making Lab.
