In light of the ongoing sanitization of queer culture and the commodification and fetishization of queer sexuality for general consumption; considering the homonationalism that has made queerness a marketing tool to construct a 'progressive' national identity, which in turn justifies imperialist, racist and Islamophobic policies; and given the institutional containment of queer theory as well as the popularization and dilution of 'queer' as a buzzword within the opportunistic identity politics of the art world, it is good to be reminded once in a while of the countercultural roots of queerness and that, beyond its fluid approach to gender and desire, for many it still encompasses radical politics and a rejection of societal norms.

This is exactly what I Will Always Be Looking For You - A Queer Anthology on Arab Art does. It reminds us that while visibility and the struggle for acceptance are necessary, they also risk fostering a complacency that undermines queerness as a radical force of dissent and transformation.

With its collection of texts that aim to document and (re-)imagine queer presence in the Arab world, the book emphasizes different aspects and specificities of queerness rather than a monolithic understanding of community. It positions art as a catalyst for resistance and shared memory, and affirms solidarity in the face of oppression, censorship and erasure. Embracing dialogue as a critical tool for intergenerational exchange, the book foregrounds the sociopolitical context of artistic production and reception in the Arab world. It also insists on the political and epistemic weight of personal experience. In doing so, the volume offers a discursive space, or "counter-archive" (8), in which situated knowledge, embodied testimony and critical reflection converge.

The book is the outcome of a five-year research project initiated by Dayna Ash, the founder of Haven for Artists (HFA). Established in 2011 and based in Beirut, Lebanon, HFA is a feminist NGO that works at the intersection of art and activism. It hosts exhibitions and festivals, runs an artist residency program, and offers funding for artists in Lebanon to support their projects and research. In light of the recent Israeli military strikes on Lebanon, HFA has also collected and distributed aid, shelter supplies and warm meals for people displaced in Lebanon.

Since 2022, HFA has been publishing manbouzine, a free print zine with contributions by artists and writers on topics such as radical idleness, fear, utopia, solidarity and the political imaginary. I Will Always Be Looking For You is the first comprehensive monograph published by the organization. The volume, edited by Yasmine Rifaii, artist and creative director of HFA, and Nadim Choufi, artist and researcher, brings together texts by 24 writers on 31 artists from 13 Arabic-speaking countries.

The editors made it a point to only commission authors either from the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region or with diasporic ties to it, and to publish the book in Arabic and English. In line with a refusal to confine themselves to predetermined narratives and an urgency to debunk 'Eurocentric misrepresentations', they regard the book not as "a token of representation" but as a "testament of reclamation" that addresses "the diversity, shared struggles, and varying coping strategies" of Arab queers in all "their complexity" (8).

Rather than establishing a category of "queer Arab art", Rifaii and Choufi conceive of their 'queer anthology' as an "exercise in observing what the merging of queerness and Arabness can look or feel like in an artwork" (15). Whereas queerness surfaces differently across these artworks, the text formats - the book includes essays, conversations, poetry and more experimental writing - similarly resist uniform shape, adopting "queerly" (16) inflected expressions that reflect the editors' broader methodological commitment to formal plurality.

The notion of 'Arabness' is approached not as a stable or self-evident identity but as something contested, layered and refracted through geographic, generational, diasporic and linguistic points of view that together resist any singular or essentialized definition of what it means to be Arab. The artworks discussed in the book span different media, including installation, sculpture, painting, photography, film and video. Many of the contributions discuss artistic positions in dialogue, setting the work of an older generation alongside that of a younger one, tracing continuities and ruptures across time. Other texts focus on a single artist or a specific work more closely.

Raed Rafei, for example, takes on a queer reading of the films of Egyptian directors Yousri Nasrallah and Youssef Chahine. He discusses how they evoke "moments of unexplored homoerotic desire" and how both Nasrallah's and Chahine's films "open the door to watching Egyptian cinema with an anti-conformist, queer lens" (49). Nour Almazidi considers Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi's video installation Mendeel Um A7mad (N x I x S x M) (2012) "as a queer practice and method that is deeply informed by the contextual specificities of everyday material and political realities of Kuwait" (109). She explores how the work addresses the public perceptions of 'Boyah' (a combination of the English word 'boy' with the Arabic feminine suffix 'ah' to designate a locally rooted form of butch subjectivity) in relation to anti-queer sentiments in the Gulf that habitually frame queerness as "unnatural and Western" (111). And Sophia Sherif critically assesses Mohamed Soueid's documentary Cinema Fouad (1993) and his depiction of a Syrian trans woman in relation to Mohamad Abdouni's archival project Treat Me Like Your Mother: TransHistories From Beirut's Forgotten Past (2022), which documents the lives of trans women from the 1980s to the 2000s. Sherif carefully weighs the extent to which the artists afford their subjects trans feminine agency, describing the experience of encountering these works as "a trans feminine* person from a younger generation" as "both eye-opening and heartbreaking" (303).

While some contributions offer rigorous critical analysis of artistic practices, others respond in a more allusive, poetic manner or take artworks as a point of departure to reflect on broader issues of queerness, representation and the sociopolitical circumstances at hand.

Joud Hasan, for example, takes Jad Wadi's video Ladies, Gentlemen, and Everyone in Between (2020) as an occasion for grappling with his own transitioning and gender dysphoria. Ruba El Melik's essay on Ahmed Umar addresses the bias of Western standards of progress linked to the politics of visibility, claiming that Umar's "art challenges the narrative that coming out is the beginning to a perfect end, that visibility is proof of existence" (32). For MK Harb, the works of Lara Tabet and Omar Mismar offer a lens through which to examine cruising culture and how the intersection between social class and sexuality constitutes queer spaces in Beirut. Bekriah Mawasi, writing on Sharif Waked's Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) and Elias Wakeem's Homecoming Queenz (2019), argues that the "experience of navigating checkpoints and borders reveals how the Palestinian body is continually surveilled and alienated, rendered 'queer' in its deviance from the occupier's controlled order" (333).

Many of the contributions address the codes through which queer people in Arab countries and communities navigate visibility, circumventing outward representation and control. In a region marked by conflict, war and ongoing genocides in Gaza and Sudan, some texts more or less explicitly stress that "to be queer is to be decolonial" (280). Language, moreover, is tackled as a site of negotiation and subversion. Rana Issa in her text on the Syrian artist collective Fehras Publishing and their project Borrowed Faces (2021) highlights translation as their central methodology to explore cultural practices in the Levant during the Cold War period. For Issa, translation within Borrowed Faces "warps around the historical material like a kaleidoscope" (189) and, in combination with drag, makes obvious "the fiction that is integral to historiography as a practice" (193).

The bilingual layout itself renders translation as a structural and political gesture. Meticulously balanced in its design by Marwan Kaabour, the book distributes its content so that Arabic and English readerships are addressed with equal care and without hierarchy, neither language serving merely as a supplement or afterthought to the other. This also applies to the placement of visuals and texts throughout, reinforcing the dialogical approach that defines the ethos of the volume as a whole.

A few contributions remain underdeveloped from an art-historical perspective, and one wishes at times for a clearer and more sustained engagement with the artistic practices at their centre. Akram Zaatari, who has produced a large body of work on gay desire and homosociality, could have warranted a more dedicated and expansive treatment, and Mahmoud Khaled's Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man would have deserved a more extended close reading than it receives here. Other works by artists who have meaningfully engaged with gender, sexuality or the decolonial potential of queerness - such as Youssef Nabil, Aïcha Snoussi, Marwa Arsanios, Roy Dib or Basyma Saad - are not present, suggesting how much remains to be explored. However, the anthology does not set out to be comprehensive, nor should it be held to that standard. It is a major stepping stone - one that opens conversations and stands as a labour of love driven by genuine care and urgency.

Daniel Berndt