2026 Two-Vehicle Event / Onderweg Naar Thuis Exhibition graphics / Harissa by Metti 2025 28 Days in Tangier / AFAC Calendar / When Mokum Meets Al Maghrib / Land Stories 2024 A Song to a Place / ‘The New Agents Variety Show’ / ‘Read The Room’ Publication Series / abs(dis)tracted calendar 2023 Yaani / Still in My Quotidian 2022 Tongues at Play / Lentil Space / On Entering the Garden / Word Match
2026 Two-Vehicle Event / Onderweg Naar Thuis Exhibition graphics / Harissa by Metti 2025 28 Days in Tangier / AFAC Calendar / When Mokum Meets Al Maghrib / Land Stories 2024 A Song to a Place / ‘The New Agents Variety Show’ / ‘Read The Room’ Publication Series / abs(dis)tracted calendar 2023 Yaani / Still in My Quotidian 2022 Tongues at Play / Lentil Space / On Entering the Garden / Word Match
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The calendar / Asriyya عصرية / Takweem تقويم / Ruznama رزنامة is a quotidian item found in many Moroccan and Lebanese homes. It sits there, on the shelf in the kitchen, hanging on the fridge, with an expiry date wide and proud. An object that carries little traces ; perhaps a religious story, a recipe, or a proverb to inspire your day, an Arab fortune cookie of sorts, bearing witness to the multi-lingual realities, part lunar, part solar. This calendar is a multi-lingual take on this object, influenced by the calendar culture between Morocco and Lebanon. It tells parallel stories of two multi-lingual port cities: Tangier and Beirut. It also speaks to daily habits, pace, and the passage and perception of time in those two cities through food and coffee / tea habits, encounters and stories of how we experience this object. It also offers a glossary that reflects the nuances of dialects between the two places. A heavy history carries them across; two Arab and Mediterranean cities, widely occupied, fighting in their own ways.
For generations of Moroccan-Dutch families in Amsterdam Nieuw-West and beyond, the annual road trip from the Netherlands to Morocco was more than just a holiday; it was a recurring annual ritual. It meant days spent on the road with a car packed full of suitcases, food, cassette tapes, gifts, and conversation, all set against an endless horizon. With the advent of budget flights, this road trip is increasingly becoming a thing of the past—prompting a moment to reflect on this shared experience of togetherness, improvisation, anticipation, and reunion.
The exhibition is curated by writer, curator, theatre maker, and local resident Abdelkader Benali, who knows the journey from personal experience. Together with Benali and residents of Nieuw-West, the Van Eesteren Museum gathered personal memories and objects that collectively form a shared memory of this road trip. What stories lie behind significant objects—such as postcards, a fisherman’s jacket, or a power drill? What did the journey sound, smell, and feel like?
The graphics were conceived in a way where multi-lingualism stands at the forefront, an exhibition text stands there in Arabic and Dutch while the main exhibition title is translated into 4 languages. We chose to work with a vibrant red color that stands out and brings together the elements of the exhibition. A series of window texts were wrapped alongside the entire facade of the exhibition space, with excerpts from the audio stories invited the passer bys and visitors in.
Both Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers were part of the Fluxus movement, an international art movement that challenged the notion that a work of art must always be a unique, valuable, and autonomous object. Instead, ordinary everyday items—a chair, a lamp, or a car—could become part of an artwork or an event. In this way, the mundane becomes absurd, useless, and anti-art.
The exhibition graphics were inspired by the fluxus in terms of typography and absurdity of the placement of elements within the space.
To start another year, AFAC wishes to gift a memorable wall calendar that introduces its uplifted identity.
When Mokum Meets Al Maghrib / 2025 (illustration, publication, and merchandise design)
When ‘Mokum Meets Al Maghrib’ is a cultural exchange trip organized by Gemeente Amsterdam and DutchCulture for cultural actors in the Netherlands visiting cultural institutions to the cities of Rabat, Marrakesh, and Casablanca in Morocco.
Land stories is a publication developped by Jibal in Lebanon that collects stories from farmers on different crops that grow in Lebanon including apples, aubergine, citrus, cumin, olives, loubieh, wild plants, and wheat.
The work presented by Siwar Krai(y)tem speaks to a testament of change through encounters with language, recording encounters and mementos as part of a reinterpreted calendar of documented time in the Netherlands.
A calendar.
A record of the quotidian.
A calendar of memory, alienation, belonging…
Encounters with a reality of resistance.
A testament of time passing and all that that means, accents shifting.
Notions gained, others lost.
A reimagined familiarity.
A Song to a Place is a production diary by artist Noor Abed documenting her film sets and reflecting on the filming process under difficult conditions in Palestine.
I was invited to take part in The New Agents Program, an 18-month residency program by Mophradat. As a culmination of the program, we, a group of 5 Arab artists and cultural practioners were invited to co-curate an evening as part of the Read the Room Festival at the Kaaitheater in Brussels in October 2024. We curated a variety show featuring a play: ‘Nauseating Delirium”, and invited artsits including: Commonground, Kid Fourteen, and Samaa Wakim.
The playbill is designed and edited by Siwar Krai(y)tem and Sara Bouzgarrou with the cover illustration by Karen Kayrouz. The publication features texts, a crossword-puzzle and comissioned illustrations that present a take on the conversations, negotiations, collaborations, and comissions that resulted from a shared learning period and co-curatorial experiment.