Sharjah Art Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Publishing Grant.
Almost 600 applicants responded to the international open call earlier this year, with the majority of submissions coming from India, followed by Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, South Africa, Palestine, Canada and the United States. This geographic spread reflects in the language breakdown. Of the total applications, 59% were in English, 32% were in Arabic, and the rest in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Māori, Hindi and Urdu. Proposals were received from, or on behalf of, artists, writers, editors, researchers, magazines, zines, collectives, collaborative research projects, museums, publishing houses, journals and non-profit cultural organisations.
The winning projects were selected by Her Highness Sheikha Hoor Bint Sultan Al Qasimi – President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. The grant recognises projects for addressing urgent issues in cultural production today as well as those that may face difficulty securing funding or support elsewhere.
This year’s recipients are:
Ayman Al Ahmad, أصوات تل حلف: الموسيقى التي عبرت الركام (Voices from Tell Halaf: Music Through the Rubble)
Fai Ahmed, Memories of Poor Sounds
Iyas Shaheen, عائد 67 [A 67 Returnee]
Katarzyna Falęcka, From Algiers to Warsaw: Artistic Encounters during the Global Cold War
Rasha Azab, Atteyat Archive
The winning projects will be co-published by the Sharjah Art Foundation and released during the upcoming editions of the Foundation’s annual art book fair, Focal Point. In addition to publishing and distribution support, the Foundation provides a total of 30,000 USD to the grantees.
2025-2026 Grantees
Ayman Al Ahmad’s book uncovers the history of Tell Halaf, a significant archeological site of Assyrian and Aramean ruins in the Hasaka province of Northeastern Syria, which was excavated by a German diplomat in the early twentieth century. أصوات تل حلف: الموسيقى التي عبرت الركام (Voices from Tell Halaf: Music Through the Rubble) follows Al Ahmad’s own research around the recovered artefacts, which are currently held in the Museum of Berlin, and the accompanying audio recordings of music indigenous to the region, which have not been analysed since their production in 1911. Through his reading of objects and archives, the author pieces together a soliloquy on exile and restitution. The publication will include restored versions of the original audio.
Artist Fai Ahmed’s Memories of Poor Sounds is a multi-format book that surveys the aesthetics, politics, and cultural memory of lo-fi, underground, and often-censored sound practices in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The project traces the afterlives of music recorded on tapes, shared in private gatherings, smuggled across borders or preserved in personal archives and online platforms. Combining oral histories, archival images, media clippings, and critical essays from underground musicians, self-recording artists, and community members, Memories of Poor Sounds examines a number of questions: Why did musicians stop producing music? How did ‘poor production’ become a language of resistance? What does it mean to remember through degraded sound?
Iyas Shaheen is a Professor of Architecture at Damascus University, whose book عائد 67 [A 67 Returnee] offers a forensic remapping and retelling of Ayn Fit. The town was depopulated in 1967 following the Israeli invasion of the Golan Heights, and remains abandoned to this day. The project uses radical cartographic thinking to confront erasure and preserve land rights, while also providing a critique of hegemonic map-making. Through maps, renders of the town, and interviews with its exiled inhabitants, Shaheen’s publication reinstills Ayn Fit’s voice and dignity in face of occupation and militarisation.
Katarzyna Falęcka is an art historian who focuses on modern and contemporary art from Northern Africa and its diasporas. Her project From Algiers to Warsaw: On Artistic Encounters during the Global Cold War will explore how transregional artistic exchanges between Algeria and countries of the former Eastern Bloc informed the work of modern artists and the art world in Algeria. Shortly after Algerian independence, many artists received education or training in the Polish Peoples' Republic, Czechoslovakia and the Democratic German Republic, creating contexts for cross-cultural encounters and art shaped by shared political ideology. Falęcka’s research traces the impact of artists’ mobility on their practices, emphasising these international influences in both the processes of cultural decolonisation in Algeria and the formation of global Cold War cultural landscapes.
Rasha Azab is a writer, film researcher, and theatre festival director from Egypt who will produce a monograph on Atteyat el-Abnudi, a pioneering filmmaker who came of age with the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the advent of cinema technologies in Egypt. Atteyat Archive commemorates el-Abnudi’s work as an alternative to mainstream Egyptian cinema, with its typically male-led production and editorialisation. While most films in modern Egypt focus on the urban milieu, el-Abnudi documented rural and farm life, featuring underrepresented workers and keepers of the land. The publication will initiate an intensive archiving of el-Abnudi’s body of work, while also acknowledging other writers, artists, and producers who were invested in Egypt's alternative cultural and cinema scene at that time.