About the zines

Professional Foreigner by Khalid Albaih

In Professional Foreigner, artist Khalid Albaih turns the Venice airport into a mirror. From the transit lounge, he observes the multiplicity of travelers—and the weight assigned to certain bodies when they pass through European borders. The airport becomes a staging ground for the migrant experience: being rendered a stranger under the racist gaze, even as one carries the wound of a homeland in collapse. For Albaih, this displacement is doubly painful. Sudan falls apart at home; he finds himself untethered from family scattered across refugee routes. Professional Foreigner is a short comic strip that holds both realities together—the immediate sting of stereotyping and the long-distance grief of separation. It is an act of witness: making visible the longing that official categories try to erase.

Muscular Dreams by Dalia al-Kury

In Muscular Dreams, Dalia al-Kury documents lives suspended between survival and loss. Reflecting on her hybrid film Syrialism, al-Kury introduces "speculative non-fiction," a practice where she co-creates worlds with subjects like Salam, who navigate the crushing weight of survival guilt. These are refugees whose futures in exile are governed by unresolved crises at home. Drawing on their shared dreams, al-Kury lets them break the laws of physics—turning a water hose into a lifeline from Oslo to Syria—to visualize solutions reality denies. For al-Kury, pain is the material of art, transformed through surreal imagery into public resistance. If history is written by victors, she argues, cinema must let the oppressed write the future. This piece frames collective grief as a vital site of political reclamation where the impossible becomes possible, and where we dare to imagine a livable world.

This is Not You by Sarah Rifky and Ahmad Douma

In This is Not You, curator Sarah Rifky joins poet Ahmad Douma to document ten years of incarceration. Ahmad was freed from Egyptian prison in September 2024, only to face repeated rearrests while working on this project. On the day this zine went to print, he was sentenced to another year in prison for an essay on incarceration and the genocide in Gaza he published in March 2026. Together, Ahmad and Sarah reflect on prison conditions, survival, and what it means to write when freedom is conditional on relinquishing justice. The zine features poems and photographs Ahmad smuggled out during his decade-long confinement. Our solidarity demands more than grief; it demands persistence. This work is both witness and weapon: proof that even behind bars, poetry and resistance persist.

Grønland Maidan – Our home, our neighbourhood by Vjolla Emiri

In Grønland Maidan – Our home, our neighbourhood, Masahat colleague Vjolla Emiri archives a day of direct action and cultural expression in Oslo’s Grønland neighbourhood. Returning to a street festival they curated in 2025, Emiri details how artists, activists, and local institutions mobilized for a full day of street interventions. Targeting real estate agents and landlords threatening residents with evictions and rent hikes, the event transformed public space into a site of creative protest against gentrification. This zine serves as both an archive of that day and a testament to ongoing resistance. It captures the voices of a community refusing to be displaced, documenting a persistent struggle where art and activism merge to defend the right to home.

Dikt samling by Zubair

The poems in Dikt samling [Poems collection] were written by Zubair over several years in Agder prison, department Froland, where he was a student at Agder Art Academy (2021-2023) and participated in workshops in self-publishing together with designer and visual artist Marie Payan. The poems were not written with publication in mind. They emerged as notes, sketches, poems, and reflections on love, loss, family, hope, pain, and freedom. Zubair writes in Norwegian, a language he learned as an adult. Agder Art Academy was an art education and a collective, public artwork initiated by curators Kristine Jærn Pilgaard and Thora Dolven Balke, developed with artists Dag Erik Elgin, Hege Nyborg and Sverre Gullesen, and produced by KORO in collaboration with the Norwegian Prison Service. 

The Natural by Jannik Abel

In The Natural (Det naturlige), artist Jannik Abel traces a profound journey from personal grief to ecological awakening. Following the loss of multiple family members in rapid succession, Abel turned to nature—not as escape, but as connection. Months spent camping, eventually leading to life in a forest home, became a practice of both healing and discovery. Nature, in Abel's words, reconnects us to our loved ones and to the world itself. The zine weaves together Abel's artistic vision with their decade of documenting protest movements across Norway. It lives at the intersection of art, activism, and nature joy, articulating a politics rooted in love for the living world. As extractivist capitalism fractures our relationship with the earth, The Natural offers us a precious way forward, grounded in witness, care, and the wild places that hold us.

The zine is available both in English and Norwegian.

The Natural/Det naturlige was launched with a conversation about environmental grief between artists Jannik Abel, Ina Hagen, moderated by Rana Issa, on April 30, 2026 in Atelier Kunstnerforbundet Loft. Read more about the event here.