Red Dots No Red Lines: Mouneer Alshaarani Design Retrospective
Sharjah Gallery, AUC, Egypt - 2018
RED DOTS, NO RED LINES: MOUNEER ALSHAARANI DESIGN RETROSPECTIVE, 2018
Some designers spend a lifetime building a body of work. Others spend part of that lifetime separated from their own name.
For Nagla Samir, Mouneer Alshaarani represented both a remarkable history of Arab graphic design and contemporary Arabic calligraphy, and a more personal story of authorship, exile, and artistic resistance. Decades of political displacement had forced Alshaarani to work anonymously or under the pseudonym Emad Halim, leaving a significant part of his design practice disconnected from the name through which he would later become internationally recognized. Red Dots, No Red Lines was conceived as a retrospective capable of restoring those missing connections.
Curated by Nagla, the exhibition was built through primary research across personal and private archives in Cairo and Beirut. Rather than approaching Alshaarani through a single established label, Nagla traced the evolution of his practice across decades, revealing the experiences, political convictions, and formal experiments that shaped his visual language. Works from the 1970s onward were brought together to reconstruct a fuller picture of his contribution to contemporary Arab design and visual culture.
The retrospective reached back as far as Alshaarani’s graduation project—a work whose uncompromising position, according to Nagla’s research, nearly resulted in his expulsion and foreshadowed the political confrontations that would later lead to imprisonment and exile. For Nagla, these moments were essential to understanding the work. Design was not separate from biography or conviction; it became one of the spaces through which Alshaarani continuously defended the right to think, speak, and create without submission.
Equally important was his relationship with Arabic script. Nagla was drawn to the way Alshaarani challenged the stagnation that could emerge when calligraphy was treated exclusively through inherited sacred or traditional conventions. His research allowed the Arabic letter to operate as a living visual system—one capable of experimentation, graphic construction, contemporary communication, and cultural renewal. In doing so, his practice expanded the possibilities of Arabic calligraphy and Arabic graphic design beyond imitation, while remaining deeply informed by the script’s historical and cultural heritage.
The exhibition title distilled this duality. Red dots, recurring as visual punctuation within Alshaarani’s graphic language, became markers of his distinctive design vocabulary. No red lines referred to the boundaries he repeatedly crossed—political, artistic, and disciplinary—in defending his ideas. The title also became the framework for an accompanying publication authored by Nagla, extending the retrospective into a documented account of a designer whose authorship had too often been obscured. That inquiry continued in the later publication Against the Grain, co-authored with Hoda Simazan and published by Khatt Books in Amsterdam, which further positioned Alshaarani’s design practice as an act of resistance—one shaped by political conviction, formal independence, and a persistent refusal to work within inherited boundaries.
A short documentary directed by Nagla Samir further brought Alshaarani’s own voice into the exhibition, while a designer talk and book-signing event created space for audiences to engage directly with his thinking and process.
Red Dots, No Red Lines ultimately became an act of design-historical recovery: reconnecting a designer with works that had been detached from his name, while positioning Mouneer Alshaarani within a broader history of Arab visual culture, Arabic typography, calligraphy, graphic design, and politically engaged design practice.
Red Dots, No Red Lines: Mouneer Alshaarani Design Retrospective
2018
Sharjah Gallery, The American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Role: Curator / Publication Author / Documentary Director
Format: Design Retrospective / Archival Research / Publication / Documentary / Designer Talk
Featured Designer
Mouneer Alshaarani
Research Context
Personal and private archives in Cairo and Beirut
Publication
Red Dots, No Red Lines — authored by Nagla Samir
Public Program
Designer Talk · Book Signing — 19 February 2018
Curatorial Focus
Mouneer Alshaarani · Arabic Calligraphy · Arabic Graphic Design · Arabic Script Design · Design History · Visual Culture · Political Design · Exile and Authorship · Archival Research · Arab Design Heritage
Media Links:
http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1212/5/25/27799/L%E2%80%99art-des-points-de-suspension.aspx
Link to Documentary: