When Romaisa Baddar began re-posting images she had come across of daily life in the SWANA (south west Asia and North Africa) region, on an Instagram account called Middle East Archive, she never had a sense that the project would develop into a globally-recognised publishing and curatorial platform. Since 2020, Middle East Archive has released nine books and a limited-edition zine, and staged spotlight displays in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, London, Los Angeles, New York and Paris. This Autumn sees the launch of two public installations/presentations new exhibitions, produced collaboratively with Foam, as part of its offsite programme in Amsterdam-West, which will be followed by Middle East Archive’s first large-scale museum exhibition opening at Foam in summer 2027. At Galerie Mercatorplein, Foam’s annual public open-air exhibition in the neighborhood’s buzzy public square, Egyptian-French photographer Yomna El Beyaly presents a new commission titled In Her Own Way / شوية وراجعة, which explores identity, femininity, and familial and social relations amongst Egyptian women. At MAQAM, a creative space for local residents, creatives and communities in the west of Amsterdam, with which Foam has collaborated since 2022, the exhibition Al Nisa / النساء brings together images of women from the SWANA region sourced by Baddar, that encourage an unlearning of traditional Western ideas around Arab feminity and feminism, which are so often rooted in colonial and racist ideologies.

Baddar’s early archival impulses were born out of both abundance and absence; a profusion of visual representations of the region referred to as the ‘Middle East’ (with all its Anglocentric connotations) which emphasised war, violence, oppression, and charismatic but ruthless dictators. At the same time, there was so much missing, so much that Baddar recognised from her own upbringing with Moroccan and Egyptian parents amongst Amsterdam’s diaspora communities. With a growing interest in contemporary photographic practices, and their intersections with identity, memory and storytelling, Baddar began to seek out images which told a different, more familiar story; of everyday pleasures, of the warmth of the home, of street life, of mundanity, of dancing. Rather than a rose-tinted or romanticised viewpoint, the Middle East Archive feed began to constitute an alternative visual record of a contested region: complex, ambivalent and contradictory, with a deep soulfulness. The work became reparative and restitutional, addressing both the West’s deep misunderstanding of the region, and its diasporas’ hunger for imagery that celebrated and reaffirmed their identity, rather than brutalised it.

Al Nisa / النساء initially began as an investigation into the role of the mother within SWANA society. “In Arab culture, and particularly Muslim culture, mothers are very important,” says Baddar. “It’s a theme you see a lot in art from the region. The mother is like a pillar; everything happens around her.” However, as the research and collecting progressed, Baddar began to feel increasingly uncomfortable that a narrative was building that reinforced, rather than challenged, conservative attitudes towards women. “Being a mother is something very beautiful, it’s like a gift,” Baddar continues. “But at the same time, it’s quite a patriarchal view, as if a woman only serves to nurture. In the end, I really wanted to push back on that.” Al Nisa / النساء began to swell and take on a different shape, telling a more nuanced, messy and paradoxical story of SWANA women, inclusive of mothers, but also daughters, teachers, lovers; artists, motorcyclists, freedom fighters. It’s a retelling that feels increasingly crucial within a culture where women’s appearance has been so widely debated and weaponised, both within and outside the region. Indeed, it is the Western perception of women’s subjugation across SWANA that is often used in arguments that justify invasion, occupation, and genocide.

At Mercatorplein, Yomna El Beyaly’s new commission speaks to this sense of multiplicity and incongruity. Perhaps due to El Beyaly’s dual French-Egyptian heritage, In Her Own Way / شوية وراجعة strikes a balance between a sense of looking in and looking out. El Beyaly’s eye for the languages of fashion and dress—she has worked previously as a commercial fashion photographer—infuses her work with a sensitivity towards colour and texture, and the drape and fold of fabrics and furnishings. Her compositions privilege tension and contrast: the decorative alongside the utilitarian, the bodily alongside the artificial. Many of her single images function almost like diptychs, creating formal hinges where meaning can aggregate. Rather than attempting a literal representation of womanhood in all its facets, the work establishes scenes, backdrops and spaces where unseen women might congregate, where gossip is exchanged, where care is performed, and where knowledge is distributed. Arab culture has, after all, traditionally replicated itself through oral tradition, through spoken and sung language rather than sign systems such as writing and images. This presents an interesting point of consideration for archival practice which, in privileging material and literate cultural products, risks neglecting or even erasing the myriad ways that relational knowledge is transferred, and identity is constructed through oral modalities.

Middle East Archive situates itself at a rich intersection of reparative archival practice, representational urgency, networked culture, and community building. The capacities of social media have enabled the sharing and accretion of material in an unprecedented fashion, yet at the same time, the multinational tech companies who own these platforms can, and do, convert memory, culture and knowledge into commodified and copyrighted assets. Human and non-human moderators can remove any material they arbitrarily deem controversial without any notice to recourse to appeal. The very same platforms that allow for the rapid global spread of counter-institutional archive-building are arguably the ones in whose hands this material is most at risk. Middle East Archive’s journey into the material world, through books and exhibitions, ensures that the democratic benefits of the internet are balanced against the need for physical encounters and off-network forms of sharing and display.  

The urgent need to address the gaps in SWANA representation that have been largely built and enshrined by Western institutions could present a dilemma when those same institutions extend the invitation to collaborate. However, Baddar sees the partnership with Foam as a full circle moment: “I meet lots of publishers, and their story isn't similar to mine. I feel like I’ve had to work quite hard to gain some sort of legitimacy, because I didn’t exactly take the traditional route. Foam has always been a really important place for me, and it’s the biggest reference point in my learning about photography. I grew up in Amsterdam, I went to all the shows there, I tried to find out who was behind the scenes.” She reflects on the very specific way in which Foam has shaped her journey in recent years, having applied for several opportunities at the museum: “I kept trying again and again, because I really wanted to work there. But I can’t help but wonder, looking back, if I’d gotten those [positions], maybe I would have never started my own thing.”  

With the first major group exhibition planned for the museum in 2027, Middle East Archive’s collaboration with Foam proposes new ways that multiplicitous identities can work with and against the institution, and new ways of thinking about and building archives, both online, on the page, and in public space.  

In Her Own Way / شوية وراجعة is on view at Mercatorplein between 1 October - 29 October 2026. Al Nisa / النساء continues at MAQAM until 20 December 2026.

LILLIAN WILKIE is a writer, editor and publisher based between London and East Sussex, UK. She is the Director of Chateau International, and the co-Director of Bound Art Book Fair.