“Designing from a sociopolitical responsibility, Gaber encounters questions such as: What is contemporary Arabic? What did the modernization of the Arabic script look like? And what are the measures that define modernity for the Arabic script? In his research practice, it is these topics that Gaber addresses. However, when he speaks of his artistic practice, he takes the listener into his personal history, his life world. Growing up in a grey area outside of Cairo—raining ash from factory pollution, outsourced by European companies—he became interested in the differences between the visual languages that were used on propaganda posters by radical Islam movements. Posters differed between neighborhoods with different social statuses: the narrative, the visual elements, and the colors. Taking part in activist movements from 2006 onward, his own entry point into design—specifically of poster-making and type design—is through activist critical perspectives.” Excerpt from an essay on Mohamed Gaber by Lucie Fortuin