Sculpture and Poetry: a celebration of new publications

Dinara Asadulina

Dinara Asadulina is a writer and an educator, exploring what it is to be human and to learn. She completed her MPhil in Education from the University of Cambridge as a Chevening and Cambridge Trust scholar, and is doing an MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute.

She is the co-founder of Morley House, an artist duo working at the crossroads of visual art and literature. Asadulina sees a page as an open space and works in multidisciplinary writing, verse fiction, poetry and installation.

Kristýna Farag

Kristýna Farag is a Czech flautist, singer and teacher. Born to a Slovak mother and a Syrian father, Slavic and Middle Eastern roots define her artistic explorations.

As a versatile freelance musician, Farag enjoys performing classical music of all periods, with special attention to Czech contemporary music. You can also find her immersed in free improvisation or traditional Arab music.

Farag has collaborated extensively with prestigious Czech ensembles. With Baborák Ensemble she played solo alto flute in the recording of the score of Marketa Lazarová, an icon of Czechoslovak new wave cinema. With Syrian poet and musician Marwan Alsolaiman she recently published music videos as a tribute to Arab divas Asmahan and Layla Mourad.

Christos Kakourous

Christos Kakourous is a painter and an architect. The fascination with liminal states and spaces translates into his central art themes: trauma and healing, violence and communication, unity and isolation.

He is the co-founder of Morley House and is particularly interested in making artists’ books while seeing them as vessels, depositories for narratives, comprised of drawn and physical elements.

Kakourous received an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Cambridge and is currently doing an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins.

Issam Kourbaj

Issam Kourbaj is a Syrian-born interdisciplinary artist who works with drawing, performance and sculpture, often using repurposed material.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the British Museum and V&A in London, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. A solo survey of his work opens across Kettle’s Yard and the Heong Gallery in Cambridge, in March 2024.

Deborah Lewer

Deborah Lewer is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in twentieth-century German art and is an expert on Dada, particularly on its origins in Zurich and its later forms in Weimar Germany.

Lewer has a wider interest in the intersection of art history and theology. She is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, where she teaches on the MA course in Theology, Imagination and Culture. She is currently writing a book on the German author and poet Hugo Ball.