Ar & Or

Ar & Or is a 2012 artists’ book by Daniela Keiser that starts from one photograph taken in Al-Azhar Park in Cairo and gathers fictional biographies of the young woman it shows.

Keiser invited authors from different professions, all connected with the Arab world, to imagine a life for the woman in her picture, so a single portrait produced several short texts. Her site lists the contributors as Bärbel Dalichow (museum director), Beat Häner (filmmaker), Clara Saner (artist), Dominique Salathé (architect), Guido Hager (landscape architect), Hossam Adly (ethnologist), Judith Kuckart (writer), Susanne Schanda (journalist) and Franziska Zezulka (translator).

Edition Fink in Zürich published the book, edited by Georg Rutishauser. The English and Arabic edition is a 74-page thread-stitched brochure without a cover, with a trimmed dust jacket, and it comes with five copies of the photograph. Each was printed at a different printer in Cairo, so the color and print intensity vary from one to the next.

Keiser was born in 1963 in Neuhausen am Rheinfall and lives in Zürich. A solo show titled Ar und Or was at Galerie Stampa in Basel in 2010. Her earlier The Cairo Translation (2010) asked twelve Cairo residents to each write an Arabic text in response to one of twelve photographs she made there.