Special highlight of this edition of Middle East Now festival is the exhibition “7X7 SEVEN BY SEVEN. Transcultural Narratives from the Middle East and North Africa“, an original project produced by Middle East Now Festival, conceived and curated by Roï Saade and co-produced by Murate Art District.

“In these times of revolutions, unrest, exclusion and individualism, photography can play a fundamental role in building bridges between communities in the Middle East and North Africa. The aim of this project is to explore the differences and similarities found in each city and celebrate their diversity and complexity“. , Roï Saade.

The exhibition was coordinated by Alessandra Capodacqua, and the exhibition design was curated by Archivio Personale.

The works of 7 talented young Middle Eastern photographers – Myriam Boulos, Sina Shiri, Abdo Shanan, Amir Hazim, Reem Falaknaz, Erdem Varol, Mouad Abillat – brought together to provide a personal visual perspective of their city – Beirut, Tehran, Algieri, Baghdad, Dubai, Istanbul, Marrakesh – on a specific day of the week.

The result, SEVEN BY SEVEN, is a collective voice and vision, and at the same time a set of personal and highly original points of view on the life of people in the Middle East, a visual narrative alternative to the media representation of these cities, very often negative and linked to the facts of news and geopolitics.

As an integral part of the project, the curator has created, exclusively for the festival, 7 newspapers that can be browsed in the exhibition: 7 newspapers in whose pages the story is developed through images of every day of a hypothetical week in the Middle East.

SEVEN BY SEVEN is also presented through a special online platform – 7×7.middleastnow.it – which allows visitors to digitally explore the work of the 7 photographers and their visual account of the cities in which they live.