Hidden Companions Book Launch & Discussion

Join us for an afternoon discussing the making of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem with author, Ahmad Nabil, who is visiting from Jerusalem; translator, Fatema Alhashemi; and editor, Jenna Hamed; in conversation with Philly-based curator Mai Tahir. Together delve into the hidden realm, the process of translation, and the journey of bringing this collection of stories across thresholds, borders, and into the hands of English-reading audiences in the US and beyond. 

Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem is written by Ahmad Nabil, translated from the Arabic by Fatema Alhashemi, designed by Omaima Dajani, and co-published between The Fiction Council in Jerusalem and Radix Co-op in Brooklyn. 

About the Contributors:

Ahmad Nabil is a Palestinian, Jerusalem-based visual artist, research-er, and educator whose practice is deeply focused on documenting encounters with the unseen dimensions of everyday life, as part of Palestinian intangible heritage. He is the founder of The Fiction Council (est. 2015) in Jerusalem, a platform dedicated to Palestinian imagination through the research of Arab and Islamic mythology, superstitions, and paranormal phenomena, and their reactivation through interdisciplinary creative practices. Nabil is the author and illustrator of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem, a documentation of supernatural testimonies from Jerusalem. Hidden Companions is available in the US in the original Arabic text and in an English Translation at Radix Co-op. 

Fatema Alhashemi is a Bahraini writer, artist, and translator based in New York City. She has translated several poetry collections, including Remember I Was a Good Man by Ahmed Saleh and Ash and Air by Nadine Murtaja. She is currently writing an Arabic-language short story collection that reimagines global mythology through contemporary characters set in imagined Arab cities. 

Jenna Hamed is an artist and art worker based in Queens, New York with roots in metro-Detroit and Jerusalem, Palestine. Jenna’s background in tac-tile-driven analog practices and critical examination of art production has influenced her current interests in documentation methods via image-making, poetics, archiving through the book format. In 2024, she established Jay Seven Inc., a collaboration studio in Brooklyn dedicated to producing art installations and publishing initiatives rooted in craft, research and constraints.

Mai Eltahir is an independent curator and researcher based in Philadelphia. Her work examines the violent onset of modernity across East African coastal sites and south-south connections, tracing the residues on modes of thought, knowledge production, spirituality, ecology, and more-than-human relations. These efforts are conveyed and unfold in practice through exhibition-making, writing, and programming within and through para/institutional and collective contexts.