House to House: بيت لبيت - Articulating a Poetics of Translucence

House to House: بيت لبيت captures infra-ordinary details of daily life around the Dubai Creek through oral narratives spanning the 1940s to the 1980s. Blending documentary poetics, archival research, and text-image forms, the collection asks: how does memory become its own kind of history?
A book signing will follow, with copies available on-site.
Venue: Common Room, Warehouse 51, Alserkal Arts Foundation inside Alserkal Avenue
About House to House
Through memories spanning the 1940s to the 1980s, the poems in House to House: بيت لبيت capture infra-ordinary details of daily life around the Dubai Creek, where spectacle is noticed in the ordinary and humor is found in unconventional spaces. Here, a people made community, took care of each other’s babies and businesses, and witnessed the city’s incremental metamorphoses. Through collected and refracted oral narratives, revealed is the light, wit, wisdom, and adventure of an extraordinary generation.
About the Author
Shamma Faisal Al Bastaki is a poet and writer from the United Arab Emirates. She holds an MA from Harvard University, where her poetry collection Al-Majaz: A Crossing received the CMES Best Thesis Prize, and a BA in Literature and Sociology & Public Policy from NYU Abu Dhabi, where she received the Gulf Capital-ADMAF Creativity Award for her poetry collection House to House: بيت لبيت (ELF Publishing, 2025). A Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellow (SEAF Cohort 6) with a post-graduate diploma in Diplomacy, her work has appeared in Asymptote Journal, Harvard Graduate Review, and 421 Online, among other platforms. Her poetry has been featured at the Venice Biennale, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, Seoul International Book Fair, Seoul Museum of Art, Natural History Museum London, Lilian Vernon Creative Writers House NYC, and in a projection installation by Jenny Holzer Studio for Louvre Abu Dhabi, among others.

About the Moderator

Dr. May Aldabbagh is an independent scholar, educator, and curator. Currently, she is on a functional sabbatical exploring what it means to shed old skin, archive, and tell new stories from the underworld and beyond. For over a decade as a tenured professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, she developed a teaching/research method called “Self Tracing/استشفاف النفس” which emerged from teaching courses like: Women and Work in the Gulf, Making Women/Matter, and The Body Archive. She hosted a podcast, Talking Texts, which features interviews with a younger generation of researchers and artists in the Gulf and founded an experimental lab, Haraka, that focused on Arab Art and Social Thought. Her formal education includes a Phd (Oxford University, UK), BA (Harvard University, USA) and a Thanawiyya 3amma (Dhahran Ahliyya Schools, Saudi Arabia).

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