Lebanese-born Mohamad Abdouni is a multi-hyphenate creative force. A photographer, filmmaker and visual artist, Abdouni’s career has so far seen collaborations with everyone from Gucci to The Beirut Art Center and Amsterdam’s FOAM museum. Most recently Abdouni has focused his energy on COLD CUTS, the photojournal he founded in 2017 that explores queer culture in the Arab and South West Asia and Northern Africa region.

“Queer Arab history is incredibly rich,” Abdouni told us earlier this year. “But we just have zero access to it, and zero documentation of it; nothing at all.” COLD CUTS is a corrective to this, visually proclaiming this history across its pages in groundbreaking ways. Its latest project, a special edition of COLD CUTS called Treat Me Like Your Mother: Trans* Histories From Beirut’s Forgotten Past, will be the first ever photo book to document trans stories in Lebanon. In fact, the project - which Abdouni has collaborated on with the Arab Image Foundation and which will span portraits, recordings and stories - will form the first-ever collection of trans* archives in the Arab world.

Abdouni is set to head to Rome this summer for an artist residency, before publishing Treat Me Like Your Mother in September.

Text Katie Goh