Studio Safar, 1st floor Palm building, Abdallah Machnouk Street, Beirut (2026)

Evoked by its name—Safar is Arabic for travel—the studio is concerned with notions of communication across cultural and linguistic barriers. Projects span different media and design frameworks, most of which services the extended cultural sector, and is engaged in social and political discourse. The studio publishes the biannual and bilingual (Arabic/English) design and visual culture journal, Saf

ar. The magazine answers to the lack of critical writings on design in the global south, and it works towards acknowledging designers as active agents of cultural production.

18/06/2026

No amount of slack messages, zoom calls, or shared folders can replace what happens in a studio.

08/06/2026

SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se Vol. I

A limited-edition box set of 150, conceived by and in collaboration with Julie Mehretu, , , and Lawrence Chua, bringing together wine, art, and publication as a single integrated work.

Each box set includes three wines by Antica Terra, original artworks by Julie, Jessica, and Paul, alongside SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se, Vol. I, a publication conceived as part of the edition.

Studio Safar developed the editorial design and packaging system for the project. The edition was designed to be opened slowly. The largest box was conceived to hold the project’s many components while determining the order in which they are encountered. The journal, the artworks, and the wine boxes each occupy their own place, separated by layers and compartments. The structure owes something to magazines such as Aspen and , where reading is anything but linear.

Produced by David Lane and the team at in New York, the clamshell box is case-wrapped in Colorplan by and finished with silkscreened typography. The journal was printed by in Portland.

Photos by Janelle Jones. Courtesy of Antica Terra and Denniston Hill.

03/04/2026

Catalogue design for ’s first edition, a design and sustainability initiative reimagining crafted pieces and industrial fragments as cultural artifacts.

Conceived by and , and curated by , the inaugural edition (in partnership with Najem Group) brought together 53 designers to transform discarded stone into collectible works.

Format: 21 × 29.7 cm (A4)
Extent: 176 pages
Medium: Print and digital publication

Photographers: , , , .hurtut

29/01/2026

Publication design for and , In the Face of the Dragon (2025).

Documentation views from the exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York. Copies of In the Face of the Dragon are stacked on shelves throughout SculptureCenter’s dark basement, inviting visitors to navigate the space and read by the light they carry.

Installation view: In Practice: Nadim Choufi, SculptureCenter, New York, 2025
Photos: Charles Benton

Nadim Choufi’s work explores how ideals of progress manifest and seduce, and the price of such visions on the lives subjected to their realization. Through sculpture, film, and text, Choufi draws on visual and literary practices that oppose or complicate narratives of national and global progress. For Choufi’s project at SculptureCenter, he has produced a new publication, In the Face of the Dragon, in which he composed a cento poem from lines borrowed from Arab poets who transform themselves, their lovers, and their people into animals and natural elements, speaking through these tongues of love and resistance.

26/01/2026

Two issues ago, underwent a major shift in format. We reduced the physical size of the publication and invited to rethink the cover template, beginning with Issue 8. The cover was reimagined as an object instead of a surface: the full list of contributors runs along the spine in very small type, while select elements from previous covers were retained to maintain continuity.

Another significant update to the magazine’s template is the treatment of Arabic article titles. All titles are hand-lettered by Khalil Majed, scanned, and placed as-is. Some contain irregularities and minor mistakes, but we rarely intervene in the work of a calligrapher whose practice spans five to six decades, the hand carries its own authority.

09/01/2026

SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se
Vol. I

A limited-edition box set of 150, conceived by and in collaboration with Julie Mehretu, , , and Lawrence Chua, bringing together wine, art, and publication as a single, integrated work.

Each box set includes three wine bottles by Antica Terra, original artwork by Julie, Jessica, and Paul, alongside SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se, Vol. I, a publication conceived as part of the edition.

The cuvées were developed by Julie, Jessica, and Paul in collaboration with Antica Terra winemaker Maggie Harrison, and in dialogue with their original artworks, which later became the bottle labels. A fourth bottle, produced alongside but not included in the box set, unites the three cuvées and bears the combined drawings as an exquisite co**se.

Beginning from the inside out, featured here are the four bottles.

“…this real joy of encountering something unexpected in that process that I think we—as a group of friends, collaborators, q***r family—continue to surprise each other and also take each other’s thinking to new, unexpected places. And then the other thing that just came up in talking to Maya and Mia [of Studio Safar] is how the whole process of assembling this from the tasting and mixing of the wine to thinking through the concept and producing the actual edition also has been about an exquisite co**se, or exquisite corpsing. I like that we’re thinking of that term as a verb. And maybe that’s what we’re giving back to the Surrealists is this idea that it doesn’t necessarily resolve in an object, in a dead object, but that it is a process. A living process. I think this edition is an encapsulation of that, in that there is something living in these boxes—the wine, the ideas, the images…”
—Lawrence Chua

Designed by Studio Safar
Photos by for Antica Terra

Address

1st Floor Palm Building, Abdallah Machnouk Street
Beirut

Website

http://www.studiosafar.com/

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