Rana Issa

Rana Issa is a writer, curator, and translator whose work lives at the intersection of language, history, and social change. She moves fluidly across genres and languages, bringing together public humanities, art, activism, and research in ways that feel like a single, coherent practice.

At the center of her work is a belief that art can be infrastructure and a way of building new models for how cultural institutions operate. As co-founder and artistic director of Masahat.no, she commissions and programs artists from Arab and Global South backgrounds, creating spaces that reach new audiences while questioning the very structures that host them.

Her focus has shifted in recent years from a strictly regional lens to something more expansive: a post-nationalist perspective that traces connections between diasporic communities across Europe. Her practice is anchored in neighboring, aesthetic sociality, and conviviality, concepts that are inform how she programs artistic interventions that strenghten solidarity and communal belonging.

Her publications span leading journals and platforms in Arabic, Norwegian, and English. Her book The Modern Arabic Bible came out with Edinburgh University Press in 2023. In 2026, her autobiographical work Tung tids tale (Press Forlag, 2025) won the Thomas Hylland Erikson Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Bokhandlerprisen. Her Arabic book Inn Ushtum, Ushtum was published by Khan al-Janub in 2026.

Through all of this, her aim remains consistent: to reshape how the Middle East is discussed in public discourse, pushing back against colonial frameworks while centering migration, ecological crisis, and the lived realities of diaspora.

Protest in movement: Curatorial Principles Of Commoning Public Space
Masahat for Art in Exile

Since we began Masahat in 2015, we wanted to intervene in public discourse and the public sphere generally and present more nuanced narratives from the region we come from, the Eastern Mediterranean. Our work was driven by the revolutionary fervor that fired up the Arab spring. We sought artistic means for our political motivation and began curating arts and culture in Oslo, always from the ground up, working in collaboration with artists, activists and academics (but also with art and civil society institutions) to articulate our shared truths. As a collaborative organization, Masahat practices the principle of openness and inclusion through balancing our Arab art world expertise with a curiosity about the arts and cultures of other national diasporic groups in Norway. We are an organization in protest, deeply inspired and in solidarity with masses of people refusing the terms of their subjugation. Thus we are drawn to artists that think of the sites and expressions of protests against the many forms of political oppression? Where does the power of artistic action lie? Besides alliances between artists, cultural workers and activists, how do political thinkers, who contest genocide and many other forms of state violence, envisage the place and the role of art in the public sphere in our times? In this talk I will present our artistic principles at Masahat. I will organize my talk around movement in space, and present our own practice of commoning public space through artistic curation and anti-disciplinary collaborations.