Imad Gebrayel

Designer with a focus on sociopolitical research2008 – 2013 BA Graphic Design, AUST Lebanon
2011 – 2012 Graphic Designer, March Design s.a.r.l.
2012 – 2013 Teaching Assistant, Graphic Design Department AUST, Lebanon
2013 – 2016 Creative Director, Mojo Ink, UAE/Lebanon
2015 – 2017 MA Graphic Design, AKV|St. Joost, the Netherlands

Focus

The roots of self-representation have always fascinated me as a designer. Cultural relevance is an underestimated key player in any graphic design work, especially when it connotes and projects the different links between design and class hierarchies from one end, and design and political agendas from the other. Auto-exoticism or auto-orientalism digs deep into the effects of the westernization of local design practices and its relation to socio-economic criteria. My research focuses on the causes, effects and alternatives to auto-exoticism in Arab Design.

Questions

Is design the cause or the victim of the receding use of cultural legacies in visual communication? What are the causes and effects of auto-orientalism? What is cultural self-representation in design? How can a local design scene exoticize its own self? What are the alternative discourses to this phenomenon and how did other contexts deal with similar situations? And finally, what are this phenomenon’s counterparts in the western world?