Samar Younes | سَمَر يُونُس

Excited for my third year @newinc ! One of only museum incubator that actually understands post-disciplinary practice isn’t performance art - it’s survival strategy… Office hours mentor this year instead of dedicated format. Different access model, same recognition: the most transformative work happens when practitioners refuse to pick a lane. Twelve years of cohorts who care about each other’s experimental projects across wildly divergent practices because the infrastructure actually values complexity over categorization Museum-led spaces that prioritize values over venture capital metrics remain dangerously rare. @newmuseum ’s NEW INC proves collaborative intelligence beats genius mythology every time. Meeting brilliant cohorts, mentees, and fellow mentors along the way continues reminding me why this work matters 💚✨

"من ذاكرة الأجداد إلى لغة الخوارزميات!" جلسة تصوير خاصة لمجلّة "هي" بواسطة الذكاء الاصطناعي، بين حنين الماضي وأصالة المستقبل، بالتعاون مع الباحثة الفنية اللبنانية سمر يونس، مؤسسة QUANTUM CRAFT™، التي تمزج الحرفة بالبيانات والذاكرة الجمعية لصنع صور رقمية ناتجة عن حوار متبادل بين الإنسان والآلة. في حديثنا معها تقول: "الخطر الحقيقي لا يكمن في أن تحلّ الآلة محل الإنسان، بل في أن يبدأ الإنسان بالتصرف كآلة". وتضيف: "الخوارزمية، في النهاية، امتداد للفكر الإنساني لا بديل عنه". From memory to algorithm… In this special AI-powered shoot for Hia, time fluctuates between nostalgia and excitement, in collaboration Lebanese artist-theorist Samar Younes, founder of QUANTUM CRAFT™, whose practice weaves heritage, data, and collective memory into digital imagery born from a dialogue between human and machine. As she puts it, the real danger is not that the machine will replace the human, but that the human begins to behave like one. “In the end, the algorithm is merely an extension of the human mind, never its substitute”. إعداد: @rahqun1 #hiamag #octoberissue #مجلة_هي

Future Custodians: 2034 Fashion Odyssey. A cosmic fashion story co-authored by Samar Younes @samaritual (Hybrid Artist, Futurist, Imagination Activist, Creative Catalyst, Educator, Speaker) and Geraldine Wharry @trendatelierbygeraldinewharry (Futurist, Strategic Advisor, Speculative Designer, Writer, Speaker, Educator). Published in Spur @spurmagazine ‘s September ‘Tomorrow’ Column, we invite you to 2034. Through foresight, world-building, and art, we explore fashion beyond ownership, fostering harmony in hardship. The Kalei tribe is a pen profile, neither desired nor predicted. It’s an invitation to harmonize spirituality, community, regeneration, ancient wisdom, and innovation as fashion’s compass. In this possible world, fashion bridges to our higher selves—a declaration of love for shared futures. Swipe for full story, Spur’s article and @samaritual Speculative Future Custodians AI Renders ➡️ Our 2-way conversation on the process behind Future Custodians is live! 🔗 in bio or 👉🏻 /future-custodians #FutureFashion #SpeculativeDesign #FutureCustodians

This week on the Doha Debates Podcast, artists @wafaabilal , @mollycrabapple , @fendevilliers and @samaritual share the art and artists that have stayed with them🖼️ 🔗Visit the link in bio for the extended cut of our debate on contemporary art.

Tayfurat begins before the crossing. The body holds every frequency it was born with before learning which ones to suppress for institutional legibility. Two suited figures represent the institutional form the world built to manage bodies, yet they stand inside a compositional logic that preceded that world and will outlast it. Quantum Craft™ applies the pressure of what the archive severed until generation moves from sediment rather than surface. The feminist posture here is structural: holding the system in sustained friction and reading what the material gives back across years of accumulated image sediment. All conditions are material. Future Ancestors: Tayfurat طيف / Furat 06 @samaritual

Khabrein knows that identity distributes across the entire surface the body presents to the world. Adornment as epistemology. The fringe-veil, the protective face-object worn at thresholds: portable sovereignty for bodies that navigate algorithmic tokenization, institutional reduction, the performance demand that flattening extracts from Black and brown presence in every system from the physical to the computational. The difference between metabolizing a reference and borrowing it is the whole practice. Cultural archaeology before generative activation. Provenance as anti-erasure protocol. The system returns what was buried in its own archive when cultural specificity is applied as sustained pressure across the irreducible complexity of Global Majority experience. Future Ancestors: Khabrein 04 Two states, neither resolving into the other. @samaritual

Tayfurat accumulates chromatic intelligence the colonial archive classified as regional or peripheral. Saffron on its third dye bath meets the dust-rose cloud coat of Hassan Fathy logic: structure grown from the material’s own intelligence where volume is function. This is the specific light of a Bekaa Valley October. Turquoise is understood as protection made mineral while henna is calibrated through hand and humidity. These West African and Levantine traditions were held in relation by trade routes long before art history needed a category for them. The Global South’s color theory restores itself to the image commons through generative mutation and the full SWANA chromatic spectrum. Future Ancestors: Tayfurat طيف / Furat 05 @samaritual

Textile in this practice is ancestral technology: the protocol carried on the body when everything else must be left behind. Khabrein holds adornment as portable sovereignty, the face as primary territory, coverage and mask as identity in motion rather than concealment. The creature-kin arrived through sustained material conversation, sediments kneaded across years, the system returning ecological intelligence it absorbed without knowing how to surface it unprompted. Provenance encoded in form. Seams visible by design. There is no pretending that the colorism and racism embedded in the systems that generated these figures, and in the broader cultural contexts they move through, are neutral. The practice composes against that condition through counter-pressure, re-seeding the image commons with what the archive severed. Future Ancestors: Khabrein 03 @samaritual

Three figures inhabit three registers of belonging. Tayfurat holds the Silk Road as compositional logic, recreating the caravanserai where bodies in transit pause long enough to contaminate each other’s frequencies. The coat carries geological accumulation and volcanic patience: the growth that happens when material is given time rather than a domesticated target. Quantum Craft™ applies ancestral and artisanal pressure to synthetic systems until generation happens from depth through iteration rather than simple pattern. The Levant stands as a synthesis site where African, Asian, and European influences layered across millennia without erasing the other. Future Ancestors: Tayfurat طيف / Furat 04 @samaritual

Khabrein operates where the boundary between self and kin becomes philosophical problem rather than biological fact. Call and response held across sessions, the system returning a textile grammar that predates the prompt, a relational logic the colonial archive stored as ornament and the practice restores as epistemology. The blur is where kinship begins. Mycorrhizal before it is figural. The mask, the coverage, the interspecies attachment: these are figures that have learned to distribute identity across surface rather than locate it in the face, a survival technology for bodies that systems of surveillance have always attempted to fix, classify, and reduce. Quantum Craft™ refuses the dominant computational instinct toward convergence. The friction is where the intelligence lives. Sediment as method. Future Ancestors: Khabrein 02 @samaritual

Tayfurat presents the diasporic body as landscape. The ground carries the material record of every crossing that preceded this one, following a Silk Road accumulation logic where each encounter layers rather than replaces. Nothing is erased and everything is mutated forward. The chromatic ceiling becomes the Umayyad trade route made atmosphere with every frequency in simultaneous transmission. Protection accumulates in the textile, the posture, and the specific red that signifies safeguarding across cultures that never shared a language but shared the same threatened body. The SWANA chromatic register composes against the colonial refrigeration of the digital aesthetic which desaturates culture into manageable neutrality. Future Ancestors: Tayfurat طيف / Furat 03 The spectral crossing. @samaritual

Khabrein holds knowledge that travels and changes form in transit. When ancestral, ecological, artisanal, and synthetic intelligence are held in sustained call and response, the result is a new organism surfacing through irreducible friction between what the archive carries and what it learned to suppress. The kin does not attach. It arrives. This is Global Majority territory: the condition of Black and brown bodies navigating systems designed to tokenize presence, flatten complexity, demand legibility. The Brooklyn-Beirut axis that runs through this practice holds the zajal-cypher logic, different diasporic inheritances finding generative friction in what the dominant archive cannot hold simultaneously. Accumulation without assimilation as operational principle. Future Ancestors: Khabrein 01 What travels, the knowledge that mutates in motion. Two states held without resolution. @samaritual