Ibraaz is pleased to announce the launch of Platform 004 alongside the re-launch of its online publishing forum. Ibraaz Version 2.0 has been designed to reflect the significant amount of content on our site and encourage the use of our ever-expanding archive. New features such as the 'Related Content' and 'Most Viewed' sidebars will also allow visitors to explore the expanding web of material according to artist, author and region of interest. All galleries have been redesigned to ensure the quality of images and easy access to them.

For Platform 004, we set out to explore the issue of new media in artistic practices and activism, alongside its perceived role as a social agent in North Africa and the Middle East today. In direct response to this, Platform 004 will include contributions from, amongst many others, Nat Muller, Rijin Sahakian, Jeannine Tang, Anne Barlow, Sarah Samy, Sama Alshaibi, Ricardo Mbarkho, Ganzeer, Nermin Saybasili, Lantian Xie, and Basak Senova.

Platform 004 will also see the publication of interviews with Hassan Khan, Shady El Noshokaty, Lida Abdul, Adel Abidin, Jeanno Gaussi, Roy Samaha, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Diana Al-Hadid, and Amina Menia. Specially-commissioned essays by Franco Berardi Bifo, Sheyma Buali, Ghalia Elsrakbi and Lauren Alexander, Zeigam Azizov, Tarek Khoury, A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh, Cleo Jay, and Anthony Downey will also be published alongside artists' projects by Larissa Sansour, Saaheb Collective, and others.

In the weeks following the launch of Platform 004, Ibraaz will be publishing interviews with Ismaël Touati, Pauline M'Barek, Zeina Arida, Abbas Akhavan, Michael Rakowitz, and Pascal Hachem, and essays by Omar Kholeif, Sarah Covington, Timo Kaabi-Linke, Farah Makni, Jasmina Metwaly, and Derya Yücel.

Ibraaz would also like to announce that it has initiated a partnership with the London-based publishing house I.B. Tauris. The partnership will see the publication of an edited series of volumes on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East and see material from Ibraaz published in print form for distribution across the region and globally. Each volume will add material to the content that Ibraaz regularly generates and, more specifically, its discrete platform questions.

Volume I will be edited by Ibraaz's Editor Anthony Downey and will look at new media practices in the region and their co-option into the rhetoric and aesthetics of revolution and uprisings across the region. Volume II will examine the impact of globalisation on North Africa and the Middle East, and how artistic practices explore such developments. It is intended that I. B. Tauris and Ibraaz will publish two volumes a year.

Image captions from top to bottom; Lida Abdul, still from Dome (detail), 2005, 4’00'' NTSC 16:9 Digital Video. Courtesy of the artist; Nermine Hammam, detail from the Uppekha series, 2011, photograph. Courtesy of the artist; Tarek Al-Ghoussein, detail of Untitled 3 from Self Portrait Series, 2002-2003, digital print, 21 5/8 x 29 1/2 inches (55 x 75 cm), edition of 6. Courtesy of The Third Line and Tarek Al-Ghoussein.