Hassan Sharif’s art practice encompassed performance, painting, repurposed found objects and everyday materials, often transformed and systematically arranged as installations. As an undergraduate student in London in the 1980s, Sharif was told that without learning English, he would not be able to engage conceptually with his peers. He relentlessly pushed against this belief—the photographic series Dictionary (1981), which deemed translation a conceptual process, was part of this resistance. In 2015, Sharif evolved his 1981 series into a monumental wall sculpture. He gathered seven illustrated dictionaries, both English and Arabic, including the one he used in London during his student days, and glued individual pages to cotton ropes. Assembled together, they took on the shape of a human body, composed of polyglot cultural references.