Arts, Culture & Entertainment – Page 36 – Arabian Records (1st post : Eid Al Fitr – 01st Shawwal 1439 (AH) / 15th June 2018 ) / (BETA testing – Research

ARAB FILMS 2022: Year in Review: The Best Arab Films of 2022

William Mullally picks the best movies by Arab filmmakers over the past year.

‘Perfect Strangers’

Director: Wissam Smayra

Starring: Mona Zaki, Nadine Labaki, Georges Khabbaz

The original Italian version of “Perfect Strangers” had already been remade across the world before its Arabic-language iteration was released on Netflix. But nowhere else has it caused the stir that it did in the Middle East. The conceit is simple: Seven friends at a dinner party decide to play a game, placing their phones in the center of the table to make their calls and messages known to all. As the night goes on, their secrets are revealed, upending everything they thought they knew about each other. Not only was this the best version of the film so far, with pitch-perfect casting and memorable performances, it was also the bravest: each of its stars pushed themselves in ways they had never been able to in regional film previously, shattering taboos, capturing the world’s attention and changing Arab cinema forever.

‘Kira & El Gin’

Director: Marwan Hamed

Starring: Karim Abdel Aziz, Hend Sabri, Razane Jammal

The highest grossing film in the history of Egyptian cinema, “Kira & El Gin” is Marwan Hamed at his best. This is a crowd-pleasing historical epic that not only captures the spirit of Egypt past and present, but sets a course for a new future for the country’s film industry. Following two men fighting the British occupation in Egypt during the 1919 revolution, Hamed’s film rarely sags despite its nearly three-hour run time and sprawling cast, structured more as a suspense thriller than a social studies lecture. As Hamed jumps from genre to genre across his films, proving equally adept at each, one wonders how he will top this, should he try. But it would be foolish to bet against him as he continues to notch up career high after career high.

‘Boy From Heaven’

Director: Tarik Saleh

Starring: Fares Fares, Tawfeek Barhom, Mohammad Bakri

Egyptian-Swedish filmmaker Tarik Saleh has a bone to pick. Growing up in Europe, he was always labeled as ‘other’ — an idea reinforced in the books in his school library describing Arabs as “stupid” and “uncivilized.” Now firmly entrenched as a filmmaker, Saleh refuses to make films tailored to the Western gaze, turning his camera deep into the inner workings of Egyptian society and forcing international viewers to accept that they are seeing things through eyes that are not their own. In “Boy from Heaven,” Saleh goes deep into a corruption scandal at the influential Al-Azhar Mosque, following a hero whose strong Muslim faith is unrattled as he uncovers the evils hiding from plain sight, with scenes and images you won’t soon forget.

‘The Alleys’

Director: Bassel Ghandour

Starring: Maisa Abd Elhadi, Nadia Omran, Munther Rayahna

In 2014’s “Theeb,” Jordanian writer Bassel Ghandour crafted perhaps the greatest example of the Bedouin Western in cinema history. With “The Alleys,” Ghandour steps into the director’s chair for the first time and turns the streets of Amman into the setting for a modern noir, in which the darkness hiding in the city’s back streets slowly boils to the surface. The film’s sprawling nature is both benefit and detriment, but it’s a stirring snapshot nonetheless, elevated by star-making performances from Maisa Abd Elhadi and Nadia Omran.

‘You Resemble Me’

Director: Dina Amer

Starring: Dina Amer, Mouna Soualem, Lorenza Grimaudo

Filmmaker Dina Amer is most familiar to global audiences for her fearless journalism in 2013’s “The Square” and various Vice News stories she produced as their foreign correspondent from the front lines of regional conflicts. “You Resemble Me” cements her as a filmmaker to watch, as her harrowing experimental recounting of the life of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, the woman miscredited as Europe’s first suicide bomber, is a deeply affecting dissection of the roots of terrorism and the racism that Arab women face in Europe. One of the most original films released this year.

‘The Swimmers’

Director: Sally El-Hosaini

Starring: Nathalie Issa, Manal Issa, Kinda Alloush

The story of Yusra and Sara Mardini, two sisters from Syria who risked their lives to escape conflict for a better future only for one of them to become an Olympian, is so powerful that a film capturing their story could not help but be inspirational. El-Hosaini, the Welsh-Egyptian filmmaker behind 2012’s excellent “My Brother the Devil,” made it into something more — a thought-provoking reframing of the refugee experience at a time when Syrians and many others still suffer from that stigma, as well as a chronicle of women’s empowerment as the structures that held them back crumble, all told with a light touch that never alienates the huge global viewership the Netflix film has enjoyed.

‘Mediterranean Fever’

Director: Maha Haj

Starring: Amer Hlehel, Ashraf Farha, Anat Hadid

Palestinian cinema is often, understandably, a no-holds-barred dissection of the plight of its people. But that is by no means its only manifestation, as Maha Haj, a previous collaborator with renowned satirist Elia Suleiman, proves with her latest feature, “Mediterranean Fever,” the follow up to her acclaimed 2016 feature “Personal Affairs.” Haj focuses here on smaller human problems, following an aspiring writer who suffers from depression and befriends a small-time crook living next door. At times comedic, the film drifts into dark territory while always keeping its audience guessing. After winning best screenplay at Cannes in 2022, Haj has confirmed herself as one of the region’s most singular voices.

‘The Blue Caftan’

Director: Maryam Touzani

Starring: Saleh Bakri, Lubna Azabal, Ayoub Missioui

There is no more versatile actor working in Arab cinema today than Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri, who, with Touzani’s “The Blue Caftan,” has capped off a tremendous run of eight films in the last two years, including Farah Nabulsi’s Oscar-nominated “The Present” and Mohammed Diab’s “Amira.” This is perhaps his best performance yet. He plays Halim, a struggling master tailor in Morocco whose life is turned upside down when he and his wife take in a young apprentice. Stealing the strikingly-filmed show, however, is his co-star Lubna Azabal as his wife Mina, who is quietly enduring her own private battle with breast cancer as she and her husband struggle to communicate. With this and 2019’s “Adam,” Touzani is already one of Morocco’s great chroniclers.

‘Raven Song’

Director: Mohamed Al-Salman

Starring: Asem Alawad, Ibrahim Alkhairallah, Abdullah Aljafal

The singular contemporary Gulf filmmaker Mohamed Al-Salman is not making films so that the world may understand Saudi Arabia — he’s making them so that Saudi Arabia may understand itself. “Raven Song,” his debut feature after years of acclaimed shorts, is a stylish jump back to 2002 in the Kingdom, a formative time for both the filmmaker and his country, in which the fight between traditionalism and modernity was so heated that it manifested prominently even in the world of poetry. At times dream-like, “Raven Song” is a film that defies definition, with interpretations likely to roll in for years to come.

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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ARABIC FILMS

SAUDI ARABIA: World’s Largest Light Ball illuminates Riyadh Season 2022

A new modern landmark in the capital of the Kingdom, the Light Ball, has been named by Guinness World Records as the largest illuminated LED ball in the world, with an estimated height of 35 meters.

Located at Boulevard World, the exterior of the ball emanates bright lighting that flickers in different patterns, while the interior boasts a 220-seat theater equipped with state-of-the-art features.

Guests can recline in their seats facing a 360-degree circular screen. The short films presented in the theater are five minutes long, with varying genres suitable for families to enjoy. The shows run every 30 minutes daily from 3:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.

In addition to cultural experiences, Boulevard World includes the largest artificial lake in the world. Visitors can take part in boat and submarine rides in the lake — a first for Riyadh Season.

There are also distinctive entertainment options, such as Combat Village, Super Hero, the largest sphere in the world and cable car trips between Boulevard World and its neighboring zone, Boulevard Riyadh City.

The zone offers visitors other entertainment experiences as well, such as Boulevard Pier, Discovery, Realistic Monopoly, The Mountain, Area 15, Ninja Warriors and Fun Zone for children.

source/contents: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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Located at Boulevard World, the exterior of the ball emanates bright lighting that flickers in different patterns, while the interior boasts a 220-seat theater equipped with state-of-the-art features. (Supplied)

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SAUDI ARABIA

OMAN: The Mall of Oman opens ‘Snow Oman’ the Region’s Largest Snow Park

A multifunctional snow park was opened at the Mall of Oman. The project Snow Oman is the largest in the Middle East. The snow park was developed by Majid Al Futtaim, who has experience building indoor snow and ski amusements. In 2005 the company unveiled its first project in the flagship Mall Al Futtaim and later realized the mega project Ski Dubai in the Mall of the Emirates.

The total area of Snow Oman is 160 000 square feet. The complex combines a variety of winter attractions, the country’s first colony of penguins, and natural snow. The main decorations are an ice port town and a sunken ship with a lighthouse.

Rides include Mountain Thriller, Snow Bullet, Slide Winder, Cloud Climber, and Zorb Ball, unique attractions such as Cold Town Muscat, and a 5112-square feet ice rink. Admission to the park starts at 12.5 OMR, equivalent to $32.5.

Snow Oman caters to guests of all ages and offers activities for both kids and thrill-seekers. Outside the ski and skate slopes are cafes with hot winter drinks, warm seating, and a photo area.

Majid Al Futtaim is one of the largest mall, retail, and entertainment companies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The company operates 29 malls, 13 hotels, and four mixed-use complexes in the UAE, as well as more than 600 cinemas and several entertainment centers.

source/content: malls.com (headline edited0

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OMAN

EGYPTIAN Mezzo Soprano Farrah El-Dibany Performs French Anthem in FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Final – December 18th

Egyptian mezzo soprano Farrah El-Dibany has performed La Marseillaise the French national anthem, in the beginning of the final FIFA World Cup match against Argentine in Doha, Qatar on Sunday.

Farrah El-Dibany has sang during the re-election of Emmanuel Macron on April 24.

She was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in the grade of Chevalier (Knight) by France’s Ambassador to Cairo Marc Baréty during an official ceremony in April.

Born in Alexandria in 1989, El-Dibany is one of the well-known Egyptian singers of her generation, establishing herself on an international scale in a short time.

LEBANESE Icon Fayrouz — the Arab World’s Greatest Living Singer

She is the Arab world’s greatest living musical icon, but Fayrouz remains an enigma. She retains a sometimes-infuriating aura of mystery, rarely giving interviews and ardently protecting the privacy of her family. On stage she appears devoid of emotion — motionless and expressionless. Those characteristics have themselves become iconic, with Fayrouz’s striking but emotionless features adorning everything from handbags and posters to Beirut’s city walls.

Born Nouhad Haddad in 1934, during the course of her career Fayrouz has recorded hundreds of songs, starred in dozens of musicals and movies, and toured the world. From 1957 onwards, when she first performed at the Baalbeck International Festival, she has become one of the Arab world’s most beloved singers. And in doing so she would unite her often-fractious homeland.

All Lebanese remember the first time they heard Fayrouz. For Tania Saleh, it was during a drive to Syria to escape the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. She remembers one song in particular — “Roudani Ila Biladi” (Take Me Back To My Homeland).

“That song really marked me,” says Saleh, a singer-songwriter and visual artist. “My mother was crying while she was driving and the song created this really intense emotional moment. And I remember thinking, ‘How can a song affect someone so much? It’s just a song.’ But it affected me, too, in a manner that I didn’t understand back then.”

Fayrouz remained in Lebanon for the entirety of the war and refused to take sides. Although she continued to sing in venues across the world, she did not perform in Lebanon until the conflict was over. This neutrality, and the patriotic nature of many of her songs, meant she was a rare symbol of national unity, with all sides listening to her music throughout the 15 years of civil war. She was, as Saleh says, an “emotional anchor for all Lebanese during the war,” regardless of religion or political beliefs. When she released “Li Beirut“ (arranged and adapted by her son Ziad Rahbani) in 1984, Fayrouz and Beirut became inseparable. More than ever she embodied the very essence of what it meant to be Lebanese.

None of which would have been possible without the music of the Rahbani Brothers. Fayrouz, who was a chorus singer at Radio Lebanon in the early 1950s, met Mansour and Assi Rahbani through the composer Halim El-Roumi in 1951. She went on to marry Assi a few years later and together the trio would revolutionize popular Lebanese music. The Rahbani Brothers fused musical genres, including Levantine folkloric traditions and the music of Latin America, and incorporated both Western and Russian elements into their compositions. It was Fayrouz, however, who gave voice to their musical vision.

Fayrouz sang of an almost mythical Lebanon. She sang of love and desire, but also of an idealized Lebanese mountain village, of olive trees and jasmine, of vineyards and streams. “Lyrically, they created the Lebanon we now love,” says Saleh of the brothers, who followed in the footsteps of writers such as Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Naimy, who helped to forge a romanticized image of Lebanon that many of its citizens still cling to today.

As the Palestinian poet and film director Hind Shoufani notes, Fayrouz represents “the village girl, the stories of love, the fetching of fresh water, the mountain, the resistance, the power of the people; that kind of simple, beautiful daily existence that is in harmony with nature.” As such, her songs have an additional, heartbreaking poignancy, because the Lebanon she sings of bears no resemblance to the Lebanon of today. She sings of a fading dream — one that is shared by much of the Arab world.

That vision was rooted in Lebanon’s golden age, with Fayrouz intimately linked to the formation of a national cultural identity in the years following independence from France. As the acclaimed indie-music producer Zeid Hamdan says, Fayrouz would carry that identity “with elegance and depth like no other singer.”

Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers changed popular Arabic music forever. Umm Kulthoum, another icon of the Arab world, sang songs of love that could last for up to an hour and were deeply embedded in the tarab tradition. The songs of Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers, however, were far shorter, utilized the Lebanese dialect, and embraced new melodic forms.

“As a musician, I am very inspired by the dialect that Fayrouz sings,” says Hamdan, “arguably best known as one half of the trip-hop duo Soapkills. “It’s not only classical Arabic, it’s often modern Lebanese, and the Rahbanis — from Assi to Ziad — used the Lebanese dialect in a very clever way throughout their repertoire.”

Hamdan was introduced to Fayrouz in the late 1990s by Yasmine Hamdan (no relation), his Soapkills partner. Encouraged by her, he bought a double K7 cassette of Fayrouz’s “Andaloussiyat” and immediately fell in love with three tracks, one of which was “Ya Man Hawa.”

“The lyrics are simply incredible,” he says. “It’s a form of poetry that is several hundred years old called muwashshah and I wish I could do justice to the beauty of the words.” Another was “Yara El Jadayel,” on which, at a certain point, Fayrouz “sings at a very high pitch and very softly, the melody almost whispered on a piano arpeggio”.

It is the wonder and versatility of Fayrouz’s voice that continues to entrance audiences across the world. El-Roumi thought her voice so beautiful that he gave her the nickname Fayrouz (Arabic for turquoise) and went on to become the first person to compose for her.

“Fayrouz has one of the most distinctive voices in the Arab world,” says Egyptian-Belgian singer Natacha Atlas, who has worked with the likes of Peter Gabriel and Nitin Sawhney. “One can always tell that it’s (her) voice. It is as delicate as it is beautiful and strong, and her voice’s ability to (carry) such strong emotions is always extraordinary. She is one of my greatest influences. When I hear her, I often melt in tears at the sheer beauty of her voice and how it also evokes a deep nostalgia in me for the Middle East as it once was, and how everything has changed almost beyond recognition.”

Fayrouz’s fame outside of the Levant can also be traced back to her support of the Palestinian cause. As early as 1957, Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers released “Rajioun” (We Will Return), a collection of pro-Palestinian anthems. This was followed in 1967 by the release of “Al-Quds Fil Bal” (Jerusalem In My Heart), and as recently as 2018 she was still dedicating songs to Palestinians killed on Gaza’s border with Israel.

When her husband’s health began to fail in the 1970s, Fayrouz began to collaborate more closely with her son Ziad — the eldest of her four children. One of the albums composed and arranged by him was “Wahdon,” which was released on the Zida record label in 1979 and includes the song “Al Bosta.”

“I cherish and love her experience with Ziad,” says Saleh. “The albums that she did with him took her to jazz and bossa nova and sometimes to funk. This gave Fayrouz another dimension — that of the risk taker. She went out of her comfort zone, and that is very rare.”

This helped to cement her reputation with a younger generation and she continues to evoke a deep sense of nostalgia, not only among the Lebanese, but across the Levant and North Africa. Many Lebanese still start their day listening to Fayrouz’s songs and, despite family disputes over royalties, her controversial performance in Damascus in 2008, and accusations of plagiarism directed at the Rahbani family, her status as a cultural icon endures. When the French President Emmanuel Macron visited Lebanon in 2020, he chose the home of Fayrouz as one of his first ports of call, not those of the country’s political leaders.

“They described this beautiful Lebanon and they made us dream that this is our country, which was actually just a picture they had created,” says Saleh of Fayrouz and the Rahbani Brothers. “We were looking for it: ‘Where is this Lebanon you are talking about guys?’ We were always trying to find it but we never did. But thankfully they did create this image, because the bond that we have with our country is mainly because of them.”

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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Fayrouz performs in Beirut in 2011. (AFP)

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LEBANON

World Arabic Language Day: December 18th. Seven Facts that will Surprise You

Arabic is spoken by more than 400 million people across the Middle East and in diaspora communities across the world.

Spoken by around 400 million people across the globe, the Arabic language in its classical form is also the liturgical language of Islam, the world’s second largest religion with at least 1.6 billion adherents.

Marked every year since 2012, the date was chosen based on when the UN General Assembly recognised Arabic as one of the organisation’s official languages in 1973.

In a statement released ahead of the occasion, Audrey Azoulay, Unesco’s director-general, said: “Throughout the centuries, Arabic has been at the heart of exchanges between continents and across cultures.”

She added the language was “used by so many great poets, thinkers, scientists and scholars”.

To mark the occasion, here are some facts about the language, which you may not have known:

1. There’s no agreement on how old the language is

Depending on who you ask, the earliest records of Arabic appear as far back as the second millenium BCE, around the eighth-century BCE or as late as the fourth-century BCE.

The reason for the debate is establishing what constitutes the Arabic language as we know it today.

Languages spoken today are evolved versions of languages that were spoken thousands of years ago, but determining at what point a language becomes so distinct from its ancestor that it can no longer be considered the same is up for debate.

2. The oldest Arabic inscription dates to 470 CE

A 2014 discovery by a French-Saudi-led team unearthed the world’s oldest known inscription written in the Arabic script – “Thawban Ibn Malik” were the three words etched into stone, alongside what is thought to be a Christian cross.

The stone slab was discovered in Najran in Saudi Arabia and is said to date from around 470 CE.

The text is thought to be written in an early version of the Arabic script known as Nabataean-Arabic, which evolved from historic Nabataean and Aramaic scripts.

The Nabataean kingdom lasted from around the 4th-century BCE to 106 CE and is famed for the structures Nabataeans carved out of rock formations, such as the one found at Petra in Jordan.

3. Arabic is related to Hebrew and Amharic

Arabic is a member of the Semitic language family, which itself is a member of the Afro-Asiatic family.

The Semitic family includes languages still spoken today, such as Hebrew in Israel and Amharic in Ethiopia, as well as extinct languages that were once widely spoken, such as Akkadian and Phoenician.

Belonging to a language family means that at some point the languages evolved out of a common dialect.

While there are no records of the original language, there are enough similarities between languages such as Arabic and Hebrew to make it clear that their origin is the same.

One of the most notable features of the Semitic languages is the triliteral root system, in which words are formed out of a combination of three consonants.

4. There are dozens of Arabic dialects

Modern Standard Arabic remains a unifying dialect across the Arab world and is used in formal broadcasts, religious sermons and literature, but in day-to-day life Arabs speak a diverse array of dialects.

Sometimes differences between dialects can be so big that two native Arabic speakers cannot communicate without resorting to formal Arabic or a more commonly understood dialect, such as Egyptian or Levantine Arabic.

There are at least 30 Arabic dialects and the differences between any two are generally more stark the more geographically separated they are.

The biggest split is between the Maghrebi or western dialects found in North Africa and the Mashreq or eastern dialects found in the Levant.

There are many reasons for such dramatic differences in dialects.

As Muslim conquerors took over vast tracts of land between Morocco and Iraq, they encountered people who spoke other languages. As those people interacted with their new rulers, they had an effect on the language the new arrivals spoke.

There are also other factors, such as the influence of subsequent conquests by Turkic and European rulers and the independent evolution of languages separated by geography over long periods of time.

In that sense, the Arabic dialects are similar to the Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, which developed out of spoken Latin.

5. There’s an EU language closely related to Arabic

Maltese, the national language of Malta, was given official language status when the island joined the European Union in 2004, and is the only Semitic language to have that designation.

The country’s 450,000 natives speak a language that has its roots in Arabic, as it was spoken when the nearby island of Sicily was ruled by North African Muslims.

Although it grew out of North African dialects of Arabic, the Maltese language has taken on a lot of vocabulary from Romance languages, such as Italian, and is considerably distinct from Arabic as it is spoken today.

Nevertheless, the similarities will be obvious to an Arabic speaker. Greetings, such as merhba (welcome) and questions, such as x’jismek? (shi-yismek/what is your name?), will be instantly recognisable to an Arab.

6. Arabic was once spoken as far east as Central Asia

After the founding of Islam, successive Arab empires established control over a territory that spanned from Morocco in the west to the borders of what is now China.

This led to mass movements of people from the interior of the Middle East to areas on the periphery of the Islamic world to work as soldiers, administrators, religious leaders and merchants.

These new migrants brought their language with them and even in areas that did not become fully Arabised, their descendants continued to speak Arabic until very recently.

One such example is in Central Asia, where a variety of Arabic was spoken among some communities until the late 19th-century.

While thought to have numbered in the tens of thousands of speakers in the early Islamic era, today these populations have been assimilated into neighbouring Persian and Turkic-speaking populations.

Many descendants of these Arabic-speaking communities are still aware of their roots despite having forgotten their original language.

7. Arabic loanwords are found in many languages

Alcohol, arsenal, algebra, coffee, gauze, mascarade and safari are just a selection of words used in everyday English that have their roots in Arabic.

Safari for example comes from the Arabic for “journey” or safar, while Arsenal comes from the Arabic dar al-sina’ or “house of production”.

Some languages owe more of their vocabulary to Arabic than others. Turkish and Persian were heavily influenced by Arabic due to geographic proximity and conquest by Arab rulers, as well as the movement of Arabic speakers to areas where those languages are spoken.

Those additions are not always welcomed by nationalists in those countries and efforts have been made at various points to remove Arabic influence.

One of the most intense efforts in that regard was by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who began a process of Turkification to replace Arabic words in the Turkish language with Turkic equivalents.

Nevertheless thousands of Arabic-origin words remain in modern Turkish.

source/content: middleeasteye.net (headline edited)

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**A late seventh-century parchment featuring verses of the Quran in the Kufic script (Wikimedia/Richard Mortel)**

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ARABIC LANGUAGE

SUDAN: Artist Rashid Diab Reveals Passion for Printmaking

Rashid Diab was the first in a stream of brilliant Sudanese artists who came flooding into Kenya in the early 1990s.

He has been a way-shower ever since. Experimenting with technical skills that he’s acquired and mastered over the years, his awesome etchings have come to Nairobi’s Red Hill Gallery in an exhibition entitled A Trajectory of Etchings – 1980-2000.

A trip up to Hellmuth and Erica Rossler-Musch’s ever-green gallery is well worth the trek, if for no other reason than to meet two of the most hospitable art lovers around.

But then, to see the Gallery’s pearly white walls covered in a rich array of Rashid’s colourful etchings is all the more reason to come and see.

They are mainly abstract works, but one can see so many influences surfacing through his swirls of colours, two-dimensional lines, and calligraphic curves that disclose his Sufi upbringing.

There are more than 50 etchings, all of which are beautifully framed and displayed in geometric clusters of both miniature gems of genius dressed in sepia and ochre ink as well as larger works suggesting symbolic forms such as are found in northern Sudan, in the ancient murals of Meroetic and Kush civilisations.

The venerable Sudanese artist flew in from Khartoum, especially for his exhibition opening last Sunday, November 20, having been preceded by his son Yafil, who prepared the way for Nairobi to see facets of his father’s art other than the style of painting that he is currently passionate about and which we have seen in recent exhibitions of his work in places like Tribal Gallery, One Off, and Gravitart.

“We met Yafil more than a year ago when he came and suggested that we have an exhibition of his father’s etchings,” Hellmuth told BDLife shortly before the exhibition opened.

“We were impressed with the etchings, especially as they cover a span of 20 years, but we couldn’t hold the exhibition until now.”

There had been many steps involved in bringing Yalif’s idea to fruition, especially as he had to return to Khartoum and the process of curating the show had to proceed online.

The fact that none of the etchings had ever been seen before in Kenya made the preparation process all the more exciting for Hellmuth who relished the challenge.

But once he’d selected his favourites from the hundreds that Yalif had shared, Hellmuth insisted on framing all but ten of them to show them in their best light.

“My father was impressed to see the exhibition as he had never seen so many of the works shown so well in one space,” Yalif said.

Rashid himself hadn’t discovered his passion for printmaking, specifically for etching until he was introduced to the technique in Spain, at the Complutense University of Madrid where he had been awarded a fellowship to attend.

That discovery led to his getting advanced degrees in painting and etchings, including a PhD.

But after years of working as a scholar and professor of fine art, he felt compelled to return to his homeland where he has been sharing his knowledge, skills, wisdom and experience with his fellow Sudanese ever since.

In 2000 when he returned to Khartoum, he established the Dara Art Gallery. And several years after that, the Rashid Diab Art Centre was born.

“As we don’t have a national art gallery in Sudan, the Centre has played an important role,” Yalif said. It has also given Rashid the visibility required for the world to recognise his talent and leadership role in the arts of Sudan.

For instance, he won the King Juan Carlos of Spain award for Excellence in Service. He has also won ambassadorial status from the Japanese and British governments for his concern for peace and the environment.

He’s also exhibited his art all over the Middle East and Europe.

So, while he hasn’t lost his passion for printmaking, he had to put it on hold while shifting artistically as well as socially and culturally from his Spanish to his Sudanese circumstance.

“I’m concerned about the role of women in our society, which is why they appear so frequently in my art,” Rashid told BDLife at the opening of his first solo exhibition at Red Hill.

But it is thanks to his son, who discovered hundreds of his etchings while archiving his father’s art that we have the opportunity to see this treasure trove of an earlier phase of Rashid’s artistic ‘trajectory.’

→margaretta.gacheru@glory

source/content: businessdailyafrica.com (headline edited)

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SUDAN

EGYPT: Window of Opportunity: the Egyptian ‘nomad’ Shadia El Dardiry Directing London’s largest Arab Arts Festival

New Shubbak chairwoman Shadia El Dardiry on the privilege of supporting those from all walks of life, whether beleaguered artists or stranded migrants.

Shadia El Dardiry has been on a journey of discovery in London since arriving nearly seven years ago but one scene from her impromptu walking tours stands out from the rest.

The unexpected sight and sound of two boys speaking Arabic in a Syrian dialect as they passed by halted El Dardiry in her tracks as she tried to figure out why she recognised them.

Oblivious to her stopping and staring, they walked on without a glance but it dawned on her that she had helped the younger of the siblings when he was an unaccompanied minor stuck in Calais, after fleeing the war in Syria.

“I remember feeling so uplifted, knowing that the younger brother finally had a home and that they had been reunited,” El Dardiry tells The National, “and just seeing them live something akin to a normal life in London on a Saturday afternoon.

“It was all thanks to the work of a group of amazing lawyers and people who took these cases on at a time when the UK was pretty much refusing to comply with its legal obligations … it filled me with hope to see the fruit of all that hard work before my eyes.”

El Dardiry had signed up as a volunteer while studying to be a lawyer but she is modest about her part “on the margins” of the reunification. All she did, she says, was use her Arabic and English to interview refugees and their family members.

It seems that helping people is somewhat of a calling. Years later, El Dardiry, 34, now the new chairwoman of Shubbak, the UK’s largest and most prestigious Arab contemporary arts festival, is promoting those within the cultural sector in what has been a torrid year.

She also practises as a solicitor specialising in employment law. “There’s no hierarchy of problems,” El Dardiry says. “Unfortunately, it would be great if you didn’t need employment lawyers or immigration lawyers or any lawyers really. That would be, I think, everyone’s utopia,” she says, with a self-deprecating smile.

El Dardiry believes that her heritage and nomadic upbringing – “being a bit from everywhere” – make her particularly attuned to migration issues. As an adult, she has lived in Paris, Brussels, Geneva and Copenhagen but she ascribes what she calls her “mixed identities” to being raised in Guinea, Canada and Egypt.

Born in Montreal to an Egyptian father and an Italian mother, El Dardiry moved as a young child with her older sister to West Africa with their parents, an accountant and a doctor, who met while working in Guinea in the 1970s.

She conjures up vivid memories of a tranquil time in the port city of Kamsar, punctuated by daily family lunches and weekends of camping and trips to the beach or local waterfalls.

With just a local fresh goods market and one shop, the simplicity of life created a strong sense of community. But even the young El Dardiry was conscious that the family, as expatriates in one of the world’s most impoverished countries, were “living here but we’re not from here, and we’re very privileged”.

After moving back to Canada for a few years at the age of 7, El Dardiry relocated to Egypt with her father where she completed her schooling. An adolescence spent in one of the most populous and multi-ethnic Arab countries solidified her sense of compassion, as well as how she saw herself.

“I loved it,” she says. “Cairo is great. It’s hectic, it’s chaotic, it’s inconvenient in many ways, but it has a charm to it. I think it definitely shaped me. That’s where I developed my Arab identity and why I started saying, ‘I’m Arab’ and ‘I’m Egyptian’. Before, I used to say I was Canadian. So I think that there was a real shift there.”

It also gave her the opportunity to improve her command of Arabic. El Dardiry concedes, however, that she can never quite pass for a native on her regular trips back to the city that each time is “a little bit different, a bit bigger”.

“I have an accent and people make fun of me,” she says, laughing. “The taxi drivers love it. But I do tell them: ‘Don’t rip me off! I still know the prices.’”

Coming of age in a land that housed the likes of the Nobel-prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz and the public intellectual Edward Said, it is no surprise that El Dardiry grew fond of Arabic literature. The seeds had been sown early by her father who regaled her about the region’s authors and introduced her to the Tales of Goha.

“He’s very much a fixture of Arabic storytelling,” El Dardiry says of the titular satirical folk character whose sidekick is a long-suffering but faithful donkey. “Though I’m pretty sure my Dad eventually also started improvising his own Goha stories for me.”

After a graduate degree in political science at McGill University in Montreal, she studied as an exchange student for two years in Paris for her master’s. While writing her thesis on identity and integration of second-generation North African migrants, she recalls being struck by the extent of discrimination against those communities in the French capital.

“We all know it exists,” El Dardiry says, “but I think I was sheltered in Canada from that. And that’s what really drew me in. I think that was kind of a stepping stone where I thought ‘this is actually a sector that I’m really, really passionate about’, both in terms of refugees and asylum seekers but also populations that settle in countries and how their identities change over time.”

In a natural progression, she entered the world of non-governmental groups in various cities across Europe. She spent four years in Denmark with a human rights organisation working on asylum issues that kept her Middle East roots close and made use of her language skills.

She concedes that there may have been one downside to so enthusiastically soaking up the culture in Copenhagen and learning the local lexicon. “My Arabic suffered as I picked up some Danish, but it was great,” she says.

Her years as a human rights advocate were starting to take their toll, however. She reflects on the difficulties and taxing nature of working on immigration and asylum issues day in, day out.

It gave rise, she says, to a feeling of helplessness, particularly when the Middle East was haemorrhaging people fleeing the conflicts that followed the Arab uprisings.

“You had really strong political opposition to that in Europe, and you still have that,” El Dardiry says. “I think it just felt like a really difficult fight that we were never going to win. It was not getting better and it is only getting worse.”

She decided to qualify as a lawyer in London, and was drawn to Bates Wells. The city law firm is renowned for combining a strong commercial and charity practice with a general emphasis on public interest work.

El Dardiry’s chosen field of employment law allows a bit more distance than is afforded to those whose full-time focus is on migrants. “The lawyers who do are really impressive and have a lot of strength because it’s definitely something I’ve struggled with,” she says.

Among Bates Wells’ large charity clientele are many within the arts, and it wasn’t long before a colleague put her forward as a trustee for Shubbak in 2018.

“This offers me a chance to be more involved in art and culture coming from the Arab world,” she says. “At the same time, I’m realistic that I’m not an artist and I don’t work in that every day. So it just gave me an opportunity to contribute.”

As chairwoman, her role is to provide strategic direction to Shubbak and to assist in the long-term vision of supporting and celebrating the diversity of Arab artists’ creativity and innovation in the UK and the Mena region.

“It is very much there to act as a bridge between those two geographical locations,” she says.

Shubbak, which means window in Arabic, has evolved in the decade since its launch from a festival to bring people together every two years to what El Dardiry explains is a permanent presence with ongoing projects taking place between the biennial programmes.

To the delight of deprived art lovers, this year’s event will go ahead after the last of England’s Covid-19 restrictions lift in June. It’s a welcome hurrah for a sector that has been “hugely shaken” by the pandemic, but El Dardiry is keen to acknowledge the resilience of artists and their ability to create work out of any situation. “It’s really amazing,” she says.

While the festival will be physically held in London, the organisers have adopted a hybrid approach. Some works will be presented digitally which, for the first time ever, will make them available to a global audience. It could well be a pilot for things to come.

“I think there’s going to be even more creative ways of linking the two together,” she says. “It’s another way of presenting and working which will just enrich the organisation.”

As she waits for international travel to open up so that she can see her family in Canada and Egypt again, El Dardiry will revel in Shubbak’s role in the reinvigoration of London.

She is a flaneuse, being a “bit more of a walker” than most, and has both revelled in and been saddened by the unusually deserted streets of London for which she has developed such a deep affection on her regular roams.

When asked if all those pre-Covid hours spent pounding the pavements meant that she had been ready for lockdown restrictions, El Dardiry laughs in agreement that she had been “good to go”.

“If anything, I think the pandemic has made me tired of walking,” she says, half lamenting that everyone’s doing it now.

It is perhaps one of the lesser-known side effects of the coronavirus, but seems unlikely to impede El Dardiry from making great strides one way or another in the future.

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)
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Shadia El Dardiry the new chairwoman of the Shubbak Festival. Mark Chilvers for The National

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EGYPT

Historic Arab Manuscripts Showcased at Pearls of Wisdom Exhibition in Abu Dhabi Palace

Influence on European Renaissance highlighted.

The month-long Pearls of Wisdom exhibition launched this month at Qasr Al-Watan, Abu Dhabi’s Presidential Palace, on the sidelines of the third edition of the Abu Dhabi Manuscripts Conference.

Running until Jan. 6, 2023, it will showcase valuable manuscripts in the fields of literature, heritage, religion, music, philosophy and science.

Split into seven zones, the exhibition will take visitors on a historical journey that deliberates on the influence of Arab culture in generating religious dialogue and contributing to knowledge that paved the way for the European Renaissance.

At the heart of the House of Knowledge, visitors will find themselves in an immersive gallery panel covering the Golden Age of Islamic civilization and two regions that are at the heart of medieval Europe: Al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily in southern Italy.

Before visitors conclude their visit, they can head to the palace’s library to explore a collection of more than 50,000 books about the UAE’s history and politics along with topics including history, architecture, biology and ethnography.

Organized by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, the conference is being held under the theme “Arabic Manuscripts from East to West: Spain and Italy as a Model,” and in coordination with the National Marciana Library of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, the University Library of Bologna in Italy, the National Library of Spain, and Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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The exhibition will showcase valuable manuscripts in the fields of literature, heritage, religion, music, philosophy and science. (Supplied)

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ARAB LITERATURE & MANUSCRIPTS

EGYPT: Wegz Releases ‘EZZ EL ARAB’ for FIFA World Cup 2022 Official Song

Following up a highly eventful year, the diverse artist delivers an electrifying track for the official soundtrack of the 2022 World Cup which he will perform at the final match.

Ahead of his performance at the FIFA 2022 World Cup finals taking place in Qatar on Sunday the 18th of December, Wegz releases ‘Ezz El Arab’ as part of the tournament’s official soundtrack.

Internationally acclaimed Egyptian artist Wegz has been continuously growing throughout his career. In only a few years, the Alexandrian rapper and singer has managed to permeate the cultural zeitgeist, becoming an ever-present figure in contemporary Arabic music.

This year, Wegz has achieved major accomplishments, such as his track ‘Al Bakht’ amassing over 150 million views on YouTube and topping the charts on Spotify’s most played artist in the MENA region.

If there is one thing that Wegz has demonstrated throughout his career, it’s that he is always moving forward, continuously trying to evolve his sound and expand his reach.

In pursuit of these ventures, the beloved Egyptian rap icon has just released an official track for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, looking to afro-beats, electronic music, and his signature singing style to deliver an energising track that explores themes of unity and pride.

The music video for the track was directed by Ali El Arabi, who also directed Wegz’s, ‘B3oda Ya Belady’ from the highly acclaimed documentary ‘Captains of Zaatari’. The video features Wegz in a variety of shots around Qatar, DJing to an adoring crowd of football fans, and performing to camera in a cinematic portrayal of the tournament’s festivities.

This year’s World Cup has been more than just a sporting event for people of the MENA region. The tournament has always been a time for gathering and community, even if many Arab national teams have not reached their full potential in previous iterations of the World Cup. But this year’s tournament, hosted in Qatar, has seen incredible performances from teams such as Saudi Arabia, and of course, the Moroccan national team, who have instilled a sense of pride in Arab fans around the region and beyond. Watch the full music video here

source/content: cairoscene.com (headline edited)

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click and watch on Youtube.com

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EGYPT