The film Sanctity tells the story of Areej, a young, pregnant Saudi widow, who will do anything to protect her unborn child. Kamel not only wrote and directed the film, she also played the leading role. It was shot on location in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and is her second film. Igal Avidan met her in Berlin and asked her about women’s rights and film-making in a country that has no cinemas.
Twelve leading scholars trace Islamic discourse on the performing arts to give insight into genres of pious productions throughout the world.
From “green” pop and “clean” cinema to halal songs, Islamic soaps, Muslim rap, Islamist fantasy serials, and Suficized music, the performing arts have become popular and potent avenues for Islamic piety movements, politically engaged Islamists, Islamic states, and moderate believers to propagate their religio-ethical beliefs. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater is the first book that explores this vital intersection between artistic production and Islamic discourse in the Muslim world.
Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk
“Our Children, Where To?”, Iraqi artist Riad Nehmeh reminisces about his childhood, depicting memories both bitter and sweet
In the end people, and especially children, are the focal point of all my work, which revolves around humans and memory. I present panoramic artwork that is interconnected, with a child emerging in gradual shading from a foggy image. My intention is [to show] that children are thrust into an adult world and the wall creates a memory of the place where the child enters to inhabit this memory.
Street Art of the Arab World on YouTube
By ROBERT MACKEY
The Cairene journalist and blogger Soraya Morayef, who has written extensively about the Egyptian revolution’s graffiti, has produced a series of new video reports on street art of the Arab world, as part of a series for MOCAtv, the YouTube channel of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
I was not afraid for a moment because I believe what I am doing is necessary, especially in view of the media blackout about many aspects of the revolution. From the outset I figured there are people dying in their homes, and if I were to die in the street or on the front lines, so be it. I faced death when I was hit with shrapnel from a regime artillery shell fired on Sheikh Saeed district in Aleppo on February 7th, 2013. It broke my leg but I am recovered now.
I survived many moments that were fraught with danger while I took photographs on the front lines, and during air strikes, mortar attacks and tank shelling.
When the Syrian conflict broke out in March 2011, Nour Kelzi, a schoolteacher from Aleppo, had no idea how the war would change her life.
Kelzi, who was 23 when the conflict began, started taking amateur photographs on the front lines with her mobile phone. This eventually led to a job with the international news agency Reuters, and her current status as a well-known chronicler of the Syrian revolution.
Kelzi began her work for Reuters under the pseudonym Zain Karam to protect her family, later reverting to her real name.She spoke to Al-Shorfa about her experience as a war photographer.
Alhoush.com is a new online platform for artists in the Middle East to showcase and sell their work and make a living. Established by Ehab Shanti and Rashid Abdelhamid, Alhoush is an amalgamation of the arts and commerce: designed to help alleviate the job scarcity in the region and a void of modern Arab-inspired art.
Interview with the founders can be read on Arabic Knowledge@Wharton.
The Hospital At The Time Of The Revolution
The multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre presents the world premiere of Caryl Churchill’s remarkable 1972 play The Hospital At The Time Of The Revolution, playing for a limited run of Sunday and Monday evening and Tuesday matinee performances from Sunday, 31 March 2013
Inspired by the life and work of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the Martinique-born psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose best known works include Black Skin, White Masks and his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth.
Algeria, 1956 – a country desperately fighting for independence from French colonial rule. Frantz Fanon is head of the psychiatric department of the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algiers, treating both oppressed and oppressor. But who are the real victims?
A civil servant presents his psychologically disturbed daughter to the hospital for assessment and insists on her admittance. An inspector demands treatment for his helpless violence against his own wife and child. Three in-patient revolutionaries are delusional and paranoid. These products of a broken society are beginning to show symptoms, how should they be treated?
The Hospital At The Time Of The Revolution is a forensic insight into the adjustment of morality for the sake of conscience.
A fascinating, groundbreaking look at changing sexual attitudes and behaviour in the Arab world, and their part in 2011’s popular revolts
In the political unrest that has swept across the Arab region in 2011, all eyes have been on the streets and squares erupting in protest. But for the past five years, Shereen El Feki has been looking at upheaval a little closer to home - in the sexual lives of men and women across the Arab world. The result is Sex And The Citadel, an informative, insightful and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex might seem a strange lens with which to examine change in the Arab world; it is, in fact, a prism with which to refract the region’s complex social spectrum. Sexual attitudes and behaviours are intimately bound up in religion, culture, politics and economics. As such, they are not only a reflection of the conditions that led to the recent uprisings, as well as one of the engines of revolt, but will also be a measure of hard-won reforms in the years to come.
2013 London Palestine Film Festival
This year’s programme comprises 24 events at the Barbican Cinema and University of London, involving 38 titles, 24 guest speakers, and the UK’s first international conference on Palestine and the Moving Image.
Opening with a gala screening of David Koff’s trailblazing 1981 documentary, Occupied Palestine, the 2013 programme boasts historic depth with rarities including a thematic session marking the 25th anniversary of the first intifada, and an outing for Elia Suleiman’s debut, Homage by Assassination (part of 1991 portmanteau The Gulf War… What Next?).
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NUMBERS STARTS TODAY
An exhibition of infographics on Iraq by Mona Chalabi
22 March 2013 11:00am - 28 March 2013 5:00pm
@ The Arab British Centre, 1 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE
These images explore a story of progress in Iraq that has no easy beginning, middle or end. Each piece depicts a development statistic from a trusted source which is conveyed using a photo of the people that make up the numbers.
The 12 pieces use photography taken from trips to Iraq in 2012 and 2013 to interview Iraqis about their hopes for post-conflict stabilisation. Whether in Erbil, Najaf or Baghdad, the collective narrative Iraqis recounted was a complicated one. The past ten years have been marked by progression, recession and stagnation - development has been anything but linear.
Introducing Nature Arabic Edition
An important development for science in the Middle East?
For the 7th consecutive edition, Beirut DC is organizing Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya (Cinema Days of Beirut) Arab Film Festival, which is taking place from the 15th until the 24th of March 2013 in Cinema Metropolis Empire Sofil, Ashrafieh.
This edition includes more than 50 films, varying between feature length films, documentaries and short films, in addition to panels, networking sessions and master classes.
What is distinctive in this edition is that it witnesses the birth of a new Arab cinema coming from new countries, marking their spot on the international cinema route for the first time. The opening film, “Wadjda” by Saudi filmmaker Haifa Al Mansour just participated in Venice Film Festival, one of the most prestigious international film festivals and took several awards at the Dubai International Film Festival.
Over the last six years, Art Dubai, the leading international art fair in the MENASA (Middle East/North Africa/South Asia), has become a cornerstone of the region’s booming contemporary art community. In 2012, Art Dubai welcomed 22,500 visitors – including 75 international museums groups – and hosted 75 galleries from 32 countries.
The seventh edition of Art Dubai takes place March 20-23, 2013, at Madinat Jumeirah. Besides the gallery halls, the fair’s extensive programme will include commissioned projects and performances, artists’ and curators’ residencies, educational workshops, the unveiling of works by the winners of the annual The Abraaj Group Art Prize and the critically acclaimed Global Art Forum.
Crowdsourcing is the theme for EgyptNEGMA’s second annual conference to be held March 23rd-24th, 2013 at the MIT Media Lab, in Cambridge, MA. Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call. After all, the Egyptian revolution was a crowd-revolution.
Art exhibition for the Syrian crisis
Syrian-born artist Issam Kourbaj is exhibiting exclusive recent works in order to raise money for Syrian mothers and their families.
For the fortnight of 22 March to 7 April, Christ’s College Cambridge artist-in-residence Issam Kourbaj will be exhibiting his new art project, Excavating the Present, in a former furnishing emporium in King Street, Cambridge. Here, in a space blessed with abundant northern light, he will present his haunting installation, which amalgamates X-ray images of the human body and of familiar animals with aerial photographs of British landscapes.
In it, images of animal and human bones hang beside images of the land observed from the sky. Fixed to a clothes-line, carefully weathered with acids, the images are eerie yet domestic, a reminder that the biggest mystery of all, death, surrounds us all the time.
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