by Tasnim
I’m taking a short break from the blog. I will be defending my Phd dissertation in June, so the next two months are crisis time for me. Edit: postponed till September! Things will be slower than normal around here until then. The Arab Hyphen facebook page will continue though, be sure to check it out for the latest news on art, film, literature and music from the Arab world/MENA/WANA/NAWA/whatever you want to call the region🙂
Categories: Art
by Tasnim
Ahmed Mater’s first US exhibition, focusing on his landscape photography on the impact of urbanisation and the rapid change that Saudi Arabia has experienced, will be on view at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery from March 19–Sept. 18. The exhibition, curated by Carol Huh, includes “Empty Land,” a series of aerial photographs, “Desert of Pharan” (2011-13) which focuses on the redevelopment around Mecca, and “Ashab Al-Lal/Fault Mirage” (2015), which examines the confluence of religion and urbanisation in recent history. There’s a program of […]
Categories: Art, Photography • Tags: Ahmed Mater, Saudi Arabia
by Tasnim
The short film Alia directed by Raghed Charabaty is a “haunting and poetic glimpse into the flashpoint that started the Lebanese Civil War.” In the film, a man reminisces about Alia and “the last few moments before the death of his beloved” which are imagined as marking the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War. The monologue is spoken like a poem and references the famous song, To The Hum of The Bus ع هدير البوسطة, complete with the dark eyed Alia, the lettuce and fig eating and […]
Categories: Art, Film, Music • Tags: Fairouz, Lebanon, Raghed Charabaty, Ziad Rahbani
by Tasnim
D-Caf (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival) returns for its fifth edition on March 31 running until April 22. “Egypt’s only international multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival,” D-CAF has everything from literature readings to concerts, to film and theatre, comedy stand up and a puppet show. Dina El Wedidi and Khansa Batma open the show with a concert at Horreya Garden. The music program focuses on North Africa, and features Egyptian composer Bahaa El Ansary, Arabstazyfrom Tunisia, Ahmed Elseweasy and Abdelbaset Hammouda. In the performing arts section, Egyptian […]
Categories: Art, Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theatre • Tags: Arabstazy, Bahaa El Ansary, Danya Hammoud, Ezzat Ezzat, Fouad Nafili, Hassan El Greatly, Laila Soliman, Shaymaa Shoukry, Tania El Khoury, Youness Khoukhou
by Tasnim
Myrna Award writes about Al Hangar (The Warehouse) an initiative by young Saudi artists, who describe it as a cultural movement which aims to “ignite a sense of community.” Artists are individually invited to show work at Al Hangar, similarly to a biennial. And so far, they’ve been inundated with requests to participate, an indication of both the buzz around the alternative space, and the growing energy around Saudi’s art scene. The initiative is led by Ramy Alquthamy and Nasser Al Salem who hope […]
Categories: Art, Sculptor/Installation Art • Tags: Abdulnasser Gharem, Ajlan Gharem, Nasser Al-Salem, Saudi Arabia, Shaweesh
by Tasnim
BBC Radio 4 has a series called The Museum of Lost Objects presented by Kanishk Tharoor, and produced by Maryam Maruf which “traces the stories of 10 antiquities or ancient sites that have been destroyed or looted in Iraq and Syria.” There are currently five episodes available to listen to or download, and you can subscribe to the podcast here. One of the episodes is on the Temple of Bel, demolished by ISIS in August 2015. In this BBC article on Palmyra’s history and what […]
Categories: Art • Tags: archeology, heritage, history, Iraq, ISIS, memory, nostalgia, Palmyra, Syria
by Tasnim
The 5th edition of Luxor African Film Festival (LAFF) is scheduled to run between 17-23 March. The festival was established to remedy the lack of attention paid to African films in Egypt, with Luxor chosen to “de-centralize cultural or artistic events always organized in Cairo and Alexandria” This year LAFF is honoring Omar Sharif, who passed away on the 10th of July 2015. Along with dedicating this year’s festival to the memory of Sharif, the organization will release Omar Sharif […]
Categories: Film • Tags: Algeria, Egypt, Ghalia Ben Ali, Hamid Benamra, Hassen Ferhani, Hicham Elladdaqi, Hicham Lasri, Islam Kamal, Luxor African Film Festival, Mahmoud Soliman, Maysoon El Massry, Mohamed Hisham, Mohamed Kamel, Mohamed Khan, Mohamed Zran, Morocco, Omar Sharif, Raja Sediki, Tunisia
by Tasnim
With the 88th Academy Awards ceremony to take place this Sunday, Al Bawaba looks back at nine films from the region to be nominated for an Oscar, including Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) and Omar (2013), and Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory (2006) and Outside the Law (2010), but also Incendies (2010), adapted from Wajdi Mouawad’s play. This year Basil Khalil’s short Ave Maria, which “takes a comedic look at an encounter between a Jewish settler family and Palestinian […]
Categories: Film • Tags: Algeria, Basil Khalil, Canada, Egypt, Hany Abu-Assad, Lebanon, Mahdi Fleifel, Maher Abi Samra, Mahmoud Sabbagh, Mohamed Ben Attia, Palestine, Rachid Bouchareb, Saudi Arabia, Tamer El Said, Tunisia, Wajdi Mouawad
by Tasnim
This year the Live Ideas festival in New York, running until May 26, focuses on the MENA region in a series of events including an Emel Mathlouthi Concert on March 15th, and a conversation with Aileen Agopian, Senior International Contemporary Art Specialist at Sotheby’s on March 8. The festival will bring together 45 artists from North Africa and the Middle East. The full program can be found here. Exploring cultural transformations in real time in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) […]
Categories: Art
by Tasnim
Re:Orient in Stockholm, which arranges cultural events focusing on the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans, is celebrating Music Freedom Day as well as International Women’s Day with their week long Revolutionary Voices program from March 2-8. The program includes documentary screenings, a couple of panels and a concert, featuring Rim Banna, Tania Saleh, Dina El Wedidi and more. The week long program begins with the documentary On The Banks Of The Tigris where Majid Shokor, an Iraqi living in […]
Categories: Documentary, Film, Music • Tags: Dina El Wedidi, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Majid Shokor, Palestine, Rim Banna, Syria, Tania Saleh, Yasmin Fedda
by Tasnim
Naji Abu Nowar‘s “Bedouin spaghetti western” Theeb (2014) is in the news again, only now it is the “BAFTA-winning, and Oscar nominated, Theeb.” Theeb is “one of only 10 films from the MENA region to have been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film since 1947, and of the 112 films submitted for the category from MENA, only two have ever come from Jordan.” In a recent interview, Abu Nowar discusses the effect of the Oscar nomination as potentially […]
Categories: Film • Tags: Algeria, BAFTA, Hany Abu-Assad, Jordan, Naji Abu Nowar, Oscars, Palestine, Rachid Bouchareb
by Tasnim
Madam Mazen writes about a new Arabic version of SNL, to be broadcast by the satellite service OSN, with the first episode featuring Egyptian actress/comedian Donia Samir Ghanem. The new program comes in the wake of El Bernameg, hosted by Bassem Youssef aka “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”, taken off air for being too incisive (and red line crossing) in its satire. Apparently Bassem Youssef was asked to host the show but backed out. However two former members of El Bernameg, Khaled Mansour and Shady […]
Categories: Television
by Tasnim
The Belgian-Palestinian dance production Badke (the title is a play on dabke) is running until Feb. 20 at the Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto (harbourfrontcentre.com). A co-production between ballets C de la B, KVS (Royal Flemish Theatre) and the Palestinian A.M. Qattan Foundation, Badke is a 10-dancer piece inspired by dabke, an Arab folk dance from the Levant. Choreographed and directed by Koen Augustijnen, Rosalba Torres Guerrero and Hildegard De Vuyst, the work infuses a traditional line dance with acrobatic tumbling, hip […]
by Tasnim
Mahmoud Sabbagh’s Barakah Meets Barakah has been described as conventional in form, unconventional in setting. Surely one of the more conventional films ever to enjoy a premiere at the Berlinale’s risk-embracing Forum parallel section, it’s of considerable interest as a very rare cinematic export from a country where nearly all manifestations of cinema have been officially banned since 1979. Like Tunisian film Inhebbek Hedi by Mohamed Ben Attia, which has been described as “a conventional story about a young man […]
Categories: Film • Tags: Berlinale, Egypt, Mahmoud Sabbagh, Mohamed Ben Attia, Saudi Arabia, Tamer El Said, Tunisia
by Tasnim
DesignIndaba 2016 is running from the 17th to the 19th of February in Cape Town. Among the presentations is a talk by artists Mohamed and Haitham Rafat Elseht, “the twins at the heart of comic culture in Cairo” who appear under the name Twins Cartoon. See the full progam here. The twins have been interviewed a number of times by Design Indaba, and were recently interviewed by Herman Manson (@marklives) who asked them about their style, their talk at the […]
Categories: Art, Comics • Tags: DesignIndaba, Twins Cartoon
by Tasnim
Sayed Kashua’s new book Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life is a collection of reflections written between 2006 and the summer of 2014, when Kashua left Israel and moved to the US to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Native was originally published in Hebrew as Ben Ha’aretz. As Adam Kirsch writes, this “title that contains an untranslatable pun. Literally, it means “son of the land,” and coming from Kashua, an Arab Israeli who writes in Hebrew, it implies a claim to nativeness that carries a […]
Categories: Art, Literature, Television • Tags: Hebrew, Israel, Naguib Mahfouz, Palestine, Sayed Kashua
by Tasnim
Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies, her fifth novel, explores the complexities of loyalty, religion and nationalism, and the human yearning for belonging. The story is structured as two parallel narratives, a third person historical narrative set during the 19th century Caucasian war, and a contemporary narrative narrated in first person by Natasha Wilson, a thirty-something academic born to a Russian mother and a Sudanese father. Natasha describes herself as “a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves” resenting both […]
Categories: Literature • Tags: Anglo-Arab, Anglophone-Arab, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Imam Shamil, Leila Aboulela, Russia, Scotland, Sudan, Sufism, terrorism, War on Terror
by Tasnim
The exhibition Looking at the World Around You: Contemporary Works from Qatar Museums is being held from 9 February to 19 June 2016 at the Santander Art Gallery in Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, the “first major loan exhibition in Europe of works from Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art in Doha.” This selection, more than 160 works in total, represents the history of contemporary Arab art as seen through the eyes of 34 artists, most of whom are natives […]
Categories: Art, Sculptor/Installation Art • Tags: Abdullah Al Muharraqi, Adam Hanein, Ahmed Morsi, Algeria, Bahrain, Baya Mahieddine, Chaibia Talal, Dia Azzawi, Egypt, Etel Adnan, Faraj Daham, Farid Belkahia, Hassan Sharif, Inji Efflatoun, Iraq, Ismail Fattah, Kuwait, Lebanon, Manal Al Dowayan, Marwan Kassab Bashi, Mona Hatoum, Morocco, Mounir Fatmi, Nja Mahdaoui, Palestine, Qatar, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Sami Mohammed, Saudi Arabia, Shirin Neshat, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Yousef Ahmad
by Tasnim
The exhibition In Search of Lost Time (not the Proust novel), which runs at the Brunei Gallery, in the School of Oriental & African Studies until the 19th of March, “presents work by 13 artists who seek to reframe conventional interpretations of time in the Gulf.” The Arabic title of the exhibition, Urgent Memory is apt, as the exhibition “explores the complex relationship between image, speed and time in the Gulf, questioning the chronological and territorial notion of the region and the paradigms of […]
Categories: Art • Tags: Abdullah Al Saadi, Ajlan Gharem, Camille Zakharia, Hassan Sharif, Jafar Islah, Mohammad Sharaf, Mohammed Kazem, Monira Al Qadiri, Raja’a Khalid, Sami Mohammed, Sophia Al Maria
by Tasnim
Inhebbek Hedi, directed by Tunisian director Mohamed Ben Attia, with Belgium’s Dardenne brothers as co-producers, is “the first Arab contender in two decades” in the official competition of the Berlinale, running from 11-21 February. Hedi tells the story of “a simple young man” who “does not expect much from the life that is traced for him. He just takes life as it comes.” “He allows his authoritarian and overwhelming mother organise his marriage to Khedija. He allows his boss send […]
Categories: Film • Tags: Haifaa Al-Mansour, Hany Abu-Assad, Ibtisam Mara'ana Menuhin, Israel, Jordan, Larissa Sansour, Mohamed Ben Attia, Naji Abu Nowar, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia
by Tasnim
This year, the shortlist for the IPAF (International Prize for Arabic fiction) includes “a Syrian novel about Islamic State’s occupation of Raqqa to an Egyptian dystopian thriller” among other novels that “address the tragedy of the present-day Middle East.” The Syrian novel is A Sky Close to Our House by Shahla Ujayli, although since we are told it “spans the second half of the 19th century to the present” it is presumably about more than the Islamic state’s occupation of […]
Categories: Literature • Tags: Ahmed Khaled Taufiq, Egypt, George Yaraq, Iraq, Lebanon, Mahmoud Shukair, Mohamed Rabie, Nabka, Palestine, Rabai al-Madhoun, Shahla Ujayli, Sinan Antoon, Syria
