Sinan Antoon in Stockholm: Translation and Literature of/on Iraq

November 11, 2016 by Tasnim

Crossposted on Arablit. On October 19th, Iraqi writer and literary translator Sinan Antoon visited Stockholm University for an afternoon lecture entitled “Living Here and There: Travel and Exile in Arabic Literature.” Antoon’s talk was attended by an interesting mix of Swedish Arabic-language teachers and students, and some Arab exiles and “in-betweeners,” those who are neither fully at home in their countries of origin (having left those countries too young) nor fully comfortable in an established diaspora community (having arrived here […]

Categories: Art

Hello Again

November 11, 2016 by Tasnim

I’m back! After having taken the last five months off to work on the final stages of my phd, I’m so happy to have successfully defended my thesis, and look forward to getting back to the blog and exporing what’s new. So stay tuned for more posts in the coming days. If you’re interested in what exactly I’ve been writing about (and the impetus for starting this blog back in 2012), here is the title and abstract of my dissertation: […]

Categories: Art

Hiatus

March 31, 2016 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

Symbolic Cities: The Photography of Ahmed Mater

March 16, 2016 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

Remediating Fairuz

March 9, 2016 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

Egyptian Arts Festival D-Caf (March 31- April 22)

March 6, 2016 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

Al Hangar and the New Generation of Saudi Artists

March 2, 2016 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

Museum of Lost Objects

March 1, 2016 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

Luxor African Film Festival

February 26, 2016 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

The Oscars and the Berlinale

February 25, 2016 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

Live Ideas Festival: MENA/Future – Cultural Transformations

February 24, 2016 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

Revolutionary Voices, Stockholm, March 2-8

February 22, 2016 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

Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb After the BAFTA

February 22, 2016 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

Saturday Night Live in Arabic

February 20, 2016 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

Dabke Inspired Dance: Badke in Toronto

February 20, 2016 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 […]

Categories: Art, Dance • Tags: Badke, Dabke, Levant

Mahmoud Sabbagh’s Barakah Meets Barakah

February 18, 2016 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

Twins Cartoon at DesignIndaba 2016

February 18, 2016 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

Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life

February 16, 2016 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

Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies

February 15, 2016 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

From Mathaf to Madrid

February 15, 2016 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

Exhibition “In Search of Lost Time” at SOAS

February 13, 2016 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