MENAR Film Festival

The Middle East & North Africa Region (MENAR) Film Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria, kicks off on January 14 and runs through the end of the month. The focus this year is on female directors - the films to be shown include Egyptian Nadine Khan's Chaos, Disorder (2012),  Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania's The Blade of Tunis …

She Who Tells A Story

The exhibit “She Who Tells A Story” is a photography exhibit, a smaller scale Light from the Middle East which is dedicated to the work of women artists, featuring work by twelve women photographers from Iran and the Arab world. The photographers are: Iraqi Jananne Al-Ani, Yemeni Boushra Almutawakel, Iranians Gohar Dashti, Shadi Ghadirian, Newsha Tavakolian and Shirin Neshat, Egyptians Nermine …

Rising Star Mayssa Karaa

The National reviews rising star Mayssa Karaa's concept show, When Music Matters, performed at the conclusion of the Abu Dhabi Festival. The young Lebanese singer first rose to international fame with her Arabic rendition of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, featured on the soundtrack of the film American Hustle. As Saeed Saeed puts it: the song …

Frankenstein in Baghdad

Doing some research on the first Gulf war, I came across a brief article from 1990  in the Los Angeles Times with the title "Iraq Turns Into 'Frankenstein Monster,' Iranians Say": "Likening Iraq to Frankenstein's monster turning on its creators, Iran's media Monday stepped up its attack on Baghdad for invading Kuwait." And then there …

Making History in the Middle East

Glenn Lowry, former F|S curator of Islamic art and now director of the Museum of Modern Art, talks about contemporary art in the Middle East. In this presentation he looks at how history is constructed, in a region characterized by deja-vu, by the constant return of history. He mentions the Gulf and Levant, and in …