Film review: Everybody’s fine
Electric wires as a metaphor for connections, chemistry, emotional charges, jolts, the ebb of life. Seems unlikely? Robert de Niro plays a gracefully ageing father of four who just lost his wife 8 months ago. He invented the coating for electric wires that span America, connecting cities and people like dots. The wires...
Young Saudi Artists: Portrait of an Event
Saudi Arabia’s contemporary art scene is in a period of flux and several kinds of art life have emerged from an increasingly fertile cultural soil – events, initiatives and ideas of all ranges and colours. One of these projects is ‘Young Saudi Artists’, held since 2011. To the engaged observer of the Saudi art scene, this...
Exhibition Review: Dark Circus
Raouf Rifai, a Lebanese artist, reflects upon the political conflicts that have become a more or less permanent backdrop for his region. Raouf Rifai is a Lebanese artist whose works were displayed recently at the Athr Gallery in Jeddah. The exhibition was entitled ‘Interlude’ and it merged two...
Book Review: My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
When I read on the back flap of the book that My Name is Red is nothing like the Western thriller, I couldn’t quite conjure an ‘Eastern’ thriller in my imagination. Orhan Pamuk defined it for us. A simple transposition of décor, cultural setting, subject matter or a surgical appropriation of names and locale doesn’t...
Movie Review: ‘Up in the air’
This is a movie that belongs with new-age travel as alternative lifestyle literature. In recent years, people have opted for a life on the open road instead of a stable home. Vagabonding is the new hippy-ism, the new personal statement of lifestyle choice. There is a whole set of inspirational literature, which is...
The artist as a change leader in Saudi Arabia: Abdulnasser Gharem
Abdulnasser Gharem was one of the pioneers of what is recognized today as the contemporary art movement in Saudi Arabia. He was among the handful who, back in 2004, in a small hilly town called Abha, wrought up the vision that has slowly and irrevocably materialized in the Kingdom today as the dawn of a...
Not with a bang but a whimper: ‘The Cleft’ by Doris Lessing
‘The Cleft’ by Doris Lessing Harper Perennial No. of pages 260 While purchasing books, it is possible to be blinded by our love for some authors. Even if the back cover and the synopsis promise no excitement. For me, Doris Lessing is one such name. ‘The Cleft’ has a brazenly feminist hypothesis about evolution...
Young voices in Saudi art
Young amateurs from Saudi Arabia, green but buzzing with energy, showcase a range of eclectic works impossible to lump together in one neat category. This rebellious and chaotic variety is, to a large extent, the event’s charm. At the 2012 edition of Young Saudi Artists, the 44 works by 23 artists scanned subjects...
