Tate celebrates Fahrelnissa Zeid, Middle East modernist pioneer
Come this June (2017), Tate Modern celebrates the life and works of Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, an artist who can rightly be seen as one of the female pioneers, in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, of both modernism and abstraction in a western sense, responsive to western aesthetics and sensibilities. Abstraction, through reinterpretation of Arabic/Farsi/Osmanli/Urdu calligraphic forms, isn’t new to a region...
Let there be Light! Nour Festival offers hope in creativity
London’s annual Nour Festival returns to the multicultural metropolis 20 October-6 November 2016, promising to highlight “the best of contemporary arts and culture from the Middle East and North Africa.” Sadly the festival’s overarching mission is challenged and overshadowed by unprecedented turmoil and fragmentation in the region it celebrates and showcases. As the five-year-old festival’s audiences...
Africanist William Fagg celebrated at conference
William Fagg and the Study of African Art, an international conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art, celebrates Africanist William Buller Fagg (28 April 1914–10 July 1992) and his arguably immense contribution to the study and (perhaps equally important) appreciation of African art in Britain and elsewhere. Fagg was the Keeper of the Department of Anthropology at the British Museum (1969–1974) and, as it transpired, a pioneering...
Nour Festival 2014 launched
The annual Nour Festival in London’s cosmopolitan Chelsea and Kensington neighbourhoods launches its fifth cycle this week with an expanded cultural programme focused on contemporary Middle Easter and North Africa (MENA) and its varied British and European connections. Spread across numerous venues in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, home to citizens and residents of great cultural diversity, the six-week festival...
Darvish Fakhr’s Palimpsest at EOA.P
The extraordinary painterly explorations by Darvish Fakhr finally get a dedicated exposure in the artist’s solo exhibition at EOA.Projects, aka Edge of Arabia, in southwest London’s slowly regenerating Battersea Thames riverside, writes SAJID RIZVI. It’s a tightly edited, evocative oeuvre that’s on view at the gallery, a culmination of several years of work informed or influenced by visits to native Iran. Remaindered materials and...
Pritzker 2014 goes to Shigeru Ban
The 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize has gone to Shigeru Ban, celebrated for his fusion of contemporary architecture with humanitarian values and innovative use of everyday and found materials. Ban, 56, professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design, will receive the award, often equated with the Nobel Prize in the field of architecture, at a ceremony 13 June 2014 at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Kyoto University said the award...