Green Caravan film festival

Save the date: 28 -29th October 2009
to save the earth eventually.
Green Caravan is coming your way in Kuwait at the Dar al Athar theater in Midan Hawally. A Film Festival to show world renowned movies on Earth matters: wild animals, water, pollution...
Please check their web site for more information. Take your kids or your grandma.
In the program: "Home" a movie released early summer by Yann Arthus Bertrand, the man best known as "the photographer from above".

The effort is a non profit endeavor, by Equilibrium to pull energies into better informed opinions that might someday do something.

Link to the film festival: http://www.thegreencaravan.com

Lebanese National Library Foundation

The Lebanese National Library Foundation saw a need to fulfill: restore and bring to the public the archive of books and newspapers with a history of more than hundreds of years. The effort is tedious and straining. Exhibitions are arranged often to keep the spirit alive. Beyond their wars, Lebanese are often aware of their written heritage and their freedom of speech across ages.
In the world today, many are questioning the existing necessity of National Libraries. With the age of technologies and unwired web of information, does anyone flip through books or dictionaries or even encyclopaedias?
The National Public Library in France (Bibliotheque Nationale de France) is under a severe strain of “take over” from the gigantic info monster: Google. Under the cover of digitizing all documents, the French are propelled into the digital faster track. They have already covered 800 000 documents, and wonder if Google's intentions are beyond the profit when proposing a full coverage of the archives.
The Lebanese National Library is far from that fear. They are still desperately fundraising to restore first, and then erect a space. They are certain that a memory brought back to life could encourage the younger generations of researchers into a far broader capacity of understanding.
And these youngster need an access to the past to built a better future.

link: http://www.flbn.org/en/

Zeina Maasri "Off the Wall"

A book published in feb 2009 on posters during the WAR in Lebanon, researched and written by Zeina Maasri. The forward by Fawwaz Traboulsi is quite eloquent in the issues at stake:

" Question: Why should we remember a civil war? Answer: so as not to have it repeated (...) Forgetting is one thing, amnesia is another. Amnesia, both officialized and popular, has been rampant in post war Lebanon (...) Collective amnesia is pathological while it pretends to be curative. (...) it condemns the patient and re-enact the traumatic past as a permanent present. That is why the post war years have been lived as a 'cold civil war' awaiting for the 'return' of the hotter version.
With patience, perseverance and a lot of talent Maasri has managed to collect document and archive hundreds of posters produced by the different protagonists during the wars of Lebanon. (...) she has offered us another way of looking at posters: posters as weapons.

Fouad el Khoury

On War and Love.
Espace Kettaneh-Kunigk, Beirut, took down the traces of this photo/dairy/collage exhibition by Fouad el Khoury. Have you missed that event?
Anyhow, you needed time to explore it, and in Beirut, hardly anyone has the time for such a subtle, deep reflections on these explosive topics: WAR and LOVE
First, you have a general look and wonder to start, then realize there are dates on each photo. You search for a beginning then face the inevitable 13th July 2006. You read the caption closer: "flying to Athens the next day for the opening of my photo exhibition (...) title: 1982 named after the last invasion of Lebanon by Israel".
His daily life is displayed with photos and words to give his impression of the summer 2006, but they also mimic so many wars in Lebanon in the past 30 years. Such contrasts and aberrations simply put. He introduces his love life as a center anchor to a world disintegrating in a warfare. Unknown parameters and variables. Love becomes unknown and unstable.

Are you still in Love Fouad el Khoury or have you found peace?

His website: www.fouadelkhoury.com

Baalbek Festival

Baalbeck Festival ended their season with Verdi's "La Traviata" performed by the "Choregraphies d'Orange" in partnership with their festival in Orange, France.
Pleasant and powerful execution: voices, music, costumes surrounded by enchanting columns and stones.

The classic drama of love and death is a recurrent subject to be tackled by many Lebanese during their recent history of wars, deaths, politics, religion and in contrast the invincible effect of love.
The Lebanese's love of exquisite and refined art struck once again.

Weddings

The wedding entrance by Jill and Kevin youtube video had 18,877,982 viewers and Press attention when even NBC tv has asked to perform again in the Today show. Analysis and questions on the matter: are they acting up for a video clip, are they promoting a song? or are they just a plain creative couple putting up their wedding entrance on youtube for family and friends? and why is there such a buzz? how did they make the buzz?
They have nothing to do with any promotion of songs. They are ordinary people ready to use the latest technology and promote themselves.
In the Arab world, there are many youtube videos on weddings, such as Chantal and Elie's dance in Lebanon. With it, comes overwhelming attempts to fit the social norm in an escalating business. The location, the bride's dress, the flowers, the zaffeh, the music, the food, the service, the lighting ... on and on and on...
What matters is: are they having fun?
In the Arab culture, improvisations in weddings has yet to emerge. Until then enjoy the party.

(NBC's Link)

Walter Moers

Does anyone know a good translator from German to Arabic? If you do, please give him this book "Die Stadt der Träumenden Bücher" by Walter Moers to savor words, images, plots, suspense, races, clashes in the world of books. Electrifying. Stunning. When he reads it, it might give him the urge to propagate that love of books to the young Arab readers, through Moers' eyes.
The writer is known in Germany for his comics and his books. It is usually given to young adults as dreaming is best done when still young...

Or is it already translated? That would be the jackpot!

Legal and illegal art

Street dance in Paris is not legal. Feisal, Ibrahim and friends, some from Tunisia, others from different part of the world, perform in the tourists' zones. Under thirty years, they decide to get together to earn a few coins in the summer, entertain the crowds, and sometimes they get police intervention on the spot.
What is the sanction in France to dance in the street? probably not as much as in other countries where public dancing is punished highly, music and singing must be state controlled.
Does it stop the dancing?

On the same note, Flash Mob dancing has become a fad in many countries. In an anonymous manner, a group of dancers get on the floor of high traffic area, usually a train station, a big mall etc.. and perform together during a song to give the impression of a random event. The use of a web camera, youtube, twitter, facebook etc.. promotes the success of the pre and post event. In the past month, around the world, spontaneous flash mob dances have been organized as a tribute to Micheal Jackson.
In Kuwait, it was reported by fellow bloggers that a silent non dancing tribute to Micheal Jackson on the beach ended up being dispersed by the police.
Does it stop listening to Jackson's words :
"We are the World, we are the children ... We'll make a better day, just you and me..."
and let's start dancing!

link to flash mob dance : Montreal
Stockholm

Up

The Disney, Pixar movie "UP" in 3 D is not a movie for kids... It must be for grandparents or adults who care for the younger ones, thinking that a movie will be quiet time without running, screaming or yelling...
It is a trap, beware...
The story is about an old man, with a foot in his grave, who is thrust to the ultimate: totally give up his dream or do something about it.
The trap is hidden, disguised, dangerous with extremely critical ideas in a unbelievable story. And the worst is to believe that the bad man is really a bad man... He is nothing else but the same as the hero turned sour, sad and aggressive.
Adults are surely more gullible than kids, accustomed and trained to accept that the "Peter Pan world" is not real
(For adults, it has to be written that coffee in paper cups is extremely hot, beware... cigarettes and smoking will kill etc... Otherwise they will not take the time to pause and think...)
In this movie, you cannot accomplish anything the old man is seen doing. There is no sign anywhere saying: " you should not try this with your own home..."

Venice Biennale - 6 - collateral events

In the Saudi Pavilion, tucked down beside the Guggenheim collection, stood there, with an orange aura, the mother of all kitsch elements in the Arab world: The Fake Neon Palm Tree. Controversy on that issue can be discussed in length. But in Venice, surrounded by old stones and a view on the canal, it served its purpose.
The exhibition has the intention to be at the edge of Arabia (its title) and presents confirmed artists who like to push it to another level.
Among others, Manal al-Dowayan portraits women with some male professional tools: "I am an engineer" "I am a truck driver". The message is loud and clear. The photography in black and white is apealling.
Ahmed Mater Aseeri uses two x-rays printed on paper prepared with tea, pomegrenate, coffee and other materials used traditionally on the opening page to a religious text.
The show gives a sensation that contemporary art in Saudi Arabia is moving on the uphill road for more fame.

(link to the website : edge of arabia)

Venice Biennale - 5 - collateral events

In the collateral events, the one not be missed was : Peter Greenaway's video installation of "The wedding at Cana". He used the wall where the painting originally was hung, in the Benedictine abbey across from St Mark's Square. He pulled teams of sound and lights experts. He wrote scripts for a virtual dialogue between all figures on the canvas and added music to the event. He manipulated laser beams, projections on side panels, numbers on characters for identifications, closeups images of faces, animated diagrams. He darkened some areas, focused on others and the show was on for 50 min.
The stage set for the wedding. Murmurs of voices starts with a gossip on the far end, comments on the invitees, remarks on cloths, references on food. Attention gets closer to the main organizers, their worries and pride. Instruments are played, cutlery shaken, velvet and silk crumpled. "An ebullient painting, a feast, a wedding, a celebration, a grand event, a tumult, a swirl of bright conversation, laughter, music. (...) Banish gloom, guilt and melancholy. What are all these people saying, talking about, chattering about,debating, anticipating, discussing? Should we listen in? Can we listen in?" says Greenaway in his written introduction.
Until drinks dried up and the Christ performs his first public miracle to turn water to wine. And it continues to spin in their heads, on their tongues: doubts, amazement, suspicion, credulity...
The miracle was depicted as if Jesus was part of the Venitian court of the 16th century and far away from its setting in Cana, Galileo with a Jewish background in AD 31/ 33

Could Paolo Veronese, the Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, have thought of this interpretation in his "Wedding at Cana"in 1562? Or did Greenaway see in this painting the potential to go beyond what the artist offered in his art?
He was able to turn this silent canvas into a lively hybrid from modern technology to art history to an explanatory form of the subject with the context of the period it was painted in.
"In this way it seems that, shifting the identity of this work from vision to sound, you were able to retain the idea of Veronese, that is the idea of art, which is always to establish a non-place" says Achille Bonito Olivia

Venice Biennale, 4 Palestinian pavillion

The collateral events scattered around the city are as interesting as the main events in the official Arsenale and Giardini. With a map and the vaporetto, it felt like a paper rallye race from one end to the other, trying to locate them.
For the first time, the Palestinian pavillion presented few works of their artists. As Palestine is not recognised as a country, it could not have its own stage. In reference to that state without land, their catalogue and title "Palestine c/o Venice" is about the need to have a host for their existence.
In its tourist's guides, Venice has the stigma of starting the first Jewish ghetto in 1516, when the ruling council decided to make all Jews live in the "Ghetto Nuova" and allowed them to practice their pawn-lending under strict laws, leave their ghetto with a yellow scarf or circle and lock the gates at night.
Venice is coming a long way, to allow the victims of the Israeli occupation to have their own physical presence on land and show their art under their own banner.
Palestinian art is closely related to lives under harsh conditions. It has to do with installations of photos of land, villages destroyed, buildings restored…
Salwa Mikdadi, the event's independent curator, had the difficult task of conceiving the project, as she says on the artists :"The fluidity of their art is reflected on their ability to work unfettered by geopolitical boundaries and exile. Collectively, they have brought to the world’s attention diverse conceptual readings of space of memory, displacement, migration, nation and the human condition."
Or which art to present at the biennale and how will it be understood in the arena of the best and will it be of equal level as the other art works?
Their most surprising work was in the dark sound proof room, where Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Patti offer a recording of: words from the Oslo treaty, people arguing, songs by Oum Kalthoum, and the unfogettable, hauting resonnace of bombs and shellings... It had the simplicity of a straight forward art, with a vibration that plunged the viewer into another time and space.

Venice biennale, Giardini - 3

In the Giardini, among the 30 official pavillions, the elegant Venitian pavillion concentrated on glass works and their garden had a explosion of colors, forms and materials by the artist Dale Chihuly. The pavillion is about "glass art" and the historical link to the murano traditions.

The Egyptian pavillion presented their best work with canvas by Adel Al Siwi and Ahmed Askalany's scupltures in palm tree leaves and iron. The giants looked impressive and gave a earthly feeling of life on the Nile's shores. Size of these "worshipers" was dramatic, filling the space with deep connection to majestic monuments from the pharaos' time.

In the Brazillian pavillion, two artists were representing the art in South America. At first glance, the canvas works by Delson Uchoa in their intrecate layers of materials, and the brightness of colors were the most striking. But after reading the curator's note, the Luiz Braga's photography is on one hand very familiar and simple but also researched in details :" because his approach to the subject is not literary or ideological, his gaze records, directly and precisely, documented sequences that seem to strech out the time of a peculiar life. Treated as a raw material in an abstract, aesthetic vision, the Amazon reveals itself as an artificial world, like a markedly pictorial , nearly dreamlike staging of the place where he lives."

The Spanish pavillion proudly showed Miquel Barcelo's retrospective. His works include his love for Africa, He uses organic materials on his canvas as well as clay for his ceramics. His performance recorded on video using a large amount of clay on a wall then on a person reveals a tendency to surrender and surround himself with clay and earthly matter without disctinction between beauty and mud.

Venice Biennale, art - 2

In the main Pavillion at the Giordani (Gardens), one of the most spectacular installation was done by Tomas Saraceno, born in Argentina, living in Germany. A room filled with black elastic wire gives the impression of microcosm of cells and atoms, to the macrocosm of constellations and planets. He is interrested in innovative architectural projects and fascinated by utopian theories and astronomical issues. The Back Widow's gorssamer filaments are able to suspend extreme weights tthrough the use of complex geometry. Although light and airy, the whole room has a intriguing complex opressiveness.

Georges Adeagbo, born in Benin, explores walls two corners where he hangs various found objects and pictures, news papers relating to the moment and the ideas in his toughts. He gives the viewer time to reflect on issues of political and cultural appropriation, colonial violence and post colonial "benevolence".
With a law degree, "Already in 1971 he created in the yard of his home his first installations, which he himself called ´installations éphémères´ (ephemeral installations), but for twenty years he lived in extreme poverty and isolation, lavishing more attention on his artefacts than on his sizeable family, who sent him several times into psychiatric care. It was not till 1993 that a French curator and collector happened to meet him and take an interest in his work" (www.culturebase.net).
(no pictures were allowed)

Hans-Peter Feldmann, from Germany, plays with shadows and light: "toy figures and other objects pilled on slowly rotating platform, lit with stronglights, cast a dance on the bare walls in a manner akin to shadow puppetry or magic lanterns" Dynamic and amusing.
Susan Hefuna is the only artist of egyptian descent in the main Pavillion where 37 artists show their work.

The biennale says it is not about nationalities nor politics. Their official title is "Making the world, Fari Mondi" but many critics see it as arena where countries with their power and ressources enter the world of influence and culture.

Venice Biennale, art

Venice Biennale 2009: The artists awarded are the first to be seen as they must represent what the jury thinks is the best of art today in the world.
Golden Lion for best National participation: USA, + Bruce Nauman: Topological gardens. At the outside walls of the American pavillion is displayed some of his neon art: words flashing in contradiction - lust, faith, greed, charity ... Inside, the exercise of hands in clay as sculptors is quite taking.
Golden Lion for best artist is : Thobias Rehberger (germany) for his installation of the bar : "his project consists of a complex scheme of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, creating a visually disorienting atmosphere"
Golden Lion for promising artist: Narthalie Djurberg (swedish living in Germany). In a dark room, she puts a strange world of the heavens with colored clay figures of flore and faun and videos of clay personas who undergo cruelty and dissections.

"If any show can be said to reflect a larger state of affairs in art now, this one suggests a somewhat dull, deflated contemporary art world, professionalized to a fault, in search of a fresh consensus (NYT, review on 10/6/09)" Many reviewers have a bitter taste to what art has become.
Yet for the Arab world representatives, there are a few hints of existance and turmoil. Next posts will contain a glimpse of that.