Tate celebrates Fahrelnissa Zeid, cross-cultural modernist
Come this June (2017), Tate Modern celebrates the life and works of 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 that, in...
Artist-led London gallery unveils strategy for eclectic displays, diversity of disciplines
Yinjie Sun aka Sunny, artist, art instructor and gallerist, has been on a trajectory that is best noted for encapsulation of time, packing decades into years, months into days, or so it seems. Arriving in London in the later part of the last decade as a foundation student at Camberwell College of Arts, on the lower rungs of the University of the Arts London system, Yinjie Sun promptly set to work on raising his painterly profile with...
Yaw Obuobi: Narrator of yarns
Yaw Obuobi tells stories as he spins a yarn or two, but mostly more than two, more likely hundreds, or thousands. A selection of fruit of his painstaking work on ‘paintings’ made entirely of yarn, at the Gallery of African Art 14 July-13 August 2016, reminds us that Africa’s love of textiles is borne over a very long thread indeed. Archaeological forays into prehistory—what we do not know well enough—has yielded...
Art generation: Bahrain showcases ‘art across borders’
The minuscule state of Bahrain, morphed from an emirate into a kingdom 14 years ago, is striking out to win international recognition for its own home-grown contemporary art scene on the heels of last year’s commercial fair initiative, ArtBahrain. In what evidently is the next instalment of that effort, 17 artists will show their work in a London exhibition, Bahrain Art Across Borders, which abbreviates neatly as BAAB or baab,...
Children’s art from Hiroshima
Art made by Japanese school children in the aftermath of the Second World War is a highly appropriate though emotionally charged way to commemorate this year’s anniversary, the 70th, of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and London’s Daiwa Foundation galleries is doing just that. Paintings from Hiroshima (5-13 August 2015) brings together art produced by children, including pupils at a girls school that lost...
‘Entry prohibited…’ features artists of The Other
Europe’s current struggles with its past, present and unknowable future are brought together in what appears to be a trenchant exhibition in a town previously notorious for its unwelcoming stance, albeit as part of the Cold War, and more recently noted for a widening embrace for ‘new Europeans’ from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, writes Sajid Rizvi. ENTRY PROHIBITED TO FOREIGNERS, yes, all in capital letters, features...