Music from the Silk Road event
Five artists, including known musical figures on London’s creative scene, perform a lunchtime concert in a capsule presentation of music from the Middle East and its eastward extensions along the Silk Road ancient and modern, writes The Middle East in Europe. ‘Summertime in Distant Lands,’ part of an ongoing and well regarded Music@One series, is a collaboration between SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies),...
Waiting, and waiting: The Lost Men of Syria at the Saatchi Gallery
Syria’s grim humanitarian crisis finds yet another sombre expression in The Lost Men of Syria exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, opening 19 July. Photographer Edward Jonkler’s work examines the role of men in refugee camps, and the shifting power dynamics that can often lead to acts of radicalisation and mental illness, with once patriarchal figures becoming “lost’. Fleeing violence and the destruction of their lives...
Adib Rostami in performance
It’s a paradox of frequent or recurrent troubles in the Middle East that an international diaspora continues to spawn or uncover new artistic talent in music, theatre and the visual arts in the West or the wider world at large. Adib Rostami is one such discovery for London. Both a music industry management student and a music practitioner, Rostami has earned fame and is well on way to creating his own space in the...
PhotoX extends entry time for art photographers
PhotoX, an art photography prize supported by EAPGROUP, invites aspiring contestants to submit entries as it extends the time available for submissions. “Due to many late submissions, we have now decided to extend the entry deadline until 8 May 2017. Huge thanks to all the worldwide entries already received,” PhotoX said. PhotoX prizes include a combined GBP 2,000 cash prize, shared among four winners, and an artist...
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...