Illustration by Jaimee Lee Haddad.
Every Thursday, L’Orient Today, in partnership with The MYM Agenda, guides you through happenings across the Middle East that are actually worth your time.
Consider this your weekly shortcut to what matters in the region’s buzzing cultural scene.
Photographer Joumana Jamhouri is obsessed with water and is showcasing her exhibition Flow at Mar Mikhael's Galerie Tanit. Water demarcates our cities, reflects the sky, shapes the horizon and keeps us and our plants healthy and happy. It's a force much bigger than any of us, and Jamhouri's pictures of vast landscapes and close-ups of fish are just what you need to bid beach weather goodbye.
For more information, click here.
Samia Halaby, the groundbreaking Palestinian artist who has redefined abstraction for more than six decades, will be at Sfeir-Semler Beirut this Thursday to celebrate her new solo show, Abstract in Motion. Showcasing canvases she drew from the 1980s to today, the exhibition is a chance to get up close and personal with the stories she has been telling for decades, heavily influenced by Palestinian culture and architecture.
On Thursday, Halaby will also be showcasing in real-time her pioneering digital “kinetic paintings,” where computers become live painting instruments.
For more information, click here.
Jameel Arts Center in Jaddaf Waterfront, Dubai, is hosting multimedia artist Asuncion Molinos Gordo's The Peasant, The Scholar and The Engineer — the amalgamation of 15 years of research-based work on farming communities. Gordo highlights farmers' insane skills as people who can do it all. They're engineers, intellectuals, community staples and the people who organize and take care of one of our most important resources, our land.
Gordo’s works examine food as an aspect of global politics, one that affects people in their daily lives. She also investigates water supply and irrigation, specifically the concept of water democracy — a system where water is distributed equitably, fostering social cohesion in contrast to its ongoing privatization and confiscation.
For more information, click here.
Step into Ana Escobar Saavedra’s first solo exhibition, It Starts Where It Ends, at 421 Arts Campus in Freezone, Abu Dhabi, where she meditates on what it means “to be.” Through evocative installations and artifacts, Saavedra invites you to consider where identity resides: in the body, in memory, or in the fragile systems that document our lives.
Escobar Saavedra transforms marble and granite — materials associated with endurance and historical preservation — into intimate reflections of the human body. She also reimagines the bureaucratic markers of identity — documents, certificates, lockets — fracturing and reshaping them to expose the tension between institutional record and lived memory. In her hands, names and dates no longer feel fixed, but cyclical and fluid, constantly folding back on themselves.
For more information, click here.
Discover the bright and deeply layered world of Malaysian contemporary art this weekend at the Cultural Foundation in Al-Hisn, Abu Dhabi. To Know Malaysia is to Love Malaysia displays the best of the best from the AFK Collection, highlighting the country's artistic heritage, giving you a look into its independent landscape.
For more information, click here.
This weekend, take a seat at the Museum of Islamic Art's table in Qatar, and feast on a five-course meal (visually, metaphorically) that delves into centuries of culinary traditions, spanning from the emergence of Islam to today. A seat at the table dives into key historical developments, the impact of trade on food, and how feasting and dining etiquette shaped courtly culture, all through recipes and stories.
For more information, click here.
Didn't find what you were looking for? Stay up to date with all these events and more everywhere in the Arab world through the Mym Agenda, available on our website here.
Israel continues attacks on southern Lebanon, demolishes buildings in Bint Jbeil