Illustration by Jaimee Lee Haddad.
Art is everywhere around us, even in the faces we make at ourselves in the mirror and in the buildings we pass between every night on our way home. Our exhibitions this week dive into what we see as mundane but actually holds more purpose than you'd imagine.
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.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun indeed. A life motto to some, Valerie Ghoussaini has chosen this tagline for her latest exhibition at Wadi 99 Art Gallery in Downtown Beirut, where her monochromatic paintings join the faces of various iconic women that span industries and generations.
All proceeds go to the organization Chance – Children Against Cancer. For more information, click here.
This month, Pierre Koukjian and his son Cedric are marrying their (different, but similar) artworks for a joint sculptural installation at Rebirth Beirut, in Gemmayzeh.
Pierre Koukjian approaches familiar materials — hammered steel, titanium, brass, neon, glass — as he looks back at his life, spent living across continents, merging personal histories with global issues.
Cedric Koukjian is more experimental, exploring the idea of the “Link.” His practice, like Pierre’s, is shaped by his own cross-cultural perspective and an obsession with industrialism.
NAWARIT invites you to question how materials carry memory, how objects embody connection, and how design can open new ways of seeing.
For more information, click here.
For "Instruments of Viewing and Obscurity," at Green Art Gallery in al-Quoz, Dubai, artist Nazgol Ansarinia builds a miniature Tehran to examine the idea of mass housing and brutalist architecture.
She examines the window: an architectural tool of visibility and social control, especially under Tehran's building codes and regulations. Walking through her miniature streets will give you the sense of seeing and being seen, imagining the house as an extension of the body, and the window as its eye.
For more information, click here.
Mathaf in Doha (or the Arab Museum of Modern Art to some) wants you to come out of this summer as an artist and/or creative in your own right. Every Sunday and Tuesday, you get to enroll in a workshop of your choice and learn a skill you have been eyeing for years. This month they're offering workshops in drawing mirror portraits, writing public speeches and "painting the music" (open to interpretation, I assume).
For more information, click here.
This weekend is your last chance to visit the "Summer Affordable Art" show at TAM Gallery in Cairo. Exhibiting works by artists Tarig Kamal, Mohsen Abdel Fattah, and Takwa Sabry, visit the space that is pushing for art (and beautiful paintings in your home) to become accessible again.
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.
