Illustration by Jaimee Lee Haddad.
Recently, a lot of words and ideas have totally lost their original meaning, constantly chewed and spit out into TikTok buzzwords and Instagram infographics. But is that what makes something iconic?
Having talked about it so much that it, exhausted from being passed around, transcends its original meaning, taking form in any conversation it finds itself in?
This week's icons under the microscope: Umm Kulthum, justice and accountability, the region's rich textures, and Anna Wintour.
Every Thursday, L’Orient Today, in partnership with The MYM Agenda, guides you through events across the Middle East that are actually worth your time.
What to do this weekend in Beirut:
This weekend is your last chance to catch "Kawkab al-Sharq," by painter Anas al-Lakkis, at Kalim Bechara Art Gallery, Downtown.
Lakkis' muse is Umm Kulthum, the legendary Egyptian singer known for her larger-than-life voice and stage presence. In a style eerily similar to Total Drama Island, Lakkis portrays her belting, full of emotions, always against a plan backdrop, as if her voice were transporting her to other worlds.
For more information, click here.
When you live in a country like Lebanon, where legal justice is rarely ever achieved, the concept of accountability becomes murky. If those who ruined the country are never tried, then what does our version of accountability look like? What if we all 'move on' the way we love to? Is it not a national duty to remember?
"Freedom Recalled," showing at Achrafieh's Beit Beirut, asks all these questions and more, knowing that no one has an answer. Featuring 36 participants, the exhibition explores, through art, talks, films and art therapy workshops, the ways artists and communities have processed key events from 1975 through the Beirut Port Explosion.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Cairo:
Safarkhan Gallery marks the centennial of Egyptian painter Salah Abdel Kerim (1925–1988) with a featured selection of artworks, personal items, and rare pieces from the gallery’s collection and his family’s estate.
One of Egypt’s most versatile modernists, Abdel Kerim worked across painting, sculpture, ceramics, design and scenography.
His paintings draw on geometric, expressionist, surrealist, and figurative influences, while his sculptural approach — often using scrap metal and what he called “sculpting from emptiness” — builds forms from the inside out, utilizing light and space as active elements.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Amman:
Painter Haytham Sharrouf's exhibition “Risala of Silk and Pearl: Messages from Earth,” showing at Khuzamah Aboujaoudeh Gallery, takes you through a weird sci-fi-like journey, where all the imagery feels too familiar to be alien.
Sharrouf takes inspiration from our region's main materials and fabrics, playing with textures and landscapes and throwing them all in together in one space like an assorted cookie tin.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Doha:
Fashion Trust Arabia is celebrating its seventh birthday by weaving a thread between 80 of the fashion designers it supports in the region. Its "Threads of Impact" exhibition, showing at M7, groups their work based on mutual ideas, iconographies and ideals that inspire and shape their imaginations.
Fashion has always been and remains a way to hear and feel a designer's (and even a people's) personal narratives, heritage and creative vision. Also, if none of this sold you on going, just know that Anna Wintour was there.
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.
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