Illustration by Jaimee Lee Haddad.
Whether you love or hate celebrating New Year's Eve, we can all admit our escape from the Dec. 26 to Dec. 30 purgatory is cause for celebration enough.
Within the spirit of welcoming new beginnings, this week's chosen exhibits explore relationships with identity, language and uncertainty, encouraging us to forgo everything we know about them to create our own definitions.
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:
Art District Beirut is showcasing sculptor Rim al-Bahrani's "Conditions for Being" in the New Year, diving into identity as something shaped by grounding rather than inheritance.
Each sculpture brings together a grounding base and an abstract house form. The base does not function as a pedestal; it creates a spatial condition that determines how the form above asserts its presence. While our roots offer us a ground to stand on, it is we who continually reshape our identities day by day.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Cairo:
Greek mythology tells the story of how Zeus split 'whole' and genderless humans into men and women to weaken their power.
Artist Taher Hammouda revisits this story through a personal lens in "Hin al-Lika'" (When We Meet), transforming the dichotomy of man and woman into a reflection of a broader cosmic balance.
It seems like the world operates in opposites. Earth and sky, sun and moon, sea and land, matter and its opposite. Or maybe, like Zeus, the split was man-made.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Dubai:
Dubai's Efie Gallery is showing "The Shape of Things to Come," a group exhibition of painting, photography and sculpture.
Lost in confusing times, the artists respond to the limbo and uncertainty of modern life, including political upheaval, technological change, cultural exchange and environmental crisis. Using their art to encourage insight, they use their medium as an anchor.
For more information, click here.
What to do this weekend in Manama:
Artist Nedim is (ironically) drawing his writing at Bin Matar House this New Year.
He invites 'readers' to question both the general and specific meanings of words, turning language from technical and scientific to personal and introspective. The content remains hypothetical, the connotations yours.
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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