Under a vast canopy of tents in the Saudi city of Jeddah, religious artifacts are on display alongside contemporary art pieces, part of the kingdom’s bid to transform its ultraconservative image.
The second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale, titled “And All That Is In Between,” features as its centerpiece segments of the kiswa, the black cloth embroidered with gold and silver that covers the Kaaba, the cubic building towards which all Muslims pray.
Hundreds more works are on display at the west terminal of King Abdulaziz International Airport in the coastal city, including valuable objects on loan from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and the Louvre in Paris, and rare artefacts from the Vatican Library such as a medieval Quran in Hebrew script.
Photo: AFP
“This bringing together of the contemporary and the past really emphasizes the change that Saudi Arabia is going through,” said Saudi artist Muhannad Shono, curator of the exhibition.
Home to Islam’s holiest sites, the kingdom has long been dominated by Wahhabism, a strict interpretation of Islam that prohibits the representation of human and animal figures.
As a result of the prohibition of such depictions in most Sunni Muslim schools of thought, geometric patterns came to be widely prevalent in Islamic art.
But the biennale in Jeddah features medieval Persian illuminations, including royal portraits, as well as a fountain designed by Yemeni-Indonesian artist Anhar Salem whose mosaic tiles, assembled by colour using artificial intelligence, are made up of avatars sourced online.
’TRADITIONAL CONCEPTIONS’
“We have traditional conceptions of Islam and its history, which I feel we should begin to re-examine from a new perspective,” said visitor Abdelelah Qutub, a 31-year-old architect from Mecca.
A few meters away, Franco-Lebanese artist Tamara Kalo had recreated the camera obscura, the precursor to the modern camera invented in the 11th century by Muslim philosopher Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen).
Kalo said her installation, made out of copper, sought to raise the question of “what it means to see and what it means to be a witness.”
The exhibition has also encouraged artists to be bold with scale, as can be seen from a massive disc covered in petrol — a nod to Saudi Arabia’s position as the world’s leading crude exporter — that spins endlessly.
Its creator, Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino, said: “For me it represents time... it’s something that keeps evolving while we’re watching the piece.”
Under his “Vision 2030,” de facto Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to transform the kingdom’s image, weighed down by decades of repression and ultra-conservatism.
According to James Dorsey of the National University of Singapore, Saudi authorities are seeking to address what he described as a “reputation deficit,” having long been considered a “secretive, ultra-conservative kingdom.”
Efforts to project “openness,” including the biennale, are “key to the success of Vision 2030,” he said.
’SHARE SPACE WITH THE WEST’
Strategically located in a terminal adjacent to the one reserved for Muslims on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the Jeddah biennale attracts a mix of both art enthusiasts and pilgrims.
“We had pilgrims coming from over the road here to see the Mecca and Medina pavilions last time,” said art historian Julian Raby.
The first edition in 2023 attracted 600,000 visitors — approaching the Venice Biennale’s 700,000 visitors last year.
Now, the Islamic Arts Biennale aims to exceed a million visitors, many from abroad.
“That internationalism is exactly the opposite of how many people consider Saudi Arabia. They look at Saudi Arabia and consider it as a cloistered country,” Raby said.
“The Islamic world has never been cloistered, it’s been in dialogue, dynamic.”
In front of her monumental sculpture, a black steel bush of roses floating above a fountain, Jordanian artist Raya Kassisieh was proud to benefit from the platform provided by the biennale.
“We are able and at the level to converse and share space with the West,” she said.
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
RSS