Gulf
Katherine Waters
The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...
Alison Cole
I have heard countless speeches advocating the importance of arts education, and making bold cross-curricular claims – from England’s cultural ministers and arts leaders, to the Arts Council and the Creative Industries Federation – but I have never heard the case put more persuasively and simply than by Ronnie Cheng, the softly-spoken headmaster of the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.Cheng, a Top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s phenomenal Global Teacher Prize competition (now in its fifth year), has literally devoted his life to the school: he studied there, became music Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The epic and the intimate combine impressively in Jordanian director Naji Abu Nowar’s debut feature Theeb. The epic is there is the scale of the stunning desert landscapes that are the backdrop – though the desert itself almost feels like a character here, and generic allusions to the Western abound – to his World War One story of complicated Bedouin loyalties played out on the edges of the Ottoman Empire. The intimate is found in the close bonds that dictate characters’ behaviour, and particularly in the very subtly textured role of the film’s eponymous main character.Abu Nowar has drawn out Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In the independent cinema world, the question of where exactly a director hopes to find his or her audience never goes away. On home ground? Around the international festival circuit? Or in a lucky combination of the two, when a film resounds both locally and beyond its native land? It was always going to be a tricky issue for Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first full-length feature to come out of Saudi Arabia, where cinemas simply do not exist – they are banned. And the fact that it's a woman director who has set the Saudi film industry in motion challenges further our expectations of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can’t walk down the street in central Abu Dhabi. Not because of any danger or prohibition, but simply because there just aren’t any pavements yet. Look out of any one of the high-rise buildings that dominate the city, and you’ll see a landscape modestly veiled in the dust of construction. Roads, schools, hospitals and inevitably hotels are all emerging from the desert at a rate that renders the city map unrecognisable every six months. But while the developments of infrastructure and architecture are proclaimed in the fog and clamour of drills, there’s an altogether quieter project at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you need music for a ceremonial occasion, Greek composer Vangelis is your man. He has, after all, even had a small planet named after him, and in 2001, NASA used his piece Mythodea as the theme for its Mars Odyssey mission. The following year, FIFA hired Vangelis to concoct the official anthem for the 2002 World Cup. In 2004, he draped aural grandiosity across Oliver Stone's implausible Alexander. Who better, then, to write a celebratory opus for the grand opening of the open-air Katara Amphitheatre in Doha, in the unfeasibly wealthy Gulf state of Qatar. "Vangelis to open Katara Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging frustration that dominated. The fashion, the friends, even the puns are all still in their place, but where (as Carrie Read more ...
william.ward
One of the most serious crises facing the Arabic-speaking world in recent years - but which has received precious little comment both in the Middle East and internationally - has been the serious decline in literacy and the art of reading. A United Nations report published in 2008 showed that the average Arab reads a mere four pages of literature a year. Compare that to Americans, who devour a median 11 books annually, and the British who clock in at eight.In an area which boasts many of the richest countries on earth, basic literacy is a mere 75 per cent (compared to Europe’s 99 per cent) Read more ...
terry.friel
Rising spectacularly from the warm turquoise waters of Doha Bay, the building which is probably I.M. Pei’s final and perhaps his greatest work, the iconic Museum of Islamic Art, symbolises the cultural arms race among the Islamic Emirates strung out along the Gulf, on the flank of Big Brother Saudi Arabia.Pei, now 92, journeyed through the Muslim world in search of the inspiration to be able to reflect its artistic traditions. The result is an austere cubist design - the crowning level a minimalist limestone version of a woman’s veiled face that catches the changing light of the sun. On Doha’ Read more ...