Abu Dhabi to host major Picasso expo

An exceptional selection of works of Pablo Picasso, spanning all periods and styles in the career of the 20th century’s signature artist, will be presented in Abu Dhabi in the first major Picasso exhibition ever mounted in the Middle East.

To be held from May 27 to September 4, the retrospective Picasso Abu Dhabi, Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris will be shown in Gallery One of Emirates Palace under the patronage of Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces Shaikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The exhibition is drawn exclusively from the singularly important holdings of the Musée National Picasso, Paris, which came directly from the artist’s studios.

A total of 183 works will be shown - including paintings, sculptures and works on paper - beginning with Picasso’s Blue Period Self-Portrait of 1901 and concluding with Portrait of the Young Painter (1972), made only months before his death.

Picasso Abu Dhabi, Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris is an international touring exhibition which will visit nine nations, with Abu Dhabi being the second venue after the Madrid debut.

The exhibition is being presented in Abu Dhabi by Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC), the emirate’s leading cultural and tourism asset developer, and Mubadala, a wholly-owned investment and business development company of the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

An exhibition feature exclusive to Abu Dhabi will be the inclusion of 40 drawings, prints and illuminated manuscripts that reveal, for the first time, Picasso’s development of a calligraphic poetry on the border between text and image. These 40 works are reminiscent of the Arab cultural influences that Picasso absorbed during his youth in Málaga.

The staging of the exhibition forms another component of a wide-reaching arts education programme being undertaken by Abu Dhabi ahead of the opening in the Arabian Gulf emirate of the world’s single largest concentration of premier cultural institutions.

Unprecedented in scale and scope, these facilities include the Shaikh Zayed National Museum, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, the Louvre Abu Dhabi universal museum, a performing arts centre and a maritime museum.

All have been designed by international architectural luminaries including Lord Norman Foster for the Shaikh Zayed National Museum, Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, Jean Nouvel for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Zaha Hadid for the performing arts centre and Tadao Ando for the maritime museum.

These institutions will be built in the Cultural District of Saadiyat Island – a 27 square kilometre island offshore Abu Dhabi city which is being transformed by TDIC into a world class cultural, leisure and residential destination – and will be phased in from 2012-13. /TradeArabia News/

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Six nights of wonder in Abu Dhabi’s ‘Sounds of Arabia’

Abu Dhabi is to host a festival that will showcase six straight nights of unique masterpieces of Arabic music played by a selection of talented musicians and singers in the rich Arabic music heritage.

The ‘Sounds of Arabia’ festival will present: the great Egyptian musical composer and maestro Omar Khayrat, in the first evening; the second evening belongs to the award-winning Lebanese Fayha Choir; Iraqi qanun player Furat Qaddor along with Moroccan instrumental artists Tareq and Jukia Benzi will be the stars of the show in the third evening; the fourth evening will be dedicated to the Lebanese singer Jahida Wehbe; Egyptian folklore dance by Rida Popular Arts Group will be presented in the fifth evening which will be later followed by the warm voice of Egyptian singer Nadia Mustafa; while the final night shall be reserved to Farida, the female voice of Iraqi Maqam.

The festival, which is organised by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), will also present a number of award winning documentary films related to music in the Arab World and its influence on the lives of people there, which include:

’Sacred Sounds’ (2000), directed by Carmine Cervi:

A documentary film that studies the notion behind religious music and how it is used as means of communicating with the creator in a way that is common in most cultures and religions in the world. The director manages to break through political, cultural, and religious barriers to present a vivid picture of faith via music. The events take place in a Moroccan village, where the sounds of people going about their daily lives in the market and the calls for prayers mix with traditional images to give a mystical experience at the heart of Morocco.

‘Improvisations’ (2005), directed by Raed Andoni:

The film follows the exploits of Trio Joubran, a celebrated Palestinian musical group. Three brothers, who have different personalities and opinions but share a passion for playing the oud, go on a journey through Palestinian cities under occupation to reach their final destination in Paris. Chronicling moments of hope and pain in the musicians’ pursuit of their small dream, the documentary offers a look at a Palestinian family’s life and relations.

‘We Loved Each Other so Much’ (2003), directed by Jack Janssen:

A documentary made by Dutch director Jack Janssen talks about the life of Fairouz from the beginning of her singing career up to her rise to stardom. The film focuses on the singer’s love for Lebanon, which she refused to leave during the war, showing how her voice remained the only ray of hope.

The festival, the first of its kind in the Emirati capital, will be held May 1-6, 2008.

Source

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The Cultural Observer

• Gaf Art Gallery in Abu-Dhabi is organizing an exhibition to showcase the works of various artists entitled “ The First Drop of rain” from 7 – 20 of April 2008

• The first ever exhibition of a Brazilian artist in the UAE will be held in Abu Dhabi from April 07 to 16, 2008. Artist Elizabeth Olival” will show her artworks under the theme “Sleeping Beauty” at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi.

• Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage organizes the 4th Festival for Indian Films from April 07 to 11, 2008 at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi.

• The Abu-Dhabi Culture & Heritage Department in cooperation with the Emirates Book Union will be organizing a poetry evening at 7:30pm on Monday 7/4/2008.

• The Abu-Dhabi Culture & Heritage Authority in Abu-Dhabi is organizing an Arabic lecture headed by Humaid Saeed Al Mansouri at 7:30pm on Wednesday 9/4/2008 at the Cultural Foundation, Abu-Dhabi.

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The French Architect who will design the Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum wins Pritzker Prize

Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize.

Mr. Nouvel, 62, is the second French citizen to take the prize, awarded annually to a living architect by a jury chosen by the Hyatt Foundation. His selection is to be announced Monday.

“For over 30 years Jean Nouvel has pushed architecture’s discourse and praxis to new limits,” the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.”

In extending that vocabulary Mr. Nouvel has defied easy categorization. His buildings have no immediately identifiable signature, like the curves of Frank Gehry or the light-filled atriums of Renzo Piano. But each is strikingly distinctive, be it the Agbar Tower in Barcelona (2005), a candy-colored office tower that suggests a geyser, or his KKL cultural and congress center in Lucerne, Switzerland (2000), with a slim copper roof cantilevered delicately over Lake Lucerne.

“Every time I try to find what I call the missing piece of the puzzle, the right building in the right place,” Mr. Nouvel said recently over tea at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo.

Yet he does not design buildings simply to echo their surroundings. “Generally, when you say context, people think you want to copy the buildings around, but often context is contrast,” he said.

“The wind, the color of the sky, the trees around — the building is not done only to be the most beautiful,” he said. “It’s done to give advantage to the surroundings. It’s a dialogue.”

The prize, which includes a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion, is to be presented to Mr. Nouvel on June 2 in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Among Mr. Nouvel’s New York buildings are 40 Mercer, a 15-story red-and-blue, glass, wood and steel luxury residential building completed last year in SoHo, and a soaring 75-story hotel-and-museum tower with crystalline peaks that is to be built next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown. Writing in The New York Times in November, Nicolai Ouroussoff said the Midtown tower “promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”

Born in Fumel in southwestern France in 1945, Mr. Nouvel originally wanted to be an artist. But his parents, both teachers, wanted a more stable life for him, he said, so they compromised on architecture.

“I realized it was possible to create visual compositions” that, he said, “you can put directly in the street, in the city, in public spaces.”

At 20 Mr. Nouvel won first prize in a national competition to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By the time he was 25 he had opened his own architecture firm with François Seigneur; a series of other partnerships followed.

Mr. Nouvel cemented his reputation in 1987 with completion of the Arab World Institute, one of the “grand projects” commissioned during the presidency of François Mitterrand. A showcase for art from Arab countries, it blends high technology with traditional Arab motifs. Its south-facing glass facade, for example, has automated lenses that control light to the interior while also evoking traditional Arab latticework. For his boxy, industrial Guthrie Theater, which has a cantilevered bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, Mr. Nouvel experimented widely with color. The theater is clad in midnight-blue metal; a small terrace is bright yellow; orange LED images rise along the complex’s two towers.

In its citation, the Pritzker jury said the Guthrie, completed in 2006, “both merges and contrasts with its surroundings.” It added, “It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of performance.”

The bulk of Mr. Nouvel’s commissions work has been in Europe however. Among the most prominent is his Quai Branly Museum in Paris (2006), an eccentric jumble of elements including a glass block atop two columns, some brightly colorful boxes, rust-colored louvers and a vertical carpet of plants. “Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love,” Mr. Ouroussoff wrote in The Times.

A year later he described Mr. Nouvel’s Paris Philharmonie concert hall, a series of large overlapping metal plates on the edge of La Villette Park in northeastern Paris, as “an unsettling if exhilarating trip into the unknown.”

Mr. Nouvel has his plate full at the moment. He is designing a satellite of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, giving it a shallow domed roof that creates the aura of a just-landed U.F.O. He recently announced plans for a high-rise condominium in Los Angeles called SunCal Tower, a narrow glass structure with rings of greenery on each floor. His concert hall for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is a tall rectangular box with transparent screen walls.

Before dreaming up a design, Mr. Nouvel said, he does copious research on the project and its surroundings. “The story, the climate, the desires of the client, the rules, the culture of the place,” he said. “The references of the buildings around, what the people in the city love.”

“I need analysis,” he said, noting that every person “is a product of a civilization, of a culture.” He added: Me, I was born in France after the Second World War. Probably the most important cultural movement was Structuralism. I cannot do a building if I can’t analyze.”

Although he becomes attached to his buildings, Mr. Nouvel said, he understands that like human beings, they grow and change over time and may even one day disappear. “Architecture is always a temporary modification of the space, of the city, of the landscape,” he said. “We think that it’s permanent. But we never know.” Source

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Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, staged at the Emirates Palace by the Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra

The Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Festival hit the high note yesterday with the world’s one of the most beautiful ballets, the Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, staged at the Emirates Palace by the Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra.
A repeat performance of the Swan Lake will take place today.


Hoda Khamis Kanoo, founder of the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation, the organiser of the festival, told Khaleej Times that Bolshoi and the Swan Lake are a match made in heaven.

“The Swan Lake is the Russian version of Romeo and Juliet,” she added. The tragic story is that of a beautiful girl bewitched to take the shape of a swan and only true love can undo the spell. A prince who sees the beautiful swan in moonlight falls in love with her and proposes to her, but the day he is supposed to choose his future wife during a palace ball, an evil man tricks him into choosing his daughter, made to resemble the beautiful swan.

The original story and its tragic ending was slightly changed by various theatre productions, but on this occasion, Bolshoi kept close to the original version, with the exception of the evil man who was changed with Fate and the finale, which ends on the morning after, on the shore of the lake, rather than the swan and the prince being drowned as a result of their unbearable grief.

What also makes the Swan Lake remarkable is the music, as Tchaikovsky has never written a ballet score before. The music and dance movements he had in mind were so revolutionary at the time, in the late 1800s that Moscow’s state ballet and orchestra, the Bolshoi, had great difficulty in performing in the first stages of the Swan Lake.

The present production has come far from the early beginnings, receiving outstanding reviews from western critics. The choice of Bolshoi Ballet and the Swan Lake, which will be followed by Bolshoi Orchestra, on March 29, with an opera gala, highlights not only a great taste for classical music in Abu Dhabi, but also how seriously the city officials take arts and culture.

“This is a renaissance period in Abu Dhabi, which is becoming the heart of the Arab world, witnessing all these artistic and cultural events,” stressed Kanoo.

She also pointed out that the increasing success of the annual classical music festival will not stop here. “We want the festival to be a destination for people, to mark it on their calendars and to come specially to Abu Dhabi to celebrate this wonderful music with us,” added Kanoo.

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Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra to sway people of Abu Dhabi

Each year in spring, the Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation (ADMAF) spoils music lovers with some of the best voices and talents in classical music, but this March the event promises to be bigger than ever.

After last year’s extraordinary performances of Jose Carreras, Saint Petersburg Hermitage Orchestra and Cairo Symphony Orchestra, this year’s big name is going to be the Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra.

Performing Tchaikovsky’s timeless Swan Lake ballet, the Bolshoi will be on stage at Emirates Palace Auditorium on March 26-27. Set in Germany, the tragic fairy tale tells the story of a beautiful princess, bewitched by an evil sorcerer to take the form of a swan by day.

Only love can break the spell and a prince does fall for her, but he is tricked by the sorcerer to give his promise to a different woman and, in despair, both the prince and his swan princess throw themselves in the lake.

The Swan Lake was first produced for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877 and the company has performed the ballet in several versions since.

Bolshoi Ballet, one of the principal ballet companies of Russia, is part of the Bolshoi Theatre, which also includes Russia’s premier opera company.

In 1773, the Bolshoi Ballet began as a dancing school for the Moscow Orphanage and established itself permanently in 1856. In its early decades, the ballet company competed for pre-eminence with the Maryinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg, but it was Aleksandr Gorsky, who revitalised the dance company in the early 20th century, by introducing new ballets and world-renowned ballet dancers.

Apart from Bolshoi, ADMAF will also present during the 5th Abu Dhabi Music and Arts Festival, scheduled for March 22-April 2, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Jurowsky, and Naseer Shamma with Oriental Orchestra.

Also part of the festival will be an art exhibition by Tunisian artist Nja Mahdaoui, at the Emirates Palace Auditorium Foyer, from March 22–April 2. Source

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Rare photos of Abu Dhabi’s past on show

Travellers who pass through the Abu Dhabi International Airport can now catch a glimpse of the emirate’s past images, including rare photographs of 1930s, which are on display at the airport till February 10, a statement from Abu Dhabi Airport Company (ADAC) said on Tuesday.
The images of some of the major landmarks of Abu Dhabi are also on display.

The exhibition - Abu Dhabi, the Ancient and the Modern - is being organised by ADAC, in partnership with Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Oil Operations (ADCO), the statement added.

Mohammed Al Katheeri, ADAC Deputy Chief Operating Officer, said, “At a time when Abu Dhabi is heading towards a spectacular era in its development, a look into the past would tell how far we have come. And this cannot be demonstrated more eloquently than through pictures.”

The exhibition features some rare pictures of the early oil explorations and the beginnings of construction work on what was to become some of Abu Dhabi’s landmarks such as the Al Maqtaa Bridge and Hilton Hotel.

The exhibition is put up in the hallway leading to the transit area of Terminal 1. Source

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Works of 30 French artists to go on display

“Nobody thinks they belong to the masses” reads the caption of one of the images of art photographer Romann Ramshorn.

The black and white picture portrays a large crowd in a shopping area and, like all his work, is distinct for the humourous and philosophical caption, which directs the viewer towards a specific angle.

Ramshorn is one of the 30 French contemporary artists whose works will be featured in a one-of-its-kind exhibition, the French Art Show, to be held in Abu Dhabi on February 12-15 and in Dubai on March 2-5.

On display will be paintings, sculptures, photographs and graphic designs, as well as textiles. Although all pieces belong to contemporary art, each artist presents a different, unique style.

Robert Di Credico, expressionist painter, will open the exhibition with a live painting demonstration.

He has received worldwide acclaim for his strong lines and colours in depicting bulls and bullfighters, jazz musicians and orchestra conductors, legendary heroes and chess players.

Di Credico has also created several paintings for the French Art Show, focusing on one of the most endearing Arabian heritage themes, horses, which will be on display at the exhibition.

Christine Barres has one of the brightest pallets among the 30 artists, almost entirely “thinking” in red and orange, while her nature-related subjects have a dehumanised, abstract form.

Behind-the-canvas workshops, in which the creation of a painting will be revealed, will also be held by Barres at the Cultural Foundation here on February 13-14.

Odile Duron, project manager of Comevents, the organiser of the Art Show, told Khaleej Times recently that the France-based team had worked for this art project “for years”.

“We’ve contacted each artist individually and by now they are all friends,” she said.

Duron, who manages the newly established Comevents branch in Dubai, added that the French Art Show, being organised in the UAE, is not just a one-off exhibition, but an annual event. Source

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