The New York-based Moroccan artist Lalla Essaydi admits that when it comes to the discussion and reception of her work, she has had to develop something of a thick skin.
Carefully staged portraits of Arab women that are often larger than life-size, Essaydi's photographs not only engage with the art of the past, but also combine traditional Arabic calligraphy, architecture and interiors to investigate the complexities of her contemporary sense of female, Arab and Muslim identity.
In photographs such as Bullets Revisited #21 (2013), which features thousands of carefully cut, polished and assembled cartridge cases, Essaydi reflects on the violence that engulfs the daily lives of so many women, while in other works she engages with the art of the past and the ways in which this continues to frame western views of the Islamic world.
Essaydi achieves this in pictures such as Les Femmes du Maroc: Harem Beauty #1 (2008) by echoing and critiquing the kind of western, erotically charged, 19th-century paintings of harems and odalisques that were identified as part of a colonialist "narrative of oppression" by celebrated Palestinian critic Edward Said in his influential 1978 text Orientalism.
Despite her profoundly political stance, Essaydi's work has frequently attracted criticism, and she has been accused of not only perpetuating western stereotypes, but also of aping the very works and artists she sets out to critique.
"People couldn't see the difference between my works and the original paintings, they couldn't see that I was trying to engage the viewer and to criticise the paintings in a very, very subtle way," the 61-year-old artist says from Marrakech. "In a sense, they didn't know how to read my work, but I'm an artist, not a militant, and I can't do away with the art."
The most dogged criticism Essaydi's work, she admits, is the charge it has faced since the very start of her career.
Essaydi's professors at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had no problem with the issues she wanted to investigate: her sense of identity as a woman, a Moroccan, a Muslim and an Arab, and the prejudice and injustices of Orientalism, but they did take issue with the manner of her engagement.
“When I was studying for my master's degree, my professors said my work was too beautiful, that it could not convey the messages I wanted to communicate” she says. “But for me, beauty in art is very important, it’s what attracts me to an artwork in the first place and so if I want to engage somebody, I'm not going to create something ugly and I couldn't change anyway because my work is part of me.”
In art as in life, beauty has always held a double-edged appeal. Long-equated with perfection and the highest form of aesthetic achievement, beauty also arouses suspicion, associated as it was with seduction and temptation, and as it now is with being glib, old-fashioned and aesthetically irrelevant.
Despite the many charges, Essaydi's commitment to both her subject matter and her particular treatment of it has never wavered, and she has answered her critics with a more-than-decade-long body of work that has been exhibited in international venues such the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in Washington.
The artist's first solo gallery show in the UAE, Leila Heller Gallery's Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress, features 15 works that span each of Essaydi's major projects from 2003 to 2013.
The show's title is taken from a quote by Essaydi that gets to the heart of the complexity that informs her work.
“I wish for my work to be as vividly present and yet as elusive as 'woman' herself,” Essaydi said in a 2015 monograph. “Not simply because she is veiled or turns away – but because she is still in progress.”
It was a very personal response and a sense of dissonance that spurred Essaydi's engagement with 19th-century depictions of the Islamic Middle East by European artists such as Ingres, Delacroix and Gérôme.
“I always knew those paintings, but for me they were a fantasy, like a novel, something we know is not reality, but then, when after studying and after seeing what people thought about them in the West, I was driven to this kind of work,” the artist tells me.
“A lot of people still think that's the way we live, but as an Arab woman, I don't recognise myself in those paintings,” she adds. “That piqued my curiosity and made me think about my identity as an Arab woman, so in a way, I reencountered my own culture through Orientalist paintings.”
The bodies of work represented in Still in Progress – Converging Territories, Harem, Les Femmes du Maroc and Bullets Revisited - reveal both the continuities and discontinuities of Essaydi's investigation.
All of the works include Essaydi's hand-rendered henna calligraphy, written with a syringe, that she uses to cover her subject's bodies and clothing like a veil, but whereas her earlier projects placed her subjects in a neutral setting, the latter use complex mises-en-scène, complete with traditional geometry, tiling and interiors, that often require years of planning to execute.
“When I started working, I started photographing women in amazing houses, but when I brought my work to the West, all people were seeing were the beautiful spaces – they weren't seeing the women and that was disappointing,” Essaydi explains, reflecting on works that were often mistaken as the product of fashion or interior design shoots.
“I was curious why people couldn't see it, and it was only when people were starting to understand what I was trying to do that I was able to reintroduce architecture and colour back into my work.”
Despite all of these details, Essaydi insists her focus is the women – friends, family and neighbours from her ancestral home in Marrakech – who remain her focus.
Essaydi organises gatherings of between 20 and 40 of these women every year in Morocco, during which the group spend anything from a week to a fortnight discussing their lives and the daily challenges they face.
It's only once these discussions are finished that Essaydi starts on the construction of that year's artwork, using transcriptions of the women's conversations as the basis of her henna calligraphy, rendering each project a different chapter in the artist's development and each her models a different page in the journal of her career.
“The photographic part of my work documents the experience I have with the women I work with,” Essaydi explains. “I have absolutely no audience in my mind when I am working, I do it for me and the women I work with.”
Lalla Essaydi: Still in Progress runs at the Leila Heller Gallery in Dubai until August 15, 2017. For more information, visit www.leilahellergallery.com.
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BORDERLANDS
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis
Director: Eli Roth
Rating: 0/5
The specs
Engine: Long-range single or dual motor with 200kW or 400kW battery
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Max touring range: 620km / 590km
Price: From Dh250,000 (estimated)
Du Football Champions
The fourth season of du Football Champions was launched at Gitex on Wednesday alongside the Middle East’s first sports-tech scouting platform.“du Talents”, which enables aspiring footballers to upload their profiles and highlights reels and communicate directly with coaches, is designed to extend the reach of the programme, which has already attracted more than 21,500 players in its first three years.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Blackpink World Tour [Born Pink] In Cinemas
Starring: Rose, Jisoo, Jennie, Lisa
Directors: Min Geun, Oh Yoon-Dong
Rating: 3/5
SPECS
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Teams
India (playing XI): Virat Kohli (c), Ajinkya Rahane, Rohit Sharma, Mayank Agarwal, Cheteshwar Pujara, Hanuma Vihari, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Wriddhiman Saha (wk), Ishant Sharma, Mohammed Shami
South Africa (squad): Faf du Plessis (c), Temba Bavuma, Theunis de Bruyn, Quinton de Kock, Dean Elgar, Zubayr Hamza, Keshav Maharaj, Aiden Markram, Senuran Muthusamy, Lungi Ngidi, Anrich Nortje, Vernon Philander, Dane Piedt, Kagiso Rabada, Rudi Second
Tightening the screw on rogue recruiters
The UAE overhauled the procedure to recruit housemaids and domestic workers with a law in 2017 to protect low-income labour from being exploited.
Only recruitment companies authorised by the government are permitted as part of Tadbeer, a network of labour ministry-regulated centres.
A contract must be drawn up for domestic workers, the wages and job offer clearly stating the nature of work.
The contract stating the wages, work entailed and accommodation must be sent to the employee in their home country before they depart for the UAE.
The contract will be signed by the employer and employee when the domestic worker arrives in the UAE.
Only recruitment agencies registered with the ministry can undertake recruitment and employment applications for domestic workers.
Penalties for illegal recruitment in the UAE include fines of up to Dh100,000 and imprisonment
But agents not authorised by the government sidestep the law by illegally getting women into the country on visit visas.
Company Profile
Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
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Zayed Sustainability Prize
The specs
Engine: 2.7-litre 4-cylinder Turbomax
Power: 310hp
Torque: 583Nm
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Price: From Dh192,500
On sale: Now
Top 10 most polluted cities
- Bhiwadi, India
- Ghaziabad, India
- Hotan, China
- Delhi, India
- Jaunpur, India
- Faisalabad, Pakistan
- Noida, India
- Bahawalpur, Pakistan
- Peshawar, Pakistan
- Bagpat, India
The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat & Other Stories From the North
Edited and Introduced by Sjón and Ted Hodgkinson
Pushkin Press
How%20champions%20are%20made
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Indoor cricket in a nutshell
Indoor Cricket World Cup – Sep 16-20, Insportz, Dubai
16 Indoor cricket matches are 16 overs per side
8 There are eight players per team
9 There have been nine Indoor Cricket World Cups for men. Australia have won every one.
5 Five runs are deducted from the score when a wickets falls
4 Batsmen bat in pairs, facing four overs per partnership
Scoring In indoor cricket, runs are scored by way of both physical and bonus runs. Physical runs are scored by both batsmen completing a run from one crease to the other. Bonus runs are scored when the ball hits a net in different zones, but only when at least one physical run is score.
Zones
A Front net, behind the striker and wicketkeeper: 0 runs
B Side nets, between the striker and halfway down the pitch: 1 run
C Side nets between halfway and the bowlers end: 2 runs
D Back net: 4 runs on the bounce, 6 runs on the full
T20 WORLD CUP QUALIFIER
Results
UAE beat Nigeria by five wickets
Hong Kong beat Canada by 32 runs
Friday fixtures
10am, Tolerance Oval, Abu Dhabi – Ireland v Jersey
7.30pm, Zayed Cricket Stadium, Abu Dhabi – Canada v Oman
How to protect yourself when air quality drops
Install an air filter in your home.
Close your windows and turn on the AC.
Shower or bath after being outside.
Wear a face mask.
Stay indoors when conditions are particularly poor.
If driving, turn your engine off when stationary.