Cajun flavour comes to Abu Dhabi

Louisiana Zydeco music from its Cajun practitioners, hip hop transplanted in UAE soil and powerful images from an Iranian photographer liven up the arts scene.

Wilson Savoy of the Pine Leaf Boys performs during the 2008 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

The Pine Leaf Boys, one of America's leading exponents of Cajun music, are stopping in at the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage as part of a 16-day tour of the Middle East. This Louisiana ancestor to blues and jazz is one of the most heart-bursting and infectious musical forms ever to emerge from the US. Take skiffly rhythms, happy-go-lucky accordion melodies and a whooping vocal style, spritz it all up with a bit of southern charm, and you've got yourself one heck of a musical tool. The Pine Leaf Boys are dab hands at wielding it, too: they picked up Grammy nods for their last two albums and have twice been decorated by the Cajun French Music Association. See them at Adach tonight, and then go along to their Zydeco workshop at Bait Al Oud tomorrow to find out how it's done.

From Cajun music to another great American export. The Emirati Expressions exhibition at the Emirates Palace comes to a close with a set from the home-grown hip-hop duo Desert Heat. These Dubai residents marry the usual genre signifiers of thudding downbeats, braggadocio and expensive sunglasses with a number of unexpectedly compatible Arabic elements. Their beats come augmented by ouds and flutes; their rhymes treat the joys and dilemmas of life as a child of the Gulf. "Ladies and camel-men, I'd like to welcome y'all to the Middle East," announces Illmiyah at the start of their musical manifesto Keep It Desert, before winningly confessing: "I'm a product of youth contradiction."

Not a bit of it: Illmiyah and his partner, Arableak, are clearly products of youth inspiration. With wit, flow and conspicuous good humour, they've retrofitted an American form, making it speak to and for their own pop-savvy peers. Finally, since we're on the subject of inspired appropriations, let me note Reza Aramesh's new show at Dubai's B21 Gallery. The Iranian photographer has put together a series of staged images using amateur actors and shot in black and white, which take as their text Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War. Goya has been a bit of a talisman for subsequent generations of artists: his scenes of atrocity during the Peninsula War titled things like Treat Them and On to Other Matters or What More Can One Do?, still strike viewers as a vision of the bone beneath the skin of warlike rhetoric.

A recent controversial example of the power of his cult came when the Chapman Brothers bought and defaced a set of rare Disasters prints: "rectified" them, to use their cheerfully villainous expression. The shock value of the gesture depended on the esteem in which Goya is still held. Aramesh isn't making anything like so frontal an assault on Goya's legacy, but there's still something subversive about these tableaux of internment and torture, acted out in the drawing-rooms of stately homes. His titles read like the captions in journalistic photo-agency indexes. One vision of dejection reads: "Fatah Loyalists at the Erez Crossing in northern Gaza flee for the West Bank, June 2007". But these barefoot miserables are sitting in front of sash windows and an ornamental garden. The scene calls to mind one of Derek Jarman's dressing-up games, his arch biopics of Wittgenstein or Caravaggio. Goya showed war stripped of its glamour; in Aramesh's hands, even degradation can be perceived as a sort of theatre. The title of the show is a quote from William Burroughs: "between the eye and the object falls a shadow". Aramesh asks what a truly undimmed eye might see.