Highlights from ‘Wavering Hope’ at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery
Highlights from ‘Wavering Hope’ at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery/node/2612636/lifestyle
Highlights from ‘Wavering Hope’ at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery
Tammam Azzam, ‘Bon Voyage: New York.’ (Supplied)
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Arab News
Highlights from ‘Wavering Hope’ at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery
Here are three highlights from the group exhibition ‘Wavering Hope’ at Dubai’s Ayyam Gallery running until Sept. 5
Updated 17 sec ago
Arab News
Othman Moussa
‘The Terror Group’
The Damascus-based Syrian artist is known for his realist still-life paintings. As the Syrian conflict began over a decade ago, its impact began to materialize in Moussa’s works, such as this one — “turning everyday objects into subjects of war,” the gallery’s website states. “Something as simple as food is now transformed into a weapon, reflecting the presence of violence in the most minor details of life.”
Yasmine Al-Awa
‘Dirty Laundry’
The UAE-based Syrian artist’s most recent body of work, including this piece, created this year, “shifts focus from the human figure to the realm of inanimate objects and interiors, inspired by memories from her early life in Syria and recent visits to her homeland,” the gallery says. “Drawing on the notion of fragmented memory, Al Awa brings everyday objects into the forefront of her work, transforming them into reflections of identity and longing.”
Tammam Azzam
‘Bon Voyage: New York’
Azzam’s “Bon Voyage” series is partly inspired by Pixar’s 2009 film “Up,” in which a widower ties balloons to his home and floats away. Instead of a quintessential US suburban home, Azzam uses a devastated Syrian apartment block, set against famous landmarks. “This image is about the evil and imbalance in our world,” Azzam told Arab News in 2021. “Every life is important, whether American or Syrian, and it’s right that 9/11 is commemorated, but who is commemorating the Syrian casualties?”
Chinwa is a Chinese restaurant in Riyadh which delivers a mix of authentic, aromatic, and sometimes challenging flavors. The undisputed star is the kimchi — a fiery, fermented, punchy delight bursting with complex tang and lingering heat, showcasing masterful balance.
Among the mains, the volcano spicy karaage chicken offers immediate satisfying, umami-rich comfort. The savory, creamy, slightly unctuous broth envelopes tender noodles and crisp veg, and is topped with a soft-boiled egg.
The chicken’s initial crispy, golden coating is irresistible, but the steamy container transforms it into soggy, spongy pieces far too quickly. It is a dish demanding immediate consumption.
The crab roll is a refreshing, light triumph. Its translucent rice paper reveals vibrant fillings: cool cucumber, lusciously sweet mango, mild crab sticks, and crisp lettuce. Dipped in the nutty, slightly sweet peanut sauce, it offers a texturally playful, bright, balanced bite.
The shrimp dumplings are similarly excellent — delicate, thin-skinned steamed parcels revealing plump, succulent, fresh shrimp enhanced by aromatic, well-spiced flavors. Each bite confirms a skilled hand with dim sum.
The main letdown is the black pepper beef. While the glossy, sweet-savory sauce and fragrant peppers hold promise, the beef itself is unpleasantly chewy, gristly, and overly fatty, lacking any redeeming tenderness.
For night cravings, Chinwa offers vibrant highs like the robust kimchi, bright crab rolls, and succulent dumplings. The flavorful karaage chicken suffers from a decline in texture en route, and skip the tough beef. Focus on fresh, well-executed starters and dumplings for reliable satisfaction and save broth dishes for dine-in freshness.
Middle Eastern art takes center stage in Sotheby’s London exhibition
Updated 21 August 2025
Arab News
DUBAI: Highlights from Sotheby’s exhibition of highlights from its upcoming Modern & Contemporary Middle East and Arts of the Islamic World & India auctions.
Abdulhalim Radwi
‘Untitled (Desert Scene)’
The late Abdulhalim Radwi is one of the most significant Saudi artists of all time. He studied in Italy in the 1960s and his work has drawn comparisons to that of the great French impressionist Paul Cézanne and the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh. “Radwi’s ability to merge popular culture and sentiments with newly acquired artistic techniques serves as a precursor to contemporary Saudi art today,” an old Sotheby’s catalogue states. At first, however, his style was met with confusion in his homeland, where local artistic sensibilities “very much remained grounded in more realistic artistic renderings.” Discussing his first local exhibition in 1964, Radwi said: “My works were shot down in exoticism, irony and surprise, while the people’s visual imagination in that era was held by representation and copying from reality.” The Sotheby’s catalogue continues: “He was driven by the conviction that art has a cerebral function in an environment that considered it as ornamental. According to Radwi, the very essence of a piece lies not in its physicality but in the emotions it triggers.” This piece — a mix of oil paint and sand on canvas — was created in 1975, and is expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000 (SAR 203k-305k) in October’s auction.
Ahmed Mater
‘X-ray Painting 5’
This work from arguably ֱ’s most important contemporary artist comes from the series that established him as a pioneer of the Kingdom’s art scene back in 2004, when he was featured alongside Abdulnasser Gharem and Sahraf Fayadh in a Jeddah exhibition. It combines his two occupations: medicine and art. “In these works, the first synthesis of art and science, faith and medicine can be seen,” Mater writes on his website.
“Ahmed Mater demonstrates the very special ability to speak in a universal voice but from a personal perspective,” Linda Komaroff of the LA Country Museum of Art wrote in a 2010 essay in which she also noted of the artist’s “X-ray” series: “What could be more intimate and personal than literally to see inside another individual? … The skeletal images suggest some elemental form of humanity, stripped of the skin, hair, eyes, and clothes that differentiate as well as separate us.”
Paul Guiragossian
‘Portefaix en Chomage’
This depiction of unemployed porters is typical of the acclaimed Jerusalem-born Lebanese-Armenian artist’s work, in terms of both subject matter and style. “Guiragossian was primarily a painter of clustered people: elongated figures, huddled close together, hunched or squatting. They crowd the canvas, never over-spilling its edges. Togetherness usually feels threatened, somehow, but also a spell that might ward against loss,” the art writer and curator Sam Thorne wrote in 2014. Speaking to Selections, the art website, in 2019, one of Guiragossian’s daughters said: “He would say he was like a reporter of his environment. When he was unemployed, he painted the street porters who were unemployed and hungry. When he got married … (and) had children, he painted families. I would say his objective in the early stages was portraying marginalized people based on his own life.”
Fahrelnissa Zeid
‘Untitled (Flowers)’
Zeid was an extraordinary artist who lived an extraordinary life, which included seeing her brother convicted of the murder of their father, marrying an Iraqi prince, and becoming the first woman to have a solo exhibition at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts (in 1954). “Her practice underwent transformations ranging from a figurative expressionism to the abstract sublime,” an old Sotheby’s catalogue states. “Untitled (Flowers)” dates from the late 1940s, a time when Zeid’s artistic style was in the midst of that transition from figurative artwork to a more complex abstraction, and bridges those two worlds. It is expected to fetch between £40,000 and £60,000 at auction.
Hassan Hajjaj
‘BB Stance’
This work from 2000 is a classic example of the Moroccan filmmaker, designer and photographer’s signature style — vibrant colors, stylized poses, and a border of that puts a twist on Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” by using products local to the Moroccan market (in this case, beef mortadella). “His frames are at once a nod to the twentieth-century avant garde concept of the readymade, as well as to his childhood in Morocco, where recycling was an everyday part of his life,” an entry on Sotheby’s website reads. “Hajjaj’s inclination to such materials is prompted by their immediacy and multifaced nature; in another act of recovery, the repeated patterns also make reference to Moroccan zellige tiles.” This particular image also references another of Hajjaj’s major influences — hip-hop.
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
‘A Drawing (Variations on a Hexagram)’
Arguably Iran’s best-known female artist, Farmanfarmaian crafted her own definitive style over the course of her six-decade career, mixing classical Iranian culture and Islamic geometry with avant garde ideas often inspired by her time in New York in the 1940s and 1950s — and again in the Seventies and Eighties. She is perhaps most well-known for her mirror mosaics, but drawings such as this one clearly show her fascination with geometry and the principles of Islamic art, which was the cornerstone of those famed mosaics.
‘Night Always Comes’ — Netflix poverty thriller needed to pick a lane
Updated 21 August 2025
Adam Grundey
DUBAI: In “Night Always Comes,” British director Benjamin Caron and British star (and producer) Vanessa Kirby attempt a gritty look at the lengths to which the ever-increasing wealth gap in the US can force those on the wrong side of the gap to go. Part-suspense thriller, part-social-realist diatribe, the film (written by Sarah Conradt) seems fueled by genuine anger and good intentions. Whether that’s enough to justify you actually watching it… well, maybe.
Kirby plays Lynette, a young woman with a trouble past holding down multiple jobs (including working at a bakery and being an escort) and trying to secure the finances to ensure that her childhood home, where she lives with her nightmare narcissist mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her older brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who has Down syndrome. As the film begins, she has 24 hours to get the required down payment of $25,000 to the landlord — cash that she believes she and her mother have squirreled away. Then Doreen turns up in a new car. Guess how much it cost? Yep. As a spur to get the plot moving, this works. But it’s an act so malicious that it undermines the film’s later attempts to explore the mother-daughter relationship in a more-balanced way and to suggest that Doreen isn’t all bad.
Terrified that she — and, particularly, Kenny — will be out on the streets the next day, Lynette throws herself into increasingly desperate attempts to secure the necessary funds by 9 a.m. These attempts include ripping off an old friend; returning to sex work and asking her rich client to “invest” in the property; stealing the rich client’s car when he refuses; and trying to sell some stolen/found cocaine. Kirby is compelling (which is just as well, as she’s in literally every scene of the film’s almost-two hours), and the decision to make Lynette a genuinely complex, multi-faceted, confrontational and not entirely likeable woman is a welcome one. But each step of the way, her actions become increasingly reckless and dumb, and harder to believe. And as the grim revelations about Lynette’s traumatic past pile up, the tension — impressively stoked for the first 45 minutes or so — actually drops because the film becomes formulaic.
There’s plenty to admire here — the believable sibling chemistry between Gottsagen and Kirby, for example — and Leigh, one of her generation’s finest actors, is excellent. But, as a whole, “Night Always Comes” is trying to be too many things, and ends up being great at none of them.
Sweden’s capital is a cultural delight, and a joy to explore on foot
Updated 21 August 2025
Jasmine Bager
STOCKHOLM: Sweden’s capital city, Stockholm, is spread across 14 islands connected by 57 bridges. Here, the freshwater of Lake Mälaren meets the brackish tides of the Baltic Sea. Even the city’s Viking-coded name reflects this layered geography and history: stock, meaning log or post, and holm, meaning islet. It’s a Viking city.
I stayed at a boutique hotel in Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s oldest neighborhood — a storybook setting of cobbled lanes and medieval buildings; compact, walkable, and full of surprises. Up any elevated alleyway, you’ll find small specialty shops and local vendors selling ice cream or hot snacks. A short walk away are popular chains with more international offerings.
I happened to visit during Midsommar, the festival marking the peak of Swedish summer. While viewers of the film might worry, I saw no bears or cults — just floral headpieces and white linen dresses. It’s one of the most earnest, unironic national celebrations I’ve ever seen.
The ABBA Museum. (Getty Images)
The sky stubbornly stays lit until nearly midnight — it is just as bright at 10 p.m. as it was at 10 a.m., making an early bedtime feel irrelevant. However, many of the nearby shops and cafés close around 7 pm.
As a self-professed foodie-in-training, meals were a feast for the eyes and stomach. I indulged in fresh salmon, brown meatballs, and nearly every pastry I could find. I also squeezed and sampled the condiments that seem to only come in toothpaste-like tubes for some reason. My hotel breakfast was full of quirky and fun delights — my plates looked like mad scientist experiments. I also tried every fresh juice and immune-boosting liquid potion they offered.
One of my favorite rituals was fika, the Swedish pause for coffee and something sweet. Unlike the Spanish siesta, fika is meant to be social. Coined in the 19th century by scrambling the syllables of kaffi (old spelling of coffee), it’s a cornerstone of calm and connection. While it traditionally involves hot coffee and a pastry, iced drinks are just as common these days. I quickly developed a preference for the cardamom bun (kardemummabulle) over the more common cinnamon (kanelbulle).
Stockholm’s intellectual energy is no surprise — it is, after all, the home of the Nobel Prize. A visit to the Nobel Museum offers deeper insight. Another fun fact: Sweden introduced the world’s first banknote in the 1660s, and yes, there’s a museum for that too. Their colorful krona banknotes feature portraits of notable women.
Kanelbulle in Stockholm. (Getty Images)
The Royal Palace is an architectural masterpiece overlooking the water and well worth the price of admission.
My favorite activity of all, though, was simply wandering round the city. I found bookshops dedicated entirely to science fiction, another to transportation, and dozens more with niche themes.
Stockholm is also a city of boats. Ferries and leisure craft buzz between the islands, reflecting the city’s deep history of fishing and trade.
There’s also a pleasing architectural balance: clean lines contrast with centuries-old facades. Even the metro doubles as art. Often called the world’s longest art gallery, over 90 of its 100 subway stations contain murals, mosaics, and sculptures — many carved into raw bedrock. Even short commutes feel like cultural excursions.
One such trip took us to Skansen, the world’s first open-air museum, on Djurgården island. Founded in the 1890s, it combines living history with a Nordic animal park. Inside, you can stroll through a recreated 19th-century town, then turn a corner to see animals lounging beneath giant trees. With live musicians playing folk songs and so much greenery, it truly feels like stepping into a fairytale.
Nearby, the ABBA Museum celebrates Sweden’s most famous musical export. And all across the country, Dala horses — carved wooden steeds painted in red, blue, and white — stand proudly in shops and public spaces. They became my favorite souvenir, along with hand-painted kanelbulle earrings.
While I didn’t catch the aurora borealis this time and wish I’d explored more of the country — there’s always next time. I had such an enriching experience, I will definitely be back. Sweden is a place that invites you to build your own destiny at your own pace — much like an IKEA cabinet.
Acclaimed British musician Paul Weller sues accountants that cut ties over his pro-Palestine views
Accounting firm Harris and Trotter ‘offended’ by his assertion that Israel is committing genocide
The Jam ex-frontman: ‘Silencing those who speak this truth is not just censorship — it’s complicity’
Updated 20 August 2025
Arab News
LONDON: British musician Paul Weller is suing his former accounting firm after it reportedly ended their business ties over his pro-Palestinian comments.
Harris and Trotter had a professional relationship with Weller spanning more than three decades, The Independent reported on Wednesday.
The acclaimed musician and former frontman of The Jam filed a discrimination claim over the accounting firm’s decision.
It followed public statements by Weller that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He was told in March that Harris and Trotter would no longer work with him or his companies, his lawyers said in a pre-action letter.
A partner at the firm sent a WhatsApp message to Weller saying: “It’s well known what your political views are in relation to Israel, the Palestinians and Gaza, but we as a firm are offended at the assertions that Israel is committing any type of genocide.
“Everyone is entitled to their own views, but you are alleging such anti-Israel views that we as a firm with Jewish roots and many Jewish partners are not prepared to work with someone who holds these views.”
In ending its relationship with Weller, the firm illegally discriminated against his protected philosophical beliefs, his lawyers said.
Weller has publicly supported moves to recognize Palestine as a state. “I’ve always spoken out against injustice, whether it’s apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. What’s happening to the Palestinian people in Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
“I believe they have the right to self-determination, dignity and protection under international law, and I believe Israel is committing genocide against them.
“That must be called out. Silencing those who speak this truth is not just censorship — it’s complicity.”
According to his lawyers, Weller will donate any received financial damages toward humanitarian campaigns in Gaza.
“I’m taking legal action not just for myself, but to help ensure that others are not similarly punished for expressing their beliefs about the rights of the Palestinian people,” he said.
The firm Hodge Jones and Allen is representing Weller. One of its lawyers, Cormac McDonough, said the case “reflects a wider pattern of attempts to silence artists and public figures who speak out in support of Palestinian rights.
“Within the music industry especially, we are seeing increasing efforts to marginalise those who express solidarity with the people of Gaza.”