Summer 2008
Omar Naim
By Omar Naim Summer 2008 | ArteZine If pop culture were candy, my childhood would have been one long stomachache. I devoured the stuff like it was religion, sifting through it for signs of higher intelligence, or lower intelligence, and maybe some sense of my own intelligence (that search goes on, by the way). This hunger…
Mazen Kerbaj
By Mazen Kerbaj Summer 2008 | ArteZine Mazen Kerbaj was born in Beirut in 1975 and has lived there since. His main passions are comics, painting, and music. In March 2000, he published some of his more personal works in his Journal 1999 (a dairy in comics). He has published eight other books and many short stories….
Mohieddin Ellabbad
By Mohieddin Ellabbad Summer 2008 | ArteZine Three pages from the Egyptian master illustrator’s book on visual culture. Intended for children, yet equally insightful for adults. Mohieddin Ellabbad was born in Cairo, Egypt, where he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. Before completing his degree he began work as a caricaturist for Roz al-youssef and…
Hengameh Fouladvand
By Hengameh Fouladvand Summer 2008 | Gallery Artist/educator Mohammad Ehsai is one of the most renowned trendsetters in what is now called the art of calligraphic painting (Naghashi-khat) in the Middle East and specifically Iran. Rarely has the work of Mohammad Ehsai been discussed with an analytical eye or a refined method. Rather, his work has…
Spring 2008
Jacques Aswad
By Jacques Aswad Spring 2008 | Gallery Excerpted from Saloua Raouda Choucair: Her Life and Art, pp. 17-35, Catalogue raisonné (Beirut, Lebanon, 2002). Translated by Kirsten Scheid.[1] From the beginning, that is (as far as Saloua Raouda Choucair can recall of the young school-girl she was in the 1920s), from her very first contact with the…
Kirsten Scheid
By Kirsten Scheid Spring 2008 | Gallery Excerpted and revised from Painters, Picture-makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State (Princeton University, 2005). A clear plastic bag, bursting with papers of various yellows and grays – this is what Saloua Raouda Choucair reached for in the cupboard next to her bed. She pulled out of…
Rasha Salti, Daikha Dridi
By Rasha Salti and Daikha Dridi Spring 2008 | ArteZine Between the ardor of militants and passions of aesthetes, a retrospective visit to the golden era of ciné-clubs in the Arab world. There was a time in the contemporary history of Arab world, a mere forty or thirty years ago, when the passion for non-commercial cinema and the…
By Rasha Salti and Daikha Dridi Spring 2008 | ArteZine In the 1960s, 1970s, and sometimes until the 1980s, almost all big Arab cities lived a spectacular infatuation with ciné-clubs. In the Maghreb especially, many of these ciné-clubs were founded by militants affiliated to leftist political organizations, with the intention to create spaces for free expression and activism…
Walid Chmeit
By Walid Chmeit Spring 2008 | ArteZine Daikha Dridi interviews veteran Lebanese film critic and essayist Walid Chmeit, a founding member of the Beirut Arab Ciné-Club. Available here in French (PDF). What led you to grow an interest in cinema and ciné-clubs? At the outset, I was mostly interested in theater, and I remember discovering cinema…
Raja Shehada
By Raja Shehada Spring 2008 | ArteZine When I think of cinema in Ramallah, I think of Esther Jallad. She and her family were expelled from their wealthy home in the port city of Jaffa in 1948 and found themselves in the hilly village of Ramallah. In her displacement, Esther carried one passion with her: she…
