The Arts Edit: When fine art was an Olympic event
The Paris Olympics are nearly at an end, and this year’s Games have dominated cultural conversations across the region and the world.
While Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec’s casual style provided the internet with days of meme-worthy fodder, it was the firestorm surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s very identity that provided the most food for thought, both on gender and Orientalism.
Indeed, even 46 years after Palestinian philosopher Edward Said wrote the book on the subject, there is still so much progress to be made in broadening western perceptions of those in the Arab world.
In Abu Dhabi, the Bassem Freiha Art Foundation’s exhibition examining the history of Orientalism, which is not to be missed, closes on August 15. Find more on that here.
Overall, however, the Olympic Games have been a joyous time. Rapper Snoop Dogg has been one of the highlights of an event that has kept The National’s Arts and Culture team glued to the screen, including Faisal Salah, who explored his love for the ongoing spectacle here.
And while pop art will always have a place at the Games, from adorable mascots of varying quality to daily Google Doodles, fine art once had a place, too.
For decades, competitions took place across categories including architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture.
The competing works addressed sport-related themes and were rooted in the spirit of the Games.
Sometimes, even former athletes who later pursued the arts returned to the event to compete in a different discipline.
Almost three decades after becoming the first swimming champion of the modern Olympics, Alfred Hajos arrived at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris ready to compete again.
The Hungarian athlete had won two gold medals at the 1896 inaugural event in Athens.
A sporting legend in his time, Hajos proved his mettle not just as a swimmer, but as a sprinter and footballer.
Nevertheless, it might have seemed strange that he was returning to the Olympics in 1924. He was 46 and well beyond his prime sporting years.
However, this time Hajos was not competing as a swimmer, but as an architect.
Find Razmig Bedirian’s fascinating account of that forgotten history here.
While there are still many highlights of this year’s event to look forward to, the closing ceremony is only days away, with film star Tom Cruise rumoured to be taking part.
Find everything you need to know about how the Paris Olympics will end here.
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Inside Ahmed Mater show at Christie's
Ancient Arab nomads thought they could see water on the horizon of the parched desert, and their poems about this were passed on through generations to young Saudis today, Lemma Shehadi writes.
Poems about these mirages inspired the Saudi artist Ahmed Mater to create an installation in the desert of Saudi Arabia’s oasis city of AlUla.
Marble models on display at Christie’s auction house in London give a glimpse of the monumental work, which is set for completion next year.
They show people walking through a long corridor into an urn-shaped building. This is, in fact, a giant circular mirror box – set to be 45 metres in diameter – where visitors inside the hall are reflected as holograms to onlookers outside the building.
Other mirror boxes encased in orange alabaster cylinders are also on display – the material appears to be a nod to the ancient marble tiles found at the bottom of Mecca’s Al Kaaba. The installation’s name, Ashab Al Lal, is a nod to the vernacular Nabati language of the Arabian peninsula.
Entitled Chronicles, the non-selling exhibition at Christie’s celebrates the work of Mater, who is one of Saudi Arabia’s leading contemporary artists.
See inside the exhibition here.
M Night Shyamalan's twists get personal
You learn a lot about a filmmaker just by observing what they’re interested in – even more so, what they’re not. In Trap, the latest film from M Night Shyamalan, the Indian-American director, 53, gives away a lot about himself. Maybe even more than he realises.
Shyamalan is a storyteller known for his love of a good twist, dating back to his breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense, which was released 25 years ago on Tuesday.
But his twist films increasingly don’t operate like others that rely on that plot device. In the hands of other renowned storytellers, a twist is a beautiful watch face that, once removed, reveals the careful engineering underneath. Trap isn’t particularly well-engineered, and that’s because its director is not much of a machinist. He’s more of an emotionalist. He goes with his gut and follows his feelings.
Find my review exploring the humanity underlying Trap here.
In interviews over the years, Shyamalan has often talked about the emotional roots of each story. When he was writing Old, for example, released in 2021, he was consumed by the fear of ageing, watching his father slowly slip away in front of him with dementia. The Village was about parents trying to protect their children from the outside world, which he’d made early in his fatherhood.
The Sixth Sense still stands as his masterpiece, and is also a film that draws from his own life, albeit more obliquely.
Shyamalan was born in India and moved to the US aged six. He was raised Hindu but was sent to a Catholic school in Philadelphia – where the film is set – and treated as an interloper by his peers and a lost soul by his elders.
Find more on why that film has stood the test of time here.
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