Article published in September edition of Masquarade magazine - new style and fashion publication in the Middle east. I took all the photographs also.

THE HORSE - FROM THE ARABIA TO ASCOT

Early risers in the British racing town of Newmarket can glimpse something magical as the sun rises over the paddocks – strings of thoroughbred racehorses passing almost silently through the still slumbering streets to be exercised on the surrounding heath.

Those on the heath to see this equine nobility in action can, on rare occasions in the months from April to November, also glimpse the hawk like profile of the owner of many of the finest steeds.  

Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, often wearing tweed while surveying these dawn gallops, has two Newmarket stables housing the Maktoum family’s famous Godolphin thoroughbreds.

The ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE is not only the world’s most successful racehorse owner, but also a man who values horses in a very special way. When it comes to understanding people and the challenges of government, Sheikh Mohammed believes much can be learned from horses.

In his book “My Vision – Challenges In The Race For Excellence”, the Sheikh writes: “If you know how to please horses, you know how to please people. And if you know how to respect horses, you know how to respect people. And if you are good at raising the morale of horses, you’ll be able to do the same for human beings. ”

Sheikh Mohammed, himself a world class horseman, devotes an entire chapter of the book - not yet translated into English – to horsemanship and politics with a reminder of the value put upon horses by the Prophet Mohammed himself.

In the Qur’an horses are described as a gift from God. “When God created the horse, he said to the magnificent creature: I have made thee as no other. All the treasures of the earth lie between thy eyes. Thy shalt carry my friends upon thy back. Thy saddle shall be the seat of prayers to me. And thou shalt fly without wings, and conquer without sword; oh horse.”  

Horses have been exalted – and highly valued  - in the Arab world since ancient times. They enabled the early warriors of Islam to spread the faith across the entire region. Their prowess in war lasted until 20^th century armaments made horsepower valuable only in motorised vehicles.

But the importance of the horse to mankind endures and its position in the Arab world, revived across the Gulf region in recent decades, is the subject of: “The Horse – From Arabia to Royal Ascot.” an exhibition at London’s British Museum until September.Those unable to get there, can visit the House Of The Horse Museum closer to hand in Dubai’s al-Shindagha district.

The London show marks the Diamond Jubilee of one of Britain’s most passionate horse enthusiasts, Queen Elizabeth the Second. At 86 she has now forsaken the saddle but is still a passionate racing enthusiast.

The ruling classes have long enjoyed equine sports of many sorts – from horse racing and show jumping to the ancient – though now illegal - sport of fox hunting. That spectacle with riders in hunting pink and packs of Beagles can still be seen in the English shires. But no ultimate kill is allowed.

Across the Gulf region horses are also used for falconing - another popular hunting pursuit. The founding father of the Emirates. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan said one of his earliest childhood memories was of his ancient sport.

The first verified record of the domestication of horses is in Kazakhstan around 5,500 years ago. But Nigel Tallis curator of the British Museum show says: “It is in the Middle East that it was first used to it’s fullest potential and you see these incredible inventions appearing. The horse becomes part of these urbanised, civilised societies.”

One exhibit suggests that the relationship between humans and horses may have originated far earlier, in the southwest of what is now Saudi Arabia. Some years ago a farmer digging a well came across a cache of carved stone artefacts including one appearing to be of a horse with a bridle. Scientists have not definitively verified its age, but think it could be 2,000 years older than the Kazakhstan finds.

The uses of horses in agriculture, war and sport are well documented throughout the exhibition – stone fragments with Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian war chariots and Furusiyya manuscripts detailing Islamic ideals of horsemanship together with more modern racing paintings.

Horses have played a crucial role in the development of human societies around the globe. Probably the earliest horses with Arabian bloodlines to reach Europe came indirectly through Spain during the era of the Caliphate. Later others would have arrived with returning Crusaders as spoils of war.

Another major infusion of Arabian horses into Europe occurred when the Ottoman Turks sent 300,000 horsemen into Hungary in the 16^th century many mounted on captured pure-blooded Arabians.  After the Turks’ defeat at the gates of Vienna many of these animals provided foundation bloodstock for major Eastern European stud farms.

Interestingly no horses of any sort were known in the Americas until the arrival of European settlers. Aztec warriors thought Spanish conquistadores on horseback were fabulous creatures. Cortes is known to have brought some sixteen Arabian horses with his army.

Today the Arabian remains the most highly prized of all horses – a pure bred whose qualities were first formally recognised soon after the Hejira.  Its distinctive features are finely chiseled bone structure, concave profile, arched neck, comparatively level croup and high-carried tail. The Arabian has the high spirit and alertness needed in a horse used for raiding and war, combining willingness and sensitivity.

They’re the stuff of myth. It is said, for instance, that the only horses that survived the Emperor Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow were Arabians.  Both the Emperor Napoleon and his nemesis at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, rode Arabian steeds.

The Arabian is a versatile breed. It dominates the discipline of endurance riding, a sport in which both Sheikh Mohammed and some of his sons, have excelled and competes today in many other fields of equestrian activity.

Perhaps the greatest is horse racing, the so-called sport of kings. No racing event in the UK is more gilded than Royal Ascot every June, a highlight of the social calendar though race meetings are held across the country throughout the year and long ago transcended class barriers.

And of course some of the finest racehorses are Arabians. Sheikh Mohammed’s horses from Godolphin have won the world’s richest race, the Group One US $10-million Dubai World Cup, on six occasions from Almutawakel’s win in 1999 to Monterosso this year.

And they notched up another triumph at this year’s Royal Ascot when the Sheikh’s leading jockey Frankie Dettori won the Gold Cup aboard Colour Vision, narrowly beating another Godolphin horse, Opinion Poll, into second place.

For most of the world horses are now seen primarily in the sporting arena. In war and agriculture, they’ve been largely eclipsed by machines. But in the Arab world they are still accorded a special place in the social order.

Sheikh Mohammed says: “The back of a horse is not just somewhere to sit, but a platform from which the rider feels he can take flight to the heavens. This feeling opens up wide horizons for vision, it gives birth to new ideas and it purges the mind of the routine and the commonplace. It enables the leader to see the way that lies ahead of him and his people, so that he knows where he is going, what his goals are and what the far horizons will bring him on the morrow and what it will bring his people.”

Feature in The national weekend supplement - published June 1st.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/stamps-to-high-art-queen-elizabeth-ii-is-the-uks-public-face

To see the fully illustrated version go The national's website

and as written......

Queen Elizabeth is out and about touring Britain this spring to mark her Diamond Jubilee. And as always, wherever she travels she invariably wears an outfit in some brilliant hue. For her first stop in Leicester it was a lurid pink and black affair.

Royal biographer Robert Hardman says she once said she wore bright colours because:  “I can never wear beige because nobody will know who I am.”

The Monarch was obviously joking. This year Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor has been on the throne for 60 years. At the age of 86 she is surely the world’s most recognisable woman.

The changing face of the British monarch in the 60 years, marked this June by the Diamond Jubilee of her Coronation, is the focus of a major exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery – “The Queen: Art and Image” until mid October.

Paul Moorhouse curator of the show says that while Queen Elizabeth is: “Familiar to millions around the globe, for the man or the woman in the street, she is seen from afar.

“The impressions of her in the minds of ordinary people are not based on reality, but on innumerable visual representations. Her thoughts and opinions on many subjects remain undisclosed.”

And, while many believe that the Mona Lisa is the world’s most reproduced artwork, that honour actually belongs to a little picture of Queen Elizabeth by an artist called Arnold Machin.

He is hardly a household name, yet at the time of writing more than 220 billion copies of his image used on British postage stamps have been produced in the 45 years since it was first introduced.

And the Queen’s face has also adorned every UK coin since she came to he throne and all banknotes since 1960.

Jubilee year is jammed with events with a range of other exhibitions showing off some of the tsunami of royal images created over 60 year by artists, photographers and cartoonists.

Queen Elizabeth was born on April 21^st 1926 when television was an experiment. She has since become the first mass media monarch. She now has a Facebook presence, her Christmas broadcasts are also seen on YouTube and she even has an indirect Twitter link.

Her visibility started with a childhood trickle of officially sanctioned and sedate photographs and paintings of her with her sister Margaret at play or in posed portraits by such society snappers as Cecil Beaton. The first known painting was by a Hungarian artist called Philip de Laszlo of the Queen at the age of seven.

But early in Elizabeth’s childhood, her uncle King Edward The Eighth abdicated over his love for the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. This made her father George the King and Elizabeth his heir. As Queen she has since witnessed an era of dramatic change including the transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth and her own role as ruler become an ever more symbolic one.

Today royalty still exerts a huge public fascination and there is great public affection for the Queen. This has prompted amiable parodies in satirical TV shows such as the puppet show Spitting Image, film portrayals including Helen Mirren’s Oscar winning portrayal in The Queen and innumerable newspaper cartoons.

The avant-garde has sometimes been crueller. Graphic artist Jamie Reid’s image of her with a safety pin through her nose became a defining image of Punk when used by The Sex Pistols and the extreme conceptual artist Genesis P.Orridge received a suspended jail sentence for juxtaposing her face with pornographic images.

Even some established portraitists have upset the nation. After Lucien Freud – grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and acclaimed as Britain’s greatest modern portrait painter – portrayed her in 2000, one critic said the resulting image, included in the NPG show, was so ugly Freud should be imprisoned in the Tower of London. Another said it made her look like a Royal Corgi that had suffered a stroke.

And all the while representations of the Queen have proliferated – from family snaps and official portraits by such Royal relatives as Lord Snowdon and the Earl of Litchfield to today’s paparazzi pictures for the tabloid press and popular magazines.

Every British embassy, Consulate and High Commission around the world displays an official portrait. The latest, created a few weeks ago is by the photographer John Swannell.  He says: “I’ve photographed all the top members of the Royal Family over the years. Princess Margaret was the only one I didn’t do. It’s been good fun.  They’re very easy going. I had to shoot the Queen Mother, the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William all together, and they said, ‘You realize when you shoot this it’ll be the most important photograph since Queen Victoria was photographed with her family?’ I said, ‘Oh great, how long have I got to do it?’, and they said ‘10 minutes’! You’re allocated a time slot because they’re so busy, and you’ve really got to work fast.”

Another painted portrait, included in the National Portrait Gallery show, is by the Florentine-born artist Pietro Annigoni. It is said to be one of the Queen’s favourite paintings of herself and she liked it so much that she purchased it in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Annigoni said: “ I did not want to paint her as a film star. I saw her as a monarch, alone in the problems of her responsibility.”

But portraiture is no longer limited to painting and photography. In 2004 holographic artist Chris Levene was commissioned by the Island of Jersey to create a portrait to mark 800 years of allegiance to the crown. It has just been given the National Portrait Gallery.

Two sittings were involved using a high-resolution cam, a 3D data scanner and a standard medium format camera. The resulting and most publicised image is startling – showing the Queen with her eyes closed.

Levene says: “The Queen had a great knowledge of photography – by the time we had finished I had a genuine sense of warmth for her. She is a quite extraordinary lady. As a model she has done many sittings and she is really radiant.”

But for all of these billions of images, how just how much do we really know of the Queen? She never gives interviews and the artists and photographers who’ve created portraits from life are dutifully tight lipped about any conversations in the studio. A familiar facade conceals a very private personality.

The closest recent portraitists have come to spilling the beans on conversations during the work in progress sessions was the Australian born TV Presenter turned artist Rolf Harris. After he finished a painting in 2008 he said that The Queen had confided: "I'm only too happy to be sitting absolutely motionless, doing nothing."

Artist from Dubai

Short piece published in The National in February 2012

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/dubai-artist-adham-faramawy-spearheads-elite-uk-student-show

Adham Faramawy feature

You get a little shock of the old when you glimpse the lecture theatre at the heart of the Royal Academy Schools in London’s Piccadilly where the young Dubai-born artist Adham Faramawy spends much of his week.

Drawings by venerable artists adorn the walls and a life-size model of a horse so old and fragile it cannot be moved dominates the room.

It is hard to imagine how Faramaway fits in here. He is an artist who fizzes with imaginative ways of using new media – a creator at the cutting edge whose provocative collaborations have been part of London’s avant-garde scene for some time.

But he is among an elite of just 17 postgraduate students culled from some thousand who applied to study here.

The young Arab artist who grew up in Dubai, Sharjah and London, is now poster boy for a show of work by these students. A still from his digital piece “Between Two Suns” is being used to publicise this show: ”Premiums Interim Projects”.

Faramawy works in digital media, photography and performance. “When I was at school I did painting and drawing and I wouldn’t rule that out again at some point,” he says. “But by the time I was doing my A-levels I was already experimenting with video and with performance.”

His background seemed to have destined him for the creative life. His mother is a magazine writer based in Dubai’s Media City and his father is a political cartoonist in Cairo. Faramawy did all of his art studies in the UK – at Norwich in East Anglia and then the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London.

In April his work will again feature in the Academy Schools in a show organised by the Red Mansion Foundation that promotes artistic exchange between Britain and China. It will draw upon a month he spent in a suburb of Beijing. ”It was fascinating discovering how people navigate the realities of living in this city and issues such as the Internet and people’s relationship with authority.”

Faramawy won’t reveal his age “It is irrelevant. I don’t discuss it” (though Wikipedia says he was born in 1981.) And nor will he explain what his art is about. “I don’t mean to evasive, but really if I could explain what it is about I wouldn’t need to make it.” But he says one theme running through recent work is the issue of consensus – how people agree that something is the case.

That is certainly one level of meaning explored in the video work “Between Two Suns” - a science fiction based piece inspired by such UFO cults as the suicidal Heaven’s Gate group in California.

But his life experience and background does flow into the work. He had a period exploring Egyptian history and mythology and he is a Muslim. He says he has the full range of emotional responses to the turbulence in various parts of the region at present. But none of this is dealt with in any specific way in his art.

“It would have been wrong for me to go to Tahrir Square. I have Egyptian roots, but I live here now. I am a Londoner.” His fame is already growing in wider avant-garde circles with shows in Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and Ireland under his belt. But so far nothing in the Emirates or Egypt.

“I would love that to happen but I have no-one I work with there …-no one who knows me yet. “

“Premiums Interim Projects” runs at the Royal Academy Schools in London from March 2^nd to March 15^th 2012

Dawn.....

Hockney - as published

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/david-hockney-i-am-addicted-to-art?pageCount=0

David Hockney

Feature due to appear shortly in The national magazine.


DAVID HOCKNEY
By John Kelleher for The National

When you ask David Hockney how many cigarettes he smokes a day he simply shrugs, though five minutes into a conversation in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London he is already lighting-up for the second time.

But he is clearer about his art. He produces a new work every day.

Hockney, now 74, is the grand old man of British art and doesn’t suffer rules gladly. An Internet search reveals smoking as a present preoccupation but if you graze for images, his popular California swimming pools paintings from the 1970s predominate.

California seems a lifetime away in London’s autumn sunshine where, as he puffs, Hockney fulminates. “I am sick and tired of people telling us what we can and can’t do. Smokers get a very rough deal.”

His voice is rising, to the consternation of an Academy minder. “David. You promised you wouldn’t.“

But the artist is in full stride with a captivated audience. “People say cigar smoking kills you. I would like to say loudly” (his voice now booming out and attracting the attention of tourists) “that smoking cigars never killed anyone.”

He adds: “We are all addicted to something. I am addicted to lots of things. In particular I am addicted to art.“ And it is the art that matters most.

His latest works as an artist, due to go on show in London after Christmas, will reveal another newer addiction – the landscape of his childhood – the woods and fields of East Yorkshire presented with a luminous intensity.

From the playful young artist who dyed his hair in the 1960s – “because blondes have more fun” – through his frank depictions of the hedonistic lifestyle of Los Angeles to his current persona as an ageing curmudgeon, Hockney has always been uncompromising.

But controversy has always been counterpointed by a constant flow of terrific art - enjoyed around the world and attracting both increasing acclaim and ever higher prices. The Yorkshire-born artist is in London on a brief visit from his present base at Bridlington in Yorkshire for a sneak preview of the Academy’s big Hockney show, coming in January, entitled “A Bigger Picture.” It is part of the cultural Olympiad running up to the 2012 Olympic games.

“Its not two thousand and twelve” he scolds a representative from the show’s sponsor BNP Paribas during a press conference. “It’s twenty twelve. Perhaps by the time we get to 2066 people will have got it.”

In cold print Hockney may sound testy but in person all his anger is delivered with a wry smile and a northern sense of humour. It’s a personality that has made him one of the best-loved artists in Britain. His work has made him one of the most admired and respected. And he has long been one of the most articulate of the nation’s painters.

Hockney has avoided the post-modern provocations and conceptual japes of younger British artists like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Instead he has devoted most of his career to painting but with regular forays into other media.

But to label him old-fashioned would be to misrepresent the radicalism at the heart of his art and his constant willingness to experiment.

His latest departure will be unveiled at the January show – a way of representing the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire in a series of multi-screen films produced by locking together nine video cameras.

The cameras were clamped into a frame and mounted on the front of a jeep. As the vehicle moves slowly through the woods the images captured force the viewer to look much more closely at the details of the landscape.

They’ll be given their first full exposure in January, but Hockney confides he hopes to smuggle them into the public’s awareness earlier by persuading TV shows like the BBC’s Countryfile to show them.

One of the films portrays Woldgate Woods through four seasons. “It took a whole year to make this and each of the films is an hour and a half long. We could have filled four walls with it.”

And once again Hockney has no time for rules that get in the way of creativity. “If you tried to do this in California they’d stop you immediately and say you need a permit to do that. Here in Yorkshire no one ever stopped me.

“I did get a ticket one day for not wearing a seat belt. If they’d found us driving along with all this stuff, all these cameras, on a jeep, I’d probably be in prison. But you have got to bend the rules.”

In the past Hockney has been what the digital age dubs “an early adopter.” He believes that throughout history, technical innovation has created dramatic new ways for artists to work.

In 2006, when he first unveiled some of his large scale Yorkshire landscapes in at London’s Annely Juda Gallery he said: “Constable would have been thrilled to work on this scale, but his problem was that he did not have tubes of paint. The invention of the collapsible tube was necessary for the burst of plein-air painting that was Impressionism.”





In his long career he has experimented with photocopiers and fax machines and, 20 years ago, used a Quantel digital paintbox – a television graphics tool – to create art live on TV. He has used montages of photographs to offer a more incisive exploration of landscapes, interiors and portraits with multiple viewpoints through time and space (echoing the Cubist experiments of his beloved Picasso).

In his 1993 book “The Way I See It” he said of Picasso; “What he did may appear distorted, but only if you think of one particular way of seeing, which is from a distance and always in a kind of stopped, frozen time. The minute you realise what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well and that is why you can see around the back of a body as well as the front, once you realise that it becomes a very profound experience.”

“A Bigger Picture” isn’t actually a retrospective as it focuses solely on the landscape paintings Hockney has produced since the late 1950s. An equally vast show could be devoted to his portraiture and other work.

The earliest piece here is virtually juvenilia – a sketch of his Yorkshire countryside made early in his art school days. His vivid work in California and in other parts of the world will also be represented.

But the undoubted star attraction will be a huge collection of new work made since he returned to the landscape of his earliest years in the woods and fields of East Yorkshire in 2005. He says it’ll make the region look as exciting as the Grand Canyon.

They range from a vivid series of coloured works drawn swiftly on his iPad to vast multi panelled paintings of woods and fields, transformed from seemingly unremarkable places few would notice to groves of luminous beauty.



Throughout his long decades abroad, Hockney had returned to Yorkshire regularly to visit his parents at Christmas and, after his father’s death, to see his mother and sister. He also spent a long time there during the final illness of his friend Jonathan Silver, founder of the Salts Mill Gallery near Shipley that is largely devoted to Hockney’s work.

“I spent 30 Christmases in Yorkshire, but though it's a landscape I knew from my childhood I never really thought of it as a subject until about ten years ago when I realised that at my age it would be a wonderful subject – a marvellous place where it was quiet and we would be left alone.”

One of the revelations was the change of the seasons – something he says he missed in California.

“Not many people would think this landscape is unique and there’s not many people here which is nice because you can drive and walk around and there is no-one else. It’s unknown. It is actually very lovely. Little valleys with no rivers in them because it’s a glacial landscape and they’re hidden.”

Now he has spent years in these woods looking and learning about when the best time to paint is, the direction of the sun, the changing play of light.

“A friend came up recently and I got him up at 5.30 and took him into the woods and I said – ‘look now everything is incredibly clear, everything is well defined.’ It is only like this at 6.30 in the morning when the sun is low on the east coast. I said you’ve got to know the optimum time to look at something in nature. Look at the way van Eyck painted his foliage. He must have known the best time.

Hockney used to do opera set design, but his increasing deafness forced him to stop. But deafness has helped him in other ways. “ As I was losing my hearing I noticed I was seeing Yorkshire more clearly. I can’t hear spatially now, but my visual spatial awareness has increased dramatically. So for me this disability is an advantage.”

For Hockney, his art is about an intensity of looking and seeing the world anew. It is also, he says, about sharing this intensity – making people look at things differently.

He says: “To get the most out of the world around you you’ve got to really look hard. Most people out walking in the woods don’t really look. They just glance around. They scan.

“Before I start a painting I spend a hell of a lot of time looking and thinking, I go out in the car and pull a chair out of the boot and sit in the woods. I sit there and smoke and just look.”

The way Hockney talks about his art, nature and the world you get a sense of spiritual intensity. He once wrote: “I think the world is beautiful and, that if we don’t think it is, then we’re doomed as a species. I don’t think there is a place in the natural world that we would call ugly. It tends to be the man-made things that can be called ugly.”

But he is not religious. “ I lived in Los Angeles for a long time and I was always aware of the power of nature there because the earth trembles. But I’m touched by what Van Gogh once said. He’d lost the faith of his father, but found another one in the infinity of nature. I feel that.”

Of the show’s likely impact he says:” Maybe people will watch the following spring more carefully. Get more pleasure, more enjoyment from the world. Enjoy the world. That’s what I say.”


DAVID HOCKNEY BIO BOX By John Kelleher

When the 1960s started to swing David Hockney was there to help get the party started – still an art student when he was declared one of the founders of the British pop art scene.

Less steely than its American counterpart, the pop art visions of Hockney, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Richard Hamilton were at the playful end of the spectrum. Hockney’s mop of dyed blonde hair, funny glasses and Northern sensibilities placed him at the heart of that era’s revolt into style alongside The Beatles and Rolling Stones, the photographer David Bailey and Twiggy.

But he was a bit older than most of them. He was born in Bradford in Yorkshire in 1937 to working class parents and after going to Bradford College of Art spent two years doing National Service as a hospital orderly before going off to the prestigious Royal College of Art in London.

He was still studying when his work was included in the 1961 Royal Academy show Young Contemporaries - alongside Peter Blake - that proclaimed the arrival of British Pop Art.

Hockney has been a rebel without a pause ever since, making waves and ruffling feathers with his uncompromising stance on everything from smoking and gay sexuality to controversial claims about how the Old Masters made their work outlined in his 2001 book “Secret Knowledge.”

But Hockney’s work has always transcended mere fashion and could never be caged with one movement.




In 1963 he had his first one man show in London at the Kasmin Gallery and that same year he started to travel internationally, actually spending much of the hedonistic party decade of the 1960s outside the UK. In 1963 he visited New York and was then commissioned by The Sunday Times in London to produce a series of images in Egypt.

That year he also moved to America – living in and teaching in Los Angeles, Iowa and Colorado. In 1968 he came back to London, then lived and worked in Paris from 1973 to 1975

His reputation grew throughout the 1960s with several solo exhibitions in London, Paris and New York and participation in many group shows. But his real fame grew after he moved to Los Angeles and started to produce his popular images of swimming pools and the California landscape and lifestyle with allusions to his gay sexuality. The period was celebrated in the highly successful movie “A Bigger Splash.” (1973)

In the decades that followed Hockney worked widely in different parts of the world – travelling to China in 1981 with the writer Stephen Spender with whom he collaborated on a book, “China Diary.”

He has designed widely for the theatre and Opera, has been bold in experimenting in unexpected media and trying such new technology as the Polaroid camera, fax machine, photocopier, the iPhone and the iPad. The show in London in 2012 will unveil innovative use of video.

Hockney lived and worked in Los Angeles for nearly 25 years, but at the end of the 1990s returned to Britain, settling at Bridlington in East Yorkshire to be near his ageing mother. He was worked on landscapes there ever since.

His first giant scale work “A Bigger Grand Canyon” was unveiled in Paris in 1999 – a vast study of the Arizona landmark. It featured sixty painted panels. The 2012 show will feature many more large works made up of multiple canvases.

Arabs in London

Feature published today July 23rd by The National in dubai... cover story for their weekly colour magazine.

http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/why-arabs-love-london


Why Arabs love London
John Kelleher
Jul 23, 2011


When the world arrives at London's 2012 Olympics site, one of the first buildings visitors will see is the Aquatics Centre - a beautiful structure designed by one of London's most illustrious Arab citizens.

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad, is renowned as the greatest architect to emerge from the Middle East since the Ottoman mosque builder Sinan - and is adept at building bridges that are both physical and metaphorical.

Hadid's canvas is global. Residents of Abu Dhabi using the new Sheikh Zayed Bridge can see her remarkable design skills every day, and she is behind the performing arts centre being built on Saadiyat Island. But she is also one of the architects of a deeper bridge of understanding between Arab nations and the rest of the world.

Hadid is one of more than 300,000 Arabs who live in London, with more than half a million across the UK. Numbers are boosted in the summer months by up to a million and a half visitors from the Middle East, mainly the Gulf. For many, the city's cosmopolitan appeal is the magnet.

"London is fantastic. There is nowhere like it in the world," says Sulayman Al Bassam, a British-Kuwaiti theatre director and playwright. "It is everything and anything to anyone."

Al Bassam, whose trilogy of plays inspired by Shakespeare is nearing completion, has lived and worked in the UK for almost two decades. His production of Richard III was the first Arabic-language production staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Building cultural bridges is at the heart of Shubbak - the name means "window" in Arabic - the capital's first celebration of contemporary Arab culture. The three-week festival is showcasing the work of more than 100 creative figures at 30 venues across the city.


"Shubbak is an opportunity to see the world through new eyes and to strengthen the relations between artists working in London and across the Arab world," says London's mayor, Boris Johnson. "It also celebrates the influence of London's significant Arab population in our city today and demonstrates the importance of London as a capital of international cultural exchange."

Karima Al-Shomely is an Emirati artist in London for Shubbak. "I love being here," she says. "Back home in Sharjah in the summer, it is too hot to go outdoors much. Here you can walk in the streets, all over the place, and enjoy things."

She is working with Khalid Mezaia, a graphic artist and illustrator from Dubai, on a project called Shopopolis that engages with the staff at Westfield, London's largest shopping mall. Mezaia says: "In Dubai the art scene is really young and anyone can be an artist. But in London there is a long tradition."

Arabs have been visiting Britain for centuries; Phoenicians and other ancestors of Arabs came as traders before the Roman invasion. But the first significant Arab community was established when Yemeni seamen settled in London's docklands.

The flow was two-way. Westerners had made forays into the Arab world since the dawn of Islam. One of the first was an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim named Willibald who died in 787 after spending several years in the Middle East.

Medieval religious writing abounds with references to Saracens and Arabs, but the first notable Arab character in English literature was Othello in William Shakespeare's tragedy. The playwright is believed to have been inspired after joining crowds thronging London's streets to witness a delegation from Morocco led by Abd El-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun to the Court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Few great Arabs came to London after that until more modern times - not even the great traveller Ibn Battuta, though the Ottoman traveller Evliya çelebi, inspired by a dream, did visit in the 17th century.

Some who have arrived more recently have included dissidents, political exiles, resistance figures and radicals outlawed at home. Palestinian groups have long used London as a base, as have such radical Islamist groups as Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned across most of the Middle East but still a shadowy presence in London. The government has expelled other radical Arab clerics such as the Egyptian Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada from Jordan, judging them a security threat.

Politics and culture often intersect. Shadia Mansour, who was born in South London but is of Palestinian descent, is acclaimed the "first lady of Arab hip-hop". She is an active voice in opposing Israel's occupation of Palestine. "My music sometimes sounds hostile. It's my anger coming out. It's non-violent resistance, " she says. "It's about showing support and that there are Palestinians in the diaspora who want to promote their identity and culture."

Political issues often arise for younger Arabs when they meet non-Arab friends. Nadia, a Bahraini who has lived in London for more than three years, first as a student and then pursuing a career in the media, says: "I find a lot of mixed attitudes to me as a young Arab and Bahraini - but I enjoy listening carefully to the opinions people have of what is going on in Bahrain. There isn't much prejudice. I've moved around quite a lot in my life, but London seems to be perfect."

ondon is a global city, but Arabs often fall back on old colonial and linguistic connections when settling in Europe - Algerians or Tunisians choosing France or Moroccans heading for Spain. The bulk of Britain's resident Arabs come from Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and the Gulf - which also provides the majority of visitors, especially Saudi Arabians.

"Arabs from the Gulf come only to London when they visit Britain," says Said Chaarawi, a Lebanese businessman. "You'll hardly ever find them travelling to places such as Manchester or Birmingham. They feel London is the ultimate luxury destination. They may visit Paris or New York but spend much longer here. It's partly to do with language and history and, these days, with tightened security. It is harder to visit the US."

Chaarawi recently established Understanding Arabia, a consultancy that schools retailers in the etiquette of handling Arab customers. These visitors are important. Up to a third of retail revenue in London's West End comes from Arab customers, who spend about £1.5 billion (Dh8.85 billion) a year.

Chaarawai worked at Harrods and saw the often innocent blunders salespeople can make with Arab customers: "If I am an Arab, quite religious let's say, and I have my wife with me and I came to buy a watch for her, I wouldn't be really happy if the salesperson was a man and he tried to put the watch on her wrist. The Arab etiquette is to give the watch to the husband and the husband would help his wife."

Saudi Arabians remain the biggest customers for London properties - and spend fortunes on homes they may occupy only during the summer. The estate agents Hamptons says the Arab Spring has led to an upsurge of Arab investment in the capital.

And the spending power is vast. Some buy properties that range from £30 million (Dh177mn) to £100 million (Dh590mn), mostly in such upmarket areas as Belgravia, Chelsea, Kensington, Knightsbridge and Holland Park.

"The likely buyer of one property I am handling will probably use it herself for only about three months a year, but other family members will also visit and, for instance, her son will be marrying this summer and they plan a big party," says Mandy Craig from Hamptons.

Another palatial property near Hyde Park with parking for 30 cars was sold to a Saudi princess years ago but has stood empty ever since. Even so, it remains fully staffed and thousands are spent on filling it each week with fresh flowers - just in case its owner visits.

Such images of the oil-rich distort the wider picture and promote envy. But older clichés also abound. The Piccadilly department store Fortnum & Mason presently has an Arabian Nights-inspired window display replete with bejewelled emirs and turbaned djinns.

The Libyan-born writer Nahla Al-Ageli is frustrated by such stereotypes, especially images of Arab men sitting in shisha cafes in the Edgware Road and ogling passing women, even though its coffee shops and delicatessens are a magnet to generations of Arabs.

"This is so wrong," says Al-Ageli. "The beauty of London is its cosmopolitan nature. People come from all over the world and I have British friends, Arab friends, people who are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Hindu. That's why I love it."

But many Europeans and Arabs are challenging these stereotypes, preferring to reveal our cultural interconnectedness and the deep debt western civilisation owes to the Arab and Islamic world.

The Swiss-born Egyptian intellectual Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al Banna and now a professor in the UK, argues that Arab and Muslim culture should not be seen as something new in Europe, but instead as an intrinsic part of European heritage.

The Iraqi-born professor of theoretical physics, Jim Al-Khalili, one of the UK's premier science popularisers, highlighted the essential role played by Arab science and scholarship in the development of modern civilisation in a book and TV series.

"What is remarkable, for instance, is that for over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic," he says. "One of the greatest rulers the Islamic world has ever seen was the ninth-century Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah Al-Ma'mun, who came to power in 813AD, and who was to truly launch the golden age of Arabic science. His lifelong thirst for knowledge was such an obsession that he was to create in Baghdad the greatest centre of learning the world has ever seen, known throughout history simply as Bayt Al-Hikma: the House of Wisdom.

"At a time of increased cultural and religious tensions, misunderstandings and intolerance, the West needs to see the Islamic world through new eyes. And, possibly more important, the Islamic world needs to see itself through new eyes and take pride in its rich and impressive heritage."

Shubbak's mission is to open eyes, too. Munira Mirza, the director of arts and culture for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, says: "The aim is to surprise people, to give them a new perspective on what the Arab world is like. And it is more timely to be having it in the current climate. Arab artists were thinking about political change long before the politicians were."

Change is happening at grass-roots levels. Bahraini Amal Khalaf, a London resident for 11 years, works to promote art by British Arabs and is part of the Edgware Road project featured in Shubbak. She has a wide range of Arab and other friends. "I like people from everywhere," she says. "I love living in London and feel very lucky. It is a great, transient city."

Arab culture is visible throughout the capital and increasingly knitted into its multicultural fabric - from Lebanese kebab shops to the clubbing and music scene and the pervasive Emirates football shirts worn everywhere by fans of Arsenal, the North London football club that agreed to a £100 million sponsorship deal with the Dubai airline in 2004.

The global coffee shop culture has its roots in the Middle East, and for London's Arab visitors and residents there is an expanding range of sophisticated Middle Eastern and North African restaurants. One of the most fashionable is Momo in the West End, started by Mourad Mazouz, the son of an Algerian Berber. He also has restaurants in Paris, Dubai and Beirut.

Mazouz says that when he first arrived in London he rode around on a scooter looking for the sort of food he loved back home, but couldn't find it anywhere. So he started a little restaurant. It has become one of the most fashionable in London. He still uses the scooter to get around town.

On his journeys Mazouz will pass newsagents overflowing with Arab-language newspapers, many published here. London has long been a media hub for the Middle East, hosting dissident voices and exiled critics. One long-established publication is the Maghreb Review, founded in 1976 by the Algerian-born writer and bookseller Mohamed Ben-Madani. He is one of the foremost Arab commentators in London and has been in constant demand since the Arab Spring.

London was the first home for the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Company. Al Jazeera has a bureau here, as does Al-Arabiya, and there are many home-grown Islamic broadcasters. And of course the BBC is now running an Arabic Radio and TV operation.

Film production companies such as the Saudi-owned ORTV in Soho are a part of London's vibrant creative scene. Its founder and chairman is Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, who is also general manager of Al-Arabiya. ORTV produces films for British and Gulf broadcasters. Its output includes a profile of King Abdulaziz, and a documentary about German Cold War politics.

London has many organisations that aim to support the disparate threads of the Arab community. One of the newest is the British Arab Association, founded in 2009 by the Palestinian-born businessman Atallah Said.

"British Arabs have come to recognise the UK as a home, for us and our families," he says. "That is why we believe in integration in the communities in which we live. We have to recognise that Britain is our future and we should become active participants in its civic and political life."