Photographs in Doha's Tasweer photo festival explore belonging, identity and home in the Arab world
DOHA: A young Sudanese man sits in a chair dressed in an elegant off-white three-piece suit. He holds a small shotgun in one hand which he eyes solemnly while resting against the wall behind him on a crimson red tapestry is a rifle. The photograph is titled 'Life Won't Stop' and is one of several images by Sudanese photographer Mosab Abushama documenting his friend's wedding in Omdurman, Sudan, a city constantly targeted by airstrikes.
For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @arabnews.lifestyle
The photograph is on view as part of the show 'Tadween,' referring to the concept of recording of news and emotions through writing, photography, audio or video, and is one of several exhibitions in the third edition of Doha's Tasweer Photo Festival, which runs until June 20.
'Despite the clashes and random shelling in the city, the wedding was a simple but joyous occasion with family and friends,' wrote in the caption for the work. 'The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, brought horrors and displacement, forcing me to leave my childhood home and move to another part of the city. It was a time none of us ever expected to live through. Yet, this wedding was a reminder of the joy of everyday life still possible amidst the tragedy and despair.'
Abushama's photograph earned recognition at the 2025 World Press Photo Awards in the Singles Africa category.
Abushama's poignant image is one of many on show this year in the Tasweer Photo Festival that prompt deep reflection and compassion.
One of the numerous exhibitions on view is 'Obliteration — Surviving The Inferno: Gaza's Battle for Existence.' The images are displayed outside in Doha's Katara Cultural Village unfolding in five stages to capture each chapter thus far of the war on Gaza. Each image, such as Abdulrahman Zaqout's 'When Food and Water Become Weapons,' has been shot by a Gazan photographer on the ground to witness and experience the catastrophe. From children extending bowls for food to mothers comforting terrified children, each image recounts the tales of horror that continue to unfold as the war in Gaza continues.
'As I Lay Between Two Seas,' another exhibition in the festival, is at the Doha Fire Station. Curated by Meriem Berrada, an independent curator and artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary African Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, the exhibition is a poignant and poetic display of 25 photographers from the Arab world and its diasporas grappling and coming to terms with ideas of identity, belonging and home.
'(The exhibition) approaches belonging not as a fixed state, but as a fluid, evolving condition shaped by memory, distance, rupture, and imagination,' Berrada told Arab News. 'The exhibition unfolds through a non-linear narrative that invites diverse temporalities and perspectives to coexist.'
The title of the exhibition is drawn from a photographic series by Ali Al-Shehabi that conjures up a metaphor that speaks to the fluid, ever changing idea of understanding the self.
'Guided by the metaphor of the sea — shifting, unstable, and expansive — it draws inspiration from poets of the region whose writings on exile and longing offer a conceptual and emotional foundation,' Berrada said. 'The selected works span a wide spectrum from documentary to conceptual and abstract practices. These works examine family and community dynamics, spiritual and philosophical relationships, and the sociopolitical structures that influence selfhood. They explore the symbolic ties to one's roots, often shaped by personal memory and collective histories.'
From Lebanese artist Ziad Antar's dreamy and edgy photographs of abandoned and unfinished buildings in Beirut and on the Lebanese coast and Saudi artist Moath Alofi's series of desolated mosques along the winding road to Madinah, Saudi Arabia, to Palestinian Taysir Batniji's 'Just in Case #2' (2024), portraying images of a series of keys representative of feelings of loss and exile, the photographic works on show oscillate between feelings of pride, belonging, loss and longing.
A poem by Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Darwish titled 'I Belong There,' appears on one wall between the display of several photographs reflecting through words many of the feelings expressed in the images on display. 'I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born […] I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey. I belong there.'
Elsewhere in Tasweer, a solo exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art on the works of Moroccan photographer and filmmaker Daoud Aoulad-Syad titled 'Territories of the Instant' presents the essence of Moroccan popular culture and remote regions in the country. Another exhibition, 'Threads of Light: Stories from the Tasweer Single Image Awards,' presents 31 captivating images from 2023 and 2024 awards highlighting the extraordinary in daily life, including sacred traditions in Oman, dynamic street scenes in Yemen and moments of contemporary change in Iraq and picturesque marine views of traditional boats in Doha.
As Berrada said of the festival, which can arguably apply to numerous works and shows in Tasweer this year: 'It also reflects on the photographic medium itself — how image-making can question fixed and often deterministic categories of belonging and become a powerful tool for reimagining identity in a deeply interconnected world.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Arab News
a day ago
- Arab News
Saudi artist Abdullah Al-Othman discusses work exploring linguistic architectural landscapes
DUBAI: In the Bawwaba section of the most recent edition of Art Dubai, Saudi artist Abdullah Al-Othman's installation 'Manifesto: Language & the City II' presented photographs and numerous illuminated signs and symbols in Arabic against two black walls, reflecting the urban signage one may find in Riyadh. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @ The installation was an evolution of a series that includes 2021's 'Manifesto: the Language and the City,' a multimedia installation exploring the linguistic and architectural landscape of Riyadh for the inaugural Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, which went on to be included in the Lyon Biennale in 2022, and 'Fantasy Land,' which Al-Othman created for the Sharjah Islamic Arts Festival in 2021 — a neon wall installation exploring themes of human experience and the shifts between reality and illusion. 'Language & the City II' pulsed with light and color and the expressive characters of the Arabic language made the viewer feel as if they were indeed on a bustling street in the Saudi capital. 'Language is akin to history — it's very deep,' Al-Othman tells Arab News. 'Through my research I realized how language is like a brand for a culture — it references history and people. I study the language that we find in cities. The documentation of language affects the architectural style in an urban environment and the relationship between people and their environment.' 'Language & the City II' was made from a variety of materials, predominantly neon signage, lightboxes and wooden advertising signs that were once hung in the streets of Riyadh. Al-Othman's installation brought them together to create a portrait of the city through its typographic, visual and architectural styles. Riyadh's identity, explains Al-Othman, is revealed through the language, style and vibrant colors of these lit symbols, offering a collective memory of a city in the throes of change. As an artist and a poet, language has always played an important role in Al-Othman's life. While he began as a writer, he arrived at a point where he could no longer fully express himself with words and turned to art, creating works that incorporate sound, found objects, sculpture, film and performance. In 2017's 'Suspended Al-Balad,' for the 21,39, contemporary art festival, Al-Othman wrapped an entire building in Jeddah's historic Al-Balad district, originally used as a shelter for widows and divorced women, with tin foil. Al Othman's intuitive approach to art creation leads him to organically move between and incorporate different mediums. Light is a significant element in his work, whether bouncing off tin foil or shining in neon to reflect the everyday urban environment of Riyadh. 'I want to create journeys for people to discover the importance of language,' says Al-Othman. 'Language is a deeply important part of being human.' Today Al-Othman continues to expand his research and art creation. He has recently published a book on his research supported by The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) and the Saudi Cultural Development Fund. Presently he is creating sculptures out of various Arabic words from made from different materials for his latest project, 'Engineering the Incomplete.' 'In my artistic practice, I engage with language as an open field for analysis and reconstruction,' he writes in his statement for the new project. 'I begin from moments of absence — from missing letters and fractured words — treating them as signals of the fragility inherent in the symbolic systems we rely on to make sense of the world. 'Failure to achieve perfection becomes an essential part of creation, not a flaw to be corrected,' he continues. 'Incompleteness is not simply a void, but an active component that generates new, open-ended meanings. Each missing letter, each visual gap, forms an alternative path of reading and invites the viewer to reshape their relationship with language and the urban environment.' 'Engineering the Incomplete' uses the structure of the letter as an entity capable of both disintegration and destruction and therefore the resulting text as something that is unstable and constantly changing. 'My practice transforms language from a tool of communication into a material and temporal organism caught in the tension between structure and collapse,' Al-Othman adds. 'Through material techniques that draw from urban elements and the reconfiguration of textual spaces, my work seeks to highlight the continuous tension between the desire for expression and the inherent limits of linguistic possibilities.' Al-Othman says that 'Engineering the Incomplete' is not an attempt to restore what is lost, but an invitation to read absence, or lacking, as another form of presence and a new beginning. Incompleteness, he emphasizes, offers 'a way to produce new meaning and vision.'
Arab News
a day ago
- Arab News
Highlights from Bashir Makhoul's ‘The Promise' at Zawyeh Gallery
'Drift' The Galilee-born British-Palestinian artist's solo show's title, according to the gallery, 'encapsulates a poetic and ambiguous statement of intent — an assertion that is both an event and a transformation. A promise is made and, inevitably, can be broken.' That is the duality at the heart of Makhoul's practice, as is the recurring motif of the house. 'Deep Wounds' This work is part of a series of painted wooden sculptures, each of which bears a carved hollow scar, disrupting its 'wholeness.' 'These wounds are marks not just of trauma but also spaces of beginnings, resonating with Edward Said's notion of origins as an act of cutting open, a rupture that invites multiple directions.' 'My Olive Tree' Makhoul has been experimenting with electroplated 3D printing to produce crystalline machine-generated structures that 'paradoxically resemble organic formations' such as those seen in this work representing Makhoul's own tree which stands between two plots of land he does not own.
Asharq Al-Awsat
26-05-2025
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Demi Lovato Marries Singer-Songwriter Jordan ‘Jutes' Lutes in California
She's more than just cool for the summer — Demi Lovato is officially married. The musician-actor, 32, tied the knot with Canadian singer-songwriter Jordan 'Jutes' Lutes, 34, on Sunday in California, as first exclusively reported by Vogue. The couple met while working on Lovato's last album that was released in 2022, and dated for nearly two years before Lutes proposed in December 2023. Lutes co-wrote a few of the songs, including 'Happy Ending,' 'City of Angels," and the pop-punk single, 'Substance.' Lovato wore a white Vivienne Westwood dress and Lutes wore a Saint Laurent suit. Representatives for Lovato did not immediately respond to The Associated Press' request for comment. Lovato, a former child star, began her entertainment career on 'Barney & Friends' before becoming a staple of Disney Channel in the 2000s for her role in the 'Camp Rock' films and as the star of 'Sonny with a Chance.' Beyond her acting, Lovato has long been celebrated for her gifted soprano and has released eight albums across her career. Lutes, an independent artist whose hybridist music marries elements of emo, pop-punk and trap, was previously signed to Capitol Records. Prior to her relationship with Lutes, Lovato was engaged to the actor Max Ehrich in 2020. They called off their engagement after two months.
