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Art Week Riyadh: Inaugural city-wide event is proposing a new way of discovering art

Art Week Riyadh: Inaugural city-wide event is proposing a new way of discovering art

The National07-04-2025

In Le grand miroir du monde, or the great mirror of the world, thousands of mirrored shards are arranged in a rectangle spanning several metres. The work by Algerian-French artist Kader Attia captures the fragmented state of the world while also suggesting that something new and beautiful may arise from the broken pieces. The installation is the opening piece of Art Week Riyadh's curated section at the Jax District. The scale and nature of the work effectively and immediately sets the tone of the event. It makes it clear from the outset that the inaugural Art Week Riyadh is not an art fair. Rather, the event presents something new – a city-wide initiative that aims to celebrate and bolster the Saudi capital's art scene. 'We thought about ways in which we could create platforms that would allow for connectivity, increased awareness, dialogue, debate, exchange, and at the same time, shed a light on the many actors that play a part in the arts landscape of Saudi Arabia,' Dina Amin, chief executive of the Visual Arts Commission, says. 'We envisioned and envisaged an art week that would be a new model, which would move away from the traditional format of being a commercially inclined event and one that would be culturally focused,' she says. This position is particularly evident in At The Edge, the curated section of Art Week Riyadh and the centrepiece for the event. More than 30 local and international galleries are showcasing works as part of the curated section at the Jax District. By not basing their selections on the priority of sales, galleries are instead all putting their best foot forward. Most of the works presented are grand in scale and teeter to towards the conceptual. The exhibition is a bit like an all-star show, featuring several top names from the local and regional arts scenes. Galleria Continua is showcasing a series of works by Ahmed Mater that were produced using plastic toy gun caps, with a series of panels that spell out the words hilm (dream), hurriya (freedom) and salam (peace). Tabari Artspace is presenting Lulwah Al Homoud's 100 Names of Allah, which proposes a universal geometric language that takes cues from Ibn Muqlah's Proportional Cursive Script and the mathematical principles of the Vedic Square. Lawrie Shabibi is showcasing untitled works by Shaikha Al Mazrou that are emblematic of her use of painted metal to explore form, space and abstraction. Perrotin is showing Monira Al Qadiri's hand-blown glass series, which draws from the form of the toxic Portuguese man o' war jellyfish. Lisson Gallery is presenting the mixed media works of Wael Shawky, which reimagines familiar landscape and forms with a touch of magic realism. Efie Gallery is highlighting the large intricate textile works of Abdoulaye Konate. Ayyam Gallery is showcasing works by Faisal Samra and Safwan Dahoul. Le Lab is presenting paintings and sculptures by Khaled Zaki. There is an arresting work at every turn. 'We wanted to make it inter-generational, not only the youngest or the oldest, really everybody. This was our mission,' Vittoria Matarrese, artistic director and curator of Art Week Riyadh, says. 'With the gallery, it's important to treat them as partners. Too often, we think galleries are just vendors. But galleries are the closest persons to the artists. They discover them, let them grow, of course they also sell their works, but they also figure out how to put them in museums and institutions. 'The whole idea was really to talk to them and select works that you don't see usually in fairs,' Matarrese adds. 'For example, if you see the Wael Shawky booth with Lisson, this is a museum piece. Who ships this for an art fair? Nobody.' However, it's one thing to bring thought-provoking works, but ensuring a cohesive curation is another. The scenography was a key part in this. With an open space, and minimal divisions, the exhibition organically moves from one gallery booth to another, while also shifting across its three thematic threads: Everyday Life, Landscapes and Motifs. 'We really tried to connect it between the galleries,' Matarrese says. While At the Edge can perhaps be seen as the nucleus attraction of Art Week Riyadh – its initiatives and exhibitions are far more sprawling. Collections in Dialogue, also taking place at the Jax District, is highlighting important collections of three institutions. These include King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (Ithra), which is showcasing works by Maha Malluh, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mohammad Alfaraj and Hazem Harb. Art Jameel is presenting works from Ahaad Alamoudi, Hiwa K, Yto Barrada and Mater. The Saudi Research and Media Group is highlighting the development of abstraction in Saudi Arabia, exhibiting artists such as Mohammed Al-Saleem, Abdulhalim Radwi, Taha Al-Sabban, Raeda Ashour, Rashed AlShashai and Zaman Jassim. The Al Mousa Centre in central Riyadh is also a major site of Art Week Riyadh. Formerly a commercial complex, the centre has grown to become a cultural attraction with 15 galleries. The institutions will be presenting a mixture of group and solo exhibitions especially put together for Art Week Riyadh. Although several exhibitions and events have been set up, it is Art Week Riyadh's public programming that seeks to animate these different elements. The programming includes a series of talks titled How to Art World? Lessons in Value. The talks, curated by writer Shumon Basar, will delve into subjects relevant to the visual arts scene in Riyadh. Participants will include cultural experts from Christie's, Sotheby's Gagosian and others. 'As a visual arts commission, we're dedicated to knowledge, knowledge awareness, knowledge exchange, transfer,' Amin says. 'It's part of our DNA as an entity.' Mater, Ayman Zedani, Marwah AlMugait and Muhannad Shono will also be opening up their studios at Jax District to the public this week, allowing audiences to discover their creative spaces and learn more about their artistic processes. 'When we talk about the richness and depth and breadth of everything that's happening here, there's no way we can capture it in one exhibition,' Amin says. 'Part of Art Week Riyadh is really asking that everyone open their doors for all of us to be able to discover what's happening. That discovery will vary from studio to studio, entity to entity. Each organisation has has a different language and a different focus. That richness is really important for us when understanding what Art Week Riyadh is trying to do.'

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But Forsyth's hurricane-paced thriller complete with journalistic-style detail and brutal sub-plots of lust, betrayal and murder was an instant hit. The once poor journalist became a wealthy writer of fiction. "I never intended to be a writer at all," Forsyth later wrote in his memoir, The Outsider - My Life in Intrigue. "After all, writers are odd creatures, and if they try to make a living at it, even more so." So influential was the novel that Venezuelan militant revolutionary Illich Ramirez Sanchez, was dubbed 'Carlos the Jackal'. Forsyth presented himself as a cross between Ernest Hemingway and John le Carre - both action man and Cold War spy - but delighted in turning around the insult that he was a literary lightweight. "I am lightweight but popular. My books sell," he once said. His books, fantastical plots that almost rejoiced in the cynicism of an underworld of spies, criminals, hackers and killers, sold more than 75 million copies. Behind the swashbuckling bravado, though, there were hints of sadness. He later spoke of turning inwards to his imagination as a lonely only child during and after World War Two. The isolated Forsyth discovered a talent for languages: he claimed to be a native French speaker by the age of 12 and a native German speaker by the age of 16, largely due to exchanges. He went to Tonbridge School, one of England's ancient fee-paying schools, and learned Russian from two emigre Georgian princesses in Paris. He added Spanish by the age of 18. He also learned to fly and did his national service in the Royal Air Force where he flew fighters such as a single seater version of the de Havilland Vampire. Impressing Reuters' editors with his languages and knowledge that Bujumbura was a city in Burundi, he was offered a job at the news agency in 1961 and sent to Paris and then East Berlin where the Stasi secret police kept close tabs on him. He left Reuters for the BBC but soon became disillusioned by its bureaucracy and what he saw as the corporation's failure to cover Nigeria properly due to the government's incompetent post-colonial views on Africa. It was in 1968 that Forsyth was approached by the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, and asked by an officer named "Ronnie" to inform on what was really going on in Biafra. By his own account, he would keep contacts with the MI6, which he called "the Firm", for many years. His novels showed extensive knowledge of the world of spies and he even edited out bits of The Fourth Protocol (1984), he said, so that militants would not know how to detonate an atomic bomb. His writing was sometimes cruel, such as when the Jackal kills his lover after she discovers he is an assassin. "He looked down at her, and for the first time she noticed that the grey flecks in his eyes had spread and clouded over the whole expression, which had become dead and lifeless like a machine staring down at her." After finally finding a publisher for The Day of the Jackal, he was offered a three-novel contract by Harold Harris of Hutchinson. Next came The Odessa File in 1972, the story of a young German freelance journalist who tries to track down SS man Eduard Roschmann, or The Butcher of Riga. After that, The Dogs of War in 1974 is about a group of white mercenaries hired by a British mining magnate to kill the mad dictator of an African republic - based on Equatorial Guinea's Francisco Macias Nguema - and replace him with a puppet. The New York Times said at the time that the novel was "pitched at the level of a suburban Saturday night movie audience" and that it was "informed with a kind of post‐imperial condescension toward the black man". Divorced from Carole Cunningham in 1988, he married Sandy Molloy in 1994. But he lost a fortune in an investment scam and had to write more novels to support himself. He had two sons - Stuart and Shane - with his first wife. His later novels variously cast hackers, Russians, Al Qaeda militants and cocaine smugglers against the forces of good - broadly Britain and the West. But the novels never quite reached the level of the Jackal. A supporter of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, Forsyth scolded Britain's elites for what he cast as their treachery and naivety. In columns for The Daily Express, he gave a host of withering assessments of the modern world from an intellectual right-wing perspective. The world, he said, worried too much about "the oriental pandemic" (known to most as COVID-19), Donald Trump was "deranged", Vladimir Putin "a tyrant" and "liberal luvvies of the West" were wrong on most things. He was, to the end, a reporter who wrote novels. "In a world that increasingly obsesses over the gods of power, money and fame, a journalist and a writer must remain detached," he wrote. "It is our job to hold power to account."

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