Latest news with #HornimanMuseumandGardens
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The summer programme of events including free late opening at Horniman Museum
A museum in Forest Hill is offering a free late-night opening to mark World Oceans Day. The Horniman Museum and Gardens is marking the occasion with an event on Thursday, June 5. From 5.30pm to 9pm, guests can enjoy a night of coral-themed activities inspired by the Horniman's Project Coral research. The evening will feature performances, games, and experiences presented by Royal College of Art students. Visitors can also explore the museum's collections after hours and enjoy the current exhibitions. This late-night opening is free of charge, with no advance booking required. However, some activities may incur a fee. On Sunday, June 8, from 10am to 3pm, the Horniman's Second Hand Sunday market is returning. Local sellers will be offering a variety of second-hand clothes, books, toys and more, promoting sustainable shopping. The market is free for all to enjoy. Later in the month, the Horniman Plant Fair is set to take place on Saturday, June 21, from 11am to 4pm. In partnership with Plant Fairs Roadshow, the event will showcase a wide variety of plants from small and independent nurseries. Visitors can also interact with specialist growers, attend a series of talks curated by head of horticulture Errol Fernandes, watch a live botanical installation, and try their hand at dry flower arranging. Advance booking is required, with tickets priced at £12 for adults and £3 for children. The plant fair is primarily aimed at adult visitors, and there will be no children's activities. Dogs are allowed but must be kept on a lead. In July, the Horniman Gardens will be transformed into a midsummer daydream for the Big Fish Little Fish family rave on Saturday, July 5, from 2pm to 6pm. The event will feature crafts, a bubble show, circus skill workshops, and storytelling. It will also showcase some of London's best street food stalls. Advance booking is essential, with tickets priced at £20 for adults and £15 for under 16s. On Wednesday, July 30, the Llama Library, featuring author Holly Ryan and illustrator Ella Bailey, will be holding a storytelling and crafts event. The event will run in four sessions at 10am, 11.30am, 1.30pm, and 3pm, with tickets priced at £7.50 per child. The ticket includes one free adult. On Saturday, August 16, the Horniman will host a celebration of Caribbean culture. The event, running from 1pm to 6pm, will feature a line-up of musical talent, a selection of jerk, vegan, and vegetarian dishes, and an arts and crafts market. Tickets will be on sale from June, with prices for adults set at £17, over 60s at £12, and children at £10. The Horniman Museum's exhibitions and displays will also be open to the public. The Robot Zoo, running daily until November 2, 2025, offers an insight into the mechanisms that give animals their amazing abilities. The Egyptian women-themed exhibition All Eyes on Her is a new collaborative display honouring the everyday resistance of Egyptian women. The Great Kingdom of Benin display highlights the rich cultural, creative, and political history of the Kingdom of Benin. The Horniman Museum and Gardens is free to visit and open daily, from 10am to 5.30pm. The World Gallery, Music Gallery, and Natural History Pop-up display in The Studio are all free to visit, with no advance booking needed. However, the Natural History Gallery and Nature Base are currently closed for redevelopment until 2026. The Aquarium, Butterfly House, and The Robot Zoo require advance booking, particularly during busy periods such as weekends and school holidays.
CairoScene
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
‘All Eyes on Her!': Reclaiming Egyptian Womanhood in This London Show
'All Eyes on Her!': Reclaiming Egyptian Womanhood in This London Show In 'Orientalism', Edward Said claims that, 'From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.' Said's words continue to ring true today, where a Western person's imagination of an Egyptian immediately conjures up a pharaoh, or perhaps a vague sense of chaos. The image of an Egyptian woman, more specifically, is either that of exotic eroticism or heartbreaking oppression. The stolen Egyptian artefacts on display in their museums only reinforce these ideals; pharaonic statues and belly dancers' attire and yashmaks. These images are as far as can be from the life of the Egyptian woman. Heba Abd el Gawad, a senior curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum and Gardens and Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, University College of London (UCL), is intent on shifting that narrative. For the past four years, Abd el Gawad has been working on creating a space where the Egyptian woman can come as she is, with all that she is. The result is an exhibition at Horniman Museum and Gardens with a singular demand: 'All Eyes on Her!' 'All Eyes on Her!' is dedicated to resisting the stereotypical orientalist image of Egyptian women by honouring what they refer to as the everyday activism of these women. To put it together, Abd el Gawad used the Egyptian artefacts already existing in the museum (statues, clothes, etc.) as well as new acquisitions from women in Egypt. 'We wanted to show people the living Egypt,' Abd el Gawad tells CairoScene. 'The spirit, stories, street signs, soundscapes and even WhatsApp stickers that make up Egypt today - instead of the ancient frozen culture it is often portrayed as. It's not just an empty landscape with the pyramids as the backdrop.' The exhibition is split into three sections: resist, revolt and reclaim. All three sections are fed with initiatives from Egyptian women performing these respective actions, often unknowingly. In the resistance section, there's a display of eight women consistently showing up for their population, including Gehad Hamdy, the founder of feminist initiative Speak Up, and Namees Amrous, the founder of woman-centred community E7kky. The resist section also features the personal journal of Mai Zayed, the writer and director of 'Ash Ya Captain', a movie chronicling the trials and tribulations of Olympic female powerlifters. 'All Eyes on Her!' is Horniman's first-ever bilingual exhibition. Some installations in the exhibition are even only in Arabic, with no English translation. 'For the first time in my life, I stood in front of an exhibition window and could see myself,' says Abd el Gawad. Everything in 'All Eyes on Her!' centres Egyptian women - including the visual identity and wallpaper, which were the responsibility of Egyptian illustrator Dina Zaitoun, commonly known as Artopathic. 'We used the wallpaper as an opportunity to integrate elements that could widen people's understanding of the Egyptian woman,' Zaitoun tells us. 'In lieu of traditional feminism, with its rallies and petitions, we wanted to portray the normal woman, the woman on the street selling vegetables, or the woman taking her kids to school.' Zaitoun's illustrations gave the exhibition life; she set the stage for every element of the exhibition. She illustrated individual frames for each of the eight influential women in the resist section, based on their work and their character. She illustrated a wall of eyes (all on her, of course) that tell the story of Egyptian heritage, including the eye of Horus, as well as the evil eye, and the tearing eye Egyptian women often wear around their necks. She also illustrated iconic Egyptian women, close-up. 'Someone we featured a lot is Abla Kamel, who is featured at the centre of the display, standing on a balcony,' says Abd el Gawad. 'She's a representation of the average Egyptian woman, in all her vulnerability and equally all her strength.' In the revolt section, Abd el Gawad and Zaitoun spotlighted an Egyptian woman the Western audience typically forgets about: the women of the 1919 revolution. Here, Zaitoun illustrated images of the revolting women of that time, clad in all black, on roller skates, with phrases from the revolution floating above. 'When faced with images of faceless Arab women, the West regards them as oppressed. But we're way more than that image. We're not victims, we're revolutionary,' Abd el Gawad says. The revolt section also features images of photographer and graffiti artist Hanaa El Degham's work, whose graffiti took centre stage in representing women in the 2011 revolution. In 'Orientalism', Edward Said continues to say that 'Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.' This is the very responsibility that 'All Eyes on Her!' undertakes in the reclaim section of the exhibition. The reclaim section is where the Egyptian artefacts that are already part of the museum's collection reside, with phrases like 'take me back to my country' illustrated above them in Arabic. Another installation features a glittering dress from the 19th century, one typically worn by belly dancers at the time. Instead of catering to the orientalist view of belly dancers as erotic, the dress is shown alongside a profile of Asmaa Halim, a dance movement therapist reclaiming belly dancing as the intergenerational method of empowerment it originated as. 'It's still a priority to return these historical artefacts to their home,' Abd el Gawad emphasises, 'but that doesn't undo the damage done. Creating a conversation around our culture, showing people a new, perhaps shocking perspective on it, is what enables us to reclaim our heritage and our narrative as our own. We're no longer being narrated by foreigners - we're speaking for ourselves.'
