Girl and boy
“Once upon a time there was a girl and a boy, without both of them, the world would no longer be…”
For the third year in a row, the European Commission has launched, under the patronage of the Belgian Princess Mathilde, an international drawing competition on gender equality to honour International Women’s Day. The competition, which is open to children from eight to ten years all over the world, calls on them to express their vision of gender equality. Two drawings by children from every region participating will be selected by a jury of European children, and a prize equivalent to 1000 Euros for each region will be awarded to the winners.
The White Fleet
Last month saw the USS San Antonio host a reception in honour of its visit to the port of Alexandria. The celebration marks the 100th anniversary of the visit of the US Navy’s Great White Fleet to the port of Suez in January 1909. Rear Admiral Scott E. Sanders, Vice Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said, “Today it is our relationship with the Egyptian people that we celebrate.”
“Just over 101 years ago, on 16 December 1907, the vast majority of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet set sail from Norfolk, Virginia on a 70,000 kilometre voyage, with 20 port calls on six continents over the next 14 months. This historic voyage tested US naval readiness, spread international goodwill, and improved the skills of our sailors. Painted white except for the gilded scrollwork on their bows, these ships were given the collective name the Great White Fleet by the reporters who came along for the journey. The Great White Fleet arrived in Egypt on 3 January 1909,” Rear Admiral Scott reminded.
Musical Bridge
The third Egyptian-Finnish Musical Bridge, a brainchild of the Finnish pianist and conductor Ralf Gothoni, was back in Cairo for three performances this March. The Musical Bridge offered a week of musical workshops, master classes and joint performances at the Cairo Opera House between virtuoso Egyptian and Finnish musicians and opera singers. The aim is to boost bilateral cultural relations and promote talented Egyptian musicians, a number of whom are later invited to perform in Finnish musical institutions such as the Savonlinna Music Academy.
Swiss Film
A Swiss Film Week was held earlier this month in Cairo. The Pro Helvetia Swiss arts council joined the Swiss Films Organisation and Misr International Films in treating Cairo viewers to a wide range of feature, documentary and animation films produced in Switzerland. The Swiss Film Week came within the framework of Cinemania – The Panorama of European Films.
The week followed the opening ceremony and concert of the Palestinian singer Kamilya Jubran on 3 March. On 4 March the documentary Telling Strings, starring Jubran, was screened in her presence, starting the Swiss Film Week with a Q & A about the film. The film tells the history of two generations of Palestinians. Elias Jubran (born in 1933), a music teacher and lute-maker from Galilee and his sons and daughters live a double life in Israel then leave in search of a more open environment. The film raises questions on the survival of Palestinian culture and the issue of cultural identity between surrender, protest and hope.
The Swiss film director Richard Dindo conducted a workshop on documentary filmmaking in which his film Genet in Chatila was discussed. The film presents the story of the French writer Jean Genet and his relation to the Palestinian revolution.
Napoleon on the Nile
More than 200 years after Napoleon commanded his armies to Egypt, the work his scholars gathered during their time on the Nile is being showcased at the SUArt Galleries in New York. “Napoleon on the Nile” focuses on research conducted by French scholars during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt.
“We see it as a wide-ranging show that will interest not just artists and art historians, but also those interested in languages, anthropology and sciences, too,” said David Prince, director of SUArt Galleries.
Though originally a military expedition, Napoleon brought scholars with him to study the Egyptian culture. Their findings were compiled in the multi-volume encyclopedia The Description of Egypt which is still the basis of modern Egyptology.
The prints that were published inside The Description of Egypt are the main focus of the exhibit, and detail the people, culture and architecture of Egypt. Accompanying these prints are various other paintings from the same four-year period. They show Egyptians rich and poor in their daily life. The prints describe clothing styles and show illustrations of pyramids and other structures.
The paintings give the viewer a good description of what life for the nobility of Egypt was like. One painting by Edwin Longsden Long, titled Love’s Labour Lost illustrates aristocratic Egyptian women relaxing. Servants, kittens, a monkey and a small deer join them in the richly decorated room.
“Napoleon on the Nile” will show until 29 March.
Gates of Heaven
The exhibition “The Gates of Heaven; Visions of the World in Ancient Egypt” opened earlier this month at the Louvre in Paris and runs till 29 June.
Containing about 350 artefacts spanning three millennia, from the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period, the exhibition endeavours to place everyday objects in their social, religious and artistic context.
In the ancient Egyptian language, “gates of heaven” referred to the doors on a sacred shrine holding the statue of a god. Opening these doors brought the divine world into contact with the human one, an act that enabled the Universe to perpetuate itself by renewing the process of creation. It also allowed humans to glimpse an image of an ineffable reality. Closing the doors was merely the prelude to another, future rebirth; in the meantime, the god returned to the shadowy Beyond, withdrawing his image from human sight.
Egyptians felt that certain places acted, in a way, as replicas of these shrines containing divine statues. These places were therefore endowed with doors—actual or false—which represented the transition between physical and mental realities. This exhibition focuses on four of these realities: the ordered Universe, the Beyond, the tomb chapel, and the temple forecourt. Objects designed to depict these worlds or to be placed within them reflect a complex logic that reveals the intricacy of Egyptian philosophy, far removed from our own rational, Cartesian way of thinking.
This exhibition, featuring masterpieces and other works in French and European collections, offers a new analysis of ancient Egyptians’ visual and mental representations through an exploration of their rhetoric and a few aspects of the civilisation that generated it.