At the recent three-day Film & Comic Convention in Dubai, I was struck by the number of young, female collective art groups from the Gulf region. One example of such a collective, Light Studio, has members who travel from Saudi Arabia to attend conventions such as this in order to sell and promote the work […]

*names changed to protect privacy I came across an uplifting piece by David Sim of the IB Times featuring gorgeous photographs of Syrian girls envisioning their future career goals. They pose as a radiologist examining X-Rays or as an architect holding building and project plans. The series is called “When I Grow Up” and was […]

All too often, art relating to Muslim women blurs the lines between challenging and mimicking stereotypes. Other times, Islamic art is reduced to “calligraphy and rugs.” There are, of course, spaces that cultivate and present a diverse selection of Muslim art, but these spaces are too few. Western narratives tend to prefer to portray Muslim […]

Emma Watson met with Malala Yousafzai in an interview posted online this week. I will let you draw your own conclusions (more sources here and here). Speaking of Malala, U.S. Presidential candidate Marco Rubio named her as someone he would like to have a beer with. The Republican Party, always with its fingers on the […]

Originally published here.  Where does parody end and self-exoticization begin? At what point does the Arab woman artist, stepping into the so-often imagined space of “The Harem” risk pandering to an audience that seems to have a never-ending appetite for remediations of Orientalist artwork? Lebanese photographer Rania Matar’s wonderful and insightful A Girl in Her Room […]

Responding to a question on the potential of art to transform at Jewish Book Week last year, Palestinian-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua commented: “Sometime people talk about culture and literature and art as something that can connect people together…to bridge between cultures. I hate bridging between cultures. It should be tunnels.” I was reminded of Kashua’s […]

Coming Out Muslim: Radical Acts of Love is a storytelling performance that highlights the experiences of LGBT Muslims. While I was aware of Coming Out Muslim, I did not realise that one of the people behind the project is a West African Muslimah. I was connected with Terna Tilley-Gyado through a mutual friend Mikael Owunna […]

Walking home recently, I rounded the corner from my apartment and noticed a poster that was banal and startling at the same time. I had previously written about the (mis)use of images of Muslim-looking women by Dutch non-profit organisations as an attention-grabbing device, which may or may not be related to the actual work being […]

On the 18th of December, the Syrian Trojan Women project staged a production of Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women with a cast of Syrian refugee actors and crew in Amman. Their reinterpretation of this 2000-year-old play traces the parallels between the fates of the women of Troy and contemporary Syrian women refugees fleeing the violence […]

Born into a family where art is a compulsion, Isha Farha started learning dance at the age of three from her mother, Kalamandalam Haseena. She is now adept in various Indian dance forms, including Bharathnatayam , Mohiniyattam, and Kuchipudi. She won the title of Kalathilakam in 2008 for excellence in the field of Bharathnatyam, Mohiniyattam, […]