Category: Новини

Kenya saw a jump in cases of gender-based violence (GBV) during its COVID-19 lockdowns, which heightened social and financial stress.  To address the problem, Kenyan authorities are turning to the dramatic arts.

At the Kenya’s National Theatre in Nairobi, some 65 young people are putting their acting skills to use, as part of Kenya’s latest strategy to educate the public about the evils of gender-based violence.

Titled “A Little Girls Worth,” the one-hour play by Kenyan playwrights Derrick Waswa and Tommah Sheriff, is a new production co-sponsored by the Ministry for Public Service, Youth and Gender Affairs. It tells a story of how despite their extraordinary contribution in society, women suffer disproportionately.

Derrick Waswa, the play’s director, said the goal is to sensitize the public on violence against women, which he said stems from cultural beliefs that a woman is part of a man’s possessions.

“Basically people are blaming the violence and not looking at the cause. What we are trying to explain is that the African cultural nature has made women to be submissive. From the bible, you are told to submit to your husband as it is to the Lord, and in this African set up where a man has to pay dowery for you, it means they are technically purchasing you,” he said.

A February 2022 report by the Kenya Federation of Female Lawyers (FIDA Kenya) shows that cases of gender-based violence rose sharply during the pandemic, to the point where they made up nearly half the cases reported to the federation.

Authorities attribute the rise in these cases to the pandemic and the economic losses it caused.

The play premiered this month with a three-night run to audiences of 350 at the National Theater.

Audience members like Samson Osoro expressed hope that the dramatic arts will help change men’s mindset.

“This play will go a long way to also sensitize especially the men, who may be so unwelcome or harsh to our ladies, to know that ladies are also very important as men are. As a father I would really wish for my daughter to be treated in a better way than during the time of our mother and grandmother,” he said.

Njeri Migwi is the founder of Usikimye, an organization working to end sexual and gender-based violence in Kenya.  The group’s name means “speak up” in Swahili.

Migwai told VOA that programs such as door to door campaigns will reach more people, but said the play is a step in the right direction.

“Art imitates life and so for the government to use that as a means of educating… one of the things that I have been very passionate about is calling the government to start educating people about the importance of them being aware of GBV and how to acknowledge one of the forms.  So the government putting up the effort to put out a play is amazing,” said Migwai.

No further dates are set, but youth affairs authorities are hoping to show the play in social halls across the country.
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A host of celebrities and comedy royalty will gather Sunday night at the Kennedy Center as comedian, talk show host and political influencer Jon Stewart receives the Mark Twain Prize for lifetime achievement in humor. 

Stewart, the 23rd recipient of the prize, will be honored by testimonials and skits from fellow comedians and previous Mark Twain recipients. Stewart himself spoke during Dave Chappelle’s Mark Twain ceremony in 2019. 

The 59-year-old Stewart — born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz — rose to prominence as a standup comic and host of multiple failed talk shows before taking over  Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in 1999. His 16-year run as “Daily Show” host turned him into a cultural and political force as Stewart trained his satirical eye on both politics and an increasingly polarized national media. 

In perhaps his most iconic moment, Stewart went on CNN’s popular “Crossfire” debate show in 2004 and challenged the show’s entire premise of left-wing versus right-wing debate. Stewart told co-hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala they had a “responsibility to the public discourse” that they were cheapening with insincere political role-playing. 

Stewart’s appearance rocketed him to new levels of prominence and political relevance and may have sealed the fate of “Crossfire,” which was canceled three months later. 

Since retiring from “The Daily Show” in 2015, Stewart has become a vocal proponent of a number of social causes and one of the most prominent voices in support of health care for Sept. 11 first responders in New York City. He recently returned to television as host of “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on Apple TV+. 

When Stewart’s selection was announced in January, Kennedy Center President Deborah F. Rutter hailed his body of work as “equal parts entertainment and truth.” 

Rutter said Stewart’s career “demonstrates that we all can make a difference in this world through humor, humanity, and patriotism.” 

This will be the first Mark Twain ceremony since Chappelle’s in 2019. The award skipped 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Aside from that two-year break, the prize has been presented annually since 1998, with Richard Pryor receiving the first honors. 

Other recipients include Carol Burnett (the oldest recipient at age 80), Tina Fey (the youngest at age 40), Eddie Murphy, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin and Lily Tomlin. 2009 recipient Bill Cosby had his prize rescinded in 2018 amid multiple allegations of sexual assault. 
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During Ramadan, communal iftars, or breaking of fasts for Muslims in mosques, are the norm in the United States, but since the coronavirus pandemic began, drive-through food distributions have become popular. VOA’s Faiza Bukhari takes us behind the scenes at one of Virginia’s Islamic centers, where a daily drive-through iftar for roughly 800 people is organized. Camera and video editing by Qazafi Babar.
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The 2022 Asian Games in China will go ahead, the Olympic Council of Malaysia said Saturday, denying claims that it was facing the possibility of being postponed.

The Olympic-sized event is scheduled to be held in September in Hangzhou, a major metropolitan area less than 200 kilometers southwest of Shanghai.

Shanghai is currently grappling with a major coronavirus emergency, with its roughly 25 million residents currently in a weeks-long lockdown as authorities try to curb an omicron-fueled wave.

An official working with governing body the Olympic Council of Asia, who did not want to be named, had told AFP on Thursday that no decision had been made but there was a possibility of postponement.

However, Olympic Council of Malaysia president Norza Zakaria disputed that.

“The Asian Games 2022 in China is going ahead,” he told AFP Saturday. “We have checked with OCA (the Olympic Council of Asia) and the organizing committee.”

Most international sports events have been on hold in China since the COVID-19 pandemic, although Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in a strict bio-bubble in February.

Right after the Olympics ended, Shanghai — China’s biggest city — witnessed the country’s worst COVID outbreak in two years, and its residents have largely been confined to their homes since early April.

All 56 competition venues for the Games in Hangzhou have already been completed, Chinese organizers said this month, promising to publish a virus control plan that takes its cue from the Winter Olympics.

Hangzhou is scheduled to hold the Games from Sept. 10-25, becoming the third Chinese host after Beijing in 1990 and Guangzhou in 2010. 
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For the first time in the 127-year history of the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art fair features a majority of female and gender non-conforming artists, under the curatorial direction of Cecilia Alemani.

The result is a Biennale that puts the spotlight on artists who have been long overlooked despite prolific careers, while also investigating themes including gender norms, colonialism and climate change.

Alemani’s main show, titled The Milk of Dreams, alongside 80 national pavilions opens Saturday after a one-year pandemic delay. The art fair runs through Nov. 27. It is only the fourth of the Biennale’s 59 editions under female curation.

The predominance of women among the more than 200 artists that Alemani chose for the main show “was not a choice, but a process,” Alemani, a New York-based Italian curator, said this week.

“I think some of the best artists today are women artists,” she told The Associated Press. “But also, let’s not forget, that in the long history of the Venice Biennale, the preponderance of male artists in previous editions has been astonishing.”

“Unfortunately, we still have not solved many issues that pertain to gender,” Alemani said.

Conceived during the coronavirus pandemic and opening as war rages in Europe, Alemani acknowledged that art in such times may seem “superficial.” But she also asserted the Biennale’s role over the decades as a “sort of seismographer of history … to absorb and record also the traumas and the crises that go well beyond the contemporary art world.”

In a potent reminder, the Russian pavilion remains locked this year, after the artists withdrew following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nearby, sandbags have been erected in the center of the Giardini by the curators of the Ukrainian Pavilion, and surrounded by stylized posters of fresh artwork by Ukrainian artists representing the horrors of the 2-month-old war.

Among the women getting long-overdue recognition this Biennale is U.S. sculptor Simone Leigh, who in mid-career is both headlining the U.S. pavilion and setting the tone at the main exhibit with a towering bust of a Black woman that Alemani originally commissioned for the High Line urban park in New York City.

Fusun Onur, a pioneer of conceptual art in Turkey, at age 85 has filled the Turkish pavilion with wiry cats and mice set up in storyboard tableaus that confront modern-day threats like the pandemic and climate change. While proud of her role representing Turkey and the work she produced during the pandemic in her home overlooking the Bosphorus, she acknowledged that the honor was late in coming.

“Why it is so I don’t know,” Fusan said by phone from Istanbul. “Women artists are working hard, but they are not always recognized. It is always men first.”

New Zealand is represented by third gender artist Yuki Kihara, whose installation Paradise Camp, tells the story of Samoa’s Fa’afafine community of people who don’t accept the gender they were assigned at birth.

The exhibition features photos of the Fa’afafine mimicking paintings of Pacific islanders by post-impressionist French artist Paul Gaugin, reclaiming the images in a process the artist refers to as “upcycling.”

“Paradise Camp is really about imagining a Fa’afafine utopia, where it shutters colonial hetero-normality to make way for an Indigenous world view that is inclusive and sensitive to the changes in the environment,” Kihara said.

The image of a hyper-realistic sculpture of a futuristic female satyr giving birth opposite her satyr partner, who has hung himself, sets a grim post-apocalyptic tone at the Danish Pavilion, created by Uffe Isolotto.

The Nordic Pavilion offers a more hopeful path out of the apocalypse, with artwork and performances depicting the struggle against colonialism by the Sami people, who inhabit a broad swath of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland into the Murmansk Oblast of Russia, while also celebrating their traditions.

“We have in a way discovered how to live within the apocalyptic world and do it while, you know, maintaining our spirits and our beliefs and systems of value,″ said co-curator Liisa-Ravna Finbog.

This year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement awards go to German artist Katherina Fritsch, whose life-like Elephant sculpture stands in the rotunda of the main exhibit building in the Giardini, and Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuna, whose portrait of her mother’s eyes graces the Biennale catalog cover.

Vicuna painted the portrait while the family was in exile after the violent military coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende. Now 97, her mother accompanied her to the Biennale.

“You see that her spirit is still present, so in a way that painting is like a triumph of love against dictatorship, against repression, against hatred,” Vicuna said.  
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Verdant landscapes, stylized portraits of peasant women, curved sculptures — an exhibition in Baghdad is allowing art aficionados to rediscover the pioneers of contemporary Iraqi art.

Around 100 items are on display in the capital, returned and restored nearly two decades after they were looted.

Many of the works, including pieces by renowned artists Jawad Selim and Fayiq Hassan, disappeared in 2003 when museums and other institutions were pillaged in the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of pieces were stolen, and organized criminal networks often sold them outside Iraq.

Tracked down in Switzerland, the U.S., Qatar and neighboring Jordan, sculptures and paintings dating between the 1940s and 1960s have been on display since late March at the Ministry of Culture, in a vast room that used to serve as a restaurant.

“These works are part of the history of contemporary art in Iraq,” ministry official Fakher Mohamed said.

Artistic renaissance

Pictures and sculptures were in 2003 spirited away from the Saddam Arts Centre, one of Baghdad’s most prestigious cultural venues at the time.

While he crushed all political dissent, Saddam cultivated the image of a patron of the arts. The invasion and years of violence that followed ended a flourishing arts scene, particularly in Baghdad.

Now, relative stability has led to a fledgling artistic renaissance, including book fairs and concerts, of which the exhibition organized by the ministry is an example.

It helps recall a golden age when Baghdad was considered one of the Arab world’s cultural capitals.

Among canvases of realist, surrealist or expressionist inspiration, a picturesque scene in shimmering colors shows a boat sailing in front of several “mudhif,” the traditional reed dwellings found in Iraq’s southern marshes.

Other paintings, in dark colors, depict terrified residents surrounded by corpses, fleeing a burning village.

Elsewhere, a woman is shown prostrate in a scene of destruction, kneeling in front of an arm protruding from stones.

There is also a wooden sculpture of a gazelle with undulating curves, and the “maternal statue” — a work by Jawad Selim that represents a woman with a slender neck and raised arms.

The latter, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was rediscovered in a Baghdad district known for its antiques and second-hand goods shops. It was in the possession of a dealer unaware of its true value, according to sculptor Taha Wahib, who bought it for just $200.

‘Priceless works’

Looters in some cases had taken pictures out of their frames, sometimes with cutters, to steal them more easily.

“Some pieces were damaged during the events of 2003 — or they were stored in poor conditions for many years,” Mohamed, the culture ministry official, told AFP.

But “they were restored in record time,” he said.

Other works are being held back for now, with some waiting to be restored — but they will be exhibited once more, Mohamed pledged.

He wants to open more exhibition rooms to show the entire collection of recovered items.

“Museums must be open to the public — these works shouldn’t remain imprisoned in warehouses,” he said.

The 7,000 items stolen in 2003 included “priceless works,” and about 2,300 have been returned to Iraq, according to exhibition curator Lamiaa al-Jawari.

In 2004, she joined a committee of artists committed to retrieving the many stolen national treasures.

“Some have been recovered through official channels” including the Swiss embassy, she said, but individuals also helped.

Authorities coordinate with Interpol and the last restitutions took place in 2021.

The selection on display will be changed from time to time, “to show visitors all this artistic heritage,” Jawari said.

Ali Al-Najar, an 82-year-old artist who has lived in Sweden the past 20 years, has been on holiday in his homeland.

He welcomed the exhibition.

“The pioneers are those who initiated Iraqi art. If we forget them, we lose our foundations” as a society, Najar said.
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The Buenos Aires design and architecture firm Estudio Normal is honoring Argentina’s iconic butterfly chair in a towering art installation at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California. From the festival, Genia Dulot has the story.
Camera: Genia Dulot 
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