I feel obliged at this early stage to offer a word of warning: Remnants is a particularly challenging exhibition, which refuses to give up its secrets easily. It is thematically knotty, occasionally infuriating, and it demands patience and perseverance. It is also, at times, immensely rewarding.
Curated by Sara Alonso Gomez and held at Green Art Gallery in Dubai, Remnants features works by eight artists from Cuba and the Middle East. It grapples with themes of waste, displacement and exclusion, as well as the "remnants" left behind. As Gomez notes in the programme, "the things and phenomena that surrounded us before seem to threaten us today". And Gomez is not just referring to material waste. "What and who would fall into this category of the residual in the world in which we live?" she asks.
This question is most emphatically addressed by Ghaith Mofeed, the self-taught Syrian artist who has created a work – the most accessible here – that challenges our understanding of world order. In Citizen of my World (2018), Mofeed has reconfigured a world map on a rough piece of fabric, placing Syria at the centre, and partially hiding, behind overlapping joins, those countries that Syrians are forbidden from entering. There is a discomfiting contrast between the ease with which Mofeed has done this and the seeming impossibility of affecting real change in his homeland, which he has been forced to flee.
Mofeed has painted in green the countries that Syrians are allowed to visit without a visa. There are only a dozen or so of these; the rest are painted in a livid red. Mofeed has taken an issue we like to tell ourselves is complex and reduced it to the most simple statement: we are keeping out those people who most need our help.
From here, things get more complicated. Wilfredo Prieto's vast installation, Anti-pigeon Lines, Anti-personnel Lines (2018) dominates the centre of the gallery, a sprawling maze of razor wire and anti-pigeon spikes. As Prieto's sculpture snakes this way and that, threatening to snag you as you move around the room, we are reminded just how threatening and invasive these structures are. They have been designed to keep certain people and animals away.
Yet here in an art gallery, they take on a certain, clinical beauty. This, Prieto appears to be saying, is the privilege that wealth affords us. We have the right to choose how we perceive these objects; others do not. The message about our treatment of some humans as animals is also explicit.
This preoccupation with exclusion and human trauma emerges again and again throughout the exhibition. One of the most striking pieces here is Iranian artist Nazgol Ansarinia’s installation, Mattress, from her series Mendings (2010-11). A pink mattress lies in the corner of the room. At first glance, it looks like a comforting domestic object, but it is, in fact, ruptured by a seismic tear down the middle. Ansarinia has taken the middle section of the mattress out and joined what remains back together. The scar left by her operation is still clearly visible. “This transfers to the object human traces that could also be human wounds,” says Gomez.
I like this idea of the place where we sleep inheriting our anxieties and traumas. And Mattress, to my mind at least, also has important things to say about the speed of change in Tehran. The familiar has been torn out, the landscape changed.
Remnants feels less convincing, however, when it attempts to move away from the political into the thematic. Not because the works that are less overtly political are weaker necessarily – Mexican artist Yornel Martinez's Atlas (2018), in which old painting rags are stretched into artworks themselves, is beautiful and innovative. It's simply that they sit uncomfortably within the dominant context of the show. Atlas, Gomez tells me, raises questions about "how we select what is and what isn't an artwork".
Cuban artist Jenny Feal's The Weight that Counts (2015), meanwhile, is an ordinary clock covered in clay that flakes off and falls away as the exhibition progress. Again, it's an interesting comment on how objects perish as time passes.
But in presenting so many ideas – so many questions – in a single room, Remnants eventually overreaches itself, the power of the political works weakened by these more slippery, nebulous additions. Nearly all the individual pieces leave their mark, but ultimately, it is hard to pin down exactly what Remnants is trying to say.
It would be unfair to end on that note, though, since there is so much here to move and excite you. Take Turkish artist Fatma Bucak's video Scouring the Press (2016), which features three women, including the artist, washing Turkish newspapers in basins. It is as convincing an attack on censorship as you could hope to see. With works of this quality, it is easy enough to forgive an occasional loss of focus.
Remnants is at the Green Art Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, until October 26. For more, visit: gagallery.com
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Read more:
A guide to Galleries' Night at Alserkal Avenue
Santiago Sierra's new work in Tel Aviv is every bit as provocative as you'd expect
UAE memorial artist Idris Khan on the 'overwhelming' nature of making award-winning Wahat Al Karama
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Three-day coronation
Royal purification
The entire coronation ceremony extends over three days from May 4-6, but Saturday is the one to watch. At the time of 10:09am the royal purification ceremony begins. Wearing a white robe, the king will enter a pavilion at the Grand Palace, where he will be doused in sacred water from five rivers and four ponds in Thailand. In the distant past water was collected from specific rivers in India, reflecting the influential blend of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology on the coronation. Hindu Brahmins and the country's most senior Buddhist monks will be present. Coronation practices can be traced back thousands of years to ancient India.
The crown
Not long after royal purification rites, the king proceeds to the Baisal Daksin Throne Hall where he receives sacred water from eight directions. Symbolically that means he has received legitimacy from all directions of the kingdom. He ascends the Bhadrapitha Throne, where in regal robes he sits under a Nine-Tiered Umbrella of State. Brahmins will hand the monarch the royal regalia, including a wooden sceptre inlaid with gold, a precious stone-encrusted sword believed to have been found in a lake in northern Cambodia, slippers, and a whisk made from yak's hair.
The Great Crown of Victory is the centrepiece. Tiered, gold and weighing 7.3 kilograms, it has a diamond from India at the top. Vajiralongkorn will personally place the crown on his own head and then issues his first royal command.
The audience
On Saturday afternoon, the newly-crowned king is set to grant a "grand audience" to members of the royal family, the privy council, the cabinet and senior officials. Two hours later the king will visit the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the most sacred space in Thailand, which on normal days is thronged with tourists. He then symbolically moves into the Royal Residence.
The procession
The main element of Sunday's ceremonies, streets across Bangkok's historic heart have been blocked off in preparation for this moment. The king will sit on a royal palanquin carried by soldiers dressed in colourful traditional garb. A 21-gun salute will start the procession. Some 200,000 people are expected to line the seven-kilometre route around the city.
Meet the people
On the last day of the ceremony Rama X will appear on the balcony of Suddhaisavarya Prasad Hall in the Grand Palace at 4:30pm "to receive the good wishes of the people". An hour later, diplomats will be given an audience at the Grand Palace. This is the only time during the ceremony that representatives of foreign governments will greet the king.
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The%20specs
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WOMAN AND CHILD
Director: Saeed Roustaee
Starring: Parinaz Izadyar, Payman Maadi
Rating: 4/5
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Company%20profile
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The specs
- Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
- Power: 640hp
- Torque: 760nm
- On sale: 2026
- Price: Not announced yet
The%20specs
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BACK%20TO%20ALEXANDRIA
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ETamer%20Ruggli%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarring%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ENadine%20Labaki%2C%20Fanny%20Ardant%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E3.5%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
THE CLOWN OF GAZA
Director: Abdulrahman Sabbah
Starring: Alaa Meqdad
Rating: 4/5
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League final:
Who: Real Madrid v Liverpool
Where: NSC Olimpiyskiy Stadium, Kiev, Ukraine
When: Saturday, May 26, 10.45pm (UAE)
TV: Match on BeIN Sports
Lexus LX700h specs
Engine: 3.4-litre twin-turbo V6 plus supplementary electric motor
Power: 464hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 790Nm from 2,000-3,600rpm
Transmission: 10-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 11.7L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh590,000