Over the course of 12 hours, the all-women Hiya Live festival aims to change perceptions of the region's music scene.
Curated in celebration of Women’s History Month, the online event will run from Saturday to Sunday, March 13 to 14, streaming on radio and video platforms across a range of partnering music collectives, including Radio Alhara, Disco Tehran, Future Female Sounds and Ballroom Blitz.
It is the brainchild of Lebanese journalist and DJ Shirine Saad and Natalie Shooter, co-founder of the Beirut Groove Collective, and is an off-shoot of Saad’s podcast of the same name, which celebrates the new generation of South-West Asian and North African female musicians. It’s a venture born from years of research on both the region’s contemporary music scene and the historic influences from which it draws.
"We wanted to take it from a research project to something that was more celebrated," Shooter tells The National. They also want to ensure the festival celebrates as many of the region's cultures and identities as it can.
“We’ve got artists from Iran, Armenia, Tunisia, everywhere. It was really important for us to do something that was connecting across the region,” Shooter says.
The line-up, which brings together 21 musicians and spans multiple genres and styles, includes Alsarah, the Khartoum-born singer-songwriter and "self-proclaimed practitioner of East African retro-pop" and Armenian DJ Lucia Kagramanyan, who is based in Vienna.
For Egyptian singer and visual artist Zeyada, Hiya Live can help highlight artistic output from this past year. She says the pandemic gave her the artistic space to finish an album, collaborate with other artists and even develop new music projects.
“This was something really beautiful, I think, to come out of [lockdown],” she says. “[Hiya Live] is showing a community now, and I don’t think there’s been something like that here before.”
Showcasing that community of regional women, she says, is the festival’s most important feature.
“The stronger any of us women get, the stronger everyone gets,” says Zeyada. “There’s this idea that women have to compete with each other. Even if we don’t do it, men say we do, and it’s not true, and it doesn’t work that way … So I feel like this airing and being out there is, if anything, solidifying this idea that we grow together.”
Award-winning Tunisian producer and DJ Deena Abdelwahed is also involved. Her distinct experimental dance tunes carried her music career from Tunis to Berlin, and she often harnesses her production skills to blend rhythms from more traditional Arabian genres into a glitchy, contemporary electronic sound.
Abdelwahed says her biggest hurdles in the industry came from Europeans over-romanticising her experience as an outspoken Arab woman, and that she’s excited Hiya Live can offer an answer to that.
“More French media journalists, they really wanted me as clickbait for their articles. Like, they’d ask me, ‘Oh, was it so bad in Tunisia?', [as if to say] thank you to France. My challenge [there] is how to express myself as Deena, not as a little girl coming from a ‘third world country’.”
With Hiya Live, she says, they can start to break that stigma, "that stupid idea of ‘oh poor Arab women’ and actually listen to them”.
Saad and Shooter agree. For them, centring the region means there’s no need for the term ‘Middle East’ at Hiya Live. After all, East of who and where?
“We’re trying to change the narrative around the region and around gender,” says Saad.
“In the music industry it’s no secret that there’s a problem with sexism, but also a problem of white supremacy. The DJs that [often] end up succeeding are straight white men, even though they’re often playing the music of the so-called Middle East or global south,” adds Saad.
“What we’re trying to do is say let us play our own music, and maybe what we play will change your perception of what our music is about.”
The performances will be virtually sprinkled around the world, promising backdrops from the mountains of Egypt's Dahab to Beirut nightclub Ballroom Blitz, and French rooftops overlooking the Pyrenees Mountains.
Saad and Shooter hope the digital blending of geographies will help to create a more meaningful connection.
“There are so many ways in which we are separated ... I mean we have Iran, Armenia’s under siege, Lebanon has been going through hell, Egypt, Palestine ... We’re saying OK, we can come together, we can overcome these boundaries. For me that’s the beauty of it,” says Saad.
It’s an ambitious, almost heavy undertaking, but Hiya Live’s architects also understand there’s power in constructing an event that brings joy and celebration to the fore.
But what are the organisers most excited about? “Having a party!" says Saad. "Spending 12 hours with all of these incredible women and allies from around the world.
“We’ve worked super hard to make all of this happen and we have beautiful presentations. We’ve been so isolated this year and this digital festival is going to allow people to come together in a way that maybe they wouldn’t have with visa, budget or geographic problems. This is going to be such a magical moment.”
Shooter adds: “Music is the resistance, in itself.”
Hiya Live runs on Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14. More information is available on its Facebook page.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?
The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.
Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.
New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.
“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.
The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.
The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.
Bloomberg
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