Feminism

Saudi feminism, a hotel for women only

The Luthan hotel in the north of Riyadh will try to put an end to the problems of Saudi women who travel and work in the country, and who always need special authorization to reserve a room in 'mixed' hotels. The rhythm of a woman's life in Saudi Arabia is marked by the permits that male figures of reference must approve before she can do anything, from driving a car to reserving a hotel room to working. The Luthan spa is a hotel for women only, the first of its kind in the Gulf and the only one where no special permissions will be necessary. The hotel emerged from the idea of a group of businesswomen who wanted to resolve some of the difficulties that Saudi women face. The chairperson of the board of partners is Princess Madawi Bint Mohammad Bin Abdullah, who says they have obtained approval from Sultan Bin Salman, secretary general of the Saudi tourism commission.

The current laws in Saudi Arabia do not allow 'mixing' among the sexes, and businesswomen who travel for their work often find themselves in unpleasant situations when the moment arrives to check in to a hotel. The hotels of the kingdom will accommodate only women who are accompanied by a male family member, or in possession of a written permit granted by a manager at their workplace, or by the police.

I really like the idea and it’s just a start of women’s problems issues with the special authorization like traveling as a women alone its must have an authorization from a father or brother, life women in Saudi Arabia is changing to the Good with King Abulla applauded a statement that women they will drive cars someday. Women then called for a dialogue to convince opponents of female driving to change their mis-conceptions. that the issue required patience, and he would not impose it against the will of the people. He noted that women drive on the kingdom's deserts and in rural areas. "I believe strongly in the rights of women", he said during his first TV interview adding: "I believe the day will come when women drive. In time, I believe it will be possible. And I believe patience is a virtue.

Women life in Saudi Arabia lives changing for the better in Saudi Arabia but slowly. The Ladies Kingdom has given several women the chance to start their own businesses, including an artist who has a small gallery. Women entrepreneurs will be able to rent office space in a soon toopen business center.

Reference

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fh52m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWgmpUH0Mz8

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/hotels/2008-01-21-saudi-women_N.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7305549.stm

http://www.luthanspa.com/default.htm

http://www.allbusiness.com/mining/oil-gas-extraction-crude-petroleum-natural/584794-1.html

Modernism/post modernism

Modernism in Saudi Arabia :

The geographical region of the Arab land has frame the cultural background of the country relates to modernism of Arab world. The Arab world includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and spreads over the Middle East (or the Eastern Mediterranean. Most Arab countries gained their independence from British and French colonial rule between the end of World War II and the mid 1950s.

Modernists focused on innovative forms of expression and rejected realism and creating and shaping the world and Arab world (specifically art/architecture/things that make up culture). Modernism can be a way of thinking that supports the ability of humans to be able to change their environment in ways that make it more practical for their use. Although the political, economic and social environments since the 19th century have caused the decline of traditional arts in the Arab world It also rejects boundaries between high and "low" forms of art. By the middle of the 20th century, modern Arab had developed, based on Western aesthetics and norms; and by the end of the 20th century all Arab countries had extended modern art movements that reflected their cultural and artistic growth.

The Bicycle is a larger-than-life sculpture of a bicycle and is the most famous landmark in Jeddah

Example is The King Fahd Causeway is multiple dikes - bridge combination connecting Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and the island of Kingdom of Bahrain.1982

Example of a modernist building in Saudi Arabia is the Department of defence

Postmodernism: The modern is always historically at war with what comes immediately before it in this same sense, modern is always post-something. Postmodernism deals with the idea that if something is meaningless that it is not important to focus on finding meaning like how some gallerys end up in burnes empty rooms, it’s about having fun with creating it . Edge of Arabia, which opened on October 16th at the Brunei Gallery, school of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, offers a unique opportunity to see the work of 17 contemporary artists from Saudi Arabia.

Installation art is an good example of post modern art.Ayman Yossri Daydban

The Choice photograph by Manal Al Dowayan

The Kingdom Tower in Riyadh is the tallest skyscraper in Saudi Arabia

Lionel Mill's film has unique access to Prince Saud bin Abdul Mohsen, one of the rulers of the rich, powerful and secretive Saudi royal family. This is a fascinating insight into the conflicts between tradition and modernity in one of the world's most conservative and autocratic countries.

References

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fh52m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk_mvSp1xmA

http://worldslongestbridges.blogspot.com/2009/12/worlds-longest-bridges.html

http://susieofarabia.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/larger-than-life-bicycle-sculpture/

http://susieofarabia.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/skywatch-jeddah-sculpture/

http://www.saudiarabian.tv/?p=1140

http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/5101-expressionism-saudi-fine-arts-its-time-document

http://www.thegarretboys.com/news/saudinews.htm

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2003/modern_art_from_the_arab_world

http://www.galenfrysinger.com/saudi_arabia_modern_architecture.htm

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia/photos/11_ayman_yossri_daydban

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia/photos/08_manal_al_dowayan

http://www.djibnet.com/photo/saudi+arabia/kingdom-tower-1145676387.html

Introducing Postmodernism", by Richard Appignanesi (Author), Chris Garratt

Cinema project

This project is inspired by the intimate relation between photography and cinema ,from lightning,set design to a narrative, port rating characters and locations through film stills.
I was inspired in this project by the film "The Indian in The Cupboard" by Banks,Lynne Ride and Brok Cole. Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday,1980.

My images is been inspired by the Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri an urban environments photographer . He is recognized for his actual landscapes by simulating shallow depth of filed via the use of tilt-shift lens photography.And Slinkachu photography Slinkachu has attracted a cult audience for his photographs of tiny, hand-painted figures in unlikely urban settings.
And the lighting is been inspired by David Levinthal an American photographer,Levinthal uses a small toys and props with dramatic lighting to construct mini environments of subject matters.

a series images is been taken for my first year photography Cinema project,and my plot story is "A girl is suffering from asthma, smoking heavily every day cant realize how smoking is effecting her health. Its been told from the doctors that she have to quit smoking.
A little toys " Miniature" plastic toy figures in her living room they come bake to life when she go's to sleep. The miniatures steeling her cigarettes from her cigarettes from her packet and throw them from the balcony so when she wake up she founds nothing in the destroyed packet.
They are trying to help here without she knows" .

Nan Goldin

Biography

Nan Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American fine-art and documentary photographer. She has been represented in America exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery since 1992 and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968; Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.
Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror" (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and "All By Myself."
Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. .

Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.

I have chosen this image for Nan Goldin because I want to see her different in her others most known pictures ,

Goldin lives in New York and Paris—one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past .
In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.
She was presented the 2007 Hasselblad Award on 10 November, 2007.

Criticism

Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil."
Portrayal in film
The photographs by the character Lucy Berliner, played by actress Ally Sheedy in the 1998 film High Art, were based on those by Goldin.

Links to her gallery:
http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin/
http://www.artnet.com/artist/7135/nan-goldin.html
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/fineman/fineman12-12-96.asp
http://www.lightstalkers.org/images/show/826903
http://www.marissaneave.com/2008/05/oh-nan-goldins-heartbeat/


Nan Goldin Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3sihEuiEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgL37xpBntw