Nuha BalaaMy early attempts at painting started at a young age and focused on three of my favorite subjects: the human face, the still life, and landscapes. My formal training, however lead me to a degree in interior design from the Lebanese University in Beirut. After receiving my degree, I worked for four years as a designer and consultant. In 1984, I moved to the United States with my family.

Descent: an installation by Joyce DallalJoyce Dallal's breathtaking installation Descent—made of hundreds of paper airplanes printed with the articles of the Geneva Conventions—will be featured in an exhibition entitled "Flight" at the United Nations in New York, Jan 16-Feb 20, 2009, along with African artist Samuel Komlan Olou's installation "Ese." The show will be in the North East Gallery of the Visitors Lobby, entrance is on First Avenue at East 46th Street.

The exhibition presents two installations connected by the theme of war and its impact on human beings. Dallal's piece focuses on the texts of the Geneva Conventions and Sam Komlan Olou's on the theme of migration. Descent was first installed last summer at the Barnsdall Art Gallery in C.O.L.A. 2007/2008, prompting the essay below by Doris Bittar.

Shams Ensemble with Whirling Dervishes: photo by John MontgomeryIranian composer Kaykhosro Pournazeri and his classical Shams Ensemble are touring the United States this month, with concerts in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.

The Shams Ensemble performs traditional Persian, mystic Sufi, and Kurdish music with the tanbour, daf (frame drum), and percussion instruments. The vocals feature the poetry of Rumi and other Iranian bards. Shams features Kaykhosro Pournazeri, Sohrab Pournazeri and Tahmores Pournazeri.

Before the 1979 Iranian revolution, which ushered in more conservative guidelines regulating music, the Iranian composer enjoyed a career in traditional Persian music. Even when the incoming Islamic regime thwarted his musical aspirations, Pournazeri said he never gave up hope.

Artist Mounir FatmiA multimedia artist born in Tangier, Morocco who divides his time between Paris and Tangier, Mounir Fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from his/her preconceptions of politics and religion, and allow them to contemplate these and other subjects in new ways. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires, directly addressing the current events of our world. Sometimes his work serves to both explicate the origins and symptoms of global issues as well as speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events.
An evocative work critical of corporal punishment

Niloofar, a film by Sabine El GemayelMobina Aynehdar as NiloofarMeet director Sabine El Gemayel on Saturday, November 1, when the AFI Fest screens her new feature, "Niloofar." (Also screens Nov. 3).El Gemayel will discuss the challenges of shooting on location in Iran this year.

This Franco-Iranian production includes Roya Nownahali, Shahab Hosseini, Hengameh Ghaziani, Mobina Ayenedar, Amir Aghai, Sadegh Safai, and Fatemeh Motamed Aria.

Niloofar is a twelve-year-old girl whose dream is to read and write in a village where education is only for boys. While assisting her mother during a delivery Niloofar meets a wise woman who allows her to secretly study.

The Edge of Heaven: your purchase benefits LCC programmingFrom the exceptionally talented Turkish-German writer/director of “In July,” “Head On” and “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” comes one of our favorite movies of the year—a drama with six characters that bears repeat viewings. As Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris put it, “In just a couple of movies, 34-year-old Fatih Akin has become the most exciting of Europe's young directors, reinvigorating the melodrama with a furious kind of identity politics. Like ‘Head-On,’ his 2004 wrecking-ball romance, Akin's new ‘The Edge of Heaven’ is perched along the fault line of the current Turkish-German situation. And the more determined he is here to examine the chasm between the two sides, the wider and deeper the movie gets.

Language for a New Century: your purchase benefits LCC programmingKudos to Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. This handsome new anthology (Norton 2008) celebrates the artistic and cultural forces flourishing today in the East—gathering an unprecedented selection of works by East Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Central Asian poets as well as poets living in the diaspora. The volume is organized around nine themes—including childhood, politics and oppression, identity, war, homeland and love—and includes more than 400 unique voices from 59 countries. Each section of the anthology—organized by theme rather than national affiliation—is preceded by a personal essay from the editors that introduces the poetry and invokes the readers to examine their own identities in light of these powerful poems.

An exhibit by Ara Oshagan at the The Center for Experimental Art and Architecture through October 17, 2008

Born in Beirut of Armenian heritage, with his degrees in Physics and English Literature from UCLA and a degree in Geophysics from UC Berkley, by day Ara Oshagan is a geophysicist and at other times an accomplished documentary photographer. Scion of Armenian poets, writers and educators, Oshagan is also an avowed novelist manqué who uses photography to narrate his community’s stories—or in the case of “Identity and Community”—interwoven Armenian and Ethiopian narratives. With “three skeletons of novels in my head,” nearly a decade ago he began taking photography to a higher level and has held several solo and group exhibits.

Doris BittarDoris Bittar was born in Baghdad, Iraq of Lebanese parentage and her early childhood was spent in the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon. Her memories of Lebanon are rich with pattern, from Oriental rugs to her mother's embroidery. Her family immigrated to New York where eventually she studied Fine Arts. In the United States, Bittar's observations both coincided and clashed with the portrayal of the "exotic Orient" and the various images of Arabs, Jews and Europeans. The cross-pollination between these cultures has created a hybridized tangle of perception that is played out in her paintings. Her multi-media artworks combine specific cultural narratives, Islamic patterns, Arabic calligraphy and intertwine them with European and Western cultural traditions.

The Syrian Bride: your purchase benefits LCC programmingEran Riklis' "The Syrian Bride" is another instance of the film renaissance in Israel among both Jewish and Arab filmmakers, along with "Paradise Now," Simone Bitton's documentary "Wall"—which laconically surveys the enigmatic and vastly expensive security barrier built around Israel (largely by Arab laborers)—the director herself insists on identifying as both Jew and Arab; and Danae Elon's documentary "Another Road Home."

Andrew O'Hehir, writing in Salon.com, called "The Syrian Bride" an "extraordinary social comedy." He goes on:

"If you sit through 'The Syrian Bride' without reading the subtitles or knowing the languages spoken—those being, let's see, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and some bits of English and French—you might think it was a brisk, well-made example of the kind of rural domestic comedy that's been cooked up all over the world for generations. A beautiful girl is getting married in her beautiful white dress, and if you mess with her you will pay. Her father is a crusty character, in trouble with the local pooh-bahs. Her older sister is a budding feminist —make that a full-fledged one—stuck in a bad marriage. One brother is a rake, a playboy and an operator, while the other is an outcast with a foreign wife who hasn't come home for many years. Obviously the wedding day is going to bring all these people together and iron out their political and cultural wrinkles in time for a Kleenex conclusion, right?