Saudi Royal Institute of Traditional Arts Welcomes Pilgrims with Giftshttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5031235-saudi-royal-institute-traditional-arts-welcomes-pilgrims-gifts
Saudi Royal Institute of Traditional Arts Welcomes Pilgrims with Gifts
The Royal Institute of Traditional Arts distributed special gifts to pilgrims. SPA
The Royal Institute of Traditional Arts has played a key role in this year's Hajj season, continuing its mission to promote Saudi Arabia's rich artistic heritage, in line with the Kingdom's commitment to serving pilgrims, The Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported on Saturday.
The institute distributed special gifts to pilgrims, prayer rugs adorned with traditional Saudi artistic engravings from across the Kingdom, including those found on Najdi doors, Rawashin, Sadu textiles, and Al-Qatt Al-Asiri decorations, which are testimony to the remarkable depth of Saudi culture and highlight the unique character of Saudi art forms, SPA said.
Each prayer rug comes with a tri-lingual welcome card (Arabic, English, and Urdu) – a thoughtful effort by the institute to introduce pilgrims to Saudi culture and its treasured traditional arts, the news agency added.
‘Life Through a Royal Lens’ Exhibition Showcases British Royal Photographyhttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5262104-%E2%80%98life-through-royal-lens%E2%80%99-exhibition-showcases-british-royal-photography
‘Life Through a Royal Lens’ Exhibition Showcases British Royal Photography
“Life Through a Royal Lens” runs until June 7. (Kensington Palace)
A photography exhibition showcasing more than 100 photographs taken of and by the British Royal Family is on tour following its launch at Kensington Palace.
The “Life Through a Royal Lens” exhibition explores the enduring relationship between the Crown and the camera over 200 years.
It was first launched at Kensington Palace and is now on tour, starting at The Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells, according to the BBC.
Jeremy Kimmel, arts, heritage and engagement director at The Amelia Scott, said: “Royal Tunbridge Wells has been shaped by centuries of royal connections, from the first royal visit in the early 1600s to what was then just woodland, to becoming the favorite summer retreat of Princess Victoria.”
He said “Life Through a Royal Lens” was not just about royalty.
“The images reflect moments of national identity, cultural change, and shared experience,” said Kimmel.
The royal family are one of the most photographed families in the world and the exhibition captures state ceremonies and royal tours as well as personal images which share a glimpse of life behind the scenes.
It also features the last public photograph taken of Elizabeth II taken on 6 September 2022, just two days before she died at the age of 96.
Kimmel said: “It was taken at Balmoral Castle before the historic 'kissing of hands' ceremony in which she publicly appointed her 15th British Prime Minister, Liz Truss.”
The public can also view portraits and press photographs from the first three years of King Charles III and Queen Camilla's reign.
The exhibition was created by Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that cares for Kensington Palace.
Eleri Lynn, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, said the display of images spanning 300 years of family photoshoots, commissioned portraiture and official engagements would embark on a tour planned to span the UK.
“We are thrilled that visitors to ‘Life Through a Royal Lens’ at The Amelia Scott will be able to explore the history behind the iconic image of modern monarchy we know today,” she added.
“Life Through a Royal Lens” runs until June 7.
French Lawmakers Pass Bill Simplifying Return of Colonial-era Arthttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5262093-french-lawmakers-pass-bill-simplifying-return-colonial-era-art
French Lawmakers Pass Bill Simplifying Return of Colonial-era Art
People sit at a bistro, enjoying the sun in Paris, Thursday, April 9, 2026.(AP Photo/Michel Euler)
French lawmakers on Monday passed a bill to simplify the return of artworks looted during the colonial era to their countries of origin, AFP reported.
France still has in its possession tens of thousands of artworks and other prized artefacts that it looted from its colonial empire.
The draft legislation to return them was unanimously approved by the lower house National Assembly late on Monday.
The upper house had unanimously passed the measure in January.
President Emmanuel Macron has made it a political promise to return the cultural items, and has gone further than his predecessors in admitting past French abuses in Africa.
Speaking on a visit to the Burkina Faso capital Ouagadougou shortly after taking office in 2017, Macron vowed that France would never again interfere in its former colonies and promised to facilitate the return of African cultural heritage within five years.
Designed to streamline the process, Monday's bill specifically targets property acquired between 1815 and 1972.
Former colonial powers in Europe have slowly been moving to send back some artworks obtained during their imperial conquests -- but France is hindered by its current legislation, which requires every item in the national collection to be voted on individually.
France has been flooded with restitution demands, including from Algeria, Mali and Benin.
A Novel Makes a Star Out of a Very Young Writerhttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5262077-novel-makes-star-out-very-young-writer
The book spent 29 weeks on the German best-seller list. Photo: The New York Times
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A Novel Makes a Star Out of a Very Young Writer
The book spent 29 weeks on the German best-seller list. Photo: The New York Times
By Thomas Rogers
The 22-year-old Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann has strange memories of visiting his family’s old properties when he was a child. Although he grew up middle-class in Zurich, his father was the descendant of an aristocratic family in Hungary that had, at one point, sold jewelry to royalty, but whose holdings were later seized by the communist regime.
“We would always travel to the castles that used to belong to us,” Biedermann recalled in a recent interview, describing them as “fairy-tale-like.” One property had been turned into a psychiatric institution whose walls were decorated with pictures of his ancestors. “The people there knew who we were,” he said. “I couldn’t identity with that.”
The experience helped inspire Biedermann to begin writing “Lázár,” his novel about an aristocratic family, when he was still a teenager. Published in Germany in September, the book earned a slew of rave reviews (“epic, tragic and traumatic, stormy, wistful and very romantic,” wrote a critic for Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the country’s biggest daily newspapers).
It spent 29 weeks on the German best-seller list, turning its (shockingly) young author into a literary star overnight and drawing comparisons to “Buddenbrooks,” Thomas Mann’s 1901 family epic. Summit Books is publishing it in English on Tuesday.
Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann. Photo: The New York Times
Since the fall, the German news media has seemed obsessed with the question of how a teen could write a sweeping, traditional historical novel. “Most people expect a young person’s first book to be about their own life,” Biedermann said, sipping an herbal tea in a cafe in central Zurich. “But even if you discount my age, people found it interesting that the book is stylistically, linguistically old-fashioned.”
Lanky and soft-spoken, with a thin mustache and the kind of floppy haircut popular among Gen Z Swiss men, he is unswervingly modest in conversation. He said he began writing fiction when he was quarantined during the pandemic and his high school organized a writing competition about “ends of the world.”
The result, a short story about a suicidal youth, won him the top prize and 200 francs, or approximately $250. “It was a lot of money,” he said, adding that it led him to consider more ambitious fiction-writing projects.
Like “Buddenbrooks,” his novel follows multiple generations of a single family, the titular von Lázárs, who navigate tumultuous events in Hungary between 1900 and 1956. It begins on a rural estate, with the birth of Lajos, a boy with “translucent” skin, to a baron named Sándor and his wife, Mária. Their lives, along with those of Lajos’ children, Pista and Eva, are ultimately upended by the two world wars, the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and communist repression.
The book’s historical scope and occasionally mystical tone — Lajos’ translucent skin aside, the family’s estate is located next to a seemingly magical forest that swallows up family members and seems to conjure ghosts — have led readers to compare it not only to Mann and Joseph Roth’s “Radetzky March” but Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
The elements of magical realism allowed Biedermann more freedom to fictionalize true events. “My first attempts were too close to the reality,” he said. “I felt guilty, because I was asking myself if I’m even allowed to change the family history,” he added, explaining that the mystical tone gave him the necessary distance to “write what I wanted.”
Tom Tykwer, the director of “Run Lola Run” and co-creator of the television series “Babylon Berlin,” plans to adapt the book into a movie. In a statement announcing the adaptation, he described it as a “book that drives us through the tides of life — and love — and makes us happy in a disturbingly intense way.”
In an interview, Adam Soboczynski, the literature editor at the German newspaper Die Zeit, said that the hype around the book had emerged partly because of the contrast between Biedermann’s age and the novel’s “great breadth and historical perspective.”
He argued that family novels like “Lázár” are especially popular in Germany “precisely because so many families here have, for many reasons, been shattered or incriminated by the war.” The book, he pointed out, partly deals with two periods that remain especially central to German identity: Nazism and Stalinism.
The tumultuous, early 20th-century setting, he said, might also have appealed to a German readership eager to find some parallels to the current era of European instability. “Though it also might have appealed to readers who want to escape from our weird times into an earlier age,” he said. “These two things are not necessarily contradictory.”
The New York Times
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