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Sotheby’s Auction to Showcase More Than 100 Works From Middle East

Mahmoud Mokhtar's On the banks of the Nile - AAWSAT AR
Mahmoud Mokhtar's On the banks of the Nile - AAWSAT AR
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Sotheby’s Auction to Showcase More Than 100 Works From Middle East

Mahmoud Mokhtar's On the banks of the Nile - AAWSAT AR
Mahmoud Mokhtar's On the banks of the Nile - AAWSAT AR

More than 100 works of Middle Eastern art will go on sale as part of Sotheby’s upcoming 20th Century Art / Middle East online auction.

The auction includes a selection of Palestinian artworks, demonstrating the depth and of the Palestinian art scene and collective artistic discourse.

Among the most prominent of these works is Ismail Shammout’s 1972 Crucifixion, which reflects his interpretation and experience of Palestinian history. Another piece is Laila Shawa’s the Souk in Gaza, from her first solo exhibition, held in Gaza in 1965. Known for their bold colors, storytelling and depicting women in Arab society, Shawa’s early works are considered expressions of nostalgia.

For the first time, Ibrahim Noubani and Nabil Anani, among the leading figures of the contemporary art movement, take part in the auction this year.

From the Emirates, the auction includes a conceptual piece by Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim. The Sharjah Art Foundation hosted a retrospective exhibition for the artist in 2018, and he was chosen to represent the UAE at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. The auction also includes his piece Bouquet, a 2018 cardboard sculpture.

The Moroccan modernist pioneer Mohamed Melehi’s work blends a vibrant postmodern aesthetic with Moroccan Berber crafts’ cultural richness. An internationally acclaimed painting by the artist set a new record at the auction where it was sold for £399,000 as part of a Sotheby’s online auction in March. Melehi’s work is currently on display at two exhibitions, the Alserkal Avenue in Dubai and the Cromwell Place in London.

Huguette Caland, considered among Lebanon’s most influential female figures, also features her work. Her jejune impressionist works are brimming with her appetite for life and adventure. Believed to the only daughter of Bechara El Khoury, the first president of Lebanon after it gained its independence, her bold character is nonetheless captured in her work, which explores the delicate balance between the suggestive and explicit and traditionalism’s challenges to beauty and desire.

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Varieties

119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
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119-year-old Brazilian Woman Stakes Claim as World's Oldest Person

Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes
Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, 119, sits in her house in Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes

Two months away from what she says is her 120th birthday, Deolira Gliceria Pedro da Silva, a great-grandmother from the state of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil is rushing to be recognized as the world’s oldest living person by the Guinness World Records.

The institution currently features another Brazilian, Inah Canabarro Lucas, a nun from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul as the oldest living person at 116 years, but Deolira’s family and doctors are confident that she will soon take the religious woman’s title.

“She is still not in the book, but she is the oldest in the world according to the documents we have on her, as I recently discovered,” said Deolira’s granddaughter Doroteia Ferreira da Silva, who is half her age, Reuters reported.

The documents show that Pedro da Silva was born on March 10th 1905 in the rural area of Porciuncula, a small town in the state of Rio. She now lives in a colorfully painted house in Itaperuna, where her two granddaughters Doroteia, 60, and Leida Ferreira da Silva, 64, take care of her.

The grandmother is also supervised by doctors and researchers who are interested in how she outlived the average life expectancy in Brazil, which currently sits at 76.4 years, by more than four decades.

“Mrs. Deolira, in 2025, will be 120 years old. She is in a good general state of health for her condition, she is not taking any medication,” said geriatric doctor Juair de Abreu Pereira, who checks up on Pedro da Silva frequently and is assisting her family in the process with Guinness World Records.

In a statement, Guinness said it couldn't confirm receiving Pedro da Silva's application, because it receives many from people around the world who claim to be the oldest living person.

Major floods in the region almost twenty years ago destroyed most of Deolira’s original documents, her doctor said. That may pose a challenge for the official recognition of her age.

Even if her age is not precise, Pedro da Silva is certainly older than 100 years, according to Mateus Vidigal, a researcher at the University of Sao Paulo who has studied her case as part of a project to understand the super elderly population of Brazil.

“Mrs. Deolira has not been excluded from the study, but there is this fragility which is the lack of documentation that is approved by those organizations,” Vidigal said, referring to vetting institutions such as the Guinness World Records.

Pedro Silva’s healthy diet and sleeping habits are key to her longevity, according to Dr. Pereira. To this day, she has a good interaction with her family and likes eating bananas.

“I wish I could get to her age and be like that,” Ferreira da Silva, her granddaughter, said. “While we have high blood pressure and diabetes, she does not have any of that.”