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Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Kicks Off with 718 Works, 231 Artists

Director of Cultural Affairs at the Department of Culture in Sharjah and director of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Mohammed al-Qaseer
Director of Cultural Affairs at the Department of Culture in Sharjah and director of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Mohammed al-Qaseer
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Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Kicks Off with 718 Works, 231 Artists

Director of Cultural Affairs at the Department of Culture in Sharjah and director of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Mohammed al-Qaseer
Director of Cultural Affairs at the Department of Culture in Sharjah and director of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial Mohammed al-Qaseer

The 10th edition of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial has kicked off. It various events are held in the Calligraphy Square in the heart of Sharjah, the Sharjah Arts Museum, the House of Wisdom, and the Sharjah University.

The event runs until November 30.

Mohammed al-Qaseer, director of Cultural Affairs at the Department of Culture in Sharjah and director of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial, revealed the details of the Biennial’s 10th edition held under the patronage of Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, ruler of the Emirate of Sharjah and member of the Federal Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates, with the participation of 718 works and 213 artists from around the world.

The event also sponsors 219 activities including exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and symposiums hosted by the culture department in collaboration with over 20 associations in Sharjah.

The announcement was made during a press event held at the culture department, attended by Abdullah Al-Owais, chair of the Sharjah Department of Culture, participating artists, and media personalities from around the world.

In his keynote, al-Qaseer said the Biennial “lay the foundations for calligraphy. The 10th edition is a global event held in Sharjah, which has become an artistic and cultural hub for many creatives around the world,” adding that “under the theme ‘Progress’, the Biennial is looking for new content and renewed creative proposals.

The theme refers to the progress of idea first, then the consistency of performance. Every artistic work starts with an idea and ends with an arrangement that was prepared with professional performance and mastery. This is why artists from around the world familiarize the spirit of the Arabic calligraphy, and each one of them uses their own judgement, culture, and approach of this aesthetic, cultural, and historic heritage.”

Al-Qaseer promised the audience 219 activities including exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and symposiums hosted by the culture department in collaboration with over 20 associations in Sharjah.

The activities include 29 exhibitions held by 231 artists from 27 countries including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Canada, Türkiye, Jordan, India, Pakistan, Libya, Iran, Indonesia, Tunisia, Comoros, Japan, and Norway.

Within the two coming months, the artists will present over 718 works including arrangements, crafts, murals, and paintings featuring the authentic Arabic calligraphy, Islamic decoration, and modern and contemporary calligraphies. Artists and professors specialized in calligraphy, will participate in 156 workshops.

On the theoretical level, the Biennial will see 15 lectures that shed lights on the developments of the Arabic calligraphy, like “Progress of Emirati Art Again” by Khaled al-Jallaf, and “Characteristics of the Diwani School” by Ahmed Fathi. The event also includes a symposium themed “Arabic Calligraphy: Cities and History”.

The 10th edition of the Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial brings together 180 guests including media figures, lecturers, calligraphers, and workshop supervisor from different countries.

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Quite Dramatic End to a Planet Swallowed by its Host Star

An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
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Quite Dramatic End to a Planet Swallowed by its Host Star

An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS
An artist's concept shows a ring of hot gas left after a star consumed a planet, in this undated illustration. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)/Handout via REUTERS

In May 2020, astronomers for the first time observed a planet getting swallowed by its host star. Based on the data at the time, they believed the planet met its doom as the star puffed up late in its lifespan, becoming what is called a red giant.

New observations by the James Webb Space Telescope - sort of a postmortem examination - indicate that the planet's demise happened differently than initially thought, according to Reuters.

Instead of the star coming to the planet, it appears the planet came to the star, with disastrous consequences – a death plunge after an erosion of this alien world's orbit over time, researchers said.

The end was quite dramatic, as evidenced by the aftermath documented by Webb.

Reuters wrote that the orbiting telescope, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, observed hot gas likely forming a ring around the star following the event and an expanding cloud of cooler dust enveloping the scene.

“We do know that there is a good amount of material from the star that gets expelled as the planet goes through its death plunge. The after-the-fact evidence is this dusty leftover material that was ejected from the host star,” said astronomer Ryan Lau of the US National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The star is located in our Milky Way galaxy about 12,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Aquila.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). The star is slightly redder and less luminous than our sun and about 70% of its mass.

The planet is believed to have been from a class called “hot Jupiter’s” - gas giants at high temperatures owing to a tight orbit around their host star.

“We believe it probably had to be a giant planet, at least a few times the mass of Jupiter, to cause as dramatic of a disturbance to the star as what we are seeing,” said study co-author Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Jupiter is our solar system's largest planet.

The researchers believe that the planet's orbit had gradually deteriorated due to its gravitational interaction with the star, and hypothesized about what happened next.

“Then it starts grazing through the atmosphere of the star. At that point, the headwind of smashing through the stellar atmosphere takes over and the planet falls increasingly rapidly into the star,” MacLeod said.

“The planet both falls inward and gets stripped of its gaseous outer layers as it plows deeper into the star. Along the way, that smashing heats up and expels stellar gas, which gives rise to the light we see and the gas, dust and molecules that now surround the star,” MacLeod said.

But they cannot be certain of the actual fatal events.

“In this case, we saw how the plunge of the planet affected the star, but we don't truly know for certain what happened to the planet. In astronomy there are lots of things way too big and way too 'out there' to do experiments on. We can't go to the lab and smash a star and planet together - that would be diabolical. But we can try to reconstruct what happened in computer models,” MacLeod said.

None of our solar system's planets are close enough to the sun for their orbits to decay, as happened here. That does not mean that the sun will not eventually swallow any of them.

About five billion years from now, the sun is expected to expand outward in its red giant phase and could well engulf the innermost planets Mercury and Venus, and maybe even Earth. During this phase, a star blows off its outer layers, leaving just a core behind - a stellar remnant called a white dwarf.

Webb's new observations are giving clues about the planetary endgame.

“Our observations hint that maybe planets are more likely to meet their final fates by slowly spiraling in towards their host star instead of the star turning into a red giant to swallow them up. Our solar system seems to be relatively stable though, so we only have to worry about the sun becoming a red giant and swallowing us up,” Lau said.