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Art Works that Redefine Arts and Light at Noor Riyadh Festival

Saudi artist Lulwa Al-Homoud
Saudi artist Lulwa Al-Homoud
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Art Works that Redefine Arts and Light at Noor Riyadh Festival

Saudi artist Lulwa Al-Homoud
Saudi artist Lulwa Al-Homoud

Noor Riyadh festival, which is held in 13 locations in the Saudi capital, aspires to send a message of hope and promote environmental sustainability to the people of Riyadh.

Twenty-six major artists from more than 20 countries across the globe- 40 percent of them Saudis- will participate in the lighting festival on Thursday, which is scheduled to run for 17 days.

Among the names taking part in the festival are the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren and the two Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Germany's Carsten Holler, as well as Yayoi Kusama and Dan Flavin will also be part of the festival.

Rashed Al-Shashai, Lulwah Al-Homoud, Ahmed Mater, Ayman Al-Zedani, Maha Malluh, Dana Awartani, Marwah Al-Mugait, Ali Al-Razza'a, Sultan bin Fahad and Talal Al-Zeid are among the Saudi names that will take part in the festival.

Additionally, the work of the late artist Muhammad Al-Salim, a pioneer in plastic art, will be on display in the exhibition.

Al-Shashai, whose artwork is known to highlight the human existence and the functions of society, told Asharq Al-Awsat about his artwork that will be on display at the festival.

"My work will be under the theme Searching for Darkness."

Al-Zedani pointed out to Asharq Al-Awsat that the festival will be a platform for global cultural exchange, making it a fertile environment for cooperation, learning and entertainment.

He explained that his work is a film under the theme "Earthseed," a three-channel installation video commissioned by the Royal Commission for Riyadh. The short film blends real science and futuristic science fiction to speak about the effects of climate change on the region.

Al-Homoud is proud of taking part in the festival alongside an array of artists from the Kingdom and the world. She indicated that working on her piece has been a new experience, as it is an interactive mobile piece that allows viewers to exist in a world of lines and abstract shapes whose movement resembles that of the universe. An animation displayed on a circular screen, the idea is based on language and the relationship between the finite and the infinite, as it starts from a single point and moves to meanings and ideas without limits.

Malluh submitted a series or group of photographs, "Capturing Light", and she tells Asharq Al-Awsat: "Since I started working with traditional black and white photography, and over the years, I became very interested in the relationship between light and shadow, and the lack of possibilities and places in my city. I built a darkroom for development in order to develop and print my own photos. For me, it was the only way to control both the quality and content, which are the most important qualities in the production of fine art. My fascination with photography grew and developed through my interest in combining collage and photography."

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Varieties

Australia Races to Shield Little Penguins from H5N1 Bird Flu

This handout photo taken on August 13, 2024 and released by Phillip Island Nature Parks on August 20, 2026 shows tourists watching the "Penguin Parade" at Phillip Island Nature Parks in Victoria. (Photo by Handout / Phillip Island Nature Parks / AFP)
This handout photo taken on August 13, 2024 and released by Phillip Island Nature Parks on August 20, 2026 shows tourists watching the "Penguin Parade" at Phillip Island Nature Parks in Victoria. (Photo by Handout / Phillip Island Nature Parks / AFP)
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Australia Races to Shield Little Penguins from H5N1 Bird Flu

This handout photo taken on August 13, 2024 and released by Phillip Island Nature Parks on August 20, 2026 shows tourists watching the "Penguin Parade" at Phillip Island Nature Parks in Victoria. (Photo by Handout / Phillip Island Nature Parks / AFP)
This handout photo taken on August 13, 2024 and released by Phillip Island Nature Parks on August 20, 2026 shows tourists watching the "Penguin Parade" at Phillip Island Nature Parks in Victoria. (Photo by Handout / Phillip Island Nature Parks / AFP)

Australian wildlife workers have launched an unprecedented effort to vaccinate wild populations of little penguins against the highly contagious H5N1 avian influenza.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists a year flock to viewing areas and boardwalks to watch the diminutive sea birds waddle ashore and along the beach in the evenings on the eastern coast's Phillip Island.

The stars of this "penguin parade" are from a wild colony on the island, numbering up to 40,000 seabirds at the height of the breeding season in the southern hemisphere's spring and summer.

It is the world's biggest single colony of little penguins, which have a life span of about six years with habitats in southern Australia -- mostly Tasmania -- and New Zealand.

Also known as fairy penguins, they are the tiniest species of the semi-aquatic sea birds, barely reaching knee height and weighing about the same as a standard bag of sugar.

Now, like the rest of Australia's wild bird population, they face the threat of H5N1, which breached the continental landmass for the first time in June and has since started to spread in local wildlife.

The virus was detected this month in a Phillip Island penguin that had died, the first infection in the colony by a pathogen that has caused severe disease and death in birds worldwide.

In response, wildlife teams started to vaccinate birds in the colony this week, said James Todd, chief biodiversity officer for the state of Victoria in which the island lies.

"This is unprecedented. There has been no vaccination of this scale in a wild population anywhere in the world," Todd said.

The H5N1 vaccination program, which also covers a popular little penguin population at a breakwater in the Melbourne beach suburb of St Kilda, is a challenge, he said.

"Trying to vaccinate wild populations is almost impossible, partly because you need two doses of the vaccine," Todd told AFP.

But wildlife experts are very familiar with the little penguins' burrows at Phillip Island and St Kilda, he said.

The birds, in turn, are accustomed to floodlights for the "penguin parade" tourist attraction, as well as being periodically handled by veterinarian scientists for monitoring of their health.

Vaccination teams aim to inoculate about 5,000 little penguins closest to the visitor areas, the state official said, in a program that is likely to last weeks and months, not days.

Ideally, the H5N1 vaccine should be administered in two doses with a gap of three-to-four weeks, Todd said.

"Given that we're in a bit of a state of urgency here, experts have said that it's okay to even think about you know one to two weeks," he said, though a final decision had yet to be taken.

Vaccination teams can pick up the penguins from their burrows and may try to corral some as they come ashore on the beach, using microchips to track those that have been given a shot, Todd said.

"They're wild animals -- they'll squawk and try to, you know, peck you, and do all that sort of stuff -- but as I said, the team down there are very used to handling these animals," he explained.

"If you and I were doing it, we'd probably drop the thing straight away."

Varieties

Fastest-known Star Zooms Under Milky Way Black Hole's Influence

Black holes are extremely dense objects with such strong gravity that light cannot escape them (Reuters)
Black holes are extremely dense objects with such strong gravity that light cannot escape them (Reuters)
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Fastest-known Star Zooms Under Milky Way Black Hole's Influence

Black holes are extremely dense objects with such strong gravity that light cannot escape them (Reuters)
Black holes are extremely dense objects with such strong gravity that light cannot escape them (Reuters)

Scientists have detected the fastest-known star, a stellar speedster that is zooming around the supermassive black hole residing at the center of our galaxy and might hold the key to measuring the spin of this celestial beast for the first time.

The star, around 50% more massive and five times brighter than our sun, travels at speeds up to about 56 million miles (90 million km) per hour as it orbits the Milky Way's central black hole — named Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. That is more than 8% the speed of light. No other star in our galaxy or elsewhere has ever been clocked at that speed.

The star, named S301, is traveling in a highly elliptical path around Sgr A*, taking about 8.7 years to complete an orbit. Its closest approach to the black hole is about 11.5 times Earth's orbital distance from the sun, a metric called an astronomical unit. That means the star's nearest pass is somewhat more than the planet Saturn's ⁠orbital distance from ⁠the sun. But at its farthest, S301 is about 1,360 astronomical units from Sgr A*, Reuters reported.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. Sgr A* possesses about 4 million times the sun's mass and is located about 26,000 light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

While Sgr A* presently is in a quiescent state, its gravitational pull is considerable — meaning it could gulp down stars or other material straying too close. But the researchers said S301 should remain safe from the black hole's wrath.

"Its orbit will not decay ⁠anytime soon. So the orientation of the orbit will change, but it is not in danger of being swallowed," said astrophysicist Stefan Gillessen of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, one of the leaders of the research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

No other star is known to orbit as close to Sgr A* as this one. So how did S301 end up with this crazy orbit?

Gillessen said it appears that S301 originally was part of a two-star system called a binary, gravitationally bound to a stellar partner. But the two stars at some point ventured too close to the black hole while traveling through space, and the subsequent three-way gravitational interaction wreaked havoc.

"One star shoots out from the center of the Milky Way traveling at high speed and even leaving the galaxy. The other star is stuck forever on an orbit close to the black hole. That is S301," Gillessen said.

The researchers observed S301 using the ⁠European Southern Observatory's Chile-based Very Large ⁠Telescope Interferometer. The continuing influence that Sgr A* exerts on S301 during its orbit may enable scientists to better understand the black hole, including possibly measuring its spin.

"Currently, there is very little that we know about the rotation of Sgr A*," said study co-author Felix Mang, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

Black holes are believed to rotate, so much so that they twist the very fabric of space and time around them. But confirming this spin is difficult because black holes do not emit or reflect light, rendering them invisible.

"We only can see their rotation by seeing the effect on the space around them," Gillessen said.

The researchers said that the motion of S301 remains sensitive to Sgr A*.

"The star during its orbit comes so close to Sgr A* that it actually will feel the spin of Sgr A*," Gillessen said.

"It is not a wobble — like in back and forth — but rather the star gets pushed onto a slightly different orbit each time it passes the black hole. That means that by observing that change in orbit for another good decade, we should be able to directly determine the spin of the black hole. Such a measurement is unheard of, so far," Gillessen added.

Varieties

Queen Camilla Says it Was Difficult to Keep King Charles' Cancer Diagnosis Private

King Charles and Queen Camilla alongside their Coronation State Portraits at the National Gallery in London on May 6, 2025. (AFP)
King Charles and Queen Camilla alongside their Coronation State Portraits at the National Gallery in London on May 6, 2025. (AFP)
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Queen Camilla Says it Was Difficult to Keep King Charles' Cancer Diagnosis Private

King Charles and Queen Camilla alongside their Coronation State Portraits at the National Gallery in London on May 6, 2025. (AFP)
King Charles and Queen Camilla alongside their Coronation State Portraits at the National Gallery in London on May 6, 2025. (AFP)

Britain's Queen Camilla has spoken publicly for the first time about how hard it was to keep her husband King Charles' cancer diagnosis initially private.

Buckingham Palace revealed in February 2024 that the British monarch was undergoing treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer.

He is still receiving treatment but said last December than an early diagnosis and effective intervention meant this could be scaled back, according to Reuters.

A week before the palace made the announcement, Camilla visited a Maggie's cancer support center at a London hospital and in a video released on behalf of the ⁠charity on Wednesday, she said it had been hard not to talk about her husband's own illness.

“I remember coming to see a Maggie's just after the king being diagnosed. Nobody could say anything at the time, that was quite difficult,” Camilla told Laura Lee, the chief executive of Maggie's of which the queen is president.

“I almost said something but, you know, I felt that it wasn't the time to say, (I) looked at everybody who was suffering and all the relations, and I think it made me realize even more how important these ⁠places were.

“I was just longing to let it out but obviously I couldn't.”

In the film, produced to mark Maggie's 30th anniversary, Camilla spoke of looking after her “poor husband” and how he was determined to keep working.

“Look at my husband, nothing stopped him,” she said. “He just said, this is ⁠my way I'm going to cope with it.”

Maggie's has said that the revelation that Charles and his daughter-in-law Kate, the Princess of Wales, had undergone treatment for cancer and their willingness to speak ⁠publicly about coping with the illness had had a huge positive impact on fellow sufferers.

“The king's openness about his diagnosis has undoubtedly helped others to be more open themselves ⁠and to now hear the Queen's completely understandable and natural response as a wife, shines a light on why it is so important that family and friends also get the support they need,” Lee said.