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The singer sings of endless love and passion. She wears a crimson evening dress and her hair is up, and she calls her lover with searing passion, on a night of inexhaustible longing, and begs the sun not to rise in the morning.
The singer in the 1969 video was Umm Kulthum: the best singer of the twentieth century in the Arab world, and perhaps the most famous Egyptian woman since Queen Cleopatra, and she is the star of the “Sparkling Women” exhibition. at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
The exhibition, which runs until September 26, is a quick pictorial return to the period between the 1920s and 1970s. It depicts veiled women, with a fiery and frank passion, exercising their fine arts on stage and in the screen without fear of censorship or condemnation, with feminists, political activists and art pioneers facing the coercive tyranny of patriarchy.
Along with costumes, jewelry, passports, posters, album covers and high heel shoes, visitors also see photos of famous female artists and performers making glamorous moves and posing on the beach in gorgeous outfits. The bigger picture then contrasts sharply with current Western perceptions of the Arab world as a place where women wear head-to-toe headscarves and are silently subject to the influence of powerful men.
Ms. Elodie Boufar, co-curator of the exhibition, declares: “The exhibition stands out from many prejudices and prejudices about this part of the world. Indeed, women are in the foreground, embodying modernity, and have never been absent from the course of history. They sang, acted, made cry, fascinated the hearts of the masses and lived their lives in freedom, just like Western actresses at the time.
“These images are still very fresh in the minds of the younger generations, because they are not only representative of the past,” added Ms. Boufar.
Jack Lang, the director of the institute, who was the French Minister of Culture in the 1980s and early 1990s, said in an interview that when he was a boy visiting Cairo he turned snuck into a theater where Umm Kulthum was singing, and was completely stunned and moved by what he saw. Later, he heard about another Arab singer, Fairouz (the other great artist in the exhibition), while touring Lebanon as a young actress. He then awarded him a medal of Minister of Culture in 1988, he later said.
Lang stressed that these women were not only exceptional singers: some of them participated in the country’s struggle for independence from the great colonial powers of the time, Britain and France, and have joined the wave of nationalism that swept through the Arab world at the time. “The emergence of these brilliant female artists came almost simultaneously with the state of collective liberation that was in effect at that time, and the songs and music they sang were an exceptional expression of freedom,” Mr. Lang.
The exhibition opens its activities in Cairo before World War II, and it was the artistic and intellectual center of the Arab world, where concert halls and art theaters have flourished, many of which were founded by women. , according to the co-curator of the exhibition, Ms. Hana Boughanem. She added that women also played an important role in the film industry, as they worked as “directors, producers, actresses, seamstresses and in search of new talent.”
Many of these women came from very low social backgrounds, including Ms. Umm Kulthum, who appears inside a secure velvet container in the gallery. And because she was born in a village in the Nile Delta, she performed her first songs disguised as a boy and sang religious songs that aroused the emotion of the masses. Eventually, she emerged in her true form, as a woman and as a voice, and rose to fame for her improvised singing style. His songs sometimes lasted over an hour.
The exhibition tells its story through photographs, album covers, magazine covers, video clips and colorful and bright costumes produced for the 2017 documentary film “Searching for Umm Kulthum”, directed by the artist and Iranian-born director Shirin Neshat.
Museum curators said there was no contribution from the Umm Kulthum Museum in Cairo, as things were very complicated and costly in terms of organization. There are also no contributions from Ms. Fairouz, who is still alive, despite requests made by the exhibition through the artist’s family and great acquaintances. Its section contains posters, album covers, magazines, photographs and other miscellaneous items, some of which were collected by an avid fan of Ms. Fairouz.
On the other hand, the section devoted to the half-Algerian, half-Lebanese artist, Warda, is filled with his personal effects: sunglasses, medals, earrings, passports, an oud, a brown leather bag and a novel by Agatha Christie. Mrs Warda was born in a suburb of Paris, and her first artistic appearance was as a young girl in the artistic theater owned by her father in the Latin Quarter of the city, then she became a successful artist for lyrical records, before to move to Algeria in 1962. The year his country gained independence from France. There she married an army officer who prevented her from singing. Then I moved to Egypt a decade later.
The exhibition is still accelerating as it culminates in the latest wave of Arab women artists of the twentieth century, including the Egyptian-born artist Dalida, who has become a famous star in France. Video screens in the exhibit intersect, showing a glamorous woman singing in a hot tub, then rows of dancers raising their legs in dazzling performances in shiny clothes worthy of viewing in the finest theaters of French art such as the Folly Berger.
In the decades that followed, the reality of singers and artists in Arab countries changed. Islamist movements and migration from rural areas have prompted parts of society to adopt more conservative attitudes regarding women’s clothing and general behavior. This has led to assumptions in the West that Arab women are subject to the veil and coercive restrictions in the present day, as opposed to the decades when glamorous female performers were full of hearing and sight.
For Colin Husses, author of Music of the Arab World: An Anthology of 100 Female Artists, perceptions of the past versus the present, which the exhibition was likely to encourage, were more misleading than they seemed.
In an interview, Ms Hosses said: “There are two visions of the Arab world. The first: they are barbarians, and Islamists. The other vision is that everything was fine in the past, it was a golden age in everything.
She also said, “The development of the Arab world is subject to the measurement of extreme Western criteria, such as whether Arab women smoke or not, or whether they wear short skirts or not. But there are more important factors related to equality: the number of working women, the civil rights of women, etc.
Despite the Corona virus outbreak, the exhibition was well received by visitors to Parisian museums, and visitors to the exhibition seemed to support Ms Husses’ point of view. One afternoon, spectators seemed fascinated by the story of yesterday’s starlets, who shattered the contemporary stereotype of the Muslim woman in France.
“It’s really interesting to discover the emancipation of women in these societies, and to see the contrast with what is happening today, even in terms of hairdressing”, explains Camille Hurrell, 23, visitor of the exhibition. . These strong personalities were famous and known all over the world.
Then she added: “Right now I have the impression that there is no freedom of expression at the same level.
“The Arab world today is teeming with people under the age of 30, a generation immersed in social media, completely open to the world and leading their own revolutions against their families and communities,” says Hosses.
The New York Times Service
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