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The Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris salutes the women of song and screen who revolutionized Arab music and cinema, from Umm Kulthum and Fairouz, to the legendary Dalida, through an exhibition entitled “Diva”.
“The idea is to present exceptional personalities who revolutionized music and cinema in the golden age of the Arab world, such as Umm Kulthum, Fairouz, Warda and Asmahan – their dreams.”
The “Diva” exhibition will run until September 26 and includes posters, costumes for the stars, clips from their massive concerts, recreated models from some literary salons and holograms.
The exhibition devoted an important aspect to Umm Kulthum. The singer, who has been dubbed the “Fourth Pyramid” and is considered the most famous voice in the Arab world, is not just an Egyptian gem. When she died in 1975, crowds of people attended her funeral in Cairo, but grief for her spread from Baghdad to Casablanca. The whole Arab world listened to his concerts on the first Thursday of every month on Cairo radio.
political influence
The stars presented in the exhibition had a political influence, “Umm Kulthum was the embodiment of Arabism” during the time of the late Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, while “Warda, through his songs, carried the cause. of the decolonization of Algeria, the Lebanese Fairuz hoisted the banner of the Palestinian cause, and Asmahan (a Druze princess) collaborated) with the Allies during World War II, ”according to Hannah Boghanem.
If Umm Kulthum united the whole Arab world, Fayrouz also made agree “all the Lebanese”, according to what the musician Ibrahim Maalouf declared in a recent documentary entitled “Diva”. The “Lebanese ambassador in the stars” has been a rare factor of national unity in a country which has not yet recovered from the divisions that have torn it apart.
Fayrouz is the only one still alive among the stars presented in the exhibition, and she is now 86 years old.
The singer, known to steer clear of the media spotlight except for coverage of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to his home in late August 2020, did not respond to requests from exhibition organizers , which they regret. .
“Warda Al Jazairia” was also one of the stars freed from societal restrictions. In 1972, she returned to the stage to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Algeria’s independence after having stopped singing at the request of her husband, an army officer. Then she divorced to end her artistic career, which began at the age of eleven in her father’s nightclub “Tam Tam” in Paris, and returned to Egypt, where she also entered the world of cinema.
Lovers, alcohol and poker
There is also space for Asmahan, whose short life resembled a novel, with scandals related to her lovers, alcohol, poker, etc., and her stardom career behind the microphone and on screen. , not to mention his espionage for allies.
She died prematurely when she was only twenty-seven, in still mysterious circumstances, as her car was found in the Nile …
Among the other notable women that the exhibition addresses is the Egyptian Samia Gamal, who played Dalida as her rival for her husband in the film “A Cigarette and a Cup” (1954), in the middle of a production. flourishing cinematic that attended Cairo, which was “the Hollywood of the East”.
Hana Boughanem said that awarding a pavilion to Dalida at the exhibition would attract the large French public, “who do not know all these Arab stars to the same degree”.
She added: “We wanted to present her in her Egyptian context, from the film ‘1954’ to the drama film ‘The Sixth Day’, in which she starred under the direction of Youssef Chahine in 1986, a year before her death.
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