Emirati artist Abdullah Al-Saadi to feature at 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale
Updated 05 October 2023
Arab News
DUBAI: Emirati artist Abdullah Al-Saadi will represent the UAE at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the La Biennale di Venezia, or the Venice Biennale, opening in April 2024.
Curated by Tarek Abou El-Fetouh, the solo exhibition marks the artist’s return to Venice following his participation at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2017.
Considered a key figure in the contemporary art scene in the UAE, Al-Saadi’s practice range includes painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, photography, collecting and cataloguing found objects, and the creation of new alphabets.
His work is informed by the UAE’s landscape and his family history, often exploring relationships between individuals and their natural and social environment.
“Abdullah’s practice has been, over the last 40 years, a continuous engagement with changing environments as well as personal and cultural histories, creating points where they meet and interweave,” said Abou El-Fetouh.
‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance
Updated 24 January 2026
(AFP)
PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.
In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.
The film is by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. (Supplied)
There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.
"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.
"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."
The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.
It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.
Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."
And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.
"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
