The UK’s largest celebration of performing arts and culture from the Arab world has returned to London, with a focus on art from Palestine.
The festival staged the UK’s largest Palestinian theatre production to date at the Southbank Centre at the weekend.
Part dance, part theatre, MILK is a play focused on disaster, telling the story of women who have lost their children, focusing on the moments before and after the tragic events. It is directed by Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel of the Haifa-based Khashabi Ensemble.
And as with every edition of Shubbak festival – which takes place once every two years – uncertainty about whether the artists will make it to the UK is fuelled by growing visa restrictions. This year, the Khashabi Ensemble was held up due to closures at Ben Gurion Sirport after Houthi air strikes. Members ended up taking an alternative route through Jordan.
Artistic director Alia Alzougbi said the weight of the wars in Gaza and Sudan is hanging over this year's festival, which runs until mid-June. “This year was a particularly difficult one for us because we really have to ask ourselves what are festivals for, when a group of people is being erased, their heritage and culture is being erased,” she told The National.
She hopes to bridge the uncertainty by presenting a line of up of “artists as archivists, as dreamers who hold mirrors to the world as it is, and are so crucial to society. They can help us imagine how different the world would be. This festival stands squarely before our grief and rage and at the same time reflects on our hopes and dreams,” she said.
The festival opened on Friday with a fashion show showcasing clothing brands from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria at the Southbank Centre.
Designers selected by the fashion platform 3EIB include the Ramallah-based Nol Collective, Trashy Clothing and Nafs Space, and their collections were available in a pop-up at the centre’s foyer at the weekend.
The festival is no stranger to war and adversity, having launched in 2011, capturing the optimism generated by the Arab Spring, and subsequently serving as a platform for Syrian artists exiled by the ensuing civil war.
Al Zoghbi hopes to continue this legacy, and has incorporated three plays put on by the London-based PalArts Collective into its programme this year. Ahmed Masoud’s black comedy Application 39 imagines Gaza hosting the Olympics in the year 2048 and runs all of this week at Teatro Technis.
Other theatre productions include Koulounisation, by Franco-Algerian director and artist Salim Djaferi, which explores the language of colonisation that lingers in discussions of the Algerian war of Independence. The one-man performance at the Battersea Arts Centre is played by Djaferi and will bring together storytelling, theatre and visual arts.
The British-Lebanese DJ Saliah will present her first original live show, The Scene Between, at Village Underground as part of the festival’s collaboration with SXSW. The artist made her debut appearance at Glastonbury in 2022, and is known for blending old Arabic pop songs with contemporary dance music and hip-hop.
Beauty and identity will be explored through Talking Textures, a photography exhibition curated by Yasemin Hamdan at Coal Drops Yard from June 4 to 7. This will be followed by an Eid Souq organised by the festival, where skincare products such as traditional soaps, henna and kohl, as well as textiles and food, will be sold during the Eid weekend.
Two generations of artists will be presented through the works of Syrian-born painter and sculptor Issam Kourbaj, and Leicester-based painter Sarah Al Sarraj, whose recent collection explores Islamic astronomy and indigenous knowledge systems.
Sustainable Development Goals
1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere
2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture
3. Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages
4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls
6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all
8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all
9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
10. Reduce inequality within and among countries
11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable
12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns
13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its effects
14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development
Retirement funds heavily invested in equities at a risky time
Pension funds in growing economies in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East have a sharply higher percentage of assets parked in stocks, just at a time when trade tensions threaten to derail markets.
Retirement money managers in 14 geographies now allocate 40 per cent of their assets to equities, an 8 percentage-point climb over the past five years, according to a Mercer survey released last week that canvassed government, corporate and mandatory pension funds with almost $5 trillion in assets under management. That compares with about 25 per cent for pension funds in Europe.
The escalating trade spat between the US and China has heightened fears that stocks are ripe for a downturn. With tensions mounting and outcomes driven more by politics than economics, the S&P 500 Index will be on course for a “full-scale bear market” without Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts, Citigroup’s global macro strategy team said earlier this week.
The increased allocation to equities by growth-market pension funds has come at the expense of fixed-income investments, which declined 11 percentage points over the five years, according to the survey.
Hong Kong funds have the highest exposure to equities at 66 per cent, although that’s been relatively stable over the period. Japan’s equity allocation jumped 13 percentage points while South Korea’s increased 8 percentage points.
The money managers are also directing a higher portion of their funds to assets outside of their home countries. On average, foreign stocks now account for 49 per cent of respondents’ equity investments, 4 percentage points higher than five years ago, while foreign fixed-income exposure climbed 7 percentage points to 23 per cent. Funds in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Taiwan are among those seeking greater diversification in stocks and fixed income.
• Bloomberg
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ABU DHABI ORDER OF PLAY
Starting at 10am:
Daria Kasatkina v Qiang Wang
Veronika Kudermetova v Annet Kontaveit (10)
Maria Sakkari (9) v Anastasia Potapova
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova v Ons Jabeur (15)
Donna Vekic (16) v Bernarda Pera
Ekaterina Alexandrova v Zarina Diyas
ABU DHABI ORDER OF PLAY
Starting at 10am:
Daria Kasatkina v Qiang Wang
Veronika Kudermetova v Annet Kontaveit (10)
Maria Sakkari (9) v Anastasia Potapova
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova v Ons Jabeur (15)
Donna Vekic (16) v Bernarda Pera
Ekaterina Alexandrova v Zarina Diyas
