A morning in Sharjah

10.30am: House Of Wisdom, "Gateway to the Metaverse"

1st non-fungible tokens (NFT) art exhibition on the metaverse featuring international and local artists from the UAE engaged in the digital and crypto art world.

The exhibition is curated by Stefano Favaretto, co-founder of Global Art Exhibition, a multidisciplinary global project connecting talents, along with the Morrow collective, an NFT curatorial platform in the UAE.

The tour will be led by Dr Nina Heydemann and Anna Seaman

11.30am: Maraya Art Center: "Finer: A thread … in the swell of wandering words"

Inspired by a line from the poem written by the German-Romanian Paul Celan in 1955, as a response to experiencing the atrocities of World War II, Cristiana de Marchi’s exhibition takes the poem as a starting point to address both – creation and destruction and the many nuances of their interplay with each other.

Cristiana de Marchi (b. Italy) is a visual artist and writer who lives and works in Beirut and Dubai. Cristiana works with video and textiles as her privileged medium to explore issues related to identity, displacement, belonging and the porous borders that separate regions, while allowing contact.

The tour will be led by the curator Cima Azzam with an introduction by the Director of Maraya Art Centre, Dr Nina Heydemann, in the presence of the artist. 

1pm: Sharjah Art Museum, Aref El Rayess

Aref El Rayyess’ first major institutional exhibition to date, featuring more than five decades of his work (1928 – 2005)

The exhibition includes a wide range of painting, drawing, sculpture and collage that together reveal the rich and complex artistic practice of this important Arab modernist.

A restless traveller, the artist captured the essence of the world around him in a body of work that is anchored in his deep inner-self. While much of his work reflects the political struggles of his time, the artist was also an active member of the engaged Lebanese art community, teaching, writing, organising and participating in conferences and exhibitions on politics and arts in the Arab World.