Month: April 2022

The 2022 Asian Games in China will go ahead, the Olympic Council of Malaysia said Saturday, denying claims that it was facing the possibility of being postponed.

The Olympic-sized event is scheduled to be held in September in Hangzhou, a major metropolitan area less than 200 kilometers southwest of Shanghai.

Shanghai is currently grappling with a major coronavirus emergency, with its roughly 25 million residents currently in a weeks-long lockdown as authorities try to curb an omicron-fueled wave.

An official working with governing body the Olympic Council of Asia, who did not want to be named, had told AFP on Thursday that no decision had been made but there was a possibility of postponement.

However, Olympic Council of Malaysia president Norza Zakaria disputed that.

“The Asian Games 2022 in China is going ahead,” he told AFP Saturday. “We have checked with OCA (the Olympic Council of Asia) and the organizing committee.”

Most international sports events have been on hold in China since the COVID-19 pandemic, although Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in a strict bio-bubble in February.

Right after the Olympics ended, Shanghai — China’s biggest city — witnessed the country’s worst COVID outbreak in two years, and its residents have largely been confined to their homes since early April.

All 56 competition venues for the Games in Hangzhou have already been completed, Chinese organizers said this month, promising to publish a virus control plan that takes its cue from the Winter Olympics.

Hangzhou is scheduled to hold the Games from Sept. 10-25, becoming the third Chinese host after Beijing in 1990 and Guangzhou in 2010. 
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For the first time in the 127-year history of the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art fair features a majority of female and gender non-conforming artists, under the curatorial direction of Cecilia Alemani.

The result is a Biennale that puts the spotlight on artists who have been long overlooked despite prolific careers, while also investigating themes including gender norms, colonialism and climate change.

Alemani’s main show, titled The Milk of Dreams, alongside 80 national pavilions opens Saturday after a one-year pandemic delay. The art fair runs through Nov. 27. It is only the fourth of the Biennale’s 59 editions under female curation.

The predominance of women among the more than 200 artists that Alemani chose for the main show “was not a choice, but a process,” Alemani, a New York-based Italian curator, said this week.

“I think some of the best artists today are women artists,” she told The Associated Press. “But also, let’s not forget, that in the long history of the Venice Biennale, the preponderance of male artists in previous editions has been astonishing.”

“Unfortunately, we still have not solved many issues that pertain to gender,” Alemani said.

Conceived during the coronavirus pandemic and opening as war rages in Europe, Alemani acknowledged that art in such times may seem “superficial.” But she also asserted the Biennale’s role over the decades as a “sort of seismographer of history … to absorb and record also the traumas and the crises that go well beyond the contemporary art world.”

In a potent reminder, the Russian pavilion remains locked this year, after the artists withdrew following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nearby, sandbags have been erected in the center of the Giardini by the curators of the Ukrainian Pavilion, and surrounded by stylized posters of fresh artwork by Ukrainian artists representing the horrors of the 2-month-old war.

Among the women getting long-overdue recognition this Biennale is U.S. sculptor Simone Leigh, who in mid-career is both headlining the U.S. pavilion and setting the tone at the main exhibit with a towering bust of a Black woman that Alemani originally commissioned for the High Line urban park in New York City.

Fusun Onur, a pioneer of conceptual art in Turkey, at age 85 has filled the Turkish pavilion with wiry cats and mice set up in storyboard tableaus that confront modern-day threats like the pandemic and climate change. While proud of her role representing Turkey and the work she produced during the pandemic in her home overlooking the Bosphorus, she acknowledged that the honor was late in coming.

“Why it is so I don’t know,” Fusan said by phone from Istanbul. “Women artists are working hard, but they are not always recognized. It is always men first.”

New Zealand is represented by third gender artist Yuki Kihara, whose installation Paradise Camp, tells the story of Samoa’s Fa’afafine community of people who don’t accept the gender they were assigned at birth.

The exhibition features photos of the Fa’afafine mimicking paintings of Pacific islanders by post-impressionist French artist Paul Gaugin, reclaiming the images in a process the artist refers to as “upcycling.”

“Paradise Camp is really about imagining a Fa’afafine utopia, where it shutters colonial hetero-normality to make way for an Indigenous world view that is inclusive and sensitive to the changes in the environment,” Kihara said.

The image of a hyper-realistic sculpture of a futuristic female satyr giving birth opposite her satyr partner, who has hung himself, sets a grim post-apocalyptic tone at the Danish Pavilion, created by Uffe Isolotto.

The Nordic Pavilion offers a more hopeful path out of the apocalypse, with artwork and performances depicting the struggle against colonialism by the Sami people, who inhabit a broad swath of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland into the Murmansk Oblast of Russia, while also celebrating their traditions.

“We have in a way discovered how to live within the apocalyptic world and do it while, you know, maintaining our spirits and our beliefs and systems of value,″ said co-curator Liisa-Ravna Finbog.

This year’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement awards go to German artist Katherina Fritsch, whose life-like Elephant sculpture stands in the rotunda of the main exhibit building in the Giardini, and Chilean poet, artist and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuna, whose portrait of her mother’s eyes graces the Biennale catalog cover.

Vicuna painted the portrait while the family was in exile after the violent military coup in Chile against President Salvador Allende. Now 97, her mother accompanied her to the Biennale.

“You see that her spirit is still present, so in a way that painting is like a triumph of love against dictatorship, against repression, against hatred,” Vicuna said.  
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Verdant landscapes, stylized portraits of peasant women, curved sculptures — an exhibition in Baghdad is allowing art aficionados to rediscover the pioneers of contemporary Iraqi art.

Around 100 items are on display in the capital, returned and restored nearly two decades after they were looted.

Many of the works, including pieces by renowned artists Jawad Selim and Fayiq Hassan, disappeared in 2003 when museums and other institutions were pillaged in the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.

Thousands of pieces were stolen, and organized criminal networks often sold them outside Iraq.

Tracked down in Switzerland, the U.S., Qatar and neighboring Jordan, sculptures and paintings dating between the 1940s and 1960s have been on display since late March at the Ministry of Culture, in a vast room that used to serve as a restaurant.

“These works are part of the history of contemporary art in Iraq,” ministry official Fakher Mohamed said.

Artistic renaissance

Pictures and sculptures were in 2003 spirited away from the Saddam Arts Centre, one of Baghdad’s most prestigious cultural venues at the time.

While he crushed all political dissent, Saddam cultivated the image of a patron of the arts. The invasion and years of violence that followed ended a flourishing arts scene, particularly in Baghdad.

Now, relative stability has led to a fledgling artistic renaissance, including book fairs and concerts, of which the exhibition organized by the ministry is an example.

It helps recall a golden age when Baghdad was considered one of the Arab world’s cultural capitals.

Among canvases of realist, surrealist or expressionist inspiration, a picturesque scene in shimmering colors shows a boat sailing in front of several “mudhif,” the traditional reed dwellings found in Iraq’s southern marshes.

Other paintings, in dark colors, depict terrified residents surrounded by corpses, fleeing a burning village.

Elsewhere, a woman is shown prostrate in a scene of destruction, kneeling in front of an arm protruding from stones.

There is also a wooden sculpture of a gazelle with undulating curves, and the “maternal statue” — a work by Jawad Selim that represents a woman with a slender neck and raised arms.

The latter, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was rediscovered in a Baghdad district known for its antiques and second-hand goods shops. It was in the possession of a dealer unaware of its true value, according to sculptor Taha Wahib, who bought it for just $200.

‘Priceless works’

Looters in some cases had taken pictures out of their frames, sometimes with cutters, to steal them more easily.

“Some pieces were damaged during the events of 2003 — or they were stored in poor conditions for many years,” Mohamed, the culture ministry official, told AFP.

But “they were restored in record time,” he said.

Other works are being held back for now, with some waiting to be restored — but they will be exhibited once more, Mohamed pledged.

He wants to open more exhibition rooms to show the entire collection of recovered items.

“Museums must be open to the public — these works shouldn’t remain imprisoned in warehouses,” he said.

The 7,000 items stolen in 2003 included “priceless works,” and about 2,300 have been returned to Iraq, according to exhibition curator Lamiaa al-Jawari.

In 2004, she joined a committee of artists committed to retrieving the many stolen national treasures.

“Some have been recovered through official channels” including the Swiss embassy, she said, but individuals also helped.

Authorities coordinate with Interpol and the last restitutions took place in 2021.

The selection on display will be changed from time to time, “to show visitors all this artistic heritage,” Jawari said.

Ali Al-Najar, an 82-year-old artist who has lived in Sweden the past 20 years, has been on holiday in his homeland.

He welcomed the exhibition.

“The pioneers are those who initiated Iraqi art. If we forget them, we lose our foundations” as a society, Najar said.
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The Buenos Aires design and architecture firm Estudio Normal is honoring Argentina’s iconic butterfly chair in a towering art installation at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California. From the festival, Genia Dulot has the story.
Camera: Genia Dulot 
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Onstage, they dance through hoops and perform acrobatics with smiles on their faces. Off it, they hold anguished phone calls with family back in Ukraine.

Dancers Anna and Olga have found a sense of calm performing in a circus near New York, but they are still living the war they fled thousands of miles away.

“I spent a month without a full night’s sleep. We couldn’t go out to buy food — we were stressed and shaken all the time. It was scary,” recalls Anna Starykh, who left Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February.

Now the 21-year-old is performing with the Flip Circus in the New York City suburb of Yonkers, where she can sleep without being woken by explosions.

More than 4,500 miles away from Kyiv, in a parking lot near the banks of the Hudson River, Starykh and her friends prepare to perform with colleagues from across Europe and South America.

The stage has become their sanctuary.

“Work really helps (us) to calm down and stay positive,” she tells AFP.

Their concern for their family members back home is palpable, though.

“I don’t know in which situation they will be next day, next week, next month. I cry about this,” says 22-year-old Olga Rezekina, who also fled Ukraine after the invasion began and whose parents and brother live in Odesa.

Rezekina and Starykh arrived in the United States with 20-year-old Anastasiia Savych, a Flip Circus veteran who had returned to Ukraine with other circus members to renew her visa when Russian tanks crossed the border Feb. 24.

All are graduates of the Bingo Circus Theater, a circus academy in Ukraine. Rezekina and Starykh joined Flip to replace two of Savych’s male colleagues, who were mobilized to fight and stayed in Ukraine.

On the day of the invasion, Savych left Kyiv for Poland on the train.

“I never saw the capital so empty. No cars, no people outside. Everything was closed. It was like in a horror movie,” she tells AFP.

Two other Ukrainian dancers in their troupe fled via Romania and joined up with them in America on March 10.

‘Leave problems backstage’

They are among more than 5 million people who have left Ukraine since the invasion, according to United Nations estimates.

“When I just arrived here, I felt guilty,” says Savych, whose mother convinced her that she would not be able help the family by staying in Ukraine.

Now she waits to hear that the war is over and that “we won,” Savych says.

“I’m 20 years old and want stay young and not speak about the war,” she tells AFP.

The three friends all have similar but different dreams for the future.

“Live and be safe,” says Starykh, when asked hers. “Traveling around the world,” says Rezekina, while Savych hopes to live permanently in the U.S.

Alexa Vazquez, who helps run Flip — the circus was founded by her family in Mexico more than 50 years ago — says it was difficult getting the women out of Ukraine with airports closed.

“To have these girls here with right now safe means a world to us, especially to me, because they are friends, they are family. We can support them in any way possible,” she tells AFP.

The Ukrainians appear several times in the show, in which animals do not perform.

“People come and they want to look at a good show. You can leave your problems backstage,” concludes Rezekina. 
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Miguel Cabrera’s pursuit of a rare baseball feat — a 3,000th career hit — remained on hold Thursday, with the New York Yankees taking heat for intentionally walking the Detroit Tigers slugger. 

Cabrera needs one hit to become just the 33rd player in Major League Baseball history to reach the 3,000-hit milestone, and Tigers fans in Detroit were primed to witness the feat on Thursday. 

They reacted with jeers and boos and chants of “Yankees suck!” when Cabrera, with 2,999 career hits, came to the plate in the eighth inning and Yankees manager Aaron Boone gave the signal for him to be intentionally walked. 

Cabrera had already flied out in the first inning and struck out in two more at-bats. 

With two out and runners at second and third base, Boone opted to walk the two-time Most Valuable Player to load the bases and set up a left-hander vs. left-hander matchup between his pitcher Lucas Luetge and Detroit batter Austin Meadows. 

Boone acknowledged that the decision to issue an intentional walk was “a little more gut-wrenching than usual.” 

“The left-on-left, I felt like the matchup — I just liked it a little bit better in that situation and it came down to a baseball call for me there,” Boone said. 

It didn’t pay off, however. Meadows smacked a two-run double that gave the Tigers a 3-0 lead and an eventual 3-0 win. 

Cabrera took it all in stride. 

“It’s baseball,” he told reporters, noting he had missed three chances to reach the 3,000-hit milestone earlier in the game. 

“I know history is very important,” Cabrera said in comments posted on MLB.com. “But we need to win first. It’s not about me. It’s about the team.” 

Cabrera, 39, could become the first Venezuelan MLB player to reach 3,000 hits. 

Dominican Albert Pujols is the only active MLB player who has reached the milestone.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought changes to the lives of many people, and for some, new jobs.  Mike O’Sullivan spoke with Max Miller, whose love for history and food led to a post-pandemic career as YouTube creator.
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Cristiano Ronaldo took to social media on Monday to say one of his newborn twins has died. 

“It is with our deepest sadness we have to announce that our baby boy has passed away,” the Manchester United striker wrote in a post also signed by his partner, Georgina Rodriguez. 

“It is the greatest pain that any parents can feel.” 

 

Ronaldo announced last year that the couple was expecting twins. 

“Only the birth of our baby girl gives us the strength to live this moment with some hope and happiness,” he wrote on the social-media post. 

“We are all devastated at this loss,” the post added, “and we kindly ask for privacy at this very difficult time. Our baby boy, you are our angel. We will always love you.” 

The family had four children before the twins. 

 
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Picasso ceramics, old masters works, and a fur coat are among the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s artworks and personal items that will be auctioned off near Washington this month.

Proceeds from the sale will go to the Washington National Opera to support an art form close to the iconic Supreme Court justice’s heart.

The sale, organized by an auction house in Alexandria, Virginia, will take place on April 27 and 28, and underscores the superstar status of the late judge, popularly known as “RBG” when she died in September 2020 at age 87.

She first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a lawyer, winning several court battles that brought down a host of laws that discriminated against women.

In 1993, nominated by former president Bill Clinton, Ginsburg became the second woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court; Sandra Day O’Connor was the first.

Ginsburg defended progressive causes, including the rights of sexual minorities and immigrants.

Through her work, she became an icon; younger generations nicknamed her “The Notorious RBG” in reference to the murdered rapper “The Notorious B.I.G.”

“RBG” also became known for accessorizing her judicial robe with fine-knit gloves, a pearl necklace, and muslin collars now so recognizable that they have become Halloween staples for kids.

Several plaques and medals that she was awarded during her long career are among the hundreds of personal items featured in the sale.

In 2016, the audience at Washington’s Kennedy Center gave the justice a standing ovation when she appeared on stage for a small speaking role in an opera.

“The Justice was a champion of the arts at large – but nothing came close to her passion for opera,” said the Washington National Opera, which she recently attended.
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It’s a convergence that happens only rarely. Coinciding with Judaism’s Passover, Western Christianity’s Easter and Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, Buddhists, Baha’is, Sikhs, Jains and Hindus also are celebrating their holy days in April.

The springtime collision of religious holidays is inspiring a range of interfaith events. In Chicago, there’s the Interfaith Trolley Tour coming up on April 24, in which a trolley will make stops at different faiths’ houses of worship. In cities across the United States, Muslims are inviting people to interfaith iftars so they can break their daily Ramadan fasts in community with their non-Muslim neighbors.

In addition to Passover, Easter and Ramadan, holy days occurring in April this year include the Sikhs’ and Hindus’ Vaisakhi, the Jains’ Mahavir Jayanti, the Baha’i festival of Ridvan, and the Theravada Buddhist New Year.

Across faiths, the celebration of the overlapping holy days and religious festivals is seen as a chance to share meals and rituals. For some, it’s also a chance to learn how to cooperate among faith traditions on crucial issues, including how to help curb climate change, fight religious intolerance, and assist people fleeing Afghanistan, Ukraine and other nations during the global refugee crisis.

“The rare convergence of such a wide array of holy days is an opportunity for all of us to share what we hold sacred with our neighbors from other traditions as a way of building understanding and bridging divides,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith America, previously known as Interfaith Youth Core. “This is Interfaith America in microcosm.”

On Chicago’s south side, the upcoming trolley tour is intended to teach participants about this year’s April holidays, which are converging for the first time in the same month since 1991, said Kim Schultz, coordinator of creative initiatives at the Chicago Theological Seminary’s InterReligious Institute.

The trolley will stop at several sacred spaces, including a Baptist church, a mosque and a synagogue, and will end with an iftar at sunset catered by recently resettled Afghan refugees.

“We’re asking people to take advantage of this confluence, the convergence … more than half of the world is celebrating or commemorating the critical moment in our faith traditions,” said Hind Makki, director of recruitment and communications at American Islamic College.

The event is sponsored by the American Islamic College, the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice at the Lutheran School of Theology, the Hyde Park & Kenwood Interfaith Council and the Parliament of the World’s Religions. After more than two years of COVID-19 restrictions that upended many holidays, followers are eager to meet in person again.

Organizers of the Chicago event said they had arranged for a trolley that would carry 25 people, but there was so much interest across faiths that they had to arrange for a bigger trolley for 40 people instead. And then, when more kept joining, a second trolley.

“This is a great time,” Makki said. “So, why not take the opportunity to learn about each other’s traditions, to learn about each other through those traditions.”

As part of the month’s celebrations, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA opened its mosques to host dozens of interfaith iftars in cities across the nation centered on the theme of ‘justice through compassion.’

“During our gatherings across 35 cities we emphasized that the world that we see now stands on the brink of a world war,” said Amjad Mahmood Khan, national director of public affairs for Ahmadiyya. “And only the collective prayers and actions of the faithful can really save humanity from self-destruction.”

Faith leaders from Christian, Jewish, Sikh and Hindu faiths gathered recently for a virtual panel celebrating the convergence of their sacred observances. Among the issues discussed were shared concerns over the rise of white Christian nationalism and legislation in Arizona and Florida that they criticized for marginalizing LGBTQ young people.

“We see that convergence as highly symbolic, maybe even divinely ordained as our people need to reaffirm our shared values of love, freedom and justice in order to disrupt white Christian nationalists’ attempts to decide what ideas, identities and practices are valued and respected,” said the Rev. Jennifer Butler, founder and chief executive of the Washington-based multifaith group Faith in Public Life.

“This sacred season presents the opportunity for solidarity, for prophetic witness as we lament the rise of intolerance and discriminatory laws that threaten our nation’s quest to be a multiracial and multireligious democracy,” she said.

It will also be an important moment for members of different faiths to find common ground in the runup to the U.S. midterm elections, said Nina Fernando, executive director of the Shoulder to Shoulder campaign, a multifaith national coalition committed to countering and preventing anti-Muslim discrimination.

“With the time that we’re living where essentially we’re polarized and divided among racial and religious and political lines, we can take this opportunity to talk about how to live well together amidst our diversity and talk about these holidays overlapping,” Fernando said.

The convergence of the holidays also offers a chance to dispel misconceptions about faith traditions and appreciate shared values, said the Rev. Stephen Avino, executive director of the Parliament for World Religions.

“The holidays are the enactment of the core values, and we can actually see before our eyes the beauty of that tradition through the holidays and through ritual,” Avino said. “You can compare that to your own traditions, and you can see the similarities and differences and within that is the beauty of that. And you start to see that faith as being worthy of reverence, while still maintaining your own faith.
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