PARIS: Saoirse Ronan is not like other Hollywood stars.
Spread out on a sofa in a luxury Paris hotel in a “Mary Magdalene, sorry Maggie Marilyn” pyjama suit looking like a vamp from “The Great Gatsby,” she is joking about her bad skin.
The sideburns of acne she has in “Lady Bird,” the acclaimed coming-of-age movie that has won her a third Oscar nomination at the age of 23, were very much her own, she laughed.
“No, they were real!” she told AFP. “I had a bad skin at the time so we just didn’t cover it up.
“Weirdly I never got bad skin as a teenager at all,” said the Irish actress, who was first nominated for an Academy Award when she was only 13 for “Atonement.”
“It was only when I was 21 or 22 when I was doing loads of press that I got it. So, it was you that did it,” she laughed.
Ronan is often talked about as one of the most talented actors of her generation — she won a best actress Golden Globe last month for “Lady Bird,” her “sensational” portrayal of a Sacramento teenager in the last year of high school whose lofty ambitions are often at odds with reality and her family’s precarious finances.
She is also one of the most down-to-earth, seemingly unphased by having grown up in front of the camera as a child actor from the age of eight.
“My Mam came away with me on every job till I was 18, and my Dad is an actor, so they understood the pitfalls.”
Even so, “going through puberty on screen can very easily be terrifying. You are so aware of what you look like, and to have a lens pointed at your face,” she told AFP as she promoted “Lady Bird” in the French capital.
“So you have to have the attitude that it is more important to get what you are doing right than worry whether you look pretty.”
Doing good work has been Ronan’s watchword since she was very young, carefully choosing quality films rather than playing the fame game.
“I was offered an action film at the same time as ‘Atonement’ (when she was 12) but I knew even then that was not the direction I wanted to go in,” she said.
She was a more obvious choice to play an Irish immigrant in “Brooklyn,” and Ronan insisted that hooking up with indie star Greta Gerwig for her directorial debut on “Lady Bird” was also a “no-brainer.”
“When you read a script where one of the introductory scenes is someone arguing with their mother and jumping out of a car it is a massive selling point. With Greta I knew it would be smart, interesting and funny,” she said.
Gerwig, who made her name both writing and starring in “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” with director Noah Baumbach, said it was a marriage made in heaven.
Even though the film is semi-autobiographical, Gerwig said she didn’t really “understand the character until (Ronan) started saying the lines... she is this flawed but amazing heroine.”
And for her part, Ronan said she cried when Gerwig was nominated for an Oscar. Incredibly it was only the fifth time that a woman had been nominated for best director.
“She deserves it so much. It was a really momentous thing for the times we are in to have at least one woman nominated and completely deservedly. That means a lot to all of us,” said Ronan.
In terms of empowerment, “getting to play a confident teenage girl” also mattered hugely, she said.
“It’s so rare to see a teenage girl just own it in a film — someone who just goes for it and isn’t afraid to fall on their face. There is a strength and a bravery you can catch from that person.”
Ronan is acutely conscious that “Lady Bird” has already become a key cultural reference for many teenage girls.
“She is quite outspoken which I am too. She is trying to find her people and her places. When I was around 18 I knew (like her that) I needed to get out and find who I was.
“Like Greta and Lady Bird I wanted to go to New York. I was only there eight months but it was enough to say, ‘I’ve found myself!’” she laughed.
As for finally lifting an Oscar next month at the third attempt, Ronan insists that she “hasn’t thought about winning. When you win you have to do all the press afterwards, and you don’t get a chance to have a dance. So it is also quite nice losing because you can enjoy the night.”
Saoirse Ronan, Oscar veteran at 23, laughs off her chances
Saoirse Ronan, Oscar veteran at 23, laughs off her chances
US Qatari Sophia Al-Maria wins 2025 Frieze Artist Award
DUBAI: US Qatari artist and writer Sophia Al-Maria has been announced as the recipient of the 2025 Frieze Artist Award, one of the art world’s most highly anticipated annual commissions.
The award is part of Frieze London, a leading international art fair that will return to Regent’s Park from Oct. 15-19, bringing together more than 280 galleries from 45 countries.
Presented in partnership with Forma, the award supports early- to mid-career artists in debuting new works. This year, Al-Maria will perform “Wall Based Work (a Trompe LOL),” a live stand-up comedy show held daily inside the fair tent.
The work marks Al-Maria’s first attempt at stand-up, in which she will blend sharp humor with her long-standing interest in mythology, empire and pop culture.
“In partnership with Forma, we are proud to continue supporting artist-centered programming,” said Eva Langret, director of Frieze EMEA. “Al-Maria’s debut stand-up promises a collective experience exploring vulnerability, creativity, shared anxieties and LOLs.”
Meanwhile, Chris Rawcliffe, artistic director at Forma, said: “By wielding humor as a tool for survival, Al-Maria not only provokes reflection but actively reshapes the cultural conversation … Al-Maria is more than an artist and critic, she is a catalyst for change, and an indispensable voice in both the art world and the wider social landscape.”
Al-Maria’s proposal was selected by a jury of leading industry professionals, including curator and museum consultant Lydia Yee and the artistic director of exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, Melanie Pocock, artistic director of exhibitions at Ikon Gallery, as well as Langret and Rawcliffe.
Based in London, Al-Maria works across drawing, collage, sculpture, film and writing. Her practice is unified by a focus on storytelling and mythmaking, often reimagining histories and envisioning speculative futures. Her work has been shown at major institutions and biennales, including the Gwangju Biennale, the New Museum and Whitney Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale, and Tate Britain.
Artists push the boundaries of technology in new media arts residency in Riyadh
- Residency displays futuristic artwork inspired by the natural landscape and culture of the Kingdom
- Diriyah Art Futures brings together artists from around the world, combining art, science and technology
RIYADH: Diriyah Art Futures opened a new residency displaying cutting-edge artwork in Riyadh on Wednesday evening.
The Mazra’ah Media Art Residency spring/summer 2025 open studio displays work that combines art, science and technology.
It is a three-month program designed for artists and scholars working across new media and digital art.
The theme, “High-Resolution Dreams of Sand,” explored the evolving relationships between humans, nature and technology in rapidly changing environments, informed by the distinctive contexts of Diriyah and Riyadh.
The evening’s open studio offered a behind-the-scenes look at work in progress from the spring/summer 2025 residents, alongside talks and studio discussions.
In the studios, Arab News met with various artists including Saudi Arwa Al-Neami whose creations explore themes of acceptance, identity and societal transformation.
During the residency, she undertook an artistic investigation of Saudi Arabia’s landscapes, collecting sand samples from various regions across the Kingdom.
Through nano microscopy and advanced imaging techniques, she created an immersive sensory experience that transforms microscopic grains of sand into pieces of art in the form of films, virtual reality and 3D-printed sculptures.
She told Arab News: “I am currently researching seven different areas in the Kingdom, where I’m exploring the sound of the sun using specialized sensors during sunrise and sunset. The resulting sound waves are translated into frequencies that create audible sounds.
“By analyzing the sound of the sun and the atomic structure of sands, I produce artwork that highlights the differences across various regions of Saudi Arabia.”
For 90 days, artist Dr. Stanza has been creating a whole body of work based on Saudi Arabia using real-time data including weather forecasts, pollution stats and news feeds.
Using an AI prompt, he created the series “Sons of Time” — an interactive Internet installation inspired by cybernetics and the future.
His other work, “Machine Cities,” connects 90 cities and towns across the Kingdom and tracks them in real time, presenting a visualization that the public can engage with.
The London-based artist has exhibited worldwide and earned numerous awards for his use of the Internet as an art medium.
“While I’ve been here, what I’ve really learned about Saudi Arabia is it’s a very warm and inclusive country that’s moving forward toward 2030.
“There’s a whole series of ideas about AI and agency that (are) also incorporated within my artworks. I look forward to presenting some of these works here in the future,” he told Arab News.
Indian artist Harshit Agrawal has taken his time at the residency to contemplate the juxtaposition of Diriyah’s rich heritage with its exponential development in the past few years.
Set against Diriyah’s historic farms and Riyadh’s evolving environment, the participants were encouraged to consider the impact of technology on natural and constructed landscapes.
“While I was here, I was quite fascinated, in my early days by the cultural richness, the different practices of culture, but also Diriyah as a city in transition in this beautiful time where it’s developing into something else with all these constructions and all these new things that are happening,” Agrawal told Arab News.
In “Machinic Meditations,” the artist was particularly fascinated with subhas, or prayer beads, that are commonly used in Saudi Arabia.
This prompted his research, where he also found electronic subhas. “It’s quite fascinating to move from this kind of manual device to an electronic version of it,” he said.
“I started thinking — because I work a lot with machine learning, AI data— what is the extreme scenario of that? So, I created these devices, which are motorized systems that rotate these beads autonomously, and they keep doing that continuously.
“And with each rotation, they pick up new human data to meditate on. It’s kind of the machine’s version of meditating, but on human data and climate data.”
In “Data Excavations: The New Soil,” the artist takes inspiration from construction and excavation machinery, using its mobility as a way to write out words in a choreographed manner using light strips.
“It’s been a really exciting time to be here, because it’s a great intersection between deep cultural practices that are here that I can kind of see in the city, but also really cutting-edge studios and facilities that I’ve had and (been) exposed through the material residency,” he said.
The open studio event welcomed a number of artists and prominent figures in the art scene, aiming to introduce them to the findings and research of this year’s cohort around new media arts in the region.
“Having Saudi Arabia attracting so many different cultures right now is a great thing, for artists to meet and research in the new media and technology is a great thing because they can implement their culture’s ideas in so many different ways and that’s what we see here — it’s a great cultural bridge,” visual artist Lulwah AI-Hamoud, who was attending the event, told Arab News.
DAF Director Haytham Nawar and DAF Director of Education Dr. Tegan Bristow delivered opening remarks, followed by talks from Dr. Anett Holzheid, an ZKM science and art researcher and curator, and Mizuho Yamazaki, an independent writer and scholar.
Attendees then enjoyed an open studio preview with Dr. Stanza, before a break for networking and a tour of the fabrication lab, sound lab and prototypes.
The evening concluded with studio discussions featuring Arwa Alneami, Harshit Agrawal and Reem Alnasser, all media artists.
Exhibition on animal rights in Athens spotlights Arab artists
ATHENS: An art exhibition at EMST, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, ponders a challenging yet crucial question: What are the rights of animals?
The exhibition, “Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives,” curated by EMST’s artistic director Katerina Gregos, is among the most ambitious staged by a public institution on animal ethics at a time when wars rage around the world and basic human rights are in crisis.
The show presents more than 200 works by 60 contemporary artists from four continents and runs until Jan. 7, 2026.
Evocatively curated, with works unfolding in the various rooms of the museum in dialogue with the visitor and each other, the various depictions of animals prompt both philosophical and political questions.
The show evokes questions on the nature of humanity, the emotional intelligence of animals and how to confront systems of political domination, such as colonialism and rampant industrialization, that have restricted humans and animals.
From the Arab world, Egyptian artist Nabil Boutros has created “Celebrities,” a moving series of studio portraits of lambs, ewes and rams. Each image depicts not only their aesthetic beauty but seemingly also their emotional state.
“I wanted to talk about the human condition through these works,” Boutros told Arab News. “These first portraits of (these animals) show they are different. They have different races, different attitudes and different characters, but we never look at them.”
“What is our relationship with animals? Is it just about food, about slaughtering?” he asked. “We are all part of this world and there is a whole organic structure that connects us that has been forgotten.”
Boutros’ touching portraits, exalting the personality and individuality of each animal, similar to traditional human portraiture, show us a rarely encountered world of animals and their emotional depth.
“They’re very expressive,” said Boutros, when discussing the moments he photographed them. “We imagine that they don’t have feelings, but that is not true.”
Algerian artist Oussama Tabti’s “Homo-Carduelis” is an installation that covers an entire wall of empty birdcages, each encompassing a speaker playing a birdsong created by human voices to imitate that of birds.
The work strives to show the connection between animals and humans. “The idea for the work came from the goldfinch, an appreciated bird in Algeria,” Tabti told Arab News.
“Born and raised in Algeria, the goldfinch was always in our daily soundscape.
“My work talks about the relation between the bird and the human because people appreciate (the goldfinch) and have it as a pet. They keep the bird in a cage and sometimes even go for a walk with it.”
Tabti finds the relationship at times “awkward and strange.” He thinks that Algerians at times “identify themselves in the birds.”
He added: “The work goes beyond the state of Algeria to reflect on the state of the human condition. Each one of us is in our own cage; it could be work, the environment or even one’s identity.
“I thought the bird in a cage would be a good metaphor for what we are today as human beings. We human beings are able to accomplish a lot but we live in a society that does not let us be completely autonomous.”
“For this installation,” said Tabti, “it was important for me that we can hear the birds, imitated by human beings, so it is like a human in a cage.”
Imaan Hammam continues to highlight Arab culture
DUBAI: Dutch Moroccan Egyptian model Imaan Hammam touched down in Cairo this week for an undisclosed photoshoot and shared highlights from the trip on social media, set to music by the late Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafiz.
Posting to her 1.7 million Instagram followers, Hammam offered a visual diary of her stay, capturing a mix of street scenes, style moments and local ambiance.
The carousel opened with a mirror selfie in an elevator, where she wears a high-waisted printed maxi skirt paired with a black fitted top. In another shot, she appears in a more laid-back look featuring camouflage trousers, a white tank top, a grey hoodie and yellow sneakers.
She also shared a short video that captures her tuk-tuk ride through a narrow alley, followed by snapshots of Cairo’s street life, including a local bookstore and a rooftop view of a mosque at sunset.
Hammam’s Cairo visit reflects a growing interest in reconnecting with her roots, something that also drives her latest passion project, Ayni.
Launched earlier this year, Ayni is an archival platform dedicated to preserving and celebrating Arab artistic expression through Hammam’s perspective.
In a video she shared on the Ayni’s Instagram account, she said: “For me, its always been so much deeper than just fashion. It is about staying connected to my roots, telling stories that move me and shining a light on the voices that need to be heard.”
She said her hope for Ayni is for it to grow beyond a personal vision and become a “real community.”
Hammam is one of the most in-demand models in the industry. She was scouted in Amsterdam’s Centraal Station before making her catwalk debut in 2013 by walking in Jean Paul Gaultier’s couture show.
Hammam has appeared on the runway for leading fashion houses such as Burberry, Fendi, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Marc Jacobs, Moschino, Balenciaga and Carolina Herrera, to name a few, and starred in international campaigns for DKNY, Celine, Chanel, Versace, Givenchy, Giorgio Armani, Tiffany & Co. and others.
Global sculptures at open-air museum in historic Jeddah
- The sculptures form a dynamic dialogue between the past and present, blending the site’s heritage with the language of contemporary art
JEDDAH: As part of a broader effort to revive the region’s visual identity through art, Al-Arbaeen Lake in historic Jeddah has been transformed into an open-air gallery featuring a curated collection of sculptures by international artists.
Led by the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with Jeddah Municipality, the initiative features 14 world-class artworks integrated into the city’s visual landscape, Saudi Press Agency reported.
The sculptures form a dynamic dialogue between the past and present, blending the site’s heritage with the language of contemporary art.
Notable works on display include “The Illusion of the Second Cube” by Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely; “Rouge” and “Flexibility of Balance” by Alexander Calder; “Circular Mass” by Arnaldo Pomodoro; “The Bird” by Spanish sculptor Joan Miro; and “Giving and Receiving Love” by Lorenzo Quinn — a powerful piece that reflects human values through striking aluminium forms.
FASTFACTS
• Led by the Ministry of Culture in cooperation with Jeddah Municipality, the urban art initiative features 14 world-class artworks integrated into the city’s visual landscape.
• Notable works on display include ‘The Illusion of the Second Cube’ by Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely and ‘Giving and Receiving Love’ by Lorenzo Quinn.
The installations are part of a wider artistic movement that reimagines public spaces as platforms for cultural engagement.
By transforming urban environments into art experiences, the project invites both residents and visitors to explore the intersection of architectural heritage and modern creativity.
It underscores the growing role of art in shaping urban identity and fostering public appreciation for visual beauty in shared spaces of the Kingdom.
