Event
ARC @ Abu Dhabi Summit
United Arab Emirates
Artists Speak Out: A Conversation with Afghan Film Director Sahraa Karimi
October 24, 2022 | 2:30pm-3:15pm
MAS Gallery S
This event will be livestreamed
Afghanistan is home to a vibrant cultural scene, which is an integral part of the country’s diversity and identity. Cultural and artistic expressions can nourish, sustain, and create spaces to debate and rethink solutions to address contemporary challenges and build paths for conflict resolution. UNESCO has called for the need to enable a safe environment for Afghanistan’s artists, who play a central role for national cohesion and social fabric and has expressed its grave concern about the deteriorating situation of culture professionals, emphasizing the importance of culture for Afghanistan’s citizens and for peace and stability in the country.
The vulnerability of artists in Afghanistan is heightened in emergency contexts, where they have often become direct targets of violence due to their work, sometimes forcing artists to leave the country. As women have often turned to artist to make their voices heard, this makes them particularly vulnerable in this context. Emergency situations thus represent an impediment to the continuity of artistic practices, translating into threats to the diversity of cultural expressions in the country and the loss of basic livelihoods for artists and their families.
Manojna Yeluri, Asia Regional Representative of Artist at Risk Connection (ARC) PNE America will explore these themes with Sahraa Karimi, Afghan film director and the first female chairperson of the Afghan Film Organization.
Speakers
Manojna Yeluri, Asia regional representative for the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC)
Manojna is the Asia regional representative for PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection. She is an entertainment and intellectual property rights lawyer. She founded Artistik License, a legal and business consultancy for artists and creative professionals in 2013, and has been working closely with the independent arts and music industries since, with the opportunity to present at global trade events such as WOMEX and IOMMA. She holds a Masters Degree in Entertainment, media and intellectual property rights law from the UCLA School of Law, and graduated from the NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad, India with a BA.LLB (Hons) degree. She is currently based out of Hyderabad, India.
Sahraa Karimi, Film director and Chairperson of the Afghan Film
Dr. Karimi is an Afghan film director and the first female chairperson of the Afghan Film Organization (Afghan Film). She has directed 30 short films, 3 documentary films and one fiction film “Hava, Maryam, Ayesha” which has the world premier at 76th Venice Film Festival. Prior to the fall of Kabul to the hands of the Taliban, she was the first and the only woman to be directing Afghanistan’s film entity. She received her PhD degree in the field of Cinema (Fiction Film Directing & Screenwriting) from the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Bratislava. Light Breeze, a documentary she made during her time in the academy, went on to win as the Best Short Fiction Film at the Sun in a Net Awards (the highest film awards in Slovakia).
About the Summit
Hosted in Abu Dhabi, Culture Summit 2022 will address the theme of A Living Culture. It will reconsider the potential of collectivity, cultivating culture ecosystems, and embracing culture as lived experience.
With thoughtfully programmed panel discussions, keynotes, presentations, screenings, and conversations, Culture Summit harnesses the expertise of policy makers, researchers, artists, and culture professionals to examine urgent contemporary issues, which include the impacts of digital media and AI, creative ecosystems and indigenous practices, representation, and topographies of public space among many others. Each of the three days is organised to examine these subjects through a different lens: Living Cultural Ecosystems takes a sectoral perspective; Living in Culture considers people, communities, and futures; and Culture, Identity, Power focuses on diversity.
Culture Summit’s extraordinary forum of knowledge exchange, debate, and policy development is organised by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with global partner organisations, including UNESCO, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Economist Impact, Google, the Design Museum, among other art, technology, and media organisations from around the world