Yemen

Being the organizer of the art workshop in which the wall bricks were to be designed, it was no problem at all for the Deutsches Haus Sanaa & Aden to attract a total of eight Yemeni artists to attend a nine-day workshop, as the wall in the world project has received a great deal of attention recently in the local media. Four of the eight artists in all come from the former north of the country, four from the south – yet there was no conflict when it came to dividing up the four bricks, the group of artists choosing to work either individually or in pairs.
The bricks for the wall in the world project accompany the German Culture Weeks 2009: from the day they began on 24 May, the bricks were exhibited for the period of one month in the National Museum in Sanaa. From November 2009 they will be on show in German museums.
The artists of the workshop Dr. Amnah Al-Nasiri, Mazher Nizar, Reema Qasim and Abdallah al-Mujahed from Sanaa, Farid Samed, Ahmed Abdulaziz, Kamal Makrami from Aden and Mohamed Mohsen Sheikh from Abyan have designed the bricks in a workshop from 16th – 21st May. The exhibition of bricks that have been designed could be seen until 25th June.


For a wall in the world essay competition, which took place alongside the workshop, the Deutsches Haus involved the highly regarded Yemeni Story Association (Al-Nadi Al-Qissas). In their essays, the two winners of the competition, Najat Bahakim and Mohamed Al-Gharbi Amran, look back on separation and unity from a social perspective, as well as looking ahead to the future. Thanks to the good cooperation in the field of literature (for example at this year’s literature conference in Sana’a), a partnership is currently being established between the Nadi Al-Qissas and the Deutsches Haus, on the basis of which an annual literary encounter between a German and a Yemeni author is to be organized.