Acclaimed writer and researcher in the history of art Rasha Adly recently published a new book titled “Mill’a Al-Ain” through the Arab House for Science Publishers, in which she writes about women in fine arts through the ages.
The “Youm 7” website reports that the book “Mill’a Al-Ain” deals with the emergence of creative fine arts throughout the ages and in various civilizations and sheds light on the history of women through Arab and international fine arts.
Consequently, it reviews paintings that illustrate the history of women through the synchronization that occurred in the development of each of them through different ages.
In the author’s point of view, the history of art is the search for everything related to work in a certain period, including social, political, and cultural events. Therefore, the book branches out and diverges into different aspects of life, to become an important documentary record from the first year AD until the postmodern era.
This book takes us on a wild journey as it presents many complex events in human history, monitored by art and recording its scattered effects here and there. Accordingly, it envisages contributing to the understanding of art paintings through the contexts of their production and social mobility and the role of the woman in it.
These paintings do not depend on their role as creative works only but rather have revealed to historians, writers, and critics many secrets and stories, and for a deeper understanding of the artistic paintings we must acknowledge that they hide more than what the eye can see, and therefore we have to look at them not as if they are just a framed scene inside Four sides, but we have to go to what the scene leads us to and look beyond it. Paintings do not present an objective reality, as is the case with photographs, but they present a different reality with ambiguous dimensions, sometimes raising questions that we cannot always find answers to.
It’s worth noting that Rasha Adly is a novelist and researcher in art history. She holds a master’s degree in art history and is also a research member of the International Association of Art Historians. The writer has contributions, articles, and research in fine arts and has been published in specialized Arab and foreign magazines, in addition to the Gallery About Art and History blog, established in 2007, that highlights paintings and art history.
Moreover, she worked as a correspondent for the Emirates Cultural Magazine, particularly in the field of fine arts between 2016 and 2020.
Her first book on the art of Orientalism was published in 2012. Adly has ten novels in total, some of which were translated into several languages. Her novels “Passion” and “The Last Days of the Pasha” were longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Booker), and the English version of her novel “Passion” won The Banipal International Prize for Translation in 2021 and was additionally longlisted for the International Dublin Prize in Literature in 2022.
