Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
Closing the Abu Dhabi Cultural Summit held over the course of this week, Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh, the Cultural Adviser to the President of the UAE and the Chancellor of UAE University, underscored the crucial role of cultural arts in forging a guiding anchor amid a volatile and unpredictable global environment.
“Culture offers us a platform and medium for exploring these existential ideas. The works of culture can foster a sense of continuity and legacy and understanding that our lives today extend back and beyond the time of our presence on this planet,” Nusseibeh told the crowd at Manarat Al Saadiyat on Wednesday.
“Therefore, through the cultural arts, we are enabled to step out of the confines of the present moment and to adopt a more holistic view of existence.”
His Excellency Al Nusseibeh is no stranger to tough conversations and even tougher philosophical questions. It was such questions that he put to the crowd on Wednesday, challenging them to ponder the heightened importance of culture in grounding our societies.
“Today’s time is an era marked by volatility, complexity, and fragmentation. In this context, we are conscious that our future is more uncertain than ever. This temporal awareness makes us prone to anxiety in action and discourse. Yet today, now is also the precise moment when we must act with confidence,” Al Nusseibeh said.
“As we navigate the shifting sands of temporal consciousness, let us remember that in this context, culture can be a guiding force, offering the foundations and pathway to reconciliation, renewal and transcendence.”
Al Nussiebeh described the paradox that humanity faced being both “fleeting custodians of Earth” while simultaneously being “entrusted with the responsibility to guard it for the generations to come”.
He said these philosophical questions were best represented and interpreted through the medium of cultural arts – which were necessary for a society to be able to digest the often complex and uncomfortable topics necessary for it to overcome its challenges.
“The cultural arts have the power to harness history, the present and the future. For the cultural arts, time is a canvas and the set of inks. We use time to transfigure its own abstract and multiply nature into a message that is available to human understanding. The cultural arts have the power to garner time and express its temporal reach to harness the achievements, anxieties and aspirations of past, current and future generations into a tangible experience that we can comprehend,” he said.
“Culture and art enable us to draw inspiration from the wisdom of the past and to weave, write, sing, dance, and sculpt a new message. The cultural arts are the canvas and ink we use to chart a path towards a more compassionate tomorrow. Today, we must set aside differences of age, culture and ideology in order to pave the way for a more harmonious, inclusive and sustainable society.”
