Roberta Fedele Saudi Gazette Famous for having dedicated 30 years of her artistic career to the preservation of Saudi Arabia's cultural heritage, 73-year-old Saudi artist Safeya Binzagr recently led an exclusive walk through the Darat, her private 854 square meter museum in Jeddah that showcases a permanent exhibition of her artworks and represents today an inimitable forum for research and learning. Before leading the audience through the museum, Binzagr retraced some of the most important moments that characterized her career and fueled her aspiration to record and document the social history of the Kingdom. She said: “I was born in 1940 in Jeddah, a city whose traditions, heritage and joyful customs represented my first impact with life. After completing my education in Cairo and London between 1947 and 1964, I returned to Saudi Arabia and discovered a completely different environment. Modernization led to changes in clothes, costumes and habitat and stretched to the very inside of the ancient houses.” The artist's official statement best summarizes how her creativity flourished within this new environment. “I fell in love with history, but it was difficult for me to write it down, so I drew it. Our heritage is full of beautiful meanings and it was saddening to see them fall into oblivion and become lost forever. This is why I started recording them. I believe in the past: without it man loses his emotional fortifications and roots.” Between 1968 and 1993, Binzagr held several private and joint exhibitions in Jeddah, Riyadh, Dhahran, Jubail, Yanbu, Madinah, London, Paris and Geneva until cementing in 1995 her fervent dream of collecting all her artworks in one place. Ready by 1995, the Darat Safeya Binzagr Museum was opened officially in 2000 by the late Prince Abdul Majeed Bin Abdulaziz. The museum represents today Binzagr's own contribution to the Saudi art movement and to the preservation of her country's folklore. The artist's guided tour through the Darat started with a walk through the ground floor's eight halls displaying all her collections since the 1960s. The initial halls contain a series of colorful and technically refined paintings describing the various phases and long rituals of ancient wedding celebrations. Some canvases portray relatives and friends of the bride preparing her trousseau, the bride's henna ceremony, the “Sak Al-Kholkhal” ritual based on the fastening of a gold ankle bracelet around the bride's foot, the groom's shaving ceremony and the groom's procession to the bride's house. Particularly fascinating are Binzagr's depictions of the “Slipper Carrier”, a young man carrying the bride's wooden and silver slippers on a cushion across the town's roads and the “Nassah”, the official ceremony that saw the sumptuous bride attired in a silk dress appearing in front of the groom for the first time. Saudi Arabia's ancient folklore also emerges in the artist's portrayals of common people's everyday life in their homes and charming depictions of the country's traditional architecture that varies from one region to another. These paintings include sketches of Naseef house in Balad and the old El-Shaf'ei and Al-Basha mosques. The central hall is dominated by a huge painting featuring the Grand Mosque in Makkah, the Prophet's Mosque in Madinah and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The paintings feature alongside ancient collections of jewelry, furniture and objects from the Kingdom's various regions and a series of traditional women clothes from different provinces that Binzagr has personally designed. “My aim was to record the shape, nomenclature and way of wearing of traditional clothes and to show at the same time the huge variations in dress patterns from province to province. This meant of course engaging in a long field research. Only after a number of years was I able to move from research to actual production.” The guided tour ended at the museum's first floor that hosts the “Darat Safeya Binzagr Cultural Center”. Established in 1997, the center comprises the artist's private studio and library, a fully equipped atelier hosting workshops for children and adults, a lecture hall and a traditional Arabian majlis. To find out more about painting courses, children drawing competitions, educational programs, exhibitions and seminars held at the Darat Safeya Binzagr Cultural Center, please visit the museum's website at www.daratsb.com/main_e1.htm
