Shirin Aliabadi (b. March 10, 1973, Tehran, Iran – d, October 1, 2018, Tehran, Iran) was an Iranian contemporary visual artist.
Aliabadi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1973. She studied art history and archaeology at the University of Paris.
Aliabadi was married to the artist Farhad Moshiri. She was represented by The Third Line gallery in Dubai.
Aliabadi died on October 1, 2018, from cancer, in Tehran, Iran.
Aliabadi's art, which includes photographs and drawings, explores the competing effects on young urban Iranian women of traditional values, religious restrictions and globalized western culture. Her work appeared in solo exhibitions in Dubai, Tehran, London, Switzerland and Denmark and in group exhibitions at the Institut des cultures d'Islam in Paris, the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, at Frieze New York, at the Chelsea Art Museum, and in Monaco, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, Italy, Norway, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and Spain.
Her work is held in the collections of Deutsche Bank AG in Gerrnany, the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery and the Farjam Collection in Dubai.
Maya Jribi, Tunisian Fighter for Democracy, Is Dead at 58
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Maya Jribi, the first female leader of a political party in Tunisia, at a meeting of the country’s newly elected constituent assembly, the body in charge of devising a new constitution, in Tunis in December 2011.CreditFethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Lilia Blaise
TUNIS — Maya Jribi, the first female leader of a political party in Tunisia and a tenacious supporter of democracy under the country’s dictators well before the Arab Spring, died on May 19 at her home in a suburb of Tunis. She was 58.
The cause was colon cancer, her sister Najla Jribi said.
Ms. Jribi was an opposition figure during the long autocratic regimes of both Habib Bourguiba and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was overthrown in early 2011 in an upheaval that began the wave of uprisings across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring.
That same year, after the revolution, she was sent to parliament in the nation’s first democratic election, which brought to power the once-suppressed Islamist party, Ennahda. There she became a strong secular voice, leading protests against efforts to enshrine Islamic law in the new constitution and took part in the parliamentary debate that led to its adoption in 2014.
The efforts of secular voices were fairly successful: The constitution guarantees freedom of religion and draws a line between politics and civil society.
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Ms. Jribi became widely known throughout Tunisia and abroad. Thousands of people, including political leaders from across the spectrum, turned out for her funeral on May 20.
Ms. Jribi was nicknamed Maya the Bee for her seeming ability to be everywhere at once, traveling constantly to demonstrations or meetings in her small green Peugeot. “She was always busy with the party, going to a place a day, campaigning, protesting another day for freedoms,” said Safia Mestiri, a longtime friend.
Maya Jribi was born on Jan. 29, 1960, in Bou Arada, about 60 miles southwest of Tunis. Her father worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, and her mother was a homemaker.
“Our parents taught us rigor,” Ms. Jribi once said, “and to never think something is due for us, to always deserve what we wanted.”
When she was still a child, her family moved to Radès, a suburb of Tunis.
Ms. Jribi studied biology and geology at the University of Sfax, on the eastern coast. There she became politically active, joining the student union and the Tunisian League of Human Rights.
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Several years after graduating, Ms. Jribi began working for opposition newspapers, and in 1983, with Ahmed Najib Chebbi, she helped establish the secularist Progressive Socialist Rally, which was soon renamed the Progressive Democratic Party.
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Ms. Jribi at a 2011 news conference in Tunis at which she announced her candidacy for the constituent assembly.CreditFethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Bourguiba had held power for a quarter-century and was opening the door a bit to other parties. But it took five years for the Progressive Democratic Party to gain legal recognition. The Democratic Constitutional Rally party — led by Mr. Ben Ali, Mr. Bourguiba’s successor — won 80.6 percent of the vote in 1989, prompting allegations that the vote had been marred by fraud. The Progressive Democrats boycotted subsequent elections.
In 2005, Mr. Chebbi went on a hunger strike with eight representatives of other parties to protest government pressure on journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates. The hunger strike helped unite a fragmented opposition.
Ms. Jribi took over as party leader in 2006. Soon afterward the regime closed her party’s offices, and she joined another hunger strike, refusing food for 33 days. The experience left her in poor health for years.
“The doctor came two weeks after she started the strike,” her friend Ms. Mestiri said. “He told her she was already a bit too fragile to continue, she was so featherweight. I told her to stop — we could have replaced her with someone. She told me, ‘I always finish my battles.’ ”
Ms. Jribi’s party merged with another to form Al Joumhouri, which succeeded in winning only one parliamentary seat in the last election, in 2014. She stepped down as party leader last year, citing ill health.
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Ms. Jribi was a defender of women’s rights. Along with pushing for equality between the sexes in the constitution, she favored quotas for women in politics and other fields.
“We had heated debates on this because I was against the quotas policy,” Ms. Jribi’s sister Najla said. “But Maya used to say that even if she did not want them for herself, she thought society needed these laws to move forward.”
In addition to her sister Najla, Ms. Jribi’s survivors include two other sisters, Souha Khassiba and Sana Ben Ghorbel, and a brother, Nizar Jribi.
In a statement after the death, President Beji Caid Essebsi hailed Ms. Jribi’s dedication to “democracy, freedom, justice, equality and faith in the civil state.”
Ms. Mestiri called Ms. Jribi a role model for Tunisian women.
“She was a constant fighter, and she used to talk to other women as if she was their equal, not as a top-down member of the elite,” she said.
“She left a vacuum after her death,” Ms. Mestiri added, “because the country still needs people who know the value of liberty and who fought for it before the revolution.”
Maya Jribi (January 29, 1960 – May 19, 2018)[1] was a Tunisian politician. From 2006 to 2012, she was the leader of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP).[2] From PDP's merger into the Republican Party in April 2012, until her resignation in 2017, she was the Secretary-General of the centrist party.
Her father is from Tatouine, while her mother is from Algeria. She followed her studies in Radès Tunisia, before studying biology at the University of Sfax, from 1979 to 1983. During that period, she became involved and an active member of the student union, known as UGET, and the Tunisian League of Human Rights. She wrote for the independent weekly Erraï and later for the PDP-newspaper Al Mawkif.[2]
Together with Ahmed Najib Chebbi, Maya Jribi co-founded the Progressive Socialist Rally, established in 1983, which was later renamed into Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). Since 1986 she has been a member of the party's executive. On 25 December 2006, Jribi was appointed Secretary-General of the PDP.[2] She has been the first woman to lead a political party in Tunisia.[3]
From 1 to 20 October 2007, Jribi, along with Najib Chebbi, engaged in a hunger strike to protest against the forced move of the party's headquarters from Tunis, which caused serious health implications for her.[2]
Jribi headed the PDP’s electoral list in Ben Arous for the Constituent Assembly Elections in October 2011.[2] The PDP list received one seat in Ben Arous according to preliminary election results. On 9 April 2012, the PDP merged with other secularist parties to form the Republican Party and Maya Jribi became the leader of this party.[4]
Maya Jribi (b. January 29, 1960, Bou Arada, Tunisia – d. May 19, 2018, Rades, Ben Arous Governorate, Tunisia) was a Tunisian politician. From 2006 to 2012, she was the leader of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). From PDP's merger into the Republican Party in April 2012, until her resignation in 2017, she was the Secretary-General of the centrist party.
Her father was from Tatouine, while her mother was from Algeria. She followed her studies in Radès Tunisia, before studying biology at the University of Sfax, from 1979 to 1983. During that period, she became involved in, and an active member of, the student union, known as UGET, and the Tunisian League of Human Rights. She wrote for the independent weekly Erraï and later for the PDP-newspaper Al Mawkif.
Together with Ahmed Najib Chebbi, Maya Jribi co-founded the Progressive Socialist Rally, established in 1983, which was later renamed into Progressive Democratic Party (PDP). After 1986, Jribi was a member of the party's executive. On December 25, 2006, Jribi was appointed Secretary-General of the PDP. She was the first woman to lead a political party in Tunisia.
From October 1 to 20, 2007, Jribi, along with Najib Chebbi, engaged in a hunger strike to protest against the forced move of the party's headquarters from Tunis, which caused serious health implications for her.
Jribi headed the PDP’s electoral list in Ben Arous for the Constituent Assembly Elections in October 2011. The PDP list received one seat in Ben Arous according to preliminary election results. On April 9, 2012, the PDP merged with other secularist parties to form the Republican Party and Maya Jribi became the leader of this party.
Maya Jribi was an outspoken feminist. She labeled Israel as a "Zionist construct", and proposed to disallow Israeli pilgrims to visit the El Ghriba synagogue on Djerba island.
Maya Jribi, announced her retirement, during the Republican Party convention in 2017.
Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in American Ballet Theater who epitomized the company’s early eclectic profile by excelling in roles that ranged from Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart to the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chicago. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by her goddaughter, Ellen Coghlan.
Because of her lyrical style in ballets like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was often cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she could also show dramatic ferocity, as the evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s “Undertow,” which depicts a young murderer’s development.
Contemporary ballet makers favored her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreographer and future film director, cast her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s etchings. She portrayed a dead woman who is tossed around by her partner in choreographed movements that suggested she was inert.
She found her signature role in Ballet Theater’s revivals of Eugene Loring’s “Billy the Kid,” from 1938. A brilliantly stylized experimental work that used occasional speech, the ballet had a biographical plotline by Lincoln Kirstein (who would become a founder of New York City Ballet), and a double role for Ms. Koesun, who portrayed both the sweetheart and the mother of the outlaw Billy.
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Her mix of hidden virtuosity and tender emotion complemented the power of John Kriza, her frequent ballet partner, as Billy. Both performed the ballet with the company before President John F. Kennedy and the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, at the White House on May 22, 1962.
Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15, 1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a Chinese physician in Chicago’s Chinatown, and the former Mary Mondulick, who was of Russian descent.
She met Mr. Kriza, later a Ballet Theater star, while studying at the Chicago ballet school directed by Bentley Stone and Walter Camryn, and performed with him in nightclubs and summer stock.
Ms. Koesun joined the company in 1946 while it was appearing in London and advanced quickly to principal dancer. She retired from Ballet Theater in 1969. Her marriage to Eric Braun, a principal dancer with the troupe, ended in divorce after eight years.
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Ms. Koesun and Michael Lland in David Lichine’s “Graduation Ball” in 1956.CreditMaurice Seymour
Ms. Koesun, who lived in Chicago, leaves no immediate survivors.
Her first years in the company were auspicious. The cover of the Nov. 3, 1947, issue of Life magazine consisted of a double portrait of two young Ballet Theater dancers, Ms. Koesun and Melissa Hayden.
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Rarely had a novice received such rave reviews as those that greeted Ms. Koesun in May of that year for her role in Ballet Theater’s “On Stage!” Michael Kidd, the future Broadway and Hollywood choreographer, had cast her as a very young dancer suffering from stage fright at a rehearsal.
“It was little Ruth Ann Koesun who captured all hearts last night,” the critic John Martin wrote in The New York Times. He praised her “lovely line” and “immeasurable charm.”
Walter Terry, the dance critic for The New York Herald Tribune, wrote later that year that Ms. Koesun’s progress “has been so rapid” and hailed “her highly individual quality of movement, shy but not weak, delicate but assured.”
“She had a unique style,” Richard Covello, an arts writer in Chicago who followed Ms. Koesun’s career closely, said in a telephone interview, noting her hidden technical strengths. “She was a strong dancer locked in the dainty,” he said.
In 1951, Mr. Martin wrote of her “exquisite dancing” in the “Bluebird” pas de deux with the French guest star Jean Babilée, adding that he wondered why “a dancer of these potentialities does not always exhibit them.”
Over the years, Ms. Koesun’s other partners included Erik Bruhn, and her repertoire included Mr. Tudor’s “Dim Lustre,” David Lichine’s “Graduation Ball,” Bronislava Nijinska’s “La Fille Mal Gardée,” Frederick Ashton’s “Les Patineurs” and new works as well, among them Mr. Babilée’s “Till Eulenspiegel.”
She performed often in Jerome Robbins’s early ballets, including “Fancy Free” and “Interplay.” Mr. Covello said that she was the only dancer to perform each of the three female roles in “Fancy Free.” This was thanks to a fluke.
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The ballet ends with three sailors chasing a young woman who appears very briefly onstage after the two main women in the ballet have left. In previous performances, Ms. Koesun had danced each of the two main female roles. On this occasion, she was in the wings when the third woman was late and did not appear.
“So,” Mr. Covello said, “Ruth Ann went back onstage and did the part.”
Koesun, Ruth Ann, age 89, of Chicago passed away Feb. 1, 2018 of natural causes. Devoted daughter of the late Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a distinguished physician for many years in Chicago's Chinatown, and Mary M. Koesun (nee Mondulick). Loving cousin of the late Loring and Dr. Moyra Moy of San Francisco. Dear friend of many including Mary Jane and Ted Fudacz, Susan and David Ruder, Jack Hackman, Richard "Dick" Covello, Barbara Pekow, Alison Hinderliter, Kerri Burkhardt, Barbara Landis and Michael Kramer. Loving godmother of Ellen (Hon. Matthew) Coghlan. Graduate of Mercy High School Class of 1945. Ruth Ann was a Principal Ballerina of Ballet Theatre, now known as American Ballet Theatre from 1946 to 1969 traveling extensively around the world. She debuted on July 4, 1946 at London's Royal Opera House and would go on to win international acclaim for her lyrical interpretations of many roles. Ms. Koesun was described as having a graceful yet assured technique and a sensitive feel for characterization, which along with her "porcelain-princess" beauty made her a popular and widely known performer. She, along with Melissa Hayden, were photographed by Philippe Halsman and appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1947. She taught master classes and was associated with her beloved John Kriza in ABT productions, in summer stock, and in the famous "Salute" shows at the College Inn in Chicago and the New Yorker Hotel. After retiring from American Ballet, Ms. Koesun was co-director of the Dance Department at Hull House Association and danced as principal ballerina with First Chamber Dance Company of New York, 1971-73, then became Executive Director of the Association of Illinois Dance, 1975-79. Ms. Koesun also worked as performing arts archivist at The Newberry Library, 1989-present, as a member of the dance panel of the Illinois Arts Council, Chicago, and as Administrative Assistant for Chamber Opera Chicago. Ms Koesun was a recipient of the Excellence Award in performing arts from the Organization of Chinese Americans, 1985. Visitation Saturday February 17, 2018 at 9:00 a.m. until time of Mass 10:30 a.m. at Holy Name Cathedral, 730 N. State Street, Chicago, IL. Interment at a later date. In lieu of flowers memorials can be made to St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church, Chicago. www.sttheresechinatown.org. Arrangements entrusted to the Original Lamb Family Funeral & Cremations Service. For info call 708-710-9549.
