Arts past and present

Abu Dhabi has a new museum – and it’s dedicated to the country’s desert landscape. The Sheikh Zayed Desert Learning Centre is in al-Ain, the fourth largest city in the United Arab Emirates and located in an oasis. It has five galleries and offers public guided tours. The architecture of the building is inspired by the surrounding landscape and is completely curved – with not a single right angle in the whole place. – DPA

Skycity, located just a short stroll from Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), will feature retail complexes, entertainment facilities, dining space, hotels, and office towers in its approximately 25 hectares of land at the north of the airport island. HKIA serves nearly 70 million international passengers and local residents annually and passenger traffic is projected to rise to more than 100 million by 2030 with the completion of the Three-runway System. SkyCity will also be able to tap into the full potential brought by the Tuen Mun-Chek Lap Kok Link and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, strategic road links that will provide greater interconnectivity not only in Hong Kong, but also with the Pearl River Delta region. The development is expected to be complete in 2020.

What was daily life like for the Maya and why did this civilisation disappear from Central America after a golden age lasting just a few centuries? These are the questions being asked in a new exhibition in the south-western German city of Speyer, which has put 250 Maya exhibits on display, many of them never seen in Europe before. “We want to explain how the Maya managed to live and survive in this inhospitable rainforest environment,” says Nikolai Grube from Bonn University, researcher and academic adviser to the exhibition in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a digital reconstruction of the Mayan city of Uxul. It is intended to show how life was organised in the society's cities. – DPA

Singapore Airlines has taken delivery of its sixth Airbus A350-900, the 10,000th aircraft that Airbus has delivered. The airline’s sixth A350-900 features a special logo highlighting that it is the 10,000th aircraft delivered by Airbus. This latest A350-900 will be used for non-stop flights between Singapore and San Francisco later this month. Singapore Airlines’ first A350-900 went into service in March and the aircraft type is now being used on its Amsterdam, Dusseldorf and Johannesburg routes, with more destinations to be added as additional aircraft enter the fleet. Singapore Airlines is the largest A350-900 customer with commitments for 67 firm orders, including seven of the ultra-long-range A350-900ULR variant.

A new exhibition at the Picasso Museum in Paris illustrates the relationship between Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti, with more than 200 works by these two master artists of the 20th century on display until February 5. The collection features paintings, sculptures and drawings from the Picasso Museum and the Giacometti Foundation, plus borrowed items from private French and foreign collections. Picasso, the Spanish master of abstract painting, and Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor famed for his stick-figures, met for the first time in the early 1930s and the exhibition chronicles the different aspects of their artistic production and the artists’ development. It also points out correspondences between their arts as they regularly exchanged creative ideas. In addition to well-known works, the show also presents rare casts, newly discovered drawings and archival material being exhibited for the first time. – DPA