What’s new for the fifth Newcastle Gateshead Art Fair? David Whetstone looks ahead to one of the North East art scene’s red letter events

THEY call it the NewcastleGateshead Art Fair but it really does open up an artistic window on the world.

The chap you see on today’s Culture pages is Shareef Sarhan and he has been making a name for himself as an artist in Palestine.

You probably won’t have heard of him. Apart from Cullercoats playwright Peter Mortimer’s admirable Shatila project, Palestinians generally enter our lives via the most unfortunate TV news coverage.

But Shareef has been making ripples overseas since setting up a Windows from Gaza contemporary art group in Palestine in 2003.

He has exhibited a few times outside Palestine – elsewhere in the Middle East, twice in the UK and in America. He has also won awards at the Festival of Arab Photographers.

As you will see also on these pages, Shareef has a nice way with a paintbrush, accentuating – in a simple depiction of a washing line – the shapes and colours which co-exist with those TV scenes of trouble.

At the end of this month you will be able to see his work for the first time in this part of the world at The Sage Gateshead, which is yet again to be the venue for the NewcastleGateshead Art Fair.

One of the galleries which has secured space at the fifth Art Fair is Arts Canteen, an ambitious London-based venture which aims to foster artistic relations between the Middle East and Europe.

It is the brainchild of Aser El Saqqa, whose mission is to broker inter-cultural approaches to the arts and, more simply, to give pleasure to audiences and spectators.

Work by Shareef Sarhan will be displayed at Gateshead along with that of two other Arts Canteen artists, Raed Issa and Mohammed Abusal.

Issa, who was born in Gaza, has exhibited in Jordan, Lebanon, Switzerland, Australia, Norway and France. He is currently an artist-in-residence in Paris.