A group of acclaimed Saudi and international photographers have joined forces for the launch of a new exhibition project in the Kingdom.
The inaugural edition of Jeddah Photo 2022, running at Athr Gallery until March 17, will be showcasing a variety of images including some of the earliest photographic experiments, modern classics, and innovative contemporary artworks.
Under the title “The Time is Right,” this year’s event aims to raise awareness about the fragile balance of humans’ relationship with the natural world.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Naphtha inaugurates Khuzam Palace’s relaunch, around the theme of oil and politics. The works selected explore the broad and deep consequences of oil on both social and environmental aspects, departing from the Kingdom and branching out to the rest of world.

There is at present a remarkable flowering of the Jeddah art scene, a sense that the young and reforming country of Saudi Arabia – having been relatively isolated from the rest of the world – has something new and different to offer on the artistic stage.

Jeddah’s yearly arts festival, 21,39, took place last week, and its ancillary events this year stretched across the country. Organisers took international visitors to Dammam, on the country’s east coast, to see the gorgeously high-spec Ithra: King Abdullah Aziz Centre for World Culture, the Saudi Aramco-funded art and cultural space that opens later this year, as well as to the King Abdullah Economic City to see the country’s first-ever solo show, Drum Roll, Please of Ahmed Mater.

The Clocks Are Striking Thirteen, curated by one of Athr Gallery’s former directors, Maya El Khalil, showed works that played with materiality and symbolism in novel ways. And it had feeling: there was a sense of things at stake.