A Thursday night of contemporary art puts a refreshing end to schools’ midyear break. Young people and art lovers filled Athr art platform based at Serafi Mega Mall’s office towers as the artwork of five woman artists from the Gulf had them mesmerized. The exhibition entitled “And Along Came Polyester” displayed the work of Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdullah’s “18 Blankets,” Qatari artist Aisha Al-Sowaidi’s “The Shift,” Bahraini artist Hala Al-Khalifa’s “She Wore Her Scares Like Wings,” Kuwaiti artist Monira Al-Qadiri’s “Legacy” and Emirati artist Layla Juma’s “A Still Moment in Thought & Spatial Perception.”

First you think: Oh, a few post cards, how nostalgic. Move closer, you can see the embroidery on the images. Times bathers on the romantic cliffs wearing orange life jackets, as they have become a symbol for refugees, even additional tents in a mountainous landscape are embroidered. The London artist Aya Haidar has collected 100 postcards from vacation destinations in the fortress of Europe for her project titled "Wish you were here" and edited, and added a new dimension to the holiday.

" Who’d have thought, for example, that one of my favourite pieces would come from Saudi Arabia at at the dynaamic Athr Gallery based in Jeddah? But Saddek Wasil’s twisted metal figures set into found pieces of crumbling masonry (backed with beautiful tiles from Mecca) are wistful evocations of isolation and loss. Like many artists in the region, Wasil has a day job (he’s a doctor), and makes his art in his father’s garage in his downtime. "

The show is politically charged and runs on the high-octane passion of its curator. “I am a very political person and I am Palestinian,” she says. “But I don’t need to be a Palestinian in Palestine. Palestine is everywhere and that is why I aspire to decolonisation.” 

The entire premise behind her oeuvre is a fascination with the earth as a concept, a material and a historical narrative. It is as much about the process as it is about the end result. For six days, she scoured parts of Dubai’s desert in search for the right kind of sand.
“It’s important for me to smell the sand and feel it with my own hands, because those senses of touch and smell allow my work a synergy," says the artist.
“And if I don’t get that synergy, I can’t work. The sand should smell natural, like the smell of rain on land, the smell that manifests like steam when it rains."

“Mater brings the rigor of his training as a physician—as well as unparalleled access—to gather frank observations of his own time and place,” said exhibition curator Carol Huh, the Freer|Sackler’s curator for contemporary art. “The resulting imagery is straightforward and striking, while his newest research-based project presents another fascinating shift in his use of the photographic medium.”

Palestinian artist Harb, who shuttles between Dubai and Rome, in his sculptural installation titled Unlimited Progress, presents the interplay between time and urban change in a fast-developing city such as Dubai, where large tracts of desert give way to urban expansion. Harb, who visited Dubai first in 2012, has been interested in architecture and urban development, and the city has provided him the backdrop to examine the “co-related relationship between progress and time”.

A new exhibition focusing on Saudi Arabia, the geographic heart of Islam, is due to open this week in Washington, DC. Symbolic Cities: The Work of Ahmed Mater at the Smithsonian Institute’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (19 March-18 September) focuses on the Jeddah-based artist’s landscape photography, which documents the rapid transformation of the ultra-conservative Middle Eastern state.  The exhibition could not be timelier, with immigration, and how Muslims are treated and perceived, dominating the agenda in the US Presidential election campaign. The Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, for example, has called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. 

Mr. Mater is emblematic of an outspoken new generation of Saudis who are making a name for themselves, and Saudi Arabia, in the world of contemporary art. Like Mr. Mater, some of these artists are using their work as a tool of critique, testing the limits of what is permissible in the ultraconservative kingdom.
“Art has a big role to play for change,” Mr. Mater said in an interview in his studio in the Red Sea city of Jeddah. “We are needed to push these red lines, the restrictions. It’s more interesting here than where there is freedom of expression.”

The Mexican painter Farida Kahlo once said: “I never paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” Jeddah Art Week and Athr Gallery is presenting Ayman Yossri Daydban’s solo exhibition, Give Me Light, that has spell-bound viewers with art that is real, yet abstract, with a few words and a thousand pictures.

Interestingly, this year’s exhibition inspiration for ‘Earth and Ever After’ comes from the Holy Qur’anic verses: “From this dust We created you, and in this We shall put you back, and from this, We shall raise you up once again.” (20:55) and “And Allah has made the Earth a spread for you, so that you may go about its broad ways.” (71:20). 

Participating artists:
Sarah Abu Abdallah, Heba Amin, Eleanor Antin, Darren Bader, Tyler Coburn, Simon Denny, Jason Dodge, Maria Eichhorn, Dora Garcia, Liam Gillick, Melanie Gilligan, Goldin+Senneby, Pierre Huyghe, Roberto Jacoby, Hanne Lippard, Lee Lozano, Mathias Poledna, Mladen Stilinovic, UBERMORGEN 
Kunstverein, Hamburg, Germany
For the first time, the exhibition FLUIDITY focuses on the fluid as a defining feature of contemporary social realities against the backdrop of the art-historical discussion of the phenomenon of dematerialization. Starting from the ground-breaking publication project "Six Years - The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972" by Lucy R. Lippard (1973), the group exhibition FLUIDITY establishes an update of international conceptual strategies.