On the fifth floor of a building attached to a shopping mall stands the Athr gallery, with a large collection of Saudi artists. The images on display are equally challenging. Ahmed Mater’s work documents how a multibillion-dollar government-backed high-rise building programme is encroaching on Mecca, a subtle commentary on the clash between Mammon and ancient tradition. One floor above, Saddek Wasil’s twisted metal images, occasionally showing a protruding hand, suggest the human desire to reach out for answers or a form of salvation. Maya El Khalil, the gallery director, says the works highlight the pressure for change and the desire to preserve tradition in Saudi Arabia. “It used to be art for art’s sake. Now they [artists] have something to say.”

A work by Nasser Al Salem is seen at the Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC) fair on September 17, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. The fair exhibits works from around 100 galleries from 17 countries and runs from September 17-20.

Showcasing three new projects based on the study of numbers, Awartani uses various contexts from a geometric standpoint proving that it is still very much a relevant theme in the Saudi art world.  Speaking exclusively to Saudi Gazette, she said: “The abjad and numerical squares have played a fundamental role in my research where I am trying to examine the significance and hidden qualities of individual numbers and show how they have not only influenced our culture, religion and our arts but also looking at how the Islamic empire were the pioneers at the time when it came to this subject.” 

In his multimedia artworks, the artist has juxtaposed various references to pre-1948 Palestine with concrete blocks, which can be seen as a symbol of occupation, representing the apartheid wall, the road blocks encountered daily by Palestinians, and the intrusion of other architectural styles on Palestinian architecture.
The artworks highlight the fact that while architecture can provide shelter, it also has the potential to destroy people and obliterate their existence. Through the heaviness and destructive power of architecture, Harb speaks about the violence of occupation and the destruction of cultural narratives.
However, he also expresses hope in the power and potential of architecture to reverse the destruction and to construct a better future. The show is organised by Salsali Private Museum in collaboration with Athr gallery, Jeddah, and curated by Lara Khaldi.

T he Written City exhibition looks at the spatial organization of city and state as a product of often conflicting political intentions. The exhibition analyzes the relationships between several political discourses and their design, interpretation and control of the urban and national space.
The Written City brings together contrasting perspectives of the construction, the use, the representations and the questioning or disputing of the political production of space.
The development of urban and national space often presupposes forms of physical or symbolic inclusion and exclusion. In that respect the exhibition deals with a number of spatial metaphors such as barricades, boundaries and fences or so-called “gated communities,” and at the same time the destruction or penetration of these types of partition.

The list of the participating artists forms a strong connection to a region in which political decisions and urbanisation are complicated and unstable. Amongst others are two artists from Palestine  – Raeda Saadeh and Hazem Harb – who are dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a particular reference to architecture of violence.
Having spent his childhood and teenage years growing up in the contested grounds of Gaza, Palestinian artist Hazem Harb’s artistic output serves as an apolitical, first hand  ACCOUNT  of this on-going conflict. In his works he deals with a number of core issues including war, loss, trauma, human vulnerability and global instability affected by the situation in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.

Harb has been working on this series, his first museum show, since 2008. For The Archaeology of Occupation series, Harb has super­imposed angular shapes onto landscape photographs. For The Tag Series, he has taken anonymous family portraits, placing squares over faces in the same way that Facebook prompts a user to “tag” or identify people in photos. “Tagging is about recognition of existence,” says El Khalil. “Here the artist is talking on behalf of the people saying ‘we are here, we are the people of the land’.” Also on display is a ­collection of ­photomontages made from pre-1948 images of Palestine.
While this show marks a significant point in Harb’s career, it also shows maturity and development for Athr, which started out as a ­contemporary art gallery in ­Jeddah but is quickly establishing itself as one of the most important initiatives in the Gulf. “One of our missions is to create dialogue,” El Khalil says. “It is very important for us that we bring to the world a dialogue that originates in Saudi Arabia but that also comes back to Saudi Arabia as well.

At Jeddah’s Athr Gallery, Hazem Harb presents pre-1948 photographs of Palestine, thwarted by intrusive slabs of concrete in his “Archaeology of Occupation” series, 2015, (there is a also a large monographic show of this work in the Salsali Private Museum in Alserkal).

Consider Dania Al Saleh’s gorgeous pair of illustrations at Athr Gallery,  Window with a View , 2015, which explore social class divisions; Akram Zaatari’s 2007 photograph  Reconstructing the Arab Highway , in which workers are photographed from behind, the word “MAN” somewhat sadly printed on the backs of their uniforms at Sfeir-Semler; and Mahmoud Khaled’s cheeky print-outs of Grindr chats,  Do you have work tomorrow?  at Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery, which consider how even “soft” spaces are politicised.

A special commission by Gaza-born artist  Hazem Harb , on view during Art Week, memorialized the actual construction of the Avenue's expansion through video and sculpture; it was admittedly strange and uncomfortable to stand there and watch footage of half a dozen foreign laborers performing their tasks  while singing , since  labor conditions in the UAE   don’t typically  generate the most  pleasing melodies . 

Athr Gallery  from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, features a group presentation entitled “Why is the Power Button Always a Circle?”, including the work of  Ahmed Mater , Ayman Yossri Daydban, Dana Awartani,  Nasser Al Salem  and  Seçkin Pirim . The theme draws from the historical, social and cultural significance of the circle. The works in the booth address and use the circle to examine disparate subjects, whether terrestrial or celestial in nature: from notions of identity and home , to spirituality and the duality of religious practices, to astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

Hazem Harb’s The Invisible Landscape and Concrete Futures is a nostalgic yearning for a land lost to occupation. Questioning the notion of architecture being destructive rather than protective, Harb’s show, based largely on photographs of pre-1948 Palestine, is a large, moving exhibition that has taken him eight years to complete. It is showing at Salsali Private Museum in Alserkal Avenue.