JEDDAH: From New York to Paris and from Barcelona to Beirut, Saudi artists are being given a great opportunity to further their knowledge and experience, as well as explore new ideas. Jeddah’s Athr Gallery, a strong supporter of contemporary art, is sending established Saudi artists to cities around the world for inspiration and self-challenge.
The art-residency program, entitled “Out of Place,” began as an open invitation to all Saudi-based artists during Athr’s 10th-anniversary exhibition. “The title refers to the notion of home and comfort zones, both of which get shaken when artists root themselves in a new city and environment for a residency program,” Alia Fattouh, director of Athr Gallery, told Arab News.
 
The main goal of an art-residency program is to inspire and broaden the horizons of those taking part, by allowing them to experience art and culture in different contexts.

Ayman Zedani’s  Between Muddles and Tangles  features a contemplative abstract video of lights dancing across a tangle of branches and leaves.
The artwork is a meeting of the artificial and the natural, as the artist filmed the glow of a light show against nearby greenery in an unknown location in the UAE.
“It’s a cross-section of man-made and natural environments where new landscapes thrive,” he says, pointing out that insects have adapted to these disruptions by using lights to guide their paths.
In one corner of the room, the artist has set up a sort of growth lab for the desert plant Kaff Mariam (Hand of Mary), placing them under LED lights that give off the same wavelength as sunlight.

The resulting video,  Sarab  (2016), was included in “ Naphtha, ” a summer exhibition curated by artist Moath Alofi at the Khuzam Palace in Jeddah and organized by the Saudi ministry of culture. It stands as a provocative representation of the changes taking place in the country, and a potent symbol of its attempted break with the past as it enters new terrain under 33-year-old crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MbS, who has promised modernizing reforms.
 “When things move fast and you are in the middle of them, you cannot comprehend the speed,” says Mohammed Hafiz, an art collector and co-founder of  Athr Gallery , a contemporary art space established in Jeddah in 2009.

The Jameel Arts Centre has announced its programming for the new season, with a focus on urgent, discursive, and digital- and research-driven artworks.
The art space, which opened on Dubai Creek last year, has already made a name for itself as a key site of critical contemporary art with an Arab regional focus. The programme for the coming year continues this pattern: with the first solo exhibitions in the region for young Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah and in 2020 for Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz. A major thematic exhibition, Phantom Limb, explores how fragments of material heritage can haunt the present.

Over the last year, Saudi Arabia’s art scene has been exploding in the region and beyond, most recently with exhibitions such as “Zamakan,” which brought together the works of 11 of the country’s top contemporary artists. In this supportive and growing environment for arts and culture, more of the Kingdom’s young contemporary artists are making a name for themselves, such as Basmah Felemban, a self-taught graphic designer from Jeddah who also owns her own studio in the city of her birth. As a young creative now based in Saudi Arabia, Felemban is an avid supporter of Kingdom’s local creative scene, often participating in workshops, talks, and utilizing her social media platforms in a way that provides inspiration to others. Over the course of her short career, Felemban has already exhibited in many international and local exhibitions including Art Dubai, 21/39, contemporary art Istanbul, Venice Biennale, and Art Abu Dhabi.

Saudi-Arabien verbindet man sicher mit Vielem: mit der systematischen Unterdrückung von Frauen zum Beispiel, mit nicht eben zimperlichen Geheimdiensten oder mit einem brutalen Krieg gegen den Jemen - jedoch nicht unbedingt mit einer jungen Videokünstlerin. Eine solche ist nun im  Hamburger Kunstverein  zu entdecken, der Sarah Abu Abdallah die erste Einzelausstellung in Europa widmet. Ihr Titel: "For The First Time In A Long Time".

The exhibition, which takes place at Ithra, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, displays the work of some of Saudi Arabia’s most pivotal contemporary artists

 
Three old wooden doors are inexplicably alluring. The first one is colored in a vibrant shade of turquoise yet numerous scratchings on its surface tell of years of use. The central one, unpainted and found in a light tan hue, is the most intact of all three and has a silver door handle while the third is the most battered, scratched and beaten—time has worn its originally soft surface into a battlefield of a wear and tear.
It’s become battered, discarded and devoured by the harsh desert and beaming with one last purpose through  Saudi  artist Moath Alofi’s work,  The Doors of Thad  (2019), part of the ongoing project The Last Tashahhud.

Hailing from  Saudi Arabia , Al Faraj has previously showcased his work across Dubai and Jeddah. “I think what really drove the idea into becoming this work was mainly seeing the robot Sophia being awarded the Saudi citizenship on TV, in contrast to my experience in trying to make a film about a group of displaced undocumented people in southern Saudi Arabia,” shares Al Faraj. “This was also my first attempt into balancing between the form and the content, make both influence each other in the work so that three chapters unfold in a sculpture of screens that's built and designed on three planes.”

Dana Awartani, Abdulnasser Gharem, Ayman Yossri Daydban and Basmah Felemban take us inside their Saudi Arabia-based studios
Ayman Yossri Daydban: “I see my studio as an important piece of artwork—it is always changing, never settling in one location. I never decided what medium I will use—sometimes I paint, sometimes I crush elements together and sometimes I mix unconventional, untraditional styles together. I will keep searching for answers. I am currently working on a solo exhibition with Athr Gallery which will launch in September.”

A recent project of the world renowned curator, Rahul Gudipudi, is  The Silence Is Still Talking,  a solo exhibition by Muhanned Shono. A showcase that consists of charcoal on blank paper seems uninspired, derivative, or even tedious. However, that is the point Shono is trying to make. Shono believes that people have the unfortunate tendency to restrain their words and verbal expressions; there is a lack of creativity and imagination with words. Through using the restricted tools of charcoal and paper, Shono has proven that word expression is a limitless endeavor. It can be explored in a plethora of different ways and angles.

Artists showcasing their work at the “Second Hand” exhibit include resident Art Jameel artists, including, Diana Al-Hadid, Doa Aly, Fayçal Baghriche, Walead Beshty, Vikram Divecha, Bita Ghezelayagh, Mohammed Kazem, Azade Köker, Cinthia Marcelle, Keita Miyazaki, Slavs and Tatars, Moffat Takadiwa, Mario García Torres, Jason Dodge, Zahrah Al-Ghamdi, Adel Abdessemed, Haig Aivazian, and Abbas Akhavan. The name of the art show is inspired by Moffat Takadiwa’s piece, “Second Hand Information” (2014). Hailing from Zimbabwe, Moffat’s piece is formed by computer keys, which instigates the notion that the way information is carried from one person to another, and so forth, is similar to the way “material changes over time”. Much of the artwork from the show has been created using materials that have been repurposed or morphed to highlight the way in which a setting can transform the purpose of particular resources. Interestingly, there are also some art pieces in the exhibition that look at the way items and art are created, making the process of creation, artistic.

“I don’t play music, but I felt that at times I was playing music by ear with this exhibition, listening to conversations around me as they were coming to the surface,” says Inouye.
Composition and sound are also key to Mohammed Al Faraj’s 10-minute video  Sophia  (2018-2019). Projected on three surfaces – two joining walls and the floor – the work merges real news footage of Sophia, the first robot to be granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, with reportage about a distressed sea turtle in Jeddah and other images of the artist’s home town, Al Hassa, in Saudi Arabia. It has an apocalyptic feel to it, particularly as Al Faraj has introduced purposeful glitches, which the curator says represent a kind of “digital decay that anticipates the demise of our computational order”.
For me, the show feels like a snapshot of now, which although spreads across a wide social and political geography, is talking of something much more central to human consciousness – the idea of a common intuition or a common idea that can traverse boundaries and borders and indeed, crash through the surface.
Surface Tension runs until September 7 at Sharjah Art Foundation, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, www.sharjahart.org