The depicted demolishing symbols mark the first phase of an impending destruction, these symbols are haunting, cancerous, apocalyptic.

Spread around the city, can be seen everywhere, yet it goes unnoticeable at first.

There’s a haunting feel about the numbers.

Some people fight against these numbers, by erasing, scratching and painting over these numbers.

View Master slides  1960-80 / 1980-2000 and 2000-2020

Images taken from Makkah’s most widely circulated pilgrim keepsake. Made in China since the pre-1960s they have been shipped over in their thousands along the same silk route that has been central to cultural interaction from East to West since 206 BCE. These same View Finders, once bought on Al Khalil Road in Makkah, are then disseminated through the hands of the pilgrims to every corner of the world. The View Finders and their images, are not only visual portals to a city that bristles under the weight of its own dramatic symbolism but a reflection of a site revered by millions created with the specific task of triggering fantasies of a pilgrimage to Makkah and all it implies. As objects, the View Finders embody these dreams, whilst the collection of images, once released from the limitations of their intended form, are transformed. They become not only social documentation but pertinent and poignant signifiers of specific times and places, drawing on collective history, iconography and memory, of a site that is at once the most visited yet the most exclusive in the world.  

I am a photojournalist

In November 2001 I went to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After covering the aftermath of 9/11 in NYC, I went to Afghanistan to get a first hand perspective of the region that many Americans fear and worry about. In Kabul, as I was photographing a boy pushing a cart in front of the bombed out ,The King's Palace (Darul Aman), I heard someone shouting at me from my left . Apparently I had been walking over land minds

Tapline, initiated in 1946, was a joint venture between several American oil companies. It set out to supplant the transport of Saudi Arabian oil through the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea with a safer and more cost-effective above-ground pipeline running in a straight line from Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to Haifa, Palestine. 

Letterhead (1950/2013), a collection of blank letterheads found at the initiative’s abandoned headquarters in Beirut, framed and laid out in a continuous line by Tabet. The fragile, weathered documents, which bear the material passage of time, form an abstracted timeline that embodies the memory of the venture and the ideas it once represented.

The Swimming Pool Series is an ongoing taxonomical study of four swimming pools built, owned and maintained by Saudi ARAMCO on each of the oil company’s four separate compounds: Dhahran (Saudi ARAMCO’s administrative headquarters), Ras Tanura (the oldest refinery and company port on the Persian Gulf Coast), Abqaiq/Biqayq (home to the company’s oil processing facility), and Udhailiyah (home to the company’s gas-gathering program).

For decades, these were the only pools that existed in Saudi Arabia until after the first Gulf War. Their blue expanses represent the superimposing of a 1950s California suburb onto a desert landscape, operating as colonial watermarks. Equally influenced by the artist’s upbringing in Dhahran and her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago and affinity with California painters and photographers like Ed Ruscha, the Swimming Pool Series imagines the encroachment of suburbia and envisions the chaos of empire and industrialization through the banality of the backyard pool.

The earliest set of four swimming pools was made in 1999 and most recent set in 2010. As the longest ongoing series of works by Waheed, they elicit a lingering sense of anxiety through their obsessive repetition and a feeling of isolationism inherent to the uncanny fabrication of the suburban experience on the world’s largest and most valuable oil compound.