Reconstructing Saudi: A Look into the Short Window of Artist-Led Spaces and Organisations in a Country on the Verge of Change

Every few years, someone writes an article about how the art scene in Saudi Arabia is ‘opening up’, or starting a ‘new era’. You don’t need to be a mathematician to know that’s a logical fallacy. How many times can an art scene start from scratch? In fact, the Saudi scene has resisted historicisation, and what may seem novel or opaque is less a function of the famous Gulf tendency to chase the new than of the country’s relative isolation and lack of a critical public culture. Because of restrictions on free speech, much isn’t written down, leading to a dominance of rumour and remembrance. Occasional newspaper articles fixate on the qualitative ‘difference’ of Saudi as a country, rather than recording in detail the development of one of the most interesting art scenes of the region. At this point, contemporary art in Saudi Arabia is twenty years old, and artistic activity in Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar/Dhahran has grown in concert with global engagement. While artistic milieus there are (for the moment) grassroots, the narratives they fulfil – critical, progressive, subversive, tribal, authentic – are informed, whether in a positive or negative relation, by regional and global art histories.

Part of what is special about Saudi rests on the history, extending back some 40 years, from which it is now emerging. A large proportion of the artists who today comprise the contemporary art scene were raised under the extreme Wahhabi social and religious codes that came into effect in 1979. In a sense, this era is ending before our eyes as Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman undoes many of the country’s most egregious strictures: the prohibition against women driving; the segregation between unrelated members of the sexes; the ban on entertainment in the form of cinemas, music and dancing. Within this whirlwind of reforms, art plays an important role – a fact to which the government’s current huge investment in museums, biennials, exhibitions and research initiatives attests. Like other ambitious and wealthy states – the UAE, Qatar, Singapore, Kazakhstan – Saudi Arabia views art as a ticket to a cool globalism, with VIP perks as well as, in this case, the credibility of building on a strong decade of self-organised, spirited art practices.

The Early Years

Most people credit the semi-artistic, semi-curatorial initiative Edge of Arabia (2003–ongoing) with introducing contemporary art to Saudi Arabia, on account of its public showing of artworks made privately in studios. The project was founded by the Saudi artists Ahmed Mater and Abdulnasser Gharem, together with the Briton Stephen Stapleton. Mater and Gharem had known each other from the southern state of Asir where they grew up, and had already helped to establish the Al Miftaha Arts Village in Abha, which acts as a centre for art practice and community hub.⁰¹ Edge of Arabia held their first exhibition in 2008, at the Brunei Gallery, part of SOAS in London, with work by Mater, Gharem and other well-known names such as Manal Al Dowayan and Faisal Samra.⁰² They then launched an international tour, starting with a pop-up exhibition at a 2010 Riyadh event, and in 2012 presented Saudi’s first large-scale public contemporary art exhibition, ‘We Need to Talk’, in the historically liberal Red Sea port city of Jeddah.⁰³ ‘We Need to Talk’ featured 21 artists and was accompanied by an educational programme that reached out to schools and university curricula, emphasising local engagement. It was conceived by Stapleton and curated by Mohammed Hafiz, who had established Athr Gallery – which has gone on to become the major gallery in Saudi – with the artist Hamza Serafi a few years earlier.

‘We Need to Talk’ was one of a number of artistic projects in Jeddah that developed in the early 2010s to give the nascent scene wider visibility. Jeddah Art Week, or JAW, which ran from 2013 to 2015, presented a city-wide programme of events and exhibitions of both Saudi and international work. It was initiated by Lina Lazaar and supported by various stakeholders – in the main the Jameel family, who are major patrons of art and social enterprise in Saudi.⁰⁴ This included the exhibition ‘Kakaibang Jeddah’, one of few shows to address the non-Saudi population. Curated by Lazaar in 2014, it showed work by fifteen resident Filipinos who were photographers alongside their domestic labour roles.⁰⁵ This was at the height of the country’s ‘Saudisation’ policy, whereby the government tried to tackle its unemployment problem by reducing the percentage of foreign workers to 20 per cent of the labour force. This severely affected the Filipino population, with reports of tens of thousands of domestic workers being abruptly put out of work and facing repatriation.

The event ‘21, 39’ was also launched in 2014: an annual programme centred around a curated exhibition. Named after the coordinates of Jeddah and organised by the Saudi Art Council (a group of fifteen important local families rather than a government body), it has grown into the most important contemporary art offering within the country and the primary means of engagement for international visitors. Its main exhibition is held across disused spaces in the Gold Moor Mall and a crumbling house in the city’s historic old town, Al Balad, and has grown into the agenda-setting role of a biennial. Notable editions were ‘Safar’ (‘Travel’) in 2017, for which Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath developed a pedagogical framework and worked closely with a group of young artists to develop their work, and ‘I Love You, Urgently’, in 2020, curated by Maya El-Khalil, formerly of Athr Gallery, which presented many of the key young artists of the last five years.

Most of these artists are working in ways unconnected to the modernist art histories that had tried to take root in the kingdom prior to the introduction of the Wahhabi codes. These codes were put into practice after the Siege of Mecca (1979), when a group of religious extremists captured the Grand Mosque, trapping thousands of worshippers inside. The site was besieged for over two weeks, with extremists fighting against the Saudi military and the French corps who had come in their support, in what became a shocking episode for the Saudis. In response, Saudi clerics sought to placate religious conservatives, and throughout the 1980s issued a number of strict proclamations. Before these restrictions, art had been part of Saudi, if only to the extent that any country with little visual arts or European cultural tradition had a painting or sculptural-based art scene. Modernism is principally associated with the Dar Al Funoon Al Saudi (Saudi Art House), founded by the painter Mohammed Al Saleem, which was active as an art school and exhibition site in Riyadh in the 1970s.⁰⁶ Many artists were sent by the government to be educated abroad during that time – a common practice among the Gulf states, which had money but no faculties for art education – to places such as Cairo, Baghdad, Paris and London. Some, such as Safeya Binzagr, set up informal art schools when they returned. It is debatable how much impact these have had on the contemporary art scene today, but their existence belies the impression of a Saudi state whose aniconic fatwas and gender hierarchies were fully enforced. In the 1990s Binzagr, together with a Scottish assistant, taught painting to both male and female Saudi and expat students at her Safeya Binzagr Gallery in Jeddah. Binzagr herself collected examples of and painted watercolours of the folk dresses that showed the diversity of tribes and regions before they were united by the house of Al Saud in the 1930s.

But the Wahhabi restrictions should not be underestimated either. They had a determining effect on the art scene that exists now, on the artwork produced as well as on the infrastructure behind it, as most culture was forced underground. Many early works were critical in nature, and this criticality increased as time went on, aided by frustration with the state and restlessness among the young population, as well as excitement over what was possible – particularly after the introduction of the internet, which met a population that had been largely home-bound, whether because of gender restrictions or lifestyle. Social media sites and YouTube played a major role in forming pockets of creativity and community among artists, film-makers, writers, graphic designers, comedians and activists.⁰⁷

Strictures against mixed gender gatherings, visual art and entertainment were roundly flouted at this time. Artists describe workarounds whereby they and other artists kept their activities private, including discussions held in private residences, which were subject to different regulations than restaurants or businesses. The Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri likened the way information travelled to samizdat. Recounting an experience from 2016 in Riyadh, the country’s conservative capital, she recalled the circuitous path she took to get to an underground society of film-makers, which was open only to men but had extended an invitation to her. She dressed in men’s clothes and followed her friend’s instructions, making several turnings and then pushing forward on a door marked with an ‘X’.⁰⁸

In Jeddah, Mater’s studio operated as a semi-public site for exhibitions, talks, screenings and general discussions. He ran it with the artist Arwa Al Neami, his then-wife, calling it Pharan Studios after the Pharan desert – another name for Jeddah’s Hejazi region. Pharan Studios became a crucial part of the Jeddah art scene, welcoming international visitors and open to local projects. The 2017 talks programme ‘RAWdah Talks’, which Mater organised with the artist and architect Abdulrahman Gazzaz, now of the architecture firm bricklab, discussed topics such as consumer culture, the relationship between public space and freedom of speech, and the idea of the genius loci, looking to the street life of Jeddah with its migrant-run shops. The year-long series was open to the public by WhatsApp and Instagram; its audience was mostly artists, students and architects.⁰⁹

Though the art world centred in Jeddah, film-makers and artists also organised in the country’s other two main cities of Riyadh and Khobar, in the Eastern Province. Gharem’s studio in Riyadh, like Mater’s, was a site for discussions and exhibitions with young artists. In 2012, the curator Raneen Bukhari set up the art organisation Loud Art in Desert Designs, a provincial art gallery run by her parents in Khobar. Loud Art aimed to present curated shows – still not yet the dominant practice in Saudi – and was a success among the emerging generation. With her co-founder Najla Al Suhaimi, Bukhari gave significant early shows to a number of now established artists, including Sarah Al Abdali, Ayman Zedani and Muhannad Shono. Prices for work were kept low – around 20–30 US dollars a piece – to avoid an elitist art market. Bukhari then launched a second, more discursive platform, Hunart, which aimed to host one talk per month and broadcast all its activities on Snapchat.

In all Saudi exhibitions at the time, works were vetted by the Ministry of Information beforehand and organisers were careful about which images were posted online. This was not only because images themselves were samizdat, but because many of these images seemed to have been shocking by any measure: reports in the Western press suggest they addressed sensitive topics head-on, in areas including gender identity and LGBTQI+ rights, sex, and religion. There were numerous run-ins with the religious police. Ashraf Fayadh, the Palestinian poet and artist who grew up in Abha with Mater and who also moved to Jeddah, was in 2015 sentenced to death for apostasy – a charge widely regarded as illegitimate. A public outcry led to the sentence being commuted, but he remains in jail.

Works attained different lives inside and outside the Kingdom. Gharem’s photograph and video Siraat (‘The Path’, 2009), for example, addresses an episode from 1982 in the village he grew up in Asir, in which a group of villagers and their livestock took shelter from flooding by gathering under a bridge. As the rainfall became a deluge, the bridge partially collapsed, and the villagers were swept away. Many died, and the incident became well-known locally, but was never officially acknowledged. In 2003, Gharem and 24 friends and associates spray-painted the cracked bridge with the word ‘siraat’ (from siraat al-mustaqim, or ‘the straight path’, repeated during Muslim prayers), by way of a memorial.¹⁰ The work has grown into an example of censorship: for many years it was exhibited abroad (at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the British Museum in London), but not in Saudi. Mater’s endorsement by the government (he briefly served as director of Misk, the art foundation set up by Mohammed bin Salman) has also meant his once controversial works are now more widely seen. His cell-phone video series Ground Zero I-II-III (2012) captured images of migrant labourers, and his suite of images titled Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Mecca (2011–ongoing) also highlighted the fast pace of development of Islam’s most holy site, the spiritual nature of which many felt was sold out to real-estate concerns. These were all exhibited in 2018 in Mater’s first solo exhibition in the Kingdom, part of ‘21, 39’.

Other artists challenged the restrictions on women. Al Dowayan made Esmi (My Name) in 2012, a series of enlarged prayer beads that hangs from the ceiling, in response to the common injunction in Saudi against women’s names being said aloud; many conservative households hold that women shouldn’t be seen or even spoken of publicly. Al Dowayan pointed out that the Quran and King Abdul Aziz, the father of Saudi Arabia, both spoke the names of their female relatives in public. She gathered together groups of women, each of whom spoke her name aloud and wrote it on a bead; Al Dowayan later strung these into the work. Sarah Abu Abdullah, in the video Saudi Automobile (2012), shows herself painting an old, disused car pink. ‘This wishful gesture was the only way I could get myself a car – cold comfort for the current impossibility of my dream that I, as an independent person, can drive myself to work one day’, she wrote.¹¹

These acts of resistance have been frequently discussed in the Western press, where they fit with narratives of the artist as dissident genius, or of the eventual triumph of Western-style democracy over Eastern oppression, particularly that of women. It is unclear how widespread the truly provocative practices were, as is the exact nature of what it was that artists were rebelling against – boredom seems as much a potential enemy as illiberal politics. Some practices appear as pointed acts aimed at changing civic society, while others appear more like adaptations to a restrictive environment. It’s also important to underline that many of these works were not anti-Saudi; many artists remain invested in the religious, historical and cultural specificity of Saudi identity. Arguably, these concerns have made Saudi artists more anti-colonialist than artists in other Gulf countries. When Al Dowayan, for example, wrote her master’s dissertation at the Royal College of Art in London, she pointedly moved away from secondary material from Western sources, using mostly Middle Eastern material instead – a performative project in its own right. Dana Awartani, who studied at Central Saint Martins, rejected the role – of oppressed woman or exiled Arab – she felt forced to play in London, and in Turkey undertook an ijazah: an apprenticeship in traditional illumination. Her practice now marries Sufi influences and traditional craft with Western contemporary art strategies such as narrative and site-specificity. There is also a strong recuperative ethos, even in the most critical of practices. Like Mater’s Mecca series, many of the works from the 2010s were produced less by artists rushing forward towards a new liberal order than by artists seeking to halt a pace of change that had begun with newfound wealth. In the series Doors of Barlik (2017) Moath Alofi captures images of series of doorways in his native Medina that were being destroyed as the city was renovated. These were made of worn wood and cheap metal, sometimes with crumbling steps – the un-new part of the Gulf already fast receding.