DUBAI: Saudi Arabia's ATHR Gallery will show works by six artists at the prestigious fair, running from Oct. 23-25.
Mohammad Alfaraj
‘The Storyteller’
“Every time we put together a booth (for an art fair), it feels less like curating and more like assembling fragments of a larger story, one that’s been unfolding across generations of Saudi artists long before I was paying attention, and one I hope continues long after,” Hamza Serafi, co-founder of Athr Gallery, which has branches in Jeddah, AlUla, and Riyadh, tells Arab News. “This year in Paris, that feeling is especially strong.” The gallery will present work from six artists: Abdulrahman AlSoliman, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Mohammad Alfaraj, Sara Abdu, and Sarah Abu Abdallah from Saudi Arabia, and Rami Farook from the UAE.
“What strikes me most,” Serafi says, “is how differently each of them carries the same questions: Where do we come from? What do we carry with us? What does home even mean once it starts to change shape?”
Al-Ahsa native Alfaraj contributes this 2016 work. “(His) connection to Al-Ahsa, to land, to agriculture and inherited knowledge, grounds the presentation in something deeply personal to me,” says Serafi. “There’s a rootedness in his practice, literally and otherwise, that reminds me how much identity is tied to place, to soil, to what our hands and families have built over time.”
Ayman Yossri Daydban
‘79’ from ‘Maharem’ series
The Jeddah-based Palestinian-Saudi conceptual artist contributes this piece from his series that features vintage Egyptian cinema posters or popular proverbs printed on tissue boxes — connecting them to sentimentality and shared memory. “He works with the residue of everyday life, found materials, inherited objects and turns them into something closer to memory than object,” Serafi says. “I’ve always felt his pieces ask you to slow down and really look at what’s been overlooked.”
Abdulrahman AlSoliman
‘Collection FIVE V14’
AlSoliman is one of the most significant figures in the Kingdom’s modern-art movement, and, as such, “brings a historical weight to the booth, a reminder that these conversations about image and identity didn’t begin with this generation, they’ve been building for decades,” says Serafi. Born in Al-Hasa in 1954, AlSoliman is an award-winning writer and artist who was the first president of the Saudi Society for Fine Arts. The work shown here is from 1991.
Sarah Abu Abdallah
‘Untitled’
The Qatif-born artist contributes this piece, created this year. “Working with hand-crafted processes-painting, collage, ceramics, installation and photographic print blankets- the works unfold as a meditation on persistence,” the gallery said of an earlier exhibition of similar works. “(Her) practice often turns the domestic and the personal into something quietly political; these familiar objects made strange yet meaningful,” says Serafi.
