From Within Puts the Kingdom on the Global Map of Contemporary Art

A group of Saudi and GCC artists reveals their concepts of the relationship between man and architecture, and how architectural styles shape human behaviour, in the layout of the From Withinexhibition, which is organised by the Ministry of Culture and is part of Quality of Life programme initiatives, as a first step to creating a contemporary arts area in Ad-Diriyah.

The exhibition hosts artworks by 25 Saudi and international artists in the Ad-Diriyah Industrial Zone. These artists excelled at expressing their perceptions of the connection between the human being and construction and the patterns of human behaviour that reflect on design and architecture; all of these concepts were brought together into a narrative of the exhibition. "Stripped Away from All Constructs", an artwork by Afra Al Dhaheri, is a piece of fabric coated in cement that hangs from the wall on two pieces of steel rebar. The artwork explores a romanticised debate of love and hate for the act of demolishing architecture. The cement lines act as a blueprint on the surface of the fabric. The cotton mesh fabric is usually used as reinforcement in construction; by suspending an architectural material from two points and allowing it to drape down as if it were made only of fabric, it becomes an imaginative performance of removing the building's structure. Imagination is often a wonderful escape from reality.

Artist Ayman Zedani highlighted the consumption of nature in the contemporary Gulf through an installation titled "The Old Ones". A virtual space is a speculative landscape that the viewer can experience from a fourth-dimensional perspective, a fictional representation of an ancient land where the desert, home as we know it, used to be very much green and vibrant with vegetation. The project, in part, is an homage to these ancient lands that made the Gulf what it is today, and in the other part, it is an attempt to encourage the process of healing for earthbound inhabitants.

In the corner of the exhibition, Aziz Jamal's artwork "Vacant" sits as a collection of dyed cement forms, cast in a variety of found objects collected by the artist. The piece was fuelled by contemplations on often disregarded objects in urban landscapes. The common understanding of space is limited to 

the space the objects occupy and never encompasses the negatives they accidentally design. The inner crevasses and outlines of things create an almost negative and neglected area of being in an urban landscape. As a collective that mirrors the environment it has previously inhabited, a symphonic play of hollow space in concrete form, this work celebrates the neglected.

As for the artist Bu Yousuf, he had a different concept about the skyscrapers, which he embodied through a synthetic artwork he called "The Nursery", an installation that consists of a hospital nursery for skyscrapers. The room is fitted out as a nursery, and the babies are skyscrapers made of silicone, referencing contemporary buildings from the artist's native city, Dubai. He posits an imaginary world where the infant buildings need constant care and attention to grow into stable structures. The performance aspect of the piece is composed of nurses who are trained to take care of the babies. The artist estimates that the babies were born at about 40 weeks and are stable, meaning they can breathe on their own and can maintain regular body temperatures, as opposed to premature skyscrapers who require more assistance. This is a commentary on the need to incubate the different buildings of Dubai and give them adequate care that meets their needs.

Donia AlShetairy is another artist among the group who presents an installation titled "The Cradle of Civilisation", which consists of a set of balls inside a hollow space. This rigid installation turns into a lively work when light is shed on its moving shadows. By using light and the visual-motor scene evoked by this work, the artist expresses the symbolic image of human adaptation, the relationship between culture and civilisation, and the environment that embraces them.

From Within is considered a significant turning point in the art scene in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and it sheds light on the creative capacities of Saudi artists, allowing them to unleash their creativity to showcase it to the world. It also opens the way for international artists to reach a large number of art enthusiasts and art practitioners to contribute to the transformation of Ad-Diriyah into a contemporary art space.