Frieze London 2025: Basmah Felemban & Daniah Alsaleh

 ATHR Gallery announces its participation in Frieze London 2025

with a two-artist presentation featuring Saudi artists Daniah Alsaleh and Basmah Felemban. This female duo showcase brings together works that reflect on Saudi Arabia as a landscape in flux, continuously reshaped by the movements of people, ecology and stories.

 

Drawing on her research in the historic Nabataean city of AlUla, Alsaleh traces layers of history through materials and memory. In her Stone Palette series, she grinds the mineral carnelian once transported along ancient trade and pilgrimage routes - into pigment to paint contemporary views of AlUla. In the multimedia installation Hinat, Alsaleh turns to a Nabataean woman whose remains were found in Tomb 117 at the archaeological site of Hegra. The inscription reads: “This is the tomb which Hinat, daughter of Wahbu, made for herself and for her children and her descendants forever.” This explicit mention of Hinat is a rare reference to a woman in the region’s history. The installation combines photographic transfer, painting, video and algorithmic generation across several panels to imagine Hinat alive,immortalized in a world where memory, fiction, and reality meet. Like ghosts returning, the silhouettes of women and the fabrics they weave emerge distorted, as if from a blurred memory.

 

For Alsaleh, mobility isn’t the mere passage of stones and caravans but the circulation of stories. Where Alsaleh chronicles, Basmah Felemban looks ahead. Her work approaches the landscape as an informational system, translated across multiple disciplines. Her perspective is futuristic, imagining new terrains built from fragments of language and data. Marine life becomes a guide to continuity: ballpoint drawings of Coral Sprite Leaf (2024) trace how heat and currents inscribe themselves onto coastlines, while Monsters in Still Places Zine (2024) probes the uncanny silences and hidden narratives of the desert.

 

Alongside paintings of catfish that depict the improbable yet tangible presence of river fish in arid terrains, these works expand into speculative narratives where natural and digital flows intersect. Through drawings, paintings, publications, and A.I. based works, Felemban transforms ecology and information into imaginative blueprints of what is yet to come Together, Alsaleh and Felemban present a dialogue between past and future, archive and algorithm. Their works reveal a Saudi Arabian landscape that is never still: a living terrain where histories resurface, futures are imagined and the very notion of place itself is in constant motion.