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Basmah Felemban

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<h1 style="text-align:center;">EXHIBITIONS</h1>

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ATHR is pleased to announce the opening of its latest edition of the ATHR Collectors’ Circle (ACC) Exhibition for the year 2023. A preview event is scheduled on&nbsp; to collectors on May 23rd for private collectors, and opens to the public on June 1st 2023.The show is catered to young, emerging and experienced art collectors, featuring editioned works by world-renowned artists. Showcasing in this exhibition pioneering artists such as Ayman Yossri Daydban and Ahmed Mater, as well as prominent and emerging artists in the Arab world like Mohammad AlFaraj and Ahaad Alamoudi. The purpose of the ACC is to develop art patronage culture within the Saudi art scene, and highlighting works that had been displayed at prestigious institutions that art enthusiasts would appreciate. In this edition, the ACC team has curated a collection of artworks that are accessible to collectors new to the contemporary art scene, the team was careful to select artworks with multiple editions or variations of the same artwork to that effect. &nbsp;ATHR Collectors’ Circle (ACC) is a gallery initiative that aims to cultivate emerging art collectors within the kingdom to establish and maintain exceptional art collections. The ACC organizes various engagement opportunities through exhibitions, events, and seminars to engage and network with like-minded individuals who are interested in the art scene, interact with artists and professionals as well as global collectors who can help navigate the art market landscape, and offer guidance on art patronage.&nbsp;&nbsp;Exhibiting artists are: Sarah Abuabdallah, Sara Abdu, Ahaad AlAmoudi, Mohammad AlFaraj, Reem AlNasser, Dana Awartani, Ayman Yosri Daydban, Sultan bin Fahad, Rami Farook, and Ahmed Mater. &nbsp;

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ATHR Collectors' Circle (2nd Edition)

Blur of the wells is an exhibition reinviting artists back to Al Ula after having exhibited or completed residencies within its perimeters. We are bringing together Ahmad Mater, Dana Awartani, Mohammad Al Faraj, Sara Abdu, and Zahra Al Ghamdi, featuring dialogues and connections to the cycle of birth for our history and celebrated knowledge.Wells themselves were a source of life since ancient times, they were a sign of wealth and essential for development and growth. Over time, these life sources began to dry and fade, even so, were parts of our culture and knowledge. After undergoing a drought period, we quench by the search to preserve and dig out what time has blurred.We find ourselves today, entering a cycle of rebirth after deterioration and abandonment, celebrating through the strong relationship with our lands and environment drawing emphasis on our preserved culture.

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Blur of The Wells

Farah Behbehani, And Make Me Light (2022)

Little is known about the cosmic dawn, the period when the first stars, galaxies and black holes were formed. Astrophysicists study it by searching for these earliest radio waves, emitted several billion years ago and obscured by ancient hydrogen clouds. When the next generation of telescopes is completed towards the end of this decade, we might be able to produce images of these primordial galaxies, but like so much else, we do not need to see them to know they are there.At the heart of Kuwaiti artist Farah Behbehani’s solo exhibition, And Make Me Light, curated by Jumana Ghouth, is another nightly search for light and yearning for dawn, an entreaty to not just find light—whatever that looks like to you—but to become it too. Rather than an event or a finite state that can be reached it is an ongoing quest and one that arguably motivates the history of humanity regardless of scientific, cultural or spiritual beliefs.&nbsp;

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And Make Me Light

Circular Show 

"Fantasia: A World Between Reality and Imagination" is an exhibition that features dialogues between animals, whether they are lions or birds. All of these fables carry moral messages that we lack today. Bahmim created fictional animals for contemporary topics; we see the fox with a wing of gold, the turtle with a shell packed with precious stones, and the king of elephants debating Fairouz the rabbit by the Moon pond.&nbsp;The artist sought to provide moral wisdom gained from stories passed down from one generation to the other through books and folktales about mythical creatures found in popular culture and human heritage. The tiger protects the cornfields, while the sharp-sighted and quick-witted peregrine falcon, also known as "Al-Shaheen", guards the horizon. These events take place outside the ordinary, in a fictional world full of wisdom, sermons, and imaginary creatures that depend on miniatures.&nbsp;

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Artsy Link

Fantasia

Is digital technology encouraging the communication of our emotions? Daniah Al Saleh questions in this show the obligation to smile to everything in our digital era’s messages brought by the emoji’s fashion. The emoji phenomenon has been developed massively around for 20 years, in the same parallel time of the booming development of the digital facilities which placed the computer at the right center of our social and economic lives. Art is part of this global digital world. It is not a casualty if Daniah Alsaleh is exploring the emojis language through an art medium which is also a language itself. Indeed, Computing is a techno-logy, meaning a technique which is also a language. Daniah Alsaleh’s exhibition looks like a mise en abyme: a language technique exploring another language format. Perhaps only this form of art could explore enough deeply the emojis language – as a form of language (achieved or not)? Confronting an immaterial expression of her vision with a material one in the same show is another major aspect of Daniah’s work. The show is articulated in two parallel movements, presenting digital works facing a series of paintings, all focused on the same theme of the emojis language. A last section offers a conclusion to this highly original confrontation, through a very innovative installation, mixing painting and digital projection. Daniah Al Saleh reminds us that the said “immaterial” world is nothing but another kind of “material”. When the art world often opposes “digital” exhibitions versus painting exhibitions, Daniah imposes her art beyond the banal statements about digital art we can hear. Daniah’s works question also the visual identity of the Emojis, born in the code after the smiley graphic inspiration. The Emojis phenomenon is as well a mere computing form of visual communication as a pictographic code. A visual object balanced between its digital and graphic identities. No other artist before Daniah has found the right expression to raise this ambiguous essence of the emojis - though the smiley was used in many art works. Daniah choses as her subject the emoticonist culture of our time - certainly the most fascinating topic raised by the Emojis. A philosophical issue matching with a digital era who wants absolutely to be ultra positive despite all the turmoiled aspects of it.

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Keep Smiling

ATHR is pleased to announce the participation of Mohammad AlFaraj in Alsekal Art Week, Dubai, opening from the 8th&nbsp;to the 13th&nbsp;of March.&nbsp;AlFaraj will debut a site specific installation,&nbsp;Limbs of the Past, an Offering For the Future.&nbsp;The work derives sanctity and spiritual significance through the use/reuse of natural and non-natural materials, and integrating them with drawings, words and shapes, as all of these elements carry within them the history and memory of those who touched, used and believed in them.Location: Warehouse 2,&nbsp;AlSerkal AvenueDate: 8 - 13 MarchTime: 10am - 10pm

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Mohammed Al Faraj at Al Serkal Ave

ATHR is pleased to announce the opening of a new gallery space in AlUla, Saudi Arabia. ATHR Gallery AlUla is located in the ancient desert city’s new arts and culture precinct, AlJadidah, in a dedicated exhibition space of 150m2 inside the AlUla Design Gallery.The AlUla Design Gallery is the newest art and design project to be unveiled in AlUla this winter and another milestone in reasserting AlUla’s position as a center of creativity and culture, with a mix of local and international art to discover.&nbsp;The new 500m2 building is a contemporary space made of corten steel, glass and polished concrete. The architecture is an homage to the breezeblock used widely across buildings in AlJadidah, the chosen pattern arranged in an algorithm creating an abstraction of the familiar feature.&nbsp;ATHR Gallery AlUla is the first space to open in the new building. The inaugural exhibition Artist Showcase, March 5 - March 15, 2022 from 4pm to 11pm daily, features Ahaad Alamoudi, Sara Abdu and Mohammad Alfaraj. The works explore themes of human nature, ecology, the inner self, country and representation within three distinct mediums.&nbsp;

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Artist Showcase

No.2 From the Semiotics of Tagg series, 2019

For its participation at Volta Basel 2022, ATHR Foundation debuts with a selection of work by 12 emerging artists based in Saudi Arabia.Curated by Saudi curator, Jumana Ghouth, the exhibition unfolds around the intangible; selecting works that explore ephemerality as a spectrum, in which a lack of physical presence is manifested as objects of truth within each work. The selection examines artmaking as a modality of material culture through which our precarious elusive realities are translated, interpreted and disseminated across time and space; revealing the emotive and poetic as language and impetus in mapping out truths in our contemporary times.This curated presentation is the first endeavor for the newly-established ATHR Foundation, a non-profit foundation that supports independent Saudi-based artists through its many programs.The featured artists include Aisha Zakiya Islam, Alaa Trabzouni, Asaad Badawi, Fahad Bin Naif, Lujain Faqerah, Nujood Alsudairi, Obadah Aljefri, Rajaa &amp; Yasmeen, Sahrish Ali, Sara Brahim, Zahra Bundakji and Zena Amer.

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A Little Stardust Caught

A Song of Silence is a solo work by Saudi artist Muhannad Shono that explores the limits of singular narratives by speculating on the ambiguity of what is held as truth, ontologies, and the rudimentary postulations of human life. The presentation skillfully illustrates the artist’s dedication to the exercise of creative agency, recognizing it irrepressible and an embodiment of a living imagination that flourishes despite doctrines that seek to repress it. It builds upon the central concepts within his practice, questioning the self, tradition, mythology, and the natural world.The presentation is inspired by the destiny of the archangel Israfel who must play the trumpet that will annihilate all of existence. It expands upon an earlier work by the artist presented at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale titled, ‘The Teaching Tree’, delving into ideas of creative resistance in the backdrop of restrictions to creative expression, the reformation of the lived world though the harnessing and unlocking of human imagination. It bears testament to the resilience and power of human creation and expression.To explore ideas of resilience and regeneration, the artist materializes notions of sound. The presentation is inspired by the lore of Israfel who was bound by duty and burdened by the weight of his destiny. Upon witnessing the profound impact of his obligation, he abdicates his role to free himself and ultimately open the possibilities of his existence to the imagination. The manifestation of this resilience and regeneration is explored in both the natural world and within human imagination, and how each space can influence the state and forming of the other.

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A Song of Silence

ATHR&nbsp;Gallery is pleased to announce the participation of Saudi artist,&nbsp;Ahaad Al-Amoudi&nbsp;at Art Basel with a solo presentation of her latest series,&nbsp;Keep It Up, People. The Night Is Young!‘Keep it up People. The Night is Young’&nbsp;is a multi-media exhibition of works by Ahaad Al-Amoudi that explore the precarity of our contemporary times, as statis, through the language of the globally observed sport: football. The presentation appropriates the game’s visual imagery as the ultimate art object, organic and sculptural, wrestling with its sustained flow of reach to the masses as site of critical intervention. Drawn from a, ‘keepie uppie’, a recognized maneuver in the sport, in which the player juggles a football without allowing it to hit the ground, highlighting the ball’s motion in flight as allegory to demonstrate the incessant flux we exist in.The works grapples with an endless process of reinvention, creating tension and suspense between the event, performer, and audience. As urgency is built through a statis of imagery, the popular sport transforms into a form whose function is a reality rendered artificial in the brief, demonstrating an intrinsic impact of extraneous forces and the exigency of adapting to the dynamic.‘Keep it up People. The Night is Young’&nbsp;offers a glimpse into the internal affairs of people. Through the experience of football, the persistent pushing and pulling of the copious pressures of life and their management is illustrated. It offers the hope and possibility of, as with ball games, the mastering of these dynamic external and internal forces to thrive at the top of your game.

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Release info

Keep it up People. The Night is Young

ATHR Gallery is pleased to announce the participation of Saudi-Palestinian artist, Dana Awartani at Frieze No.9 Cork Street with a presentation of her solo exhibition ‘When Fire Loves Water’. The exhibition will take place on the 7th of June 2022 in gallery 3 at Cork Street.‘When Fire Loves Water’ presents a selection of works by Dana Awartani that explore the potentialities of geometric compositions to chart spiritual journeys and convey contemporary realities through poetic abstractions. The exhibition demonstrates the artist’s mastery of deploying absolute pure geometric modes, in faithful acts of repetition and revival, to realize radical reinterpretations. The selection unfolds around the artist’s explorations of the circular form, revealing how meaning is constructed, to re-imagine new possibilities emanating from the same places.The exhibition is drawn from the title of a series by Awartani, who was inspired by the poetry of Shams Tabrizi, who taught the prolific Sufi mystic poet, Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. The series consists of two bodies of work: ‘In Search of Silence’ expands beyond the formal limits of traditional miniature painting techniques and explore new languages of expression, one that is more fluid, spontaneous and unrestrained; ‘The Union of Fire and Water’ brings two different temporalities together and employs the fluid and inherent repetitive nature of drawing the circle as a means of turning inwards; offering a path towards introspective and meditative states of being.To honor the historic and tradition of mastering geometric form and craftsmanship, the exhibition includes ‘The Platonic Solid Duals’ series, commissioned, and presented first at the 2016 Marrakech Biennale. Working closely with craftsmen from India to create the core shapes in wood, the works exemplify the ancient study of Euclidean geometry within the Islamic geometric tradition and reveal the shapes’ dual properties as a means of engaging with the purity of meanings embedded in the art form.The video work ‘Listen to My Words’ reveals a digital process of delicate lines that form into geometric compositions, overlaid with various female voices reciting fragments of poetry. Expanding from an earlier immersive work with the same title, the work is inspired by ornamental motifs of jali and mashrabiya, latticed screens used in traditional Islamic architecture and draws from an overlooked tradition of female poets from the pre-Islamic world and through to the 12th century. In interlacing a process of geometric symbolism and poetic utterances by modern-day Saudi women, Awartani’s digital animation unleashes these powerful voices once again and orchestrates an intergenerational dialogue that subtly questions the status of women in contemporary society.‘When Fire Loves Water’ offers a moment of pause and reflection within the artist’s practice, emphasizing a history of endless artistic pursuit to reveal the limitless potentialities within the perfect circular shape. The exhibition anchors Awartani’s impressive adherence to tradition whilst demonstrating a fluid contemporariness that is drawn from an almost-primordial wisdom and certainty of the past but speaks to the reality and precarity of the present moment.

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When Fire Loves Water

This summer, Somerset House presents Eternally Yours, a free exhibition exploring ideas around care, repair and healing.Showcasing diverse examples of creative reuse, from historical samples of the Japanese art of Kintsugi and Boro, which embrace upcycling and repurposing, to works from contemporary artists who put repair at the heart of their practice, Eternally Yours explores the unexpectedly hopeful and healing stories that repair reveals. In light of the recent global pandemic, the exhibition seeks to unpack how ‘repair’ can guide both our individual and collective healing. &nbsp; &nbsp;On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays visitors have the chance to see the talents and skills of designers and makers in action first-hand at the Beasley Brothers’ Repair Shop, they transform discarded objects to give them a new lease of life. The brainchild of designer Carl Clerkin, the installation is modelled on traditional East End repair shops of old, that could and would repair anything. Sitting at the heart of the exhibition, the shop also runs live workshops and skills training. &nbsp;&nbsp;Bringing together everything from textiles and ceramics to furniture, Eternally Yours reflects upon the hope and healing which can be found in the memories and stories that everyday objects hold in our lives. Celebrating the history and emotional value of the items we hold on to, rather than discard, the exhibition highlights works from a broad range of creatives, including textile artists Celia Pym,&nbsp;Angela Maddock and&nbsp;Georgina Maxim​, designers Studio Propolis, artist and researcher Ellen Sampson and maker Peter Marigold. Eternally Yours&nbsp;is accompanied by a display of works from participating artists exploring the concept of repair led by lifestyle brand <a href="https://www.toa.st/">TOAST</a>. From sculptural furniture by Tom Collison and reconstructed garments by Isabel Fletcher and Amy Goacher, to imaginatively repaired ceramics by Bridget Harvey and kantha-stitched textiles by Ekta Kaul, each piece is an expression of creative mending and repurposing techniques.&nbsp;TOAST continually seeks out ways to extend the life of garments, encouraging their community to do the same with their cherished pieces. In addition to displayed works, The <a href="https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/eternally-yours/toast-renewal-workshop-space">TOAST Renewal workshop space</a> in the Courtyard Rooms hosts weekly artist-led workshops and mending consultations. Artist Molly Martin will discuss sashiko repair while <a href="https://www.toa.st/pages/toast-renewal">TOAST Renewal</a> specialists will offer one-to-one sessions demonstrating traditional repair techniques. In this way, TOAST hopes to inspire people to try a variety of craft techniques and reconsider their relationship with clothing.

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Eternally Yours

The Night is No Good is a group exhibition that presents the works of three Saudi artists; Batool Al-Shomrani, Fahad bin Naif, and Aziz Jamal. The exhibition prompted the artists to venture into a personal and self-reflective journey to explore individual notions and symbols of grief, memory, and belonging. The show features new commissions by bin Naif and Al-Shomrani as well as a never before seen iteration of the piece by Jamal. The works investigate, through various mediums, the disorienting feeling of returning to something unfamiliar; by examining both the distance from the incident or place and the longing for its return to a previous state. A futile attempt at making peace with a reality that does not exist but also can no longer exist. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;At the core of the show is forgiveness; an honest reconciliation with shifted realities. For the artists, forgiveness in this context is recognized as a form of true liberation from detrimental hope. The works mark a burial of hope for the past to be altered and the absolution of the future from its implications. The show is cathartic and diaristic in its approach yet intentionally hopeless. The works are intended to be viewed as a meditation on the personally sacred and often negligible conditions.

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The Night is no Good 

A solo exhibition of artist Badr Ali (b. 1992, San Francisco, lives and works in Jeddah and Berlin), Tired Lion presents a new body of work consisting of paintings and works on paper stemming from lion statues seen in public spaces. Swift sketches of movements, landscapes, and gestures make up the building blocks of Badr Ali's works and compositions, which integrate drawing, screen-printing, and painting. Taking small-scale and shaky hand-drawn figures as a starting point, he extracts lines and motifs that are enlarged, screen-printed, and re-drawn on paper, canvas, and untreated tarp. In so doing, the artist combines the spontaneity of rapid sketching with a meticulous process of composition, layering, and repetition. These works are grounded in a long history of representation and appropriation of lions – how they are portrayed, commissioned, imagined, and used, for a wide range of artistic, spiritual, and political means. A typical expression of might and power, yet at times surprisingly melancholic, these statues are marked by the passage of time and exposure to the elements for decades or centuries. Badr Ali’s lines bring movement back to their stillness. Here, he repeats and layers these lines and motifs – which have a different composition in each image – using ink on a large canvas surface, in the same way that he would sketch on a notebook. The exhibition also presents a new series of works employing white ink, giving the lines on canvas a ghostly touch, almost like a negative of the initial outlines traced on paper. &nbsp;