In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s artistic landscape has unfolded a bold new chapter, propelled by a dynamic cultural movement that is defining creativity and contemporary expression.
Reframing History Through Art
At the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), five artists are reimagining history, memory, identity, and place and transforming them into artistic visions.
Showcasing the shortlisted works for the seventh Ithra Art Prize, the newly opened exhibition invites visitors to experience a compelling vision of contemporary Arab art and the diverse perspectives reshaping its creative landscape.
That creative momentum is vividly reflected in Ithra’s latest exhibition in Dhahran, where five shortlisted artists converge under one roof through works spanning installation, painting, textile, and conceptual practice.
Opened on August 6, the exhibition also showcases new works by Aseel Al-Yaqoub, Bady Dalloul, Heba Y. Amin El-Mahamly, Ala Younis, and Jawad Al-Malhi, revealing five unique perspectives on the region’s contemporary artistic landscape.
How Is Ithra Reshaping Arab Contemporary Art?
Since its launch by Ithra in 2017, the Ithra Art Prize has become one of the Middle East’s most leading platforms for contemporary art.
Spanning the Arab world’s 22 countries, the prize seeks to empower artists from or based in the region, with the winner securing a $100,000 grant as well as a place in Ithra’s permanent collection.
Reflecting on the exhibition’s broader significance, Farah Abushullaih, head of museum at Ithra, noted that the show stands as a living testament to “the Ithra Art Prize’s continued evolution as a platform for artistic production and dialogue.”
By uniting five shortlisted works, the exhibition also invites audiences to look beyond the finished artworks and engage with fresh ideas, creative processes, and several perspectives that are shaping the artistic scene across the region.
Five Artists, Five Worlds
Among the exhibition’s most captivating works is Kuwaiti artist Aseel Al-Yaqoub’s “Flora Incognita,” a fictional herbarium of hybrid desert plants that examines how systems of botanical categorization have shaped the ways people produce, organize, and understand knowledge of the Gulf.
Memory takes center stage in Syrian artist Bady Dalloul’s “Drawing in Matchboxes,” where a group of miniature matchbox works appears as a space for reflecting on images, lived experiences, and the formation of collective memory.
Meanwhile, Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin El-Mahamly offers a rare window into the past through “The Last Carrier: Iteration I,” reimagining an 18th-century engraving of the Egyptian mahmal procession through textile.
In “Lifted Arches,” Jordanian artist Ala Younis shifts the focus from historical imagery to the built environment. Inspired by Minoru Yamasaki’s architecture in Dhahran and Riyadh, the installation offers rare glimpses into the unparalleled intersection of Islamic architectural traditions and modernism.
To further enrich the exhibition’s psychological depth, Palestinian artist Jawad Al-Malhi examines themes of disappearance and loss in his “Ashes of Absence,” where ghost-like figures are portrayed across mixed-media works as haunting reminders of what has disappeared.
The Final Chapter
Remarkably, Farah Abushullaih, independent curator Tarek Abou El-Fetouh, art historian Nada Shabout of the University of North Texas, Palais de Tokyo co-founder Jerome Sans, as well as artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke, winner of the fourth Ithra Art Prize, carefully selected the finalists.
Together, their expertise across curating, art history, institutional leadership, and artistic practice underscores the Ithra Art Prize’s growing prestige on the international contemporary art stage.
With the five works now on display, anticipation builds toward the final moment: the winning artist will be announced in October, bringing the seventh edition of the Ithra Art Prize to its decisive close as one of these distinctive visions secures its place in the Ithra collection.
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