Founded in 2009 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, ATHR Gallery could be seen as a charter member of the country’s now warp-speed evolution as an arts destination.
Fifteen years later, with smaller branches in the capital, Riyadh, and in Al Ula, the remote and booming arts and tourism region in the northwest of the country, ATHR Gallery is an established name among artists and art collectors at a time when the country is shaking off decades of isolation at a feverish pace.
The gallery’s plans for Frieze London, running Oct. 10-13 in Regent’s Park, is a prime example of what ATHR has done in its last three visits to the art fair, starting in 2021: bringing Saudi-based artists to a wider audience. This year, four of them will showcase works that fall under the theme of “nafs,” meaning “self” or “psyche” in Arabic. It’s a theme that the gallery says is about fostering dialogue about Islamic artistic identity.
“There is currently a spotlight on Saudi Arabia because of all the new projects, and the art world is always interested in the next big thing,” Daria Kirsanova, the curator of ATHR Gallery, said in a recent video interview. “Saudi was not always so present in the art world, and people weren’t coming to this country when we opened in 2009. But now there are two biennales in the country and quite a few museums are being built. There is a lot of global curiosity.”
Curious audiences at Frieze London can see the works of Sara Abdu, Nasser Al Salem, Dana Awartani and Ayman Yossri Daydban. Each interprets the theme of nafs quite differently, Kirsanova said.
For example, Al Salem, 39, creates almost Calderesque metal sculptures that play with Arabic calligraphy, a style reflected in his two pieces for Frieze London: “Math + Metal” and “Metal Civilization.”
“His way of interpreting calligraphy is a cross section of industrial materials such as stainless steel, which he turns into ornamental structure,” Kirsanova said. “It’s often ornate Arabic calligraphy, but the way he’s interpreting it is more minimalist and conceptual.”
Awartani, 37, who created a huge piece this year for the Venice Biennale about the legacy of destruction during wars in the Arab world, will also be represented with sculptures from her “Platonic Solids Duals” series (2016-18).
“Her work for Frieze London will be much less conceptual and more about geometry with a cube within a cube,” Kirsanova said. “Nafs is an idea of self and ego, and Dana’s cube within a cube shows how you approach the multitudes of your own spirituality.”
A series of paintings, “The Line,” by Daydban for the Al Ula gallery (and adapted again for Frieze London) is a continuation of “A Rock Garden,” a landscape installation at the Desert X art festival in Al Ula where Daydban re-created a soccer field to scale in the desert with rocks painted in fluorescent white.
“The piece is talking about identity and borders, externally, but also internally that we carry with us,” Daydban, 58, who is Palestinian and became a Saudi citizen in 2021, explained in a recent video interview. “When it was a huge piece in the Al Ula desert, it was very much interactive, and I was fascinated by the fact that people didn’t want to enter the football court. It’s like they didn’t want to cross a border.”
When he modified the piece for the gallery space, he scaled it back to a painting that depicted the boundaries and goal boxes of a soccer field with 15 square panels measuring about 30 inches each (the Frieze London versions will be nine panels). But he wanted to rearrange them somehow.
“When I was installing ‘The Line’ at the ATHR Gallery in Al Ula, a child with his family was very curious at what I was doing, so I had this idea that he should arrange them,” Daydban said. “It shows the idea that borders don’t appear for a passerby or child. It speaks to this idea that seemingly random people can dictate borders. Everyone in life is creating their own narrative and their own borders.”
Lastly, the Yemen-born Abdu, 31, will present “I Loved You Once,” a series that uses human hair and embroidery.
For a related second work, “I Loved You Once: Soundscape No. 1 and Soundscape No. 2,” Abdu created a musical instrument using hair as the strings and then illustrated the sound it makes on paper with charcoal, pencil and ink in the form of soundscapes.
“I chose to work with human hair because I tend to use materials that symbolize time,” Abdu said in a recent video interview. “Hair symbolizes time or resistance to the idea of the fading of memories and the ending of a life cycle. What happens when something loses its purpose?”
In fact, a sense of purpose is what motivated Hamza Serafi and Mohammed Hafiz, the two art collectors who founded ATHR, with the idea of supporting local artists after visiting an international fair and realizing the untapped potential in Saudi Arabia.
“ATHR is doing a huge amount of work with their artists, and the gallery represents artists that nobody else does,” Eva Langret, the director of Frieze London, said in a recent phone interview. “ATHR started with us in 2021, and the committee was super excited about having our first gallery from Saudi. And now there’s so much going on. Everyone is excited about the artists and initiatives out of Saudi Arabia.”
Langret added that ATHR represented an important link between artists and art collectors in both the Middle East and Britain, which has a huge Arab population. She cited other galleries in the Middle East that have also been a part of Frieze London: Marfa’ in Beirut, Lebanon; Dastan Gallery in Tehran; and Gypsum in Cairo. Selma Feriani in Tunisia will join Frieze London for the first time this year.
“There is a really important and growing contingency of galleries from the region,” Langret said. “There are a lot of links between collectors from the scene and in London. It makes a lot of sense for us to double down on our galleries from that region.”
The post At Frieze London, Arab Artists Look Inward appeared first on New York Times.