The exhibition borrows its Arabic title, ‘Suni‘a Bisihrika’, from a phrase created to facilitate the memorization of the eight main Eastern (Arabic) musical maqâms. Each letter in this phrase represents the first letter of a main maqâm’s name. They are formal musical structures that have been used for centuries across a vast geography extending from the Arab world to neighboring regions and Central Asia.

Beyond their function as aesthetic musical structures, maqâms carry layered historical, cultural, social and political meanings shaped over centuries. Looking closely at their names, genealogies and circulation reveals that they reflect a rich artistic and cultural diversity beyond national, religious, and linguistic identity. They point instead to long histories of exchange, coexistence, translation, movement and rupture. They have endured through political shifts, cycles of exclusion and persecution, wars and the collapse of empires.

 The exhibition draws inspiration from the signs and connotations conveyed by the histories of the maqâms beyond their sonic forms, approaching them as vessels of memory, identity and transformation.

 Across sculpture, painting, installation, photography and video, the exhibition reflects on questions of ethnicity and identity, art and authority, and relations to land and other beings. It also considers how artworks may hold the trace of what is at risk of disappearance.

In works by artists such as Ahmad Ghossein, Nour Abuarafeh, Alla Abdunabi and Bachar Fayoud, questions of land, salt, hunger, survival and erasure come sharply into focus, while Hossam Sirgahyah and others turn to how people reclaim, inhabit and reorder spaces marked by destruction. Placed in conversation with one another, these works allow unexpected relations to emerge between them. Their differences remain active, producing connections and tensions that shift as one moves through the exhibition.

 ‘Made With Your Magic – Jeddah’ engages with the questions evoked by the histories of the maqâms today, at a time marked by profound upheaval. It proposes the space of art as one in which history may be re-read, identities opened rather than closed, and the world imagined otherwise.

Artists: Alla Abdunabi, Ala Younis, Ahmad Ghossein, Ayman Zedani, Bady Dalloul, Bachar Fayoud, Hossam Sirgahyah, Sonia Kallel, Fredj Moussa, Nour Abuarafeh, Mohammad Nammoor, Mounir Salah and Walid Raad among others.

 ‘Made With Your Magic – Jeddah’ is part of a project unfolding across several Arab cities. Its first chapter was launched with an exhibition in Tunis in autumn 2025, initiated by Dream City, followed by a second chapter at Beirut Art Center. The project now continues its journey to Hayy Jameel in Jeddah with its third iteration, before moving on to new chapters in Damascus and Baghdad in the coming months. Each chapter takes a different form in response to the city in which it is presented, bringing the project into new relations, questions and resonances.

Tarek Abou El Fetouh is an independent curator based in Brussels. He established visual and performance art initiatives across the Arab world, including the Meeting Points Contemporary Art Festival, which took place in different Arab cities. He curated numerous exhibitions in the Arab world and internationally, including the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale (2024); the Public Art Program for Expo 2020 in Dubai; Rituals of Signs and Metamorphoses (2018) and Captive of Love (2017) at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing; The Time Is Out of Joint at the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2016); Lest the Two Seas Meet at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2015); and the exhibition of Home Works 6 in Beirut (2013).  Abou El Fetouh was Senior Curator and Director of the Performance Department at the Sharjah Art Foundation between 2021 and 2024.