Alamoudi’s first institutional solo exhibition brings together works from the last eight years, with a new commission, ‘Moving Mountains’, as its centrepiece. This ambitious new work continues Alamoudi’s expansive exploration of rapidly changing social and cultural environments, situating Saudi’s natural and urban landscapes as sites of possibility –  punctured by effort and powered by fantasy – where both individual and collective attempts to do the seemingly impossible are imbued with humour, absurdity and, at times, hopefulness.

Inviting  practitioners both locally and globally, Art Jameel is hosting a series of closing conversations in October to open dialogue around the wider themes of the exhibition. These discussions are centred on the nature of shifting urban and natural landscapes; artistic practices of  image-making and their disseminative qualities; collaborative practices, staging and direction; and the role of performativity within them.

Agenda:

• Welcome and introduction
  2:00pm
  Project Space
• Moving Mountains: Exhibition walk-through with exhibiting artist Ahaad Alamoudi and curator Rotana Shaker
  2:20pm
  Gallery 1, Hayy Arts

Join us for a tour led by Ahaad Alamoudi and Rotana Shaker, offering insight into Ahaad’s practice over the past eight years. This walk-through will explore the themes and works featured in the exhibition, which centres around the new Art Jameel commission, Moving Mountains.

• Moving Mountains: Artist and Curator
  2:45pm
  Project Space

Ahaad Alamoudi and curator Rotana Shaker engage in an open dialogue exploring key themes from the Moving Mountains exhibition. The discussion will situate the exhibition within Alamoudi’s broader artistic practice and offer insights into its curatorial framework and process.

• Rut Blees Luxemburg and Ahaad Alamoudi on “utopia,” documentation, the image, and landscapes in flux: Rut Blees-Luxemburg and Ahaad Alamoudi
  4:00pm
  Project Space

Join us for a screening of London based artist and reader in Urban Aesthetics Rut Blees-Luxemburg’s work, followed by a conversation with Ahaad Alamoudi. The discussion will explore their shared interests in reinterpreting history, performative approaches, and an evolving urban landscape.

• Shifting urbanisms: Adrian Lahoud and Ahaad Alamoudi
  5:15pm
  Project Space

Adrian Lahoud, Dean of the School of Architecture at the RCA and an architectural researcher, will present his research on architecture and urbanism in the Global South. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session led by Ahaad Alamoudi.

• Ahaad Alamoudi in conversation with Ayman Yossri
  6:30pm
  Project Space

Ayman Yossri Daydban, a Saudi-Palestinian artist, is known for critically examining national narratives. Building on a recorded conversation between the two artists from 2020 about the concept of “utopia,” Ayman and Ahaad will reflect on how this notion resonates in the present day.

• Performance with Faisal Laban
  7:30
  Saha

Long-time collaborator of Ahaad and Majes singer Faisal Laban will perform live.

About the speakers:

Ahaad Alamoudi

Ahaad Alamoudi (b.1991, Jeddah, KSA) is a Saudi artist raised between England and Saudi Arabia, lives and works in Jeddah. Travelling between the two kingdoms, Ahaad’s work addresses history and representation. She graduated from Dar Al Hekma University in Jeddah with a BA in Visual Communication in 2014 and graduated with an MA in Print from the Royal College of Art in 2017.

In her research about Saudi’s reforming ethnography, Ahaad’s photography, video and print installations aim at reinterpreting historical renditions of a reforming culture.

Adrian Lahoud

Prof. Adrian Lahoud is Dean, School of Architecture and Fellow at the Royal College of Art. He sits on the board of the Architecture Foundation, Design Museum Future Observatory, New Architecture Writers, the Arabic cultural platform Ma3azef, and was Convenor and Co-Chair of the Rights of Future Generation Working Group. Prior to his role at RCA, he was director of the MA programme at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and Studio Master in the Projective Cities MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design at the Architectural Association. In 2019 he curated the inaugural Sharjah Architecture Triennial, the first major international platform for architecture and urbanism in the global south. His research work is focused on architecture and urbanism in the global south.

Rut Blees-Luxemburg

Rut Blees Luxemburg is an artist and Professor of Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art. Rut Blees Luxemburg’s work attends to the intersection of art and the urban context. Her practice is photographic and broadens into public art works, publications, exhibitions, and opera. The research that underpins her art practice is centred on the night in the city and addresses current and future challenges of urban experiences and representations of the nocturnal. As part of her expanded art practice, she has conceptualised and established collective systems that enable and support cultural production and community building, including FILET, an experimental art space in East London. Rut Blees Luxemburg’s artworks are shown and collected by leading international institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London, Stadtmuseum Simeonstift, Trier, Germany and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Her photographic work has been the subject of an opera Liebeslied / My Suicides performed at the ICA London. Her large-scale public artwork Silver Forest, which features the urban forests of Beijing and London, is permanently installed on the façade of Westminster City Hall in London. Amongst many other books and writings, Blees Luxemburg is the author of Future Archive, an artistic research project she developed and led to accompany the construction of the new RCA campus by architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Ayman Yossri Daydban

Born in 1966 in Ramallah, Palestine and living and working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Ayman Yossri Daydban is an established Saudi-Palestinian artist with a multidisciplinary practice. The artist’s last name translates into English as “watchman” or “guard”, and Yossri Daydban adopts the observant eye of this persona in his acute analysis of identity, existence, and belonging as they relate to cultural heritage, national integration, and the complex interrelation of East/West influences. Of particular interest to the artist are the tensions arising at the intersectional points of translation and interdependence, where questions of assimilation and divergent customs come to the fore. Yossri Daydban’s painting, photography, and printmaking explore issues of identity and alienation, often through combinations of cinematic images and text. 

Selected recent exhibitions include “Feeling the Stones”, Diriyah Biennale, Riyadh, 2021; “Durational Portrait: A Brief Overview of Video Art in Saudi Arabia”, Athr, Jeddah, 2020; “Eyes East Bound”, Cairo Biennale, 2019; “Epicenter X: Contemporary Saudi Art”, Arab-American National Museum, Dearborn, MI, 2017; “Give Me the Light”, Athr, Jeddah, 2016 (solo); and “Common Grounds”, Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, 2014.