Taking its title from a poem by artist Seher Shah, ‘We Saw an Endless Cycle’ speaks to the ways in which artists bear witness to the city. The exhibition brings together works by artists whose practices closely engage with the city through intimate gestures, often in the form of movements like walking and crawling; acts of recording and reinterpretation through photographing, painting, drawing, writing, sculpting and practices of counter mapping. These gestures find their echoes across decades and geographies. Together, they reflect a recurring impulse to contend with the dynamism, contradictions, and politics of the urban sphere through intimate, often repetitive, and at times disruptive action. 

The practices presented offer non-exhaustive windows into the various scales of our understanding and relation to the city: from the collective imagination of a modern metropolis and the transformation of the horizon into the iconic cityscape, to the embodied experiences of the individual attempting to navigate and grasp within it. The artists presented here take their tools to bare on urban sites across the globe including the nighttime pavements of London; the crowded streets of Guangzhou, Cairo and New York; the evolving maps of Jerusalem and Jeddah; the etched walls of Tunis, new-builds of Lahore and Islamabad and the imagined amalgamations of cities like them. Speaking to our location in Jeddah, a cosmopolitan port-city built on centuries of transformation, the exhibition offers audiences reverberations and reflections through the recurrent and evolving methods and motifs in visual and performative practices.  

The exhibition features artworks and archival materials including works from the Art Jameel Collection, new commissions and loans.

Participating artists include: Seher Shah, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Umber Majeed, Lulua Alyahya, Dima Srouji, Risham Syed, Rut Blees-Luxemburg, Amal Kenawy, Lubna Chowdhury, Mohammed Al Saleem, Abdulhalim Radwi, Hassan Sharif, Basmah Felemban and Mustafa Hassan, BRICKLAB, Lin Yilin*, John Smith* and Pope.L*