@home with ... MANAL AL DOWAYAN, MUHANNAD SHONO, MOHAMMED AHMED IBRAHIM, NADIM KARAM & SHERIN GUIRGUIS / Al Ula Series

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"Al Ula, the hidden gem continues ... Desert X Al Ula artists in conversation"

Desert X Al Ula is the first site‐responsive exhibition of its kind in Saudi Arabia. An exploration of desert culture, the exhibition is a cross‐cultural dialogue between artists from Saudi Arabia and its surrounding region and artists from previous iterations of Desert X in California, taking its cues from the extraordinary landscape and historical significance of Al Ula.

Manal Al Dowayan is Saudi multidisciplinary artist. Long invested in interrogating the gender‐biased customs that impact the condition of women in Saudi Arabia. She is a sensitive yet critical witness to the cultural metamorphosis engulfing the Kingdom.

Al Dowayan’s practice navigates a territory where the personal and the political overlap. Her works spring from lived experiences—these intimate encounters with social injustice, the pangs of memory and forgetting.

Muhannad Shono is a Saudi multidisciplinary artist. His curious practice is in a constant state of interrogation of what lies beneath the surface of our existence, exploring questions on the evolutionary line of the human species.

An avid storyteller, through his work he raises numerous interpretations touching religious and cultural myths intending in pushing the viewer to understand how the past can dictate human narratives we abide by.

Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim is an Emirati conceptual artist and one of the pioneer "five" conceptual artists from the United Arab. His practice has been inspired by a lifelong relationship with the environment of Khorfakkan, his place of birth, with the Gulf of Oman on one side and the Hajar Mountains on the other. His deep connection to his local environment repeats itself throughout his studio practice, whether through his installations, drawings or objects.

Nadim Karam is a multidisciplinary Lebanese artist and architect. With a background that fuses Oriental and Japanese theories of space, he tackles the universality of the human condition, working towards the reconfiguration of environments.

His research focuses on the conviction that cities need to dream, and it is the role of artists to provoke this dream. He has been commissioned to create large‐scale urban art installations for cities across the globe.

Sherin Guirguis is an Egyptian artist. Her work engages both formal and social concerns by juxtaposing the reductive Western language of minimalist aesthetics with that of Eastern ornamentation. The work attempts to problematize the history of decoration and ornamentation and its relationship with social structures, cultural identity and Women’s agency.

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