Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia

calendar-iconThursday, 30 January, 2025
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30 January – 4 May

Abdullah Al Saadi: Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia, curated by Tarek Abou El Fetouh features ten works by Abdullah Al Saadi and offers a reflection on his decades-long artistic practice. Expanding on the work initially presented in the UAE National Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in 2024, the exhibition is designed to show the prolific artist’s work in the UAE, giving the local arts community and the wider audiences across the country the opportunity to encounter Al Saadi’s practice more intimately.

In his practice, Al Saadi embodies a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer,  memory carrier, and storyteller. This exhibition includes works that were produced on his journeys in the wilderness, and invites viewers to explore his creative process in relation to the practices of Arab poets from centuries ago.

During his journeys that last several days, Al Saadi begins drawing, painting, or writing, on canvas or paper, once he feels immersed in nature. Classical Arab poets described this practice of wandering and immersion as the process leading up to the composition of their poems. He travels alone, with only the company of a book, music, domestic animals, or a means of transportation. The presence of these travel companions significantly impacts his artworks, as they join him in exploring the land and humankind’s place in it.

The presence of nature in Al Saadi’s work is not intended for visual documentation, and his map-like drawings and paintings do not include all the spatial components of the landscapes he depicts, the mountains, deserts and valleys. He creates a subjective, imagined world in the folds of nature, which does not exclude elements of contemporary life. He chooses the sites to retain, and others to forget, in a creative process that is simultaneously intellectual and aesthetic, sensorial and affective. Sites of memory are essentially paired with sites of amnesia, both necessary to the formation process of individual and collective memory, representing parallel histories alongside officially documented ones. For over forty years, Al Saadi has been creating singularly subjective narratives, and through a process of assiduous archiving, he keeps his maps, stones, scrolls, and drawings in tin boxes of various shapes and sizes. They are all stored in big metal chests like treasure boxes, numbered, dated, and coded, as if he is creating and preserving a collective memory for the future.

The exhibition is an invitation to enter Abdullah Al Saadi’s singular world and to wander among its unique and rich features. This is a journey where visitors move along a path, discovering both the displayed artworks and hidden art pieces in metal chests. In a re-enactment of the artist’s ritual with visitors in his studio, the concealed works are revealed by performers, who are constantly present in the space. They interact with visitors, telling them stories and giving them clues about the artist’s journeys and the collective memory that Al Saadi summons into the present, and meticulously preserves for the future.