THE EDGE BECOMES THE CENTER AHMED MATER
Call him naive, but Ahmed Mater sincerely believes art has the power to change the world. He believed it in the 1990s, when he was working as a community physician in the small mountain city of Abha, located in southwestern Saudi Arabia, and toying with the thought of becoming a professional artist. He believed it when his fledgling artistic career began to attract international attention during the decade-long roadshow of Saudi contemporary art produced by the Edge of Arabia initiative, which he co-founded in 2003 with British artist Stephen Stapleton and Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem. Certainly he believed it in 2011, when he moved to Jeddah and, with his wife, the artist Arwa Alneami, established Pharan Studio, a platform that continues to mount under-the-radar exhibitions with a changing cast of young, critically inclined artists in the privacy of a home and studio.
As the newly anointed director of the Misk Art Institute, Mater ostensibly still believes in art’s capacity to change society. Established in 2017, Misk is the cultural spearhead of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud’s (MBS) ambitious vision to economically and socially transform Saudi Arabia, weaning the Kingdom off oil reliance while shedding its arch-conservative veil. Misk’s agenda is to support artistic initiatives in the Kingdom and fuel cultural diplomacy abroad, with the first Saudi Arabia pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in May 2018 and the upcoming Misk Art Week in Riyadh on the lineup of projects for its first year. Mater is eminently suited to the role at Misk: as a former medical doctor, he is professionally embedded in the social fabric in a country where inclusion is everything. As an artist, his practice advocated a shift from an obedient conservativism to cultivating collective memory and valuing Saudi-ness. “I have decided to be within the change,” he said to me in our conversation in April, “rather than sit out and criticize.”
But Mater’s unfailing faith in art-as-agent-of-change, especially in regard to hisdepicting the massive redevelopment of Mecca—which reveal the spectacular collusion of late-capitalist enterprise and the religious establishment in the erasure of history—Mater’s criticality has floated somewhere between considered forms of activism, and long, research-heavy investigations that culminate in a prognosis.
