Life and Work
1979 | Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri is born in Tabuk, a largely military city in the north west of Saudi Arabia on the Jordanian border. He is the first child of Mater Ahmed Al-Ziad, a Sergeant in the Saudi Arabian army, and Fatimah Hassan Abdullah Aseeri, a painter of traditional Aseeri houses and a calligrapher. Ahmed will eventually have two brothers, Bandar and Mohammed, and four sisters, Aisha, Jawaher, Jamila and Reem.
1981 | Ahmed and his family move to Rijal Alma, his father’s village in the mountainous Aseer region of south west Saudi Arabia. They live in a small, traditional stone house perched on a steep-terraced hillside. The house’s interior is decorated by Ahmed’s mother in vividly-coloured geometric designs, painted in the traditional Aseeri style. Ahmed’s daily life is dominated by his involvement with a Qur’anic study group, helping his parents on the farm and traditional village activities.
1985 | Ahmed is photographed for the first time for his primary school enrolment. He later reflected, “I don’t have many pictures of myself as a child nor of my parents – nothing that can remind me of my childhood. To take a picture was considered against religion or haraam.”
1994 | Ahmed and his family move to a modern house in Abha, the regional capital of Aseer, where he completes his school studies. This move from the village to the city has a substantial impact on Ahmed’s view of the world, and he begins to question the traditional beliefs of his childhood.
1998 | Ahmed enrols as a medical student at King Saud University, Abha College of Medicine, to study medicine and surgery.
1999 | Ahmed joins the Al-Meftaha Arts Village, part of the King Fahd Cultural Centre, under the patronage of HRH Prince Khalid Al-Faisal. Prince Khalid offers Ahmed a studio and supports all the artists working there by providing materials, workshops in photography and painting, and helping to organise their first exhibitions. Ahmed studies under a number of teachers, including pioneering Saudi artists Dr Abdul Halim Radawi and Dr Hassan Obaid, as well as Dr Ahmed Baqer from Bahrain, Dr Rashid Diab from Sudan and Dr Mustafa Abdel-Moti from Egypt.
2000-2002 | Ahmed participates in a series of traditional and contemporary painting exhibitions including Landing on the Earth’s Surface at Al-Maseef Cultural Club in Abha. He wins a series of prizes including the Abha Cultural Prize for Fine Art and Photography. In 2000 Ahmed meets HRH The Prince of Wales, who takes up residence in Al-Meftaha while painting watercolours of the surrounding landscape. His studio at no. 9 is opposite Ahmed’s at no. 7.
2003 | Ahmed creates and exhibits his first X-ray paintings at Al-Meftaha. They are chosen for the 6th Saudi Malwan Contest and exhibited in Jeddah, Beirut, Sidon and Manama. Ahmed meets British artist Stephen Stapleton in Abha and they begin a friendship and creative collaboration which will eventually lead to the founding of Edge of Arabia.
2004 | Ahmed shows his X-ray paintings at a radical exhibition in Jeddah, organised by the newly-formed Shatta group of artists. The exhibition challenges existing parameters of art practice in the Kingdom, and is widely discussed and reported on in the media. Ahmed exhibits increasingly conceptual work and performances including The End, Chewing, Standing in Front of You, and So Far You Are From the Earth. A portrait of Ahmed in front of X-Ray 2003 features in the book Offscreen: Four Young Artists in the Middle East, published internationally by Booth-Clibborn Editions.
2005 | Ahmed works in the emergency room of Aseer Central Hospital throughout the final year of his medical training. Group exhibitions include the Al Sharjah Calligraphy Biennial (UAE), the 3rd Shatta group exhibition (Jeddah) and a Saudi Arts delegation to Tunisia. Ahmed wins the Al-Meftaha Photography Prize for Aseer from the Air, a book of aerial photographs of the region commissioned by Prince Khalid Al-Faisal. Stephen Stapleton brings X-Ray 2003 to London and shows it to Venetia Porter, Curator of Islamic and Middle Eastern Art at the British Museum.
2006 | Ahmed graduates with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (M.B.B.S) from King Khalid University, Abha College of Medicine, and works as a resident doctor at Aseer Central Hospital. His X-Ray 2003 painting is bought by the British Museum and included in Word into Art, the most comprehensive survey exhibition of contemporary Middle Eastern artists ever held in Europe. Ahmed travels to London for the opening and is invited by the Saudi Ambassador to exhibit paintings and photographs at the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia. On the back of Mater’s inclusion in Word into Art comes a burst of publicity and upon his return to Saudi, HRH King Abdullah flies to Abha to meet the artists of Al-Meftaha. While there, he publicly praises Ahmed as an important cultural role model for young Saudis. Ahmed also takes part in a delegation of Saudi photographers to Japan and Singapore and founds Ibn Aseer (Son of Aseer), a collective of Abha- based artists and designers.
2007 | Ahmed is invited by the US State Department to take part in the International Visitor Leadership Program in Washington, D.C. The programme takes him across America and includes courses on politics, the media, education and the arts. X-Ray 2003 is exhibited in Word into Art in Dubai and Ahmed is invited to present his Yellow Cow project for the first time at the 8th Sharjah Biennale, Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. He meets pioneering Emirate artist, Hassan Sharif, who has a major influence on his conceptual approach. Ahmed becomes the face of Mobily, Saudi’s largest mobile phone company, appearing in a TV commercial celebrating his life as an artist and doctor living in Aseer.
2008 | Ahmed co-curates and exhibits new works in Edge of Arabia: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia, at the SOAS Brunei Gallery in London. The show coincides with the launch of an accompanying book and website, the first ever comprehensive guides to contemporary art from the Kingdom. Ahmed exhibits his first Illumination diptych and Talismanic Illumination, and his work is widely discussed in the British and Arabic media. Illumination I is used to promote Edge of Arabia in a city-wide, London Underground advertising campaign, and he gives a talk about his work at the University of London alongside Dr Venetia Porter, Dr Geoffrey King and Peter Sanders. Ahmed exhibits Evolution of Man for the first time at the 11th Cairo Biennale. Back in Saudi, he continues to work as a G.P. and marries fellow artist Arwa Yahya Al Neimy. He moves out of his family’s home and leaves the Al-Meftaha Arts Village. For the first time, he has his own house and studio.
2009 | Ahmed is invited by Catherine David to participate in the 53rd Venice Biennale as part of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) Platform for Visual Arts. David presents an interview with Ahmed in a historic exhibition at the Arsenale, the first ever presentation of Gulf artists at the official Venice Biennale. At the same time, Ahmed co-curates Edge of Arabia in the Palazzo Polignac on the Grand Canal, where he exhibits Magnetism for the first time. He has his first solo show, Illumination, at ArtSpace Gallery in Dubai, and is voted number 62 in the ‘Power 100’ ranking of the world’s most influential Arabs by Arabian Business magazine.
2010 | In January Ahmed gives a keynote lecture about his life and work at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, as part of Catherine David’s Gulf Artists Programme. He spends much of the first part of the year working with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the militarised border between Yemen and Saudi, treating injured soldiers from both sides of the conflict. In June he presents Evolution of Man and new works, Antenna and CCTV at Grey Borders/Grey Frontiers, the new Edge of Arabia show in Berlin, curated by Rami Farook. Ahmed speaks in conversation with Greenbox Museum Founder Aarnout Helb at a symposium on Saudi Art at the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and features on the cover of several German newspapers holding his hand to his head like a gun in front of Evolution of Man. In October he presents his first major solo show and launches this book at the Vinyl Factory Gallery in London’s Soho.
