Among Ahmed Mater’s earliest memories, are the murmuring voices speaking reverently and with love about Mecca; and later, while only a boy, he recalls a visit to the holy city ‘poignant with flashes of an adventure, the comfort of family’ and his earliest experiences ‘of sustained quiet reflection.’ This ‘spiritual memory’ as Mater describes it, would later lead to some of his most important work. From the early beginnings, where the Kaaba appears at the heart of an early X-ray piece, to his iconic Magnetism and later his deep exploration of the city in Desert of Pharan, Mater continues to find inspiration and to tell new stories of this holiest of cities that has seen such rapid transformation in the last decades. His fascination, however, as we shall discover, is not mere recording, but is completely informed by his other persona – the physician who specialised in community medicine, wanting to understand and express the effect of the changes on the spiritual and physical well-being of its inhabitants.
My first encounter with Mater’s work occurred when Stephen Stapleton, fresh from his encounter with the Saudi artists who had studied at Al-Meftaha Arts Village (along with Mater, included in the group was Abdulnasser Gharem), arrived to see me with a painting under his arm. This was a collage work on canvas, X-Ray, painted in 2003, that instantly mesmerised me (p. 18). At the heart of the painting was a frame containing an X-ray of a figure facing right. Inscribed at the top of the X-ray to left, was the word Allah, opposite, scribbled text referring to the DNA making up a human being, further to the right, extracts of medical notes, elsewhere, equations and other graffiti. Most significant of all, was the drawing of the Kaaba, the hizam (belt over the kiswa) and the door highlighted in yellow, one of the minarets of the sanctuary, reaching out behind; another sketch of the Kaaba appears at the base of the handwritten medical notes. Soon acquired for the British Museum collection, this magnificent work was included in Word into Art in 2006 and published in the accompanying catalogue.
What this painting demonstrates is a meeting of Mater’s worlds, and in his words, it represents ‘the confusion in the identity of mankind in the contemporary world.’ The use of the X-ray figure would henceforth characterise the entire Illuminations series, where it would now be combined with Qur’anic text and illumination, in an echo of medieval Qur’an manuscripts (pp. 66-77). As Linda Komaroff, describes: ‘Mater is not so much reinventing Islamic art as he is repurposing it so that it becomes more clearly a vehicle for personal expression.’4 In the same way that the inclusion of the drawing of the holy Kaaba in the British Museum’s X-Ray 2003, can be seen as giving protection to the shadowy central figure, that notion of humankind’s need for nurture and safeguarding, is also evident in later works, such as Talismanic X-Ray Blue (Torso) (p. 2) where it is the symbols from the talismanic shirts, traditionally designed to protect their wearers in warfare, that play the same role.
The pull that is Mecca - the focus of the prayers of Muslims wherever they reside; the injunction to go on Hajj, at least once in their lives if they are able; the power of that attraction has translated itself into one of Mater’s best known works Magnetism. Tim Mackintosh-Smith encapsulates it evocatively: ‘The idea is simple and, like its central element, forcefully attractive. Ahmed Mater gives a twist to a magnet and sets in motion tens of thousands of particles of iron, a multitude of tiny satellites that form a single swirling nimbus.’5 This work appears both as an installation - the tiny magnet, and the iron filings held together by the magnetic field – and as a series of photogravures (pp. 102-111). As Mater describes, this gathering of the tiny metal particles can be compared to the nature of human attraction: ‘Though by nature each individual is the centre of himself, individuals like iron filings are compelled to be part of larger groups turned towards the centre.’ Magnetism was first shown in Venice during the course of the 53rd Biennial in 2009, in an exhibition organised by Edge of Arabia. In 2012, it became one of the main anchors of the British Museum’s Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam entrancing all who encountered it.
Mater’s growing engagement with Mecca as a subject for research, continued in several directions. He built up an extensive library and photographs, and continued to explore the city itself obsessively– describing it as a place that ‘bristles under the weight of its own symbolism.’ Regularly visiting the second-hand markets of Mecca, he began to purchase objects, photographs, old toy cameras, Zamzam water bottles, all relating to the city and to the Hajj. Storing these in his studio, he exhibited what were to become his 100 Found Objects in Sharjah in 2014. He even rescued discarded windows from old Meccan houses which he was to turn into an installation. Alongside, this collecting, he also began an extensive project of documentation that was ultimately to lead to Desert of Pharan. Pharan is the name given by the medieval Arab geographers to denote the desolate areas of the Hijaz, or sometimes used in reference to Mecca itself. In the Qur’an (Surah 14 Ibrahim: 37) Abraham refers to this desolation as follows: ‘Our Lord, I have settled some of my offspring in an uncultivated valley, (bi wadin ghayra dhi zara‘) close to your Sacred House.’ Mater chose the term for its very ancientness, needing to get under the skin of the city, to uncover the essential dichotomy that it is both a site of profound religious significance – where it is ‘impossible to walk the streets... without the insistent and enduring awareness that these are the same stones on which the Prophet walked’ - but also a living breathing place, full of skyscrapers and fast food restaurants such as are found anywhere in the Arab world. And thus began the walks with his camera, his conversations with the workers brought from all over the world to build and build. They invited him to their homes – he ate with them – listened to their stories. He also encountered refugees, one such, Abdulmajeed Abu Al Sham’a, Burmese, now living in Mecca for over 70 years and a prominent member of the Rohingya community, had arrived as a child along with 2,000 Burmese families.
These encounters also led to the remarkable film Leaves Fall in All Seasons with most of the footage made for the benefit of the workers’ families. As part of this extensive project of documentation, Mater explored the hotels where pilgrims stay from the modest rooms to the grand 5-star hotels overlooking al-Masjid al-Haram, the Holy Sanctuary. He examined how the city is governed, how Hajj is so effectively managed, and describes in detail his own experience of the rituals of Hajj. Struggling to evoke the intensity of the feeling, he tried at the same time, to picture the early days. The running between the hillocks Safa and Marwa, for example, where Hagar ran to find water for her baby son Ismail, and where ‘today I find myself enclosed inside vast echoing and airconditioned corridors.’ Nothing escapes Mater’s enquiring eye, that we see unfold both in the publication and the series of glorious large scale photographs (pp. 164-183), from the sensitive capturing of pilgrims at prayer on Jabal ‘Arafa, to the stranded empty buses in the desert following the end of Hajj.
But this is not all. During his Mecca research, Mater came across the story of ‘Abd al-Ghaffar ibn ‘Abd al-Rahman al- Baghdadi, a physician turned photographer who, in the late 1890s, worked alongside the Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje documenting Mecca and the pilgrims from his studio in Jeddah. Intrigued by the notion that there was once another Saudi photographer recording events and people in Mecca, Mater followed the story to Leiden where ‘Abd al-Ghaffar’s photographs are stored in the library of the University of Leiden. From these he learnt that Snouk had not been candid about the fact that ‘Abd al-Ghaffar was the originator of certain photographs that appeared in the famous Bilder Aus Mekka (1888-1889) and that there was still a great deal to learn about the Meccan doctor. Now beginning to track down members of ‘Abd al-Ghaffar’s family, this new intriguing project, is yet one more story that Mater will bring to light as he continues to dig deep into the history of the Mecca that continues to draw and inspire him.
Venetia Porter
British Museum
Bibliography
Catherine David, ed., Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Mecca (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 580.
David, Desert of Pharan, 557.
Venetia Porter, Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (London: British Museum Press, 2006), 126–127. See also British Museum Collection online https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_2006-0214-0-1 (accessed 18 June 2024)
Linda Komaroff, “Illuminations,” in Ahmed Mater, eds. Edward Booth-Clibborn, Stephen Stapleton, and Ahmed Mater (London: Booth-Clibborn, 2010), 51–77.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, “Magnetism,” in Ahmed Mater, eds. Edward Booth-Clibborn, Stephen Stapleton, and Ahmed Mater (London: Booth-Clibborn, 2010), 51–77.
Venetia Porter, The Art of Hajj (London: British Museum Press, 2012), 92.
“Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam,” British Museum, accessed 18 June 2024, https://www.ahmedmater.com/exhibitions/hajj-journey-to-the-heart-of-islam. Venetia Porter, ed. Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (exhibition catalogue, London: British Museum Press, 2012)
“Ahmed Mater: 100 Found Objects,” Sharjah Art Foundation, accessed 18 June 2024, https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-artfoundation/exhibitions/ahmed-mater-100-found-objects.
David, Desert of Pharan, 576
David, Desert of Pharan, 83
David, Desert of Pharan, 326
Henry Hemming, “Leaves Fall in All Seasons,” made with Henry Hemming, filmed by Ahmed Mater, accessed 27 June 2024, https://www.ahmedmater.com/films/leaves-fall-in-all-seasons-1.
David, Desert of Pharan, 401
Arnoud Vrolik, “An Early Photograph of the Egyptian Mahmal in Mecca: Reflections on Intellectual Property and Modernity in the Work of C. Snouk Hurgronje,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, eds. Venetia Porter and Liana Saif, The British Museum Research Publication 193 (London: The British Museum Press, 2013), 206–13.