When Ahmed and I first met in 2003, he was part of an artist group called Shatta, its name literally meaning ‘to be broken apart’. Not long before, I had formed Offscreen with a group of London-based travelling artists as an alternative to the ‘onscreen’ story about the Middle East in the western media at that time. It felt from the outset as though we were on a similar trajectory. Both of us were looking to dismantle existing traditions to create something new. The coming together of these two groups led to the creation of Edge of Arabia. Looking back over the past two decades, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to claim that our meeting changed the course of international artistic dialogue with Saudi Arabia. Ahmed was just beginning to identify a role as interpreter of cultural and social change – something that is now at the heart of his practice as an artist who uses his creative antennae to catch signals and make connections across history, geography and time. I, in turn, realised that this meeting of minds across ideological borders could be the start of something important, though we didn’t know at the time just where it would take us. This, then, is Edge of Arabia’s ‘origin story’, one that is vital to an understanding of Ahmed Mater as artist and cultural leader.

Al-Meftaha

Our first encounter was at Al-Meftaha Arts Village in the remote mountain region of Asir on the southern border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It was March 2003, the start of the Second Gulf War. I had left the UK a few months earlier on an ‘artists’ expedition’ in a customised Toyota Hilux with raised suspension which we called ‘Yasmine’. We were three artists, in a truck, with sketchbooks, our bags full of paint, and canvases on a big roll in the boot. Driving down through Eastern Europe, Turkey, and over into Iran, where we stayed for three months, I became passionate about telling the stories of the people I met through my collages. World events, too, became our story: 2002 was the year when the media was building up to the invasion of Iraq.

Crossing the border into Saudi Arabia, I felt I was on the edge of something about to happen. On arrival in Abha, the mountain capital of Asir, I remember being dropped by the side of the road under a neon palm tree. I called the only phone number I had – the office of HRH Prince Bandar bin Khalid Al Faisal, who had arranged my visa without really knowing who I was. It was March 18th. That night, I stayed in a cheap hotel and watched the ‘shock and awe’ attack on Baghdad on the TV. The next morning, I was picked up and driven in a Cadillac to meet HRH Prince Bandar at the offices of Al Watan, one of the country’s leading newspapers, which he owned. I was escorted to the boardroom where HRH Prince Bandar was hosting a meeting with his editors, all of them eating pizzas out of boxes and drinking Pepsi, and the first thing he said to me was that he was expecting someone much older! He was passionate, very open-minded and intellectual. He suggested I should visit the artist community at Al-Meftaha, which had been opened in Abha in the late 1980s by the then governor of Asir province, HRH Prince Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud.

An acclaimed poet and artist himself, HRH Prince Khalid had developed Al-Meftaha (which means ‘the open area’ in Arabic) to provide a platform for creativity against the backdrop of socio-political transformations abroad and at home.

Ahmed had first heard about Al-Meftaha in the late 1990s and began to visit every weekend. Drawn by the music and the art that reminded him of the brightly-coloured al Qatt al-Asiri murals his mother had painted on the interior walls of their family house, he started taking classes. Prince Khalid would invite some of the best artists in Saudi Arabia to teach there. The acclaimed Saudi modernist painter, Abdulhalim Radwi, made a particularly strong impression on the young Ahmed, for whom Al-Meftaha became an oasis – a refuge both from the academic intensity of Medical School and from the conservatism of society. Reflecting his parents’ vocations – his father a military pharmacist, his mother an artist – he immersed himself in training, both as a painter and a doctor. The walls of his room at home were like an ancient cave painting, covered with medical symbols and annotations, while his new studio at Al-Meftaha was dedicated to learning the foundations of drawing, perspective and colour theory.

One day, HRH Prince Charles, then heir to the British throne (now King Charles III), visited Al-Meftaha. He was friends with HRH Prince Khalid and had encouraged him to start painting as a way to observe and express the world around him. He impressed the young artists with his elegant suits and greetings in Arabic, not to mention the expensive watercolours he had with him – art materials being in short supply in Abha. In March 2003, when I arrived at Al-Meftaha out of the blue, Ahmed and the others welcomed me cautiously and I settled into my temporary studio/bedroom which opened up into a central courtyard. The village was indeed an oasis for me and so different from the harsh, concrete and neon urban landscape I had glimpsed through the window of the public bus on my journey from the Yemen border. Although modern, it was built and decorated in the old style, with bright blue shutters and doors. It incorporated artists’ studios as well as an exhibition hall, a jewellery shop, a public theatre and a mosque. Just beyond the village was the Tuesday market, where merchants from across Asir and Yemen sold practical household goods as well as incense, spices, Asiri honey (said to have healing properties), and traditional handicraft from all the tribes of the south. As we walked around, I saw the region’s famous ‘flower men’, with braided and perfumed garlands in their hair and charcoal eyes, standing out against the monotone white thobes and black abayas of the urban families. The Governor’s office was also close by, making the artists, including me, feel safe, protected by their powerful patron. 

During the day, I would make art and visit each individual studio. Every evening was spent with my new artist companions smoking shisha, listening to friends play the oud and watching the unfolding Gulf war on TV. We would switch between western channels like CNN and Fox and Arabic channels such as Al-Arabiya. We would discuss how the stories and images could be deconstructed from each other’s points of view. My turning up at that moment became a chance for us to sit together, surrounded by art and sketchbooks and poetry and the TV, and talk about what was really happening in the world. There was a constant buzz of connecting modems: the Internet had just arrived and the artists were voraciously researching obscure art movements and manifestos which weren’t in the books on their shelves.

It struck me how brave this small group of artists was, and I felt strongly that their voices deserved to be heard, that the work they were making was important. Spending a lot of time in their studios, sifting through their sketchbooks and piles of paintings, even the folders on their computers, I was intrigued. There were a lot of traditional paintings of local culture and landscapes, books on Picasso and Cézanne, references to Mecca, photographs and impressionist painting, as well as memorabilia from family pilgrimages. But there were also some genuinely experimental new works – all by the Shatta collective.

Established in 2002 by Ahmed, Ashraf Fayadh, Abdulkarim Qassim, Abdulnasser Gharem and Muhammad Khidr, Shatta wanted to break from the previous generation that had been mostly connected to the Ministry. They were radical and experimental, they wanted to be different. They even had their own manifesto, like the Futurists. Each of Shatta’s members had experienced resistance within their community – from other artists as well as the Abha branch of the Ministry of Information. The name, suggested by Ashraf, was from haram shatta meaning ‘to be broken up’ or ‘disembodied’, and Shatta saw itself as a renegade group that believed in a collective and disruptive approach to art-making.

This was immediately evident in Ashraf’s giant ID cards for undocumented Palestinians, Abdulkarim’s strange vitrine tomb full of symbolic twentieth-century objects, and Ahmed’s X-ray paintings. Ahmed’s works in particular stood out. They combined the artist’s medical revision notes with violently expressive paint and real X-rays from the hospital where he was training. At the centre of one of the works was a naïve painting of al-Ka‘ba and the word ‘Allah’ scrawled in Arabic on an X-ray of a man’s head and chest. Ahmed described it as his internal conflict between the subjective world of faith and the objective world of medicine – ‘an expression of man’s confusion at the beginning of the 21st century’.

The avant-garde turn taken by Ahmed and his friends was probably not what HRH Prince Khalid had anticipated. He did not foresee what might happen when you bring together artists, poets, journalists and a few foreign visitors under one roof, along with the Internet and access to the global events of that time. There was nowhere like Al- Meftaha in the whole of the Kingdom.

Edge of Arabia

I returned to London in April that year but was keen to get back to Al-Meftaha, which I did in November. One day we were looking at a copy of National Geographic that had a cover story about Saudi Arabia called ‘Kingdom on Edge’. The photo on the cover showed a sword-wielding Saudi prince. We were discussing the meaning of the title when somebody said, ‘Edge of Arabia’. Ahmed and I immediately responded: ‘That's it. That’s our name’. From that moment on we called the project Edge of Arabia although we still did not know exactly what it was that we were trying to do.
 

Over the next few years, between 2004 and 2008, the Shatta and Offscreen groups continued to work independently on exhibitions and books, but eventually Ahmed and I started working together under the Edge of Arabia banner. We realised that a lot of what we wanted to do as Edge of Arabia originated from those first encounters and discussions: mobilising artists across borders; linking artists’ work with global socio political themes; and promoting new kinds of images and new kinds of stories between East and West. From the outset there was also an unconventional, sometimes uneasy, connection between the official Saudi Arabia of the Princes and the Government, and the artists.

Ahmed and I stayed in close contact while also pursuing separate careers – Ahmed as a community doctor in Abha and I as a secondary (high) school art teacher, before joining the British Museum’s education department. I was also trying to make it as an artist during this time. I would travel back to Saudi Arabia once or twice a year and we would visit different parts of the country. In Dhahran we met the photographer, Manal Al Dowayan, who was using Aramco’s photographic dark room (the only one in the country apparently) to print her new series about Saudi women professionals. We went to the Shia region of Al-Qassim to meet a number of painters and sculptors working in isolation. In Jeddah we met Hamza Serafi who was a great supporter of local contemporary artists and went on to found Athr Gallery with Mohammed Hafiz. Hamza introduced me to Ayman Yossri, a Palestinian artist who had been making really crazy conceptual works in Jeddah since the 80s. In Riyadh we met a group of artists associated with the Ministry of Culture & Information including Ali Ruzaiza and Sameer al Daham; they helped us access the Ministry, whose support and permissions we would need if we were to do anything abroad. I also visited Saudi artists living in the diaspora, including Faisal Samra in Bahrain and Shadia Alem and her writer sister, Raja, in their house in Paris.

That five-year period of travel and research was really important. We were able to build a strong network of other artists and supporters from across Saudi Arabia and beyond. Nobody had made an effort to connect these artists before. And we had done it independently, funding ourselves by saving money from our other jobs. A key moment in raising the profile of Saudi contemporary art was the inclusion of one of Ahmed’s X-ray paintings in the British Museum’s Word into Art exhibition in 2006. I had bought the painting, X-Ray 2003, direct from Ahmed’s studio. Ahmed told me later that he had sold it to me for what he considered a crazy high price – £700. When I landed in Heathrow, I went straight to the British Museum where the curator of Islamic Art, Venetia Porter, decided not only to buy it (for £750) but include it in this groundbreaking exhibition of Middle Eastern art. The inclusion of work by a young Saudi artist in such a major museum exhibition made a big impact. The Saudi Embassy in London began to take an interest – they put on a solo show for Ahmed at the embassy in the build-up to the exhibition – and agreed to support Ashraf and Ahmed’s travel to London for the opening. I clearly remember, when my mother and I picked them up from the airport, the look of rising panic in Ahmed’s eyes at being driven by a woman! At the opening, Ahmed wore his Asiri scarf and full national dress, Ashraf his Palestinian scarf. Ahmed’s participation in the British Museum show made all the Saudi newspapers and reverberated throughout the country. In 2006, King Abdullah himself flew down to Abha to meet the famous artist at Al-Meftaha.

On the back of the British Museum exhibition, I developed a proposal for the first Edge of Arabia show in the UK and started circulating it in Saudi Arabia and amongst various institutions in London. I invited Ahmed and another Saudi artist, Lulwah Al Homoud to be my co-curators. The idea was to organise the group of artists we had met over the past five years into one comprehensive show. We were determined, as Edge of Arabia, to remain embedded within the communities and societies we worked with, and to be constantly driven by the possibility of changing things.

One day, in 2007, I got a call out of the blue from someone called Fady Jameel asking to meet in London. I did not know who he was, but he had clearly seen the exhibition proposal. In our office at the Arab British Centre he looked me in the eye and said, ‘We are going to take this all the way’. He committed then to funding Edge of Arabia through what would become Community Jameel and Art Jameel. The first Edge of Arabia exhibition was held at the Brunei Gallery in London in 2008. When Ahmed came through Oxford Circus station on his way from Heathrow, he was met by a huge Edge of Arabia billboard showing him in his studio, with the caption: ‘New Wave of Saudi Contemporary Art Comes to London’. Our dream of bringing the edge to the centre, of creating a true dialogue rooted in communities and the ‘disruptive’, innovative work of a new generation of artists, was underway.

Since those early days, Edge of Arabia has produced over 50 international exhibitions, including Ahmed’s solo shows at the Vinyl Factory in London (2010), Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC (2016), and Brooklyn Museum in New York (2018). Ahmed’s work remains central to that vision that bridges talent with the enormous opportunities now afforded by these wider cultural initiatives. Edge of Arabia has been there from the very beginning and continues to champion these artistic collaborations, framing them through a wide lens that takes account of the local as much as the international viewpoint, and ensuring that the vision remains sharply focused on artistic merit and integrity. While the origins of this story lie in an early artistic encounter, its true impact is only now being properly seen – an impact far greater than even Ahmed and I could have imagined.