Tadhruhu ar-Riyah: The Forces at Play

The title of the exhibition in Arabic Tadhruhu Ar-Riyah, which means to be scattered by the wind comes from the Qur’anic verse above in the chapter of Al-Kahf. Said to illuminate one’s week when read on a Friday, this chapter provides guidance to the believer on life. 

This particular verse is a vivid visual metaphor on the fragility of life on earth. It describes a drop of water that falls from the sky and intermingles with the plants of the earth which start to grow and flourish as a result, but then wither and get scattered by the wind. While one might think that ‘being scattered by the wind’ is an arbitrary and uncontrolled process, the verse reveals a system of forces at play when this scattering occurs. The first force is a vertical axial force acting on the drop of water as it falls from the sky. This force symbolises the spiritual descent, and the drop of water is in a state that cannot be affected by any lateral movement. The second force builds as the drop of water begins to mix with earthly elements such as the soil and the plant. As a result, the drop changes its state and becomes part of earth. In this changed state, a condition of growth and flourishing occurs. However, this same condition is what allows the plant (and the water in its new state) to wither and be affected by the lateral forces of the winds on earth. When the withering reaches a certain point, the wind becomes the overpowering force that is able to pull the plant from its place and scatter it all over. Thus to be affected by the wind is the consequence of an unequal system of forces where the lateral earthly forces are greater than the axial force. This verse reminds the individual of this system of forces so that when the withering and the scattering takes place, that individual rethinks their positionality and realigns it.

Standing at the intersection of the scientific and the artistic, the spiritual and the physical, Ahmed Mater’s work and journey are a reflection of this metaphor. Drawing on his background as a medical doctor and his upbringing in the village of Rijal Almaa, Mater constantly reveals and engages with these very same forces in his work. While his medical practice and philosophy informed this outlook, his early beginnings in the region of Asir also opened up his view on the existence of the intangible metaphysical forces. Growing up in Rijal Almaa, Mater used to go to Qur’anic school at an early age and was in touch with the culture and values there. He considered it to be a poetic culture that is close to nature. It was also a place where people believed in an ‘occult system of knowledge: a combination of astronomy, philosophy and politics.’ It is thus no wonder that Mater would view the world and express himself through a system of forces seen and unseen; a lens that weaves together the scientific and the spiritual. His philosophical mind and knowledge allow him to be both a keen observer of these forces as well as their cartographer, producing works that ask existential questions and require his audience to reflect on their positionalities through different pulls.

It was a tumultuous time when Mater began to shift to the type of work that we now consider the core of his artistic oeuvre. It was a time where the events happening around him required him to reflect on the broken state or hashamah of the human condition. As a practising physician, Mater understood the X-ray as a visual that allowed him to diagnose physical fractures. He was fully aware, however, that this physical fragility did not reveal the whole state of the human and that there were forces at play unseen through this image. So he starts rendering these forces with his paint. He draws Mecca in the heart of the patient and writes the word Allah (X-ray 2003), a talisman for the protection of the soul and verses from the Qur’an that are a description of the spiritual state of the same organ that is scanned through the X-ray. Through this work, Mater is achieving two things. The first is to form a holistic radiography by mapping every angle of the system of forces that he knows to exist in order to diagnose the weakness he felt at that time. At the same time, Mater is also seeking relief by asking questions and looking for answers in the forces that cannot be seen. By adding the scripts and the talisman, for example, Mater is not only revealing the unseen, but is also seeking an understanding and realignment for the whole equation to grasp the brokenness of the human condition. His works later culminates in the Illumination series where the spiritual radiography is revealed on top of the physical in the style of the illuminated manuscripts of the Qur’an. Mater combines the rays of light that illuminate a physical state with the closest visual translation of the illumination of the spiritual; the illuminated manuscript.

In the project of the Evolution of Man, Mater returns to the use of X-ray in anticipation of a withered state that can lead us to our ultimate scattering. The work is a reference to the anthropocentric consequences of the very source of energy that was once viewed as being a cause for the economic flourishing of the region. Mater shows a man holding a gun to himself as he, through a series of images, morphs into a gas pump. Originally titled What Darwin Did Not Know, the work is a commentary on oil consumerism as it speculates on the consequences resulting from our fixation with the uncontrolled gains of oil. At a time when we thought survival, wealth and greatness come from this source of energy, our hopes to survive the evolutionary test of time are met with our own demise. We are reminded here not only of the state of the withering of the plant in the verse, but also of the stage of the intermixing of water with the plant, whereby the same source of growth and flourishing becomes the cause of withering as well. In this work, Mater hints at the existence of a frictional force that Darwin didn’t know existed, and one that is acting in opposition to the expected progression of evolutionary forces. The artist once again draws our attention to the unconscious propelling movement by the winds, critically telling us to look for other forces and create other pulls to balance out this force.

However, none of Ahmed Mater’s works are as poignant and clear in their mapping of the forces described by the verse as his most iconic work, Magnetism. An almost free-body diagram representing his holistic system of knowledge and forces, Mater recreates a physical magnetic field which, through the resulting pattern, reveals the trajectory of the vectors of the lateral earthly forces and the spiritual axial force all at once. His use of the physics of magnetism is in itself a reminder that all these angles of the spiritual, the physical, the socioeconomic and the emotional are actual forces acting on the human (and the city) throughout life and one must look at them holistically in order to rebalance ones’s position or find a centre to overcome the withering and the scattering.

Mater uses physics again in his monumental land art project, Ashab Al-Lal. This time however, he pulls in rays of light through the physics of reflection to create the mystical phenomenon of a mirage at the centre of the installation. Allowing the individual to see a mirage of the nature surrounding him at that centre, and creating an illusion of the individual in the desert landscape. The mirage, which is essentially an illusion of water, is a ‘larger than life’ phenomenon that brings us back to the drop of water in the verse that is untouched by lateral forces. Similarly, the mirage in Ashab Al-Lal - while created from the physical environmentis an image that you cannot quite touch. 

If the verse in Surah Al-Kahf is a visualisation of the drop of water that ends in a state of withering and scattering, then Ahmed Mater’s work is a constant pursuit to understand and reverse that image; to pick up the scattered pieces whether they are iron shards or rays of light and reveal the underlying system of forces leaving us with questions to reflect and meditate on our own state. 

Bibliography

English translation of the verse: And give them a parable of this worldly life. ˹It is˺ like the plants of the earth, thriving when sustained by the rain we send down from the sky. Then they ˹soon˺ turn into chaff scattered by the wind. And Allah is fully capable of ˹doing˺ all things.

Ahmed Mater, Prognosis/Saudi Arabia: An Artist’s Odyssey (Booth-Clibborn, forthcoming).