Saudi oasis rich in farms and oilfields provides fertile ground for artist Mohammad Alfaraj's Dubai exhibition

At around the midway point of his solo exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre, Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj presents a commissioned installation that functions as the conceptual climax of the show.

Worn and mismatched doors, collected from Saudi’s Al-Ahsa region, are arranged to form a circular enclosure. Some stand upright, others are placed on their sides, together forming an improvised wall. The space within is carpeted by woven reed mats, with rudimentary chairs where visitors can sit and leaf through the stories in a chapbook stacked on one side. A sound installation fills the air with layered chanting, rhythmic hammering and the rustle of palm fronds.

Love is to leave the door to your garden ajar is described in the exhibition as a “storytelling space, where everyone is invited to gather, read from Alfaraj's stories, or tell stories of their own”. In both function and form, the installation is inspired by the arish, a vernacular structure found in Alfaraj’s native Al-Ahsa.

The arish is an informal shelter, made as a place of respite for farmers. It is built out of materials that are readily available, such as date palm fronds, and serves as a gathering space where farmers exchange stories and knowledge.

“The doors in the installation are all from Al-Ahsa,” Alfaraj says. “Farmers used to build shelters in the fields to escape the heat. They are social spaces to share stories. Now, many throw out wooden doors for iron ones. I collected these abandoned doors to build a space for people to sit, read or write.”

The exhibition – Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty – is abundant with similar social and anecdotal snippets, specific to daily life in Al-Ahsa. The title is a bit of a key to both the exhibition as well as Alfaraj’s practice, alluding to the playfulness with which he approaches his craft.

“The title was very important to me. It came from a childlike place,” he says. “A child drinks water at home and finds it sweet. One day, they drink seawater and it’s salty. Then they realise that tears are also salty. They wonder why the sea is salty and imagine: do fish cry all the time? The exhibition title is meant to bring back that sense of wonder and emotional empathy – towards people, animals, anything alive.”

Al-Ahsa is the focal point of the exhibition. The governorate is home to the largest oasis in the world. A Unesco World Heritage Site, the oasis is replete with natural springs and date palm groves. Its fertile soil and rich ecology have sustained human settlements for centuries.

But Al-Ahsa is also full of contradictions, Alfaraj points out. The area contains some of the world’s largest oilfields, propelling a formidable engineering sector as well as an industrial counterpoint to its natural attractions.

“Al-Ahsa is industrial and agricultural at once. In the 1960s and 1970s, people left farming to become engineers,” says Alfaraj, adding that he, too, studied mechanical engineer, but then opted for a career in art, while still reflecting upon the agricultural landscape and traditions of Al-Ahsa.

“That mix of community, land and contradiction is part of the landscape of my work,” he says.

Alfaraj doesn’t rely on any one craft or medium to evoke Al-Ahsa in Dubai. His practice is storytelling, and he will resort to whatever medium best tells the story he is focusing on, whether photographs hanging by strings from the ceiling, video projected on to a mound of sand, or a story scrawled on lined notebook paper.

“Stories are essential to me. Most of my work starts with a story, not a concept. It connects with people. You're not speaking down to them, you're in it together. The audience becomes complicit in the work. In the exhibition, there are stories where the protagonist is a bird or a tomato or a person. The stories allow you to travel across different worlds.”

Many of the works repurpose found objects. For Alfaraj, this is a guiding principle. It is also what makes the exhibition not merely an assemblage of artworks, but of objects that come together to form a world.

Immersive is a word that is gratuitously used in the art world, but rarely is it as apt as for Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty. Alfaraj's creation envelopes viewers from the moment they step into the exhibition.

From sculptures made from palm fronds and sheet metal to cryptic yet poetic phrases scrawled on the walls in chalk, artworks bleached on cotton sheets to installations that make use of palm trunks, the exhibition is very much the “landscape” Alfaraj describes it as, combining natural and man-made elements, landforms and human presence. It is the artist’s perspective that is the lifeforce of the exhibition, injecting even a seemingly mundane twig, cinderblock or stone with meaning – meaning that is accessible and eloquently communicated to the viewer.

“There’s something spiritual about using found materials. They carry memories of people who wore them, used them, lived with them. Even a stone that's been in one place for years has a story. The form of the artwork and the concept must support each other.”

While Al-Ahsa is at the core of Alfaraj’s practice and his exhibition, many of the themes resonate universally, gesturing towards an environmentally conscientious way of life.

Like the other ongoing exhibition at Jameel Arts Centre – Asuncion Molinos Gordo’s The Peasant, the Scholar and the Engineer – this too presents the farmer as a sage of sorts, embodying years of transferred wisdom and knowledge of how to live with the environment.

This perspective sprouts from a personal place for Alfaraj.

“My grandfather was a farmer, and his closeness to nature shaped me,” he says. “Farmers are like artists. They’re resourceful, they recycle, they adapt. Even now, I work in a studio next to a garden in Al-Ahsa, using palm materials, just like he did.”

Seas are sweet, fish tears are salty is running at Jameel Arts Centre until January 4